Martin was also tormented by self-doubt, but he didn't let that stop him from writing about the things that he cared deeply about; the world of comic books, heavy-metal music and cheesy sci-fi movies that are the Nerdcore Holy Trinity frequently appeared on his blog, and to read his reviews was to feel as though you were hanging out on a friend's couch, relaxed and free to express your deeply held beliefs that Liam Neeson used the same fighting moves in "Taken" that he learned all those years ago on "Krull." [...more]
I’ve posted on the Facebook tribute page for Martin, Twittered about his passing, and appealed to others to not let Martin’s sudden death go unnoticed. This really blindsided me, because only Monday I was having a typically great conversation about Martin – it was the subject of the last blog post here.
Martin sent this to me as part of a discussion we were having about health care & the stalled reform bill. We'd talked about his health problems last summer, and he seemed to be getting better. His final message here is now almost painful to read.
Which is why I decided that to really do the man justice, it is necessary to use the format that Martin loved best, and that he was a master of: the blog post.
I met Martin for the first time about a year ago, at a session for the Los Angeles chapter of the Online News Association that I had helped organize. I was moderating a panel of speakers talking about online video, explaining how indie web journalists could kick their page views (and careers) up a notch by adding some video to their sites. I had just got done explaining how I had recently researched the End-User Licensing Agreements (EULAs) on all the video-sharing sites, to see which ones were OK, and which were abusive, and would claim ownership over the copyrights to video you produced, whether or not you ever decided you wanted to take it down.
“I mean, has anyone here ever really read the EULA on these sites before clicking, the “I Agree” button?” I asked.
Towards the back of the room, a hand shot up in the air. “I have,” Martin said loud & proud. And then, a little softer, “But then, I’m kind of a freak about such things. I read all the licensing fine print before I agree to anything.”
That, right there, was Martin in a nutshell.
He wasn’t afraid to speak up in groups, to add to the conversation. But he was also careful to be self-deprecating – he was never obnoxious, overbearing or insulting, the way so many in the blogosphere are, in their attempts to vie for attention.
But most of all the man put in the work. However you want to say it, Martin sweated the details, because he knew that it was in those details that all the Devils of Corporate America lurked. And Martin had a bone-deep indignation at seeing the little guy get fucked over, and he devoted his life to working to balance things out a little.
He came up to me after the meeting was over, a balding, roly-poly guy who frowned and concentrated fiercely on whatever conversation he was having, and then burst into laughter unexpectedly. I got my first taste of Martin’s boundless energy, deep knowledge of online culture, and enthusiasm for all things nerdly. He was a bit shy at first to talk to me – he later admitted that he was a little intimidated, saying with his characteristic self-deprecation and honesty, “Man, you looked like everything that I aspired to be. You were tall, good-looking, married to a beautiful woman, and you traveled the world doing important work for freedom-loving journalists in distress.”
Coming from someone else, that would have raised alarm bells in me – in L.A., especially, I’ve come to see any form of compliment as flattery preparatory to some kind of manipulation. But coming from Martin, the words were heartfelt, sweet, and totally at odds with how I felt at the time, because, like so many of us working in the New Media content game, I had a deep suspicion that I was making a complete ass out of myself in public. It was that kindness and honesty from him that I found very endearing.
Martin was also tormented by self-doubt, but he didn’t let that stop him from writing about the things that he cared deeply about; the world of comic books, heavy-metal music and cheesy sci-fi movies that are the Nerdcore Holy Trinity frequently appeared on his blog, and to read his reviews was to feel as though you were hanging out on a friend’s couch, relaxed and free to express your deeply held beliefs that Liam Neeson used the same fighting moves in “Taken” that he learned all those years ago on “Krull.”
But he also had a real empathetic sense, and last summer when I was writing about the untimely death of my cat, Martin sent me several emails telling me how what I had written had brought tears to his eyes and choked him up, and sent dozens of people to my site to read what I had written and offer me words of encouragement. I’ve struggled with that while writing this post, because I don’t want to for even a microsecond equate my cat Duce dying with Martin’s death; I know the difference between human and feline, thankyewverymuch. I just wanted to illustrate that the guy had a real big heart in him, and that when I was feeling down, he would go out of his way to try to offer some kind of comfort. And then maybe a few laughs and a link to something new & interesting that he wanted to tear apart & put back together.
I will miss these discussions. I will miss reading his wit, and honesty and willingness to bare his soul.
I conducted a series of interviews with journalists, bloggers, opposition political leaders and human rights workers in the cities of Astana and Almaty, Kazakhstan. They are begging for help to combat increased government attacks, censorship, harassment and intimidation. [...more]
Under the guise of “protecting citizens from terrorists and porn,” the government in Kazakhstan is eliminating freedom of speech and of the press via a particularly toxic cocktail of Old Stalinist School beatings, jailings and intimidation – and cutting-edge CyberWar attacks.
I conducted a series of interviews with journalists, bloggers, opposition political leaders and human rights workers in the cities of Astana and Almaty, Kazakhstan. I was there because in mid-October of 2009, the US State Department invited me to travel to Kazakhstan to do a series of training sessions on New Media and how journalists there could learn from the mistakes that First-World TV & newspapers have made, to prepare themselves for the future.
While I was able to show them some of the new technologies and techniques in online video, mobile, social media and web monetization that I’ve developed an expertise in, I found that their crisis is far more serious than that of US publishers and journalists, whose problems revolve around absurd levels of debt entered into by multi-billion dollar corporations, and the lack of a coherent business strategy.
Kazakh journalists are quite literally fighting for their lives – and losing.
I found this out myself, when I wound up in the hospital with a severe case of food poisoning, the night before I was scheduled to conduct a class for the pro-democracy rights workers, independent journalists and dissenting bloggers. I feel almost ashamed to bring this up, because compared to what the Kazakh journalists go through, barfing for 8 hours seems like a resort vacation. Still, the embassy doctor told me I was on the point of cascading organ failure from radical dehydration. Next stop: a pine box in the cargo hold on the way back to Los Angeles.
A couple days and 4 liters of IV fluid and antibiotics later, my vision cleared and I was finally able to reschedule with the Kazakhstan’s most independent journalists and bloggers. (I had to cancel a trip to Shymkent, where even more dissidents hoped to get my help.) They wanted to interview me, because they were suspicious about my absence. “You don’t honestly think that what happened to you was an accident?” they asked. I admitted that in my most paranoid moments, I wondered…
“There are no coincidences here,” they told me. They went on to state that repeatedly, journalists, human rights workers or others who have come from the U.S. or Europe to meet with them, mysteriously get sick – just the way I did – are hospitalized, and wind up going home a couple of days later without ever actually meeting or doing any work. They all wanted to shake my hand and congratulate me for joining the club of journalists who have gone to the hospital because of their political beliefs.
I will never know if it was just a bad piece of chicken, or if I barfed out some heinous admixture of polonium and whatever PCBs/Dioxins they fed to the former president of Ukraine that turned his face into a puffy, pockmarked lunar landscape. But I will admit that seeing a couple of goons waiting in an SUV every morning to tail us around contributed to my motivation to publish this piece.
First – a bit of scene-setting: Kazakhstan is an enormous country, spread out over vast empty sub-Siberian steppes (as you can see in my pictures here), with a relatively tiny population of 16 million. It’s floating on an ocean of oil and gas, and may soon be the world’s leading exporter of uranium – check out the Wikipedia entry, if you want more facts & figures.
Put simply, Kazakhstan is a popcorn shell jammed in the teeth of international war & petro-diplomacy. It’s stuck between China to the east, Russia to the north, and Afghanistan & Pakistan to the south. They export a billion barrels of oil a year to Russian refineries, and their natural gas keeps the lights on throughout Western Europe. The U.S. uses their airspace and bases for the war in Afghanistan, and rocket launches from the old Soyuz complex near Baikonur keep the International Space Station functioning.
Nursultan Nazarbayev has been president of Kazakhstan since it split off from the former Soviet Union in 1989. Just this year, the constitution was changed to basically allow him to be president for life, and it’s a tossup as to whether or not there will ever again be open elections.
While I was there, I visited the cities of Almaty and Astana, which represent the past and the future of Kazakhstan. In 1997, Nazarbayev decreed that the capitol would be moved from the ancient city of Almaty, which is in a green valley just north of the Himalayas, on the old Silk Road, to Astana, which lies in the midst of 1,000 miles of Siberian steppes, surrounded by nothing.
A brief aside on Astana: the best way I can describe this city is to ask you to imagine what would happen if you downloaded the brains of Albert Speer and Walt Disney into a 14-year-old ADHD sci-fi fan & meth freak, and then gave him a trillion dollars and asked him to design the capitol city of Mars. Dubai in the tundra? Shanghai without the workers or industrial base? Calgary with a creeping sense of menace?
The oil billions have funded the construction of massive towers and buildings; of wide boulevards, lined with struggling fresh-planted saplings; of monuments to the ego of Nazarbayev, where wide-eyed rural citizens line up, and hold up their babies so they can put their tiny hands into the impression of the Glorious Leader’s hand, memorialized forever in a 20-pound block of solid gold.
“It’s all one giant money-laundering scheme,” a journalist confided to me. “The government says that it’s putting up these buildlings, making this city out of nothing for the future of the people of Kazakhstan. They keep comparing this place to Washington, D.C.
“But what it’s really about is that they budget $200 million, maybe for a new library or art gallery. ‘For the people, for the culture of our country,’ they say. Then they build it for $50 million, maybe $20 million. The rest all disappears.”
There is no real reason for this city, built for giants, and inhabited only by people who work for the kleptocracy, to exist, other than what you can read in “Ozymandias.”
““My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Yeah. It’s like that. Particularly the parts about the “sneer of cold command.” If you squint a little bit, from atop the big observation towers, you can see the tangled rusted girders sticking up out of the blasted, brown tundra.
As you’ll see in the following videos, the main problem they need help with is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that are unleashed on them when they dare to step over the line and criticize the government, write about the massive corruption in the banking system, or report the latest bombshell from the president’s ex-son in law. (He fled the country, and now lives in Austria, from whence he periodically releases embarrassing information – such as audiotapes of government officials conspiring to murder & steal.)
In the interviews that are included here, the Kazakh journalists talk about these kinds of problems – of the beatings, intimidation, jailings, fines, cyber-attacks and other methods by which freedom is being systematically strangled to death. I will write more about this issue in other postings, but for now, I think the greatest impact is for you to hear their raw voices.
I apologize in advance for this video. I had to blur the face and distort the voice of this journalist, to protect him from the brutal reprisals that are becoming almost commonplace in Kazakhstan. I wish that I could show you the blood clot in this man’s eye, or the fading bruises at the corners of his mouth.
I wish that you could see the way he hunches his shoulders when talking about the beating, stomping and kicking orgy of violence that landed him in the hospital recently, or the anger that replaces that fear when he talks of the beatings that have been inflicted on his colleagues.
I hope that you can still hear in his voice the raw sadness and sense of loss that is evident when he talks about the feeble FlashMob protests that are the only act of defiance left to them, and how even that is being systematically taken away.
But I cannot. I cannot bring this story to you in this open and honest way; maybe it is paranoia, but if it is, then it is well-founded paranoia. The pervasive fear that has been pounded into journalists in Kazakhstan is communicable, and if I have succumbed to it as well, so be it. I would rather err on the side of caution with these interviews than expose some of the people in them to further harm. This is also why I have beeped out the names of some of the other recent victims, as well as other information that would make it easy to identify this person.
I do recognize that this journalist’s voice and accent make what he is saying a little hard to understand, and so I am adding subtitles.
These journalists told me that the hardest part for them is the feeling of being utterly alone; that the daily outrages against them have been covered up, denied, made to disappear as they themselves are being made to vanish, one by one.
I decided to share these improvised videos (recorded before and after training sessions I led) because the journalists and bloggers I met pleaded with me to share their stories in the hopes that someone in the outside world would pay attention. To them, the internet represents the last, best hope of writers and photographers and editors who dare to speak truth to power. They have been pushed to the brink, and the DDoS attacks now threaten even that.
I was authorized to show the face and voice of journalist Yevgeniya Plakhina of Respublika.kz, and so she appears here undisguised, although there were some subjects that we discussed that she later requested be edited out. I will post some of the other videos in a later post, since this is getting a bit long.
It was a cinematic night, as event organizer Brad Nye looked like he was making an entrance in a James Bond film, and Jason Calacanis did a Q&A (thanks for taking my question first, BTW), and looked a little like Citizen Kane. It’s late and I’ve got a lot more post-processing to do on the [...] [...more]
It was a cinematic night, as event organizer Brad Nye looked like he was making an entrance in a James Bond film, and Jason Calacanis did a Q&A (thanks for taking my question first, BTW), and looked a little like Citizen Kane.
It’s late and I’ve got a lot more post-processing to do on the photos, so here’s just a couple of the images that I shot. The video of the discussions can be found at This Week in Startups.
Before the lights were adjusted, standing on the platform over the audience made the speakers look like they were either making a dramatic entrance - or having their identities concealed in some "60 Minutes" tell-all segment.
The energy of the old VIC was certainly present – a little too much, as techies on the make back at the bar made it a little hard to hear the speakers at the time. This, despite the overt threat by organizers to find the yapping networkers and toss them out.
Anyway, here’s Calacanis discussing what the future of social media sites is going to look like, and what smart companies should do in the next couple of years to try to adapt to the increasing pace of innovation.
As I said in an email to Nye, Jason would probably be secretly pleased at the whole Citizen Kane-esque imagery here. And then, of course, he'd feel conflicted about it and make a self-deprecating joke.
One of the more interesting areas of discussion – particularly since I just got back from Costa Rica – centered around virtual currency as being “the next big thing.” Certainly seems that way in places like Costa Rica, where you’re getting an increasingly large, tech-savvy and connected labor force. A lot of people either work in the internet gambling industry there – or have relatives/friends that do. The speed of internet connections in San Jose – and even out in the jungles on the Pacific side – stunned me. I’ve had much worse connections in the small town U.S.A.
One of the things that has stuck in my head the last week or so has been the stories coming out about how spammers are getting around the Captchas by simply hiring dirt-cheap human labor to fill in the blanks on the pages to stuff spam onto our hard-constructed sites. I’m not sure what the next step in trying to get rid of the spam is going to be – Calacanis lamented how from the very first days of blogs, spam started becoming a problem, and it has kept pace with our attempts to try to get rid of it. Now it’s starting to get into the social networking world (viz today’s Phishing attacks on Twitter), where the level of trust that we have for our social circle is going to make the impact of a malicious click that much heavier.
We (i.e. Singleparentcity.com and Filmson.com - don't bother trying to find them - they both folded) tried to do this back in 1999, back in Web 1.0, and there were a lot of lessons that we learned that seem to have been lost in the mists of time.
If you are going to try to be in the business of selling information (or the way we couched it, "a fulfilling multimedia entertainment experience") online, the thing to remember is that things happen way, way faster than they do in the offline/print world. [...more]
If the future of news is that it will live as a web-only play, then the InDenver and Seattle PI sites, which are (to use the horticultural metaphor) scions of the original papers are perhaps visions of what the future could look like.
Good luck and Godspeed. Selling information on the web is a business fraught with all kinds of unanticipated complexities.
The InDenver site has gotten some good & enthusiastic replies from readers eager to get good quality local news information, and who are seemingly frustrated with their other local options. Unfortunately, InDenver appears to be struggling with its e-commerce functionality – multiple readers are writing in to report that their sessions are bombing out, that they’re frustrated, that the interface is broken, or unwieldy.
Welcome to my world, folks.
We (i.e. Singleparentcity.com and Filmson.com – don’t bother trying to find them – they both folded) tried to do this back in 1999, back in Web 1.0, and there were a lot of lessons that we learned that seem to have been lost in the mists of time.
If you are going to try to be in the business of selling information (or the way we couched it, “a fulfilling multimedia entertainment experience”) online, the thing to remember is that things happen way, way faster than they do in the offline/print world.
E-Commerce for Former Print Reporters
A user subscribing to a print edition of a newspaper will fill out a 3×5 card subscription form, or mail off a check in an envelope, and patiently wait a week or so for the paper to start showing up at the front door.
A web subscriber will get halfway through filling out the form – and then a question (how old are you? male or female? what’s your zip code?) will piss them off because it seems too intrusive, and they will click away.
Or it will come time to enter their credit card information, and the process will be onerous enough so that they start to have second thoughts about it, and they will be gone.
Back in the day, we lost 80% of our customers during the payment process. You absolutely HAVE to make this as smooth and quick and painless as possible, or they will start to think twice about it – and then they are GONE, BABY GONE.
Lingering in the ether, the Seattle P-I keeps trying.
Customer Service is More than Responding to Complaints
This isn’t just fixing broken links on the site, or making sure that your pages display the same across a wide range of browsers – although that is absolutely crucial as well.
No, you have to be really, really, REALLY responsive when your readers reach out to you. You have to pay attention to what they’re telling you through their clicks, through the time spent per page, through the amount of clickthru you’re seeing on your targeted ads. You have to pay attention to what they’re saying in the comment spaces, to the kinds of photos and videos they upload (just pray that they care enough to send you their material), to the way they forward your stories to their friends and family.
That is what customer service is on the web.
If you are going to try to make people pay for a service that you provide – if you are going to sell them something – then that thing damn well better be what they want. Or they will cease to buy it. And they will do this far, far faster than they would with a print product.
The good news is that if you do manage to forge a connection to your audience, that if you do manage to get them committed to reading and acting on the information that you give them – they will then fight like tigers to make sure that you survive.
Market Yourself Like Crazed Insurgents
You can’t just rely on the goodwill and lingering fondness of your former readership to sustain you. That may work in the short term (if it works at all), but you have to make an organized, concerted effort to reach out to your market and GIVE THEM A GOOD REASON TO BUY YOU.
Take a look at the viral/guerilla marketing campaigns that were used by Bakotopia; your strategy may need to be a bit different, since you seem to be reaching out to a slightly older, more affluent demographic, but the underlying thinking is the same.
1. Go to the physical locations where your (would-be) readers are. Concerts, county fairs, farmer’s markets, coffee shops, playgrounds, whatever.
2. Have a persistent object that you can give away that will remind your readers that you exist. It can be a cheap 1-sheet flyer stapled to a lamppost, like a punk band playing an underground club. A t-shirt, hat, keychain, whatever with your logo and URL on it.
3. Reach out to your readers on regular intervals with updates as to what your new content is via email, instant messaging, SMS, whatever.
4. Enlist your readers in the effort to recruit more subscribers. Give them some kind of prize – free subscription, or exclusive merch.
Yeah, I know. This sounds like the way that rock bands run their fan clubs. It is. It also works.
You gotta be shameless. It feels like you’re a carnival barker, and that is not entirely inaccurate. But if you are going to sell this thing you’ve created, you have to prepare yourself to get your hands dirty.
Christ, I hope you guys succeed.
Meanwhile, here’s the video of the final days of the Rocky Mountain News.
The last couple of months have seen the weaker papers in two-newspaper towns file for bankruptcy, fire their staffs & announce impending doom. A lot of this can be written off as the natural consequences of a contracting ad market and an epically bad economy; the announcement today by Hearst that the San Francisco Chronicle [...] [...more]
The last couple of months have seen the weaker papers in two-newspaper towns file for bankruptcy, fire their staffs & announce impending doom. A lot of this can be written off as the natural consequences of a contracting ad market and an epically bad economy; the announcement today by Hearst that the San Francisco Chronicle is facing yet another massive & painful round of layoffs came as both a surprise and not. The gut-clencher came a little bit down in the story:
The Hearst Corp. today announced an effort to reverse the deepening operating losses of its San Francisco Chronicle by seeking near-term cost savings that would include “significant” cuts to both union and non-union staff.
In a posted statement, Hearst said if the savings cannot be accomplished “quickly” the company will seek a buyer, and if none comes forward, it will close the Chronicle. The Chronicle lost more than $50 million in 2008 and is on a pace to lose more than that this year, Hearst said.
Observers have been waiting to see which major U.S. city will be the first to go without a major daily newspaper, and San Francisco is a front-runner for the role.
Over at Content Bridges, Ken Doctor muses about the other struggling Bay Area newspapers, and wonders why a viable web-based alternative hasn’t sprung up yet, in an area that’s within a hurled semiconductor of Silicon Valley (hell, I can’t figure that one out either). However, he gets close to what I think is the underlying story here:
Could the Chronicle indeed go away? Well, don’t expect anyone to buy it. The newspaper market is, to use the kind word, illiquid. Frozen solid by two minor problems: 1) the credit meltdown, which will someday ease; 2) no one knows how to hell to value a newspaper company because no one has “visibility” in future revenue, which is a nice way to say no one likes what they see ahead.
Maybe, Hearst and MediaNews, once close, but now more distant partners, can figure out some new cost-sharing plans that will pass government review. If not, we can now imagine the Chronicle indeed closing, if it doesn’t get the “significant” cost reductions it wants. My guess given our times, is that it will get reductions, and then reduce itself in product and people to some sense of immediate sustainability. It may keep publishing, though it may scrap days like Detroit or whole sections like many of its brethren.
My read on the threat of folding the paper is that they have run up against a wall of union contracts, and want to get around them without having to resort to Chapter 11. The “concessions” that Hearst wants are going to be ugly – over at Newsosaur, Mutter spitballs them at nearly 50%.
At that point, mere eliminations of staff positions will not hit that target. To eliminate half of the staff would mean that the paper quite simply would not get out. There wouldn’t be enough people to run the presses, drive the trucks, or lay out the display ads from wackjob religious sects. Not to mention, report & edit news. That means the survivors of the cuts would have to take massive pay cuts. Maybe the newsroom staff would meekly submit to the replacement of a paycheck with a moldy roast-beef sandwich and a family pass to Hearst Castle, but those Teamsters, well, that’s another story.
The other unsettling prospect is that Hearst would either sell the Chronicle to MediaNews, the Dean Singleton empire that has been similarly troubled, or perhaps even demand back all the money that Singleton owes the Hearsts (which I’m guessing he does not have), which would mean that Hearst would wind up taking MediaNews titles like the Merc-News or Contra Costa as a barter-type payoff. Both moves have significant anti-trust problems, not to mention less than rosy implications for journalism in the Bay Area.
The big record labels’ entire business was built around moving little plastic discs around the world, similar to how a newspaper’s business was built around moving paper through a printing plant and on to you. That’s about 60-70% of the cost of producing a newspaper: getting the ink on it and moving the damn thing around. Moving things from place to place–be it plastic discs or bundles of paper–is very difficult and expensive. It’s the kind of business that rewards economies of scale and, as a result, allows for huge concentrations of power and money. It’s the kind of business that creates five major record labels and a dozen or so major news companies (that’s a generous number, actually, once you get past the first five or six you’re down to small town paper chains). It’s the kind of business that comes crashing down the quickest once its central complication–moving things from here to there–disappears. With the efficiencies of digital distribution, the established order is not simply threatened, it is broken.
So if size is a disadvantage in the New Media world, the teetering newspaper empires’ reflex to merge and merge again is perhaps the exact wrong move at this time. If the key to web success is that overused buzzword “community,” then an amorphous conglomeration that exists mainly to cater to efficiencies in distributing an ad sales platform that grows daily less relevant, is not a move in the right direction.
OK, it's a given that journalists have something of a Messiah Complex. You have to have something else going on psychologically to get into this low-pay high-stress field. But this is really crossing the line. And making an unfortunate conflation between the newspaper industry and good journalism - yes, it gets done at newspapers, and there are some magnificent examples of this. But the industry is asphyxiating itself, and dumping wads of cash on it will not solve the underlying problems.
Government intervention here would create more problems than it would solve. [...more]
While the concept of a bailout for newspapers (and allegedly for good journalism) seems attractive at first blush, I fear that in practice, the billions in bailout funds would suffer the same fate as the billions bestowed upon the banking industry.
That is, they would be swiftly pocketed in the form of “well-earned bonuses,” and only a few crumbs would make it down to the level where the money would actually do any good. While I’m not in the “burn baby, burn” camp the way many other digital triumphalists have been (and there’s at least a faint whiff of that hereabouts), I think that dumping fat stacks on media conglomerates will not solve the underlying problems of the crumbling of business models.
Now then – a Manhattan Project (of sorts) to build solid business models to support quality journalism? That would = the hoary “teaching a man to fish” paradigm.
I know faith in The Invisible Hand is in short supply these days (and where it can be found, it’s usually being in the stocks in the town square, being pelted by posters on Angryjournalist.com), but the fact is that there is a demand for something to perform the function of information dissemination that newspapers do/have done. If the Drug Wars have taught us anything, it is that where there is a demand, and money is attached to that demand, there will correspondingly be a supply.
This is all growing out an essay on the op-ed page of the NY Times and chittering in the Twiterverse, as the nervous journalists see the vultures staring downward, and big guy in the hood with the scythe striding through the newsroom.
By endowing our most valued sources of news we would free them from the strictures of an obsolete business model and offer them a permanent place in society, like that of America’s colleges and universities. Endowments would transform newspapers into unshakable fixtures of American life, with greater stability and enhanced independence that would allow them to serve the public good more effectively.
Well, allow me to respond to that one.
Not to get all Reagan on you, but that is complete and utter madness. Newspapers are so important, so crucial to our lives, that it is the duty & obligation of the government to preserve them?
Wow.
OK, it’s a given that journalists have something of a Messiah Complex. You have to have something else going on psychologically to get into this low-pay high-stress field. But this is really crossing the line. And making an unfortunate conflation between the newspaper industry and good journalism – yes, it gets done at newspapers, and there are some magnificent examples of this. But the industry is asphyxiating itself, and dumping wads of cash on it will not solve the underlying problems.
Government intervention here would create more problems than it would solve. Allison Fine is onto this issue:
So, the fundamental premise of the need to endow newspapers and preserve them at public expense is that false information exists on the Internet? Of course it does, as it does on TV, on the radio (should we also consider endowing Rush?) in magazines, and in many, many newspapers. Which media would the authors like to choose as being least likely to contain false information? And which medium do they think did the best job of bringing the lies and corruption of the Bush Administration to light — hint, don’t look at newspapers, Josh Micah Marshall and his Talking Points Memo website would be a much better bet.
So, the fundamental premise that only newspapers can hold government accountable is specious. But that isn’t my biggest issue with the article. It is the naive assumption from those outside of the nonprofit sphere that 1) nonprofit status is intended for companies that don’t have a viable business model, and 2) raising billions of dollars in endowment funds is doable, particularly in today’s economy.
If anything, the effect of billions spent on preserving the newspaper format as it is, without any changes, will mean that we’ll all be getting print products dumped on our doors that are increasingly ad-free. Yeah, there will be a number of advertisers who will still be there because the eyeballs are there. But the trends of readership of mass print products are not heading up (niche and community newspapers are another story).
Worst of all, the preservation of a business model that is clearly no longer functional will suck the oxygen out of the room for the products that should (and are, in some cases) being developed to do the job that newspapers have done. Artificially propping up newspapers in their current form will stifle the innovation in the marketplace, and long-term, only make the inevitable collapse worse.
We’re kinda seeing that take place in the real estate and credit markets right now. The government artificially propped up the economy for eight years with crazy spending and stupid low interest rates. Instead of hard work & ingenuity to produce real growth, it was Free Money Day Every Day, as real-estate speculation in areas like Scottsdale, Las Vegas, Miami & L.A. led to the “$30,000-a-year millionaire” who made $10,000 in arcane mortgage kickbacks every time he/she signed his/her name to a loan document. The results of that are the global economic meltdown we see occurring right now.
ESPN sees the writing on the wall. In their industry they need strong stories to promote sports and strong sports to drive interest to their stories. A fan that is underserved by his newspaper is less interested in following his team on ESPN. Additionally, there is big advertising money for ESPN if it can become the resource for local sports.
This is a long term proposition, however. Even the mighty ESPN cannot yet afford to hire 30 beat writers to cover each NBA team. Instead it is working towards its goal by teaming with independend bloggers in a win/win/win proposition. The bloggers have a chance at monetizing their efforts, ESPN can become the central resource it wants to become and fans can get the information they want as a new, viable local sports media business model starts to thrive.
This is the Dark Side of internet fame. You can see it in the message boards, in the comments section on any YouTube video that reaches a certain level of popularity.
Back in 1989, one of the very first celebrity stories I had to cover in Los Angeles, remains one of the saddest & most disturbing stories. The murder of Rebecca Shaeffer, a lovely young actress by obsessed stalker Robert Bardo. I can see some clear parallels between that case, and the way that online attacks are escalating into offline violence. [...more]
I can’t decide if this is one of those “sign of the deteriorating times” type stories, wherein I get to pontificate about how the free-for-all, no insult too depraved, “culture” of the internet has led to yet another sad incident …
…or if it’s a function of the pressures being put on start-ups by the generally shitty global economy, which is starting to incite people into truly depraved acts of violence…
Yesterday as I was leaving the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany someone walked up to me and quite deliberately spat in my face. Before I even understood what was happening, he veered off into the crowd, just another dark head in a dark suit. People around me stared, then looked away and continued their conversation.
(snip)
Something very few people know: last year over the summer an off balance individual threatened to kill me and my family … Seeing my parents fear for their lives and not understand how or why their son was in this position changed me, made me a much less forgiving person in general.
The Internet is the greatest revolution in democratic practice since popular suffrage. Everyone knows that, and I am just as dependent onthe Internet as anyone else. In the wake of a democratic revolution like that, there’s both an enormous explosion of information and expression, much of it useful or fun, and also an explosion of pent-up rage, social anguish, resentment, bilious, other-annihilating nastiness, prejudice and all the rest of the dark side. If that stuff is destroying conversation threads, screwing up people’s…
…reputations, spreading around unchecked rumor or just snark, it’s worth pointing to it and saying, “Stop lousing up my revolution.” The point of the book is to protect the best kind of humor by criticizing the worst.
Still, the larger point here is one that is important. In all my stops as a New Media consultant in the last few years, the one issue that animates the local reporters/editors the most is the attacks on them by anonymous internet trolls.
Arrington says that:
On any given day, when I care to look, dozens of highly negative comments are made about me, TechCrunch or one of our employees in our
comments, on Twitter, or on blogs or other sites. Some of these are appropriately critical comments on things we can be doing better. But
the majority of comments are among the more horrible things I can imagine a human being say.
Actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered by an obsessed fan who tracked her down, showed up at her doorstep, and shot her in the heart.
Even a cursory search confirms that Arrington takes his shots. This is the Dark Side of internet fame. You can see it in the message boards, in the comments section on any YouTube video that reaches a certain level of popularity.
Back in 1989, one of the very first celebrity stories I had to cover in Los Angeles, remains one of the saddest & most disturbing stories. The murder of Rebecca Shaeffer, a lovely young actress by obsessed stalker Robert Bardo. I can see some clear parallels between that case, and the way that online attacks are escalating into offline violence.
This was a murder that really changed things in Los Angeles; the DMV rules were changed so that you could no longer get someone’s address by merely doing a search on DMV records to get the address off their driver’s license. And the Threat Assessment Department of the LAPD was formed, at least in part, in response to this murder.
One of the things that I learned from covering that case (other than that it sucks to be a reporter tasked to go to a funeral and try to get quotes from sobbing family members), is that wackos and obsessed fans follow an escalating behavior pattern. They start making threats, at first rather timidly. As the response to their threats fails to completely shut them down or punish them enough, they then begin to escalate their attack patterns.
The next stage – the one that Arrington is at, I fear – is what the LAPD shrinks called, “the humiliating encounter.” Basically, the stalker has an encounter with the person they are harassing that results in humiliation – either for the victim (they spit on their face) or the stalker (the studio security guards grab him, handcuff him, and frogmarch him off the lot).
In any case, this encounter then becomes the focus of whirling obsession for the next interval. The stalker sits and broods, going over the encounter in his head, over and over again, fantasizing about what he would have done differently, inventing a whole new encounter … only this next one will be far darker, far more violent.
There is going to have to be a fundamental shift in the way conversations are conducted on the internet. If a tech blogger – not someone in the political sphere, where the contentious nature is well-known – has to take a month off & flee to a beach to be able to deal, then clearly, the writing is on the wall.
This paragraph is probably going to become much more important in the years to come:
In California, under the stalking laws passed after this attach, a stalker is defined as “someone who willfully, maliciously and repeatedly follows or harasses another victim and who makes a credible threat with the intent to place the victim or victim’s immediate family in fear of their safety.” There must be at least two incidents to constitute the crime and show a “continuity of purpose” or credible threat.
UPDATE:
Paul Boutin, over at The Industry Standard, says that the hating has been growing for quite a while:
The most common accusation was that TechCrunch sold endorsements of startups, either in exchange for advertising buys on the site, or for outright cash payments.
This is important: None of these claims ever checked out. Sources would claim to know someone who knew something, but these mystery witnesses never showed up to tell their stories to a reporter. Arrington’s success, both as a blog-era publisher/writer and a startup businessman, inflames less successful entrepreneurs and journalists with off-the-scale envy. How does he do that?
I know that the Traditional Media Curmudgeons (should I just shorten that to TMCs?) will react with finger-pointing and howls of how you just can't trust all this newfangled crowdsourcy fancypants technology, that if the Preznit-elect's Twitter account has been hacked, then that means that you can never tell who's behind the information you're seeing on the screen.
Which is correct, as far as that goes.
But the larger point is one that was driven home to me recently - that the online check/balance system is pretty quick on the self-regulation; the account-hacking was pointed out, shut down & blogged about all before 10:44 a.m. And yeah, OK, in a fire, if some schiesskopf hacked a Fire Dep't account and put up Tweets directing families into, rather than out of, the onrushing Wall O' Flame we so often get in Southern Cal, that would indeed be A Bad Thing. [...more]
This morning we discovered 33 Twitter accounts had been “hacked” including prominent Twitter-ers like Rick Sanchez and Barack Obama
(who has not been Twittering since becoming the president elect due to transition issues). We immediately locked down the accounts and
investigated the issue. Rick, Barack, and others are now back in control of their accounts.
I know that the Traditional Media Curmudgeons (should I just shorten that to TMCs?) will react with finger-pointing and howls of how you just can’t trust all this newfangled crowdsourcy fancypants technology, that if the Preznit-elect’s Twitter account has been hacked, then that means that you can never tell who’s behind the information you’re seeing on the screen.
Which is correct, as far as that goes.
But the larger point is one that was driven home to me recently – that the online check/balance system is pretty quick on the self-regulation; the account-hacking was pointed out, shut down & blogged about all before 10:44 a.m. And yeah, OK, in a fire, if some schiesskopf hacked a Fire Dep’t account and put up Tweets directing families into, rather than out of, the onrushing Wall O’ Flame we so often get in Southern Cal, that would indeed be A Bad Thing.
I’m not saying that the machine is perfect & reliable. Nothing is. But the crowdsourcing power of the web is useful, as long as you apply all the same fact-checking and verification procedures you do to any source(s).
One last thing: to the Script Kiddies that thought this would be a hoot. It was. And now you will be tracked down & harassed by the News Corp & Justice Department lawyers until your bones bleach in the sun. Thus the Circle of Life is completed.
I have hopes (perhaps naive & unwarranted) that there will be a disaggregated Newsroom of the Future, where reporters and The People Formerly Known As The Audience all work together to separate truth from spin. The Look&Feel of this Newsroom of the Future is being chiseled out of the raw WebChaos on sites like TPM, Firedoglake, ProPublica, Publish2, RedState, and even on Michelle Malkin (hey - she called the "B on the face" girl out as a fraud). [...more]
LA Times - No Shit, Sherlock?
This came in through the comment threads, and is thoughtful enough that it merits more attention:
It sounds like both media channels worked as I would expect them too. The mainstream media sticks with the low risk stories that are easy to substantiate and defend while New Media takes risks on radical story ideas, digest the story in the public forum, shares the discoveries with its readers and lets the readers decide when it is time to move on to other issues.
Very true, and a very good observation. However – my worry is that as the mainstream media increasingly dissolves, their filters grow ever weaker. Evidence of this can be seen in the big bounce in the amount of glaring errors in print editions – this last week, I noted big, bad spelling errors on the front page of the LA Times. The jump pages aren’t where they’re supposed to be. The same paragraph gets printed twice.
Apparently, the editorial guidlines have changed at the LA Times... or, to put it more colloquially, "the shit has loosened up."
Basically, the cuts in editorial positions have left the papers so stressed that they are vulnerable to the kinds of errors that would previously have been unthinkable. And if papers can screw up on something so simple as whether or not the word “Shit” should be put in a headline for a book review (as it was today), then a complex story that demands that reporters and editors pay close attention and follow a thread to its logical conclusion – well, that capability may not longer be in the traditional newsroom.
I have hopes (perhaps naive & unwarranted) that there will be a disaggregated Newsroom of the Future, where reporters and The People Formerly Known As The Audience all work together to separate truth from spin. The Look&Feel of this Newsroom of the Future is being chiseled out of the raw WebChaos on sites like TPM, Firedoglake, ProPublica, Publish2, RedState, and even on Michelle Malkin (hey – she called the “B on the face” girl out as a fraud).
It looks kinda like the same model that’s been in existence for hundreds (maybe even thousands) of years:
The reporter/blogger/town crier/social media collective identifies a trend or event as significant, and communicates that to the people in their circle of influence (make up a term – audience, listeners, readers, lurkers, etc.)
Those people take in that message and react. In the traditional media models, a positive reaction would be to buy more papers, tell their friends to tune in to the next newscast, and discuss it around the watercooler.
Positive feedback means the originator keeps doing more – that is, follow-up stories, sidebars, looking for more stories like that.
In the online world, positive feedback can mean that the audience self-deputizes and starts haring off on their own, trying to add their efforts to expand the narrative.
Negative feedback – the audience not caring about or responding to the story – means that the reporter/blogger/town crier moves on to the next story
The only change is that the web makes all this happen much faster, and allows the audience to get much more involved than was possible before.
The point is, that as it is now easier for smaller & less powerful groups to take on the mantle of the MSM, it is also increasingly possible for smaller & less powerful groups to drill into the national narrative for their own purposes…
I’ll leave you with this, from the Hearst link above:
Hearst upped his circulation by producing a new kind of paper, one with mass- market appeal. His papers used lots of pictures and illustrations, large headlines, and the like. Reducing the cost of a paper to as little as a single cent a copy, Hearst made his newspapers accessible to nearly everyone. Because he controlled so much of the market for newspapers, a market that was rapidly growing because of his newspapers, Hearst could practically dictate what the country would think the next day.
The whole point of yellow journalism was to produce exciting, sensational stories, even if the truth had to be stretched or a story had to be made up. These stories would boost sales, something very important in this period, when newspapers and magazines were battling for circulation numbers. In regard to the situation in Cuba in the mid-1890s, yellow journalism sought to exploit the atrocities in Cuba to sell more magazines and newspapers.
The papers depicted Spanish behavior as exaggeratedly bad, and political cartoons depicted “Spain” as a nearly subhuman and brutal monster, while “Cuba” was usually depicted as a pretty white girl being pushed around by the Spanish monster. Once US opinions were inflamed over Cuba, Hearst in particular tried to do everything he could to whip the public into such a frenzy that a war would start. Once the country was at war, Hearst had little doubt his papers would have no end of interesting and sensational articles to publish.
Nobody directly involved will admit it, but this is looking more and more like one of the more nasty, yet brilliant, scams of the last couple years. It may have been pulled off by the legendary Nigerian internet scammers, but it’s beginning to look like it may have been the work of a vast leftwing [...] [...more]
Nobody directly involved will admit it, but this is looking more and more like one of the more nasty, yet brilliant, scams of the last couple years. It may have been pulled off by the legendary Nigerian internet scammers, but it’s beginning to look like it may have been the work of a vast leftwing conspiracy with a twisted sense of humor.
It gets complicated, as these things often do, but the core appears to be:
2. Nobody seemed to notice that the API’s headquarters are in Norway.
3. In the weeks leading up to the election, as John McCain’s campaign was trailing smoke and in a steep vertical dive (to use an Air Force-appropriate metaphor), a ragtag bunch of deranged Obama-haters his desperate supporters seized on this story as a last-minute chance to save the U.S. from an Obama presidency, which they had come to believe would be some horrible combination of Stalinist Russia, the Taliban and a San Francisco gay bathhouse, circa 1978.
4. The overheated right-wing blog echo chamber started to scream and yell about the tapes, hoping to spark an uproar.
5. The API started getting erratic in its pronouncements about the tapes, on the one hand demanding money, on the other alleging mysterious dark conspiracies that were preventing the release of the tapes, conspiracies involving shadowy pro-Obama forces.
5. Still believing that these tapes existed, the right-wing blogs started collecting money from their readers to buy the tapes. From the Ace of Spades website:
$20,000 $25,000 Reward for Obama/Ayers/Dohrn/Khalidi Tape
Well, I don’t know if one will step forward. I can guarantee, though, that if the goods are delivered the blogosphere can contribute $20,000. In a matter of hours.
Maybe more. More would depend on the tape.
This offer includes is particularly directed towards Los Angeles Times employees. Maybe ones that just got fired. Or will get fired in the next couple of weeks.
Guaranteed.
Anonymous.
That’s how we roll.
Pretty pathetic that we have to try to bribe “newsmen” to release newsworthy tapes.
If your conscience is troubled, They should have released it anyway.
7. The bidding for the tape reached $150,000. In a move sure to be familiar to anyone who has studied the history of “The Spanish Prisoner,” the price for releasing the tape suddenly escalated to $2 million.
9. I’ll save you a whole bunch of mental consternation & possible suicidal impulses stemming from despair over the human condition, and cut to what I hope is the end of this story: the WordPress blog has been taken down, and the right-wing blogosphere has moved on (mostly) to its next alleged revelations of Obama conspiracies that will exterminate all mankind.
If your head is still spinning a little bit from all this, take a minute and look at some LOLcats or something.
Now then. How is all this relevant to the usual subject around here – New Media, newspapers, journalism? Well, as we debate migrating from the traditional media to a future where all our information comes at us over the Great Big Internet Pipe, I think it’s instructive to recognize that offloading some of the news-gathering & editing duties to the audience (i.e. crowdsourcing, Citizen Journalism, etc.), is not a process entirely free of risk.
Stories like this one were once confined to the utter fringes of our national conversation. Back when I first started working for newspapers, I learned that at least once a week, we’d get a long, somewhat smelly, letter from the local lunatic, ranting & raving about Zionist Occupation Government (“ZOG”) reading his mind with CIA laser beams. The single-spaced typewritten screeds were usually augmented by scrawling in red pen around the margins, in big circles. I’ve since learned that writing in big spirals is one of the warning signs of paranoid-schizophrenia, and in this case, of a person who has stopped taking their meds and is hearing the voices & acting on their instructions.
Unfortunately, as we open up the doors of the media to a more collaborative conversation between reader & journalist, fanatical factions are more easily able to hijack the national discourse, and divert us over into areas that are meaningless, pointless and an utter waste of time. Some would say that that has always been the case – that even in the traditional media’s heyday, we had stupid stories that for one reason or another, rose to the level where we were talking about them because everyone else was talking about them.
And yeah, I know that one of the benefits of the web is that the audience no longer just sits and passively accepts that the information being fed to them is true. That the Citizen Journalists are willing & able to step in to do research to expose fraudsters. That has certainly been the case here.
But this scam was, well, childish and poorly organized. A guy in Norway claiming to run an African news agency making wild claims? Already the red flags were waving.
However, if a much more well-funded and intelligent organization were to set out to concoct a Big Lie, and to use the low barriers to entry that the web offers to storylines, memes, etc., to deceive the public … how would we know? And if this organization were smart enough, and good enough at using SEO and other tools to bury and discredit its critics and their objections, what then?
Because surfing the Internet is like drinking from a firehose, David LaFontaine braves the torrent to tell you what trends and technologies to gulp down, swirl in your mouth, or spit out.
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