For Good Times In Cambridge, Redux

A reminder, for Boston-area folks in need of something other than our public miseries to ponder.

Tomorrow, Wednesday April 17, at 7 p.m., we got this:

Seth Mnookin and Ta-Nehisi Coates talking with David Carr, the New York Times’ media critic, on Wed., April 17, 7 p.m. in MIT’s building 6, room 120 (6-120, as folks in the Shire reckon addresses — click on the link for an interactive map).  The event is running under the title “The Future of Print in the Digital Age” and is sponsored as part of the Writer’s Series within MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, its Graduate Program in Science Writing, and the MIT Program in Science Technology and Society.  To repeat myself  from last week’s notice:  This should be a very smart evening; Carr’s one of the really good ones.

Note:  6-120 is a reasonably large room — about 120 seats, I think — but this is one that should get a lot of interest, so if you want to be there, allow a little extra time.

Next, the day after, Thursday, April 18, my former student Emily Anthes is coming back to MIT to speak about her new book Frankenstein’s Cat. You might recall that Emily and I had a conversation about the book last month (podcast here).  Emily has taken a serious and very well researched look at the intersection of biotechnology and the animals closest to their human partners/owners/users.  The result of that work is a gracefully written book that wears the author’s knowledge lightly, and argues its point — the technological manipulation of animals is both inevitable and at least potentially a benefit to both parties to the deal — with grace and rigor.  She’s got a lot to say, and she says it well.  If this is the sort of thing you like to engage, this will be a fine evening too.  Her talk is the day is also at 7 p.m. in yet another of MIT’s utterly impenetrably named venues, 56-114 — building 56, room 114.

Fun for the whole family, with decent pizza nearby for afters.  What could be bad?

(Note:  I’ll be at the event tomorrow, but will have to miss Emily’s reading, as I must be off to visit a very ill relative in the mud-season be-mucked north.  If you make it tomorrow, say hi.)

Image: Unknown artist, The Final Hour!” c. 1920

The Beast In Me*

I’m still enjoying that special lassitude that comes from trying to persuade my bone marrow to pump out enough red blood cells to deal with the oxygen pressure at 2,600 meters — Hello Bogota!….

…but I’ve been watching this blog go ape over the last few days (in a good way) and feel the need to see if I can’t contribute something to the show.

So here’s a bit of meta-media snark I worked on a bit ago, only to see it vanish into the end-of term swamp:

I know that the party-strewn resume of Tina Brown is of little moment (very little) compared with all the examples of GOP folly and malice chronicled there, everywhere, and here, today and everyday.   Even so I just can’t quite get past the astonishingly inadvertant MSM self-revelation in the Times Sunday Magazine profile of Brown — that once and present editor, now running both her upper-middle-brow web project, The Daily Beast, and that moss-covered perpetual second sister, Newsweek.

This paragraph was the first to set me off:

The Beast, as Brown calls it, is a long way from profitability, it’s an impressive achievement whose relatively few visitors (just under four million uniques per month) belie its cultural influence.

Its cultural influence?  I mean, I know I’m out of it, but except for some mild fun at Meghan McCain’s expense, and a kind of genteel averting of eyes at some of the more vacuously embarrassing conventional wisdom retreads that showed up there early on, I can’t recall any real engagement with yon wee beastie.

__

Rather, what it actually seems to be, as the Times can’t quite avoid saying, is an expensive but mediocre performer by the metric that matters in the infotainment business:  people ain’t coming and the dollars aren’t following its diminuitive audience.  Losses last year, according to the article, reached a cool ten million.

Now I know that both Brown and her Boswell are trying to suggest that the place is still somehow influential, a shaper of minds and ideas.  But again, unless I’ve just completely missed it, no.

Hell, just to do due diligence I’ve been and come back to this post in the last five minutes to see what’s up there. [This visit took place more than a week ago.  Too lazy to repeat.]  Retreads of info about Bin Laden that is everywhere else on the web, including much more straight-news branded sites, a review of advice from Mika Brzezinski about how to ask for a raise, (Mika Brzinski!), complete with a description of the book party at which Morning Joe folks told the author how wonderful Mika is (scoop!…up to a point, Lady Evans) , a piece I refused to click on Osama Bin Laden and Michael Douglas as Viagra brothers…and you get the idea.

What a huge, holy hillock of who cares.

And then there is the searing instinct for the new, the zeitgeist of modern media and those who can bend it into new forms of making meaning.  As old friend Hendrick Hertzberg says, “Tina’s a revolutionary leader,” Hertzberg says.  Or not:

Brown’s early issues have been strewn with standbys from her Rolodex: Hillary Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, Judith Regan, James Carville, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Yup, when I think of media revolutionaries, Ahhhnold and Regan (she of the O. J. Simpson “confession“) are names that pop right to top of mind.

And then there are her plans to remake Newsweek. I can’t say I have had any interest in the magazine for decades, which is a symptom of the problem Brown was hired to address, of course.  But I’m not sure this is going to help:

A new section called Omnivore: Want has featured $2,100 Chanel shoes, a $6,500 Audi bicycle and a $10,000 Burberry “Python” trench, items that would not be within reach of your average newsmagazine reader but that would feel right at home in, say, Vanity Fair.

So the salvation of the newsweekly business is to turn them into smaller, more cheaply produced versions of the aspirational titles? Apparently yes:

“There’s a great kind of high-low, newsy, sexy thing that the European newsmagazines have,” Brown said. “They have this great sort of slightly freewheeling pagination, where they go from a great sexy picture of an expensive watch to Libya or something. So I’d like to have more of that feeling in Newsweek. I think that’s a great thing for a magazine, because that’s where we all sort of are now, we’re all multiplatformed, everything’s messed up with everything else.”

Ahh, the smell of word salad in the morning.  It’s not just that I have no desire to go from pictures of a fancy watch, say, or even of the good Bruni — Carla, of course — to the sight of wrecked lives…it’s that there are already folks who do this better, and Brown seems to be putting Newsweek into a familiar second banana kind of place:  chasing somebody else’s editorial vision and formula.

The multiplatform blather at the end of the quote is a subject for another day; here I’ll just say that the fact that this sounds exactly like traditional media spouting of about a decade ago, when the great idea was to dump print onto a web page and call it multimedia.

OK — that’s enough sideswipes at Tina Brown.  There’s a bigger (to me) point here: All of this appeared in the Times Magazine.

The real howlers here are not Brown’s — for all of the crass money-as-pheramone, Sully-chasing inanity attending this merger, she’s pursuing a recognizable strategy to pull a lazarus on Newsweek.  I’m not sure Dr. House himself could save that patient, but full marks for trying.

No, what really got me about this piece was what it confirms (again) about how the Village sees itself.  What does it say that a writer could write and an editor could pass with straight faces all that heavy breathing about the cultural significance of a place that provides a soft-landing for Judy Regan?

It tells me that it’s same-old, same-old over there.  There is an information cartel at the center of our national media, struggling to maintain its hold on the bytestream.  And, just to connect all this to the themes of this blog over the last few days, I’d say that the fact that the Times could produce such hagiography over the fact that Tina Brown is ruling a new roost for conventional, right-leaning hacktitutde tells us all a lot about why the mainstream media has found it so hard to cover even the basics about things that might actually interest the broad middle class audience the newsweeklies used to own.

*Couldn’t resist the title, not least because this title lets me post this:

<div align=”center”></div>

Images:  Poster for the Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers Great Shows Combined c. 1897.

Eduoard Manet, Running at Longchamp, 1864

Once More Into Comcast’s Breach:* KO’s KO Foreshadows Cable on the Canvas?

Cross posted at Balloon Juice

Amidst the gnashing of teeth over the suspicious coincidence of Comcast’s take over of NBC and Keith Olberman’s disappearance from the air, my first reaction was, who cares?  Or rather, who really will notice?

That’s because I’ve been feeling, without much evidence, that cable blather is reaching a diminishing returns point, at least as far as political mobilization is concerned.  Certainly, their impact exceeds their actual reach. As of November, the top rated cable news-like show was Bill O’Reilly’s, with a total viewership of about 3.5 million.  In Neilson terms, that’s a rating of maybe 3.4 or so.  Not bad — but not exactly dominant either.  Next up was Fox’s Bret Baier, someone I confess I’ve literally never heard of.  His number for the month? 2.4 million — or about 2 and change in the ratings.  Olberman came in at number 12 with 1.1 million and a bit, or a barely more than one Neilson point.

It is indeed horrifying that the top 11 programs in cable news are all Fox shows — but the point is that however successful Fox has been with its business model,** these are not impressive numbers within the mass media and in an electorate the size of ours.   Fox has had influence disproportionate to its actual reach — but it helps to remember its man-behind-the-curtain quality.

By comparison, Balloon Juice scored around 25 million total page views last year.  Obviously the two media are enormously different, and there is a profoundly distinct impact when a message is delivered in spoken word and picture over and over again.  A few hundred words on the screen, however successfully they start your rhetorical engines, can’t hope to set the same emotional hooks in its audience.***

But that’s not actually my point. Rather, it is that the experience of just this one blog demonstrates that there exists a means of distribution and engagement that reaches audiences that are within an order of magnitude of those of great big gazillion dollar media machines.

I’m not usually a technological optimist — as is appropriate for someone who can’t even be bothered to maintain a functioning author’s website or Facebook page.  But I’ve just been buying video gear for a course I’ll start teaching in a couple of weeks about making documentaries, and I’m struck again how little cash up front it takes to buy the tools of fully professional production.  The machines don’t supply the talent, of course, nor a programming strategy, nor PR or any of all that.  But as with blogging and print media eight or nine years ago, the bits and pieces of infrastructure needed to create a whole new architecture of web-distributed video are coming together fast.***

Most important, the medium has finally approached normalcy.  My kid’s Wii has a browser in it, not to mention a Netflix app.  In a month or so, after I recover from my next visit to the mechanic, I’ll finally buy a web-enabled TV to replace my 16 year old CRT — and I’ll get a wirelessly networked Blu-Ray player with it.  The rap on internet video has been that only geeks want to sit at their computers and watch TV in little boxes on some small screen.  No more.  More or less transparently, you can Hulu and Netflix and browse your way to video in the same living room in which I almost never actually watch scheduled programs any more.

That’s the missing piece.  Once it’s easy to find web TV on televisions, then the fortifications protecting  traditional content originators and distributors totter.

Which is why I think the bits and pieces of rumor I’ve heard about Olberman thinking about headlining a web network — even if they are wholly fantasy — is exactly the thought that ought to terrify Big Cable the most.

All of which is a long winded way to respond to DougJ’s prediction about liberal hosts on MSNBC in five years time.  My guess is that he’s right.  But I don’t see that I care.

The caveats:  Obviously, the mere physical capacity to create and distribute programming is no substitute for actual talent, smart program choices, tolerable production values and all the rest. It is the easiest thing in the world to make crappy, undiscoverable, utterly irrelevant web-video.  There’s already a surplus of such out there.

If a Left answer to the Right’s domination of traditional cable is to have traction, it will have to both concentrate creative talent and build a conceptual infrastrucure — some model to absorb and remake the notion of channels and shows and a programming schedule.  And of course the largest cost of anything remotely like a studio program or even a curated and organized repository of audience-sourced material lies with the people who drive the cameras, cut the footage and so on.  Cheap isn’t free — but when startup costs thousands (tens of, maybe) instead of millions, you’re in with a chance.

Most important, as we’ve seen with the print world, once the barriers to entry drop, the numbers of those who can do really interesting things grows.  That’s been true in radio for a long time — just check out stuff like the Third Coast festival or a lot of what NPR has catalyzed over the last decades. (And look at the new book Reality Radio if you want to learn about how folks like Jay Allison or Ira Glass,  the Scissor Sisters, the legendary Scott Carrier or the impossibly young Jad Abumrad — and many others all found their voices telling true stories in sound.)*****

Now the underlying elements are there for video too, in an almost zero (in television terms) cost of the acquisition and post production of video and a nearly costless network on which to “broadcast” the finished product — and in the existence (finally) of an audience equipped with the tech that makes it relatively easy to engage with what could be made with such tools.

I hope the left blogosphere takes advantage.  I’m now officially thinking about what I could do to help.  And you?  More the merrier, folks.

*Breach guys, not breeches. Geez. This is a family blog.*******

**And make no mistakes: Fox is all about the cash.  If dittohead hippies became a larger and more exploitable demographic than tea-tardists, you’d see changes.  Murdoch is vile boil on the body politic, but it’s C.R.E.A.M for him too.

***Mixed metaphor alert. It’s OK, kids.  I’m a professional.  Don’t try this at home.

****Not to gear-head up the main body of the piece, you can now shoot decent HD video on cameras that run $2,000 or less.  (You can do pretty well with a camera that runs $6-800, but if you go that route you (a) have to spend a fair amount of money on add-ons that the consumer gear does not possess and (b) have to be a really clever video person.  Smarts can substitute for money, up to a point, but the price paid is in all the work-arounds you need to deal with.)  Sound gear will run you a few hundreds more for a basic kit.  Lights — you can do a lot with “practicals” — the stuff you already have lying around — and a tolerable basic 4 head light kit is another twelve or fourteen hundred at retail.

I’m thinking like a documentary person here, not a studio guy — but the same deflators apply there.  A three camera set up with grip, lighting, and sound enough to mike two or three people could be put together on a shoestring of less than $20,000, perhaps even less than $10K if you really scrounged and dumpster-dived.  That’s a lot of scratch for any individual — but in the media landscape, in a context of blogs that reach tens or hundreds of thousands per day?  It’s not much of a reach.

As for editing — it’s become almost cost free as far as the tools go.  You need a reasonably recent laptop, some hard drives (many backups folks!  Be paranoid!), and if you are just doing studio stuff, the latest iMovie will do what  you need — at a program cost of something like $80 bucks.  Even the pro editing bundles are cheap now.

In sum:  while it is certainly possible to spend an unlimited amount on anything to do with motion pictures, the point is that  you don’t have to if all you want to do is get folks in a set talking to each other or scribbling on a black board — that’s the easy stuff, and it’s unbelievable for someone like me, who started out in the ’80s, just how many barriers to entry for creative types have dropped away.  Berlin Wall c. 1989, baby.

*****Which thought makes this perhaps the right place to let y’all know that I’ll on Virtually Speaking, hosted by Jay Ackroyd — commenter here from time to time, and an FP poster at Atrios’s place, Eschaton.  My slot arrives this coming Thursday, 27 January, at 9 p.m. EST.  I believe this all happens in Second Life — which is why, I kid you not, I’m having an avatar make-over tomorrow.  Come on down!  And now, back to your regularly scheduled blog post.

******If you missed Rocky and Bullwinkle, you missed civilization.

Images:  Trophîme Bigot, Crying Man, 1625

Johann Heinrich Roos, Gypsies in an Ancient Ruin, 1675

Tasty Blog Bits/What Good Young Journalists Can Do In The Right Kind of MSM

I’ve long been a fan of the High Country News, not least because they’ve given good work to some of the wonderful students at the best science writing program in the country (I’m supposed to say that, which doesn’t make it untrue).

But these lines from a post reminded me of what makes HCN such bright spot in my MSM reading these days

If natural gas was going to try and pick me up at a bar, the encounter would likely go like this:

Gas: “I’m low-carbon, cute, and widely available.”

Me: “You’re not that cute.”

That’s from a post by HCN Social Network Editor Stephanie Page Ogburn on the marvelously named The Goat Blog, and it is just a treat of journalistic writing in the context of old+new media.

Smart, funny, instantly engaging and all that you need to read on to get a nuanced reaction, backed up by actual real data, to the prospect of natural gas as a bridge fuel from the high to low carbon emission energy system I devoutly hope my son will see.

It can be done; journalism is not dead — and the seeds of its next incarnation can be found, often, far, far from the Bos-Wash corridor.

Image:  Filippo Palazzi, “Hay Car Attacked by Goats,” 1857

A Tale of Two Financial Stories, or Why it Helps to Pay Attention to the Man Behind The Curtain — Paul Krugman and NPR edition

Two stories caught ear and eye this morning.

First, in terms of my attention, this one from NPR, heard while driving in to work.  Then, this one from K-thug, pulled up via my usual quick check of Daily Kos’s pundit round-up.*

Very short form:  the NPR story, of a type that I generally regard with a bit of suspicion, was an anchor-interviewer with a reporter doing a prospective analysis of the big financial rumble to come between, Goldman Sachs and Sen. Carl Levin’s subcommittee.  The story hinged on the release of emails by both sides intended to condemn or exculpate the poster child for a financial system gone way off the tracks.

It was everything you’ve come to loathe in political horse race stories, now translated into the big-money arena:  who’s ahead, who will win, what each is saying of the other.

There was no real attempt to make sense of the underlying argument, and in fact the reporter conflated two different issues: whether Goldman defrauded investors by failing to reveal flaws it knew and or consciously engineered into financial instruments it was selling; and/or whther Goldman in some sense conspired to bring the economy down by shorting mortgage backed securities in the run-up to the collapse of 2008.

The difference matters, to put it mildly.

Meanwhile, Krugman makes the obvious point: short sales may be ugly but they are not in themselves evil.**  FWIW  I’m not bothered by shorts at all (except on English men of a certain age, but that’s a different story, and probably relates to the trauma of being forced to wear and observe type-specimens of such schmattas as a very knobby kneed and self-conscious third grader in Hong Kong back when blogging was done with chisel and slate).

Rather, as Krugman argues, the real story revealed in straying emails is not that of Goldman doing what Goldman is set up to do — make as much money as it can, by any means up to the limit of the law (they devoutly hope, while budgeting for that hope’s denial) — but of rating agencies doing exactly what they are set up to prevent.  Krugman writes:

The Senate subcommittee has focused its investigations on the two biggest credit rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s; what it has found confirms our worst suspicions. In one e-mail message, an S.& P. employee explains that a meeting is necessary to “discuss adjusting criteria” for assessing housing-backed securities “because of the ongoing threat of losing deals.” Another message complains of having to use resources “to massage the sub-prime and alt-A numbers to preserve market share.” Clearly, the rating agencies skewed their assessments to please their clients.

These skewed assessments, in turn, helped the financial system take on far more risk than it could safely handle. Paul McCulley of Pimco, the bond investor (who coined the term “shadow banks” for the unregulated institutions at the heart of the crisis), recently described it this way: “explosive growth of shadow banking was about the invisible hand having a party, a non-regulated drinking party, with rating agencies handing out fake IDs.”

Goldman is a pit bull, trained up as an attack dog.  You expect it to bite, especially, as now, when that hound’s master has for so long failed to constrain its pet.

The response is obvious, and is now, imperfectly, working its way through the Senate.

The ratings agencies are supposed to be neutral umpires, but the payment structure under which they work has turned them, as Krugman notes, into witting confederates of the very folks whose offerings they were supposed to assess.  The term “accelerant” is often used to describe the chemical compounds arsonists to transform a match-drop ignition into a holocaust.  It works pretty well to describe what happened to our financial house when the ratings folks used their magical “AAA” rating to transform sh*t into (fools’) gold.

All of this is to say read the whole Krugman piece, for one, and to ask the DeLong question of NPR:  why oh why can’t we have a better press corps.

What’s really troubling to me is that NPR is in fact one of the good ones, by and large.  They have smart people working for them; they still employ real reporters; they pay attention.

But economics reporting is very hard — I’ve said elsewhere that I think it is harder than what most people think of as “real” science writing — and the way NPR swung and missed this morning is a very useful example of what happens when a news organization doesn’t quite get the story or the beat.

The piece I reference isn’t altogether  terrible, in the sense that it sets out to deceive or is talking about something wholly trivial in the face of a larger disaster (see Michelle Obama, sleeveless dresses of, for an example of what I mean here).  I don’t know the internal editorial sequence of events that NPR stories go through in this or in any case, but if I were to guess, I’d say that at least part of the problem behind this kind of story on that network is that the assigning or managing editors for the show are not sufficiently knowledgeable to tell the difference between the tabloid excitement of Goldman in the headlines and the substantive significance of something much duller, like whether or not Moody’s and Standard and Poor assessed risk accurately.

Just writing those last three words made my eyelids dip, just a little — which is the problem.  You have to see the story behind the facts if you want to be a useful journalist.  To be sure, a big part of the job of any specialized journalist, a science writer, an econ scribe, whatever, is to educate your editors into a broad understanding of what really matters on your beat, so I don’t want to absolve the on-air folks entirely.

Also, to be fair, we all like the tabloid stuff to help the morning coffee go down; it’s part of the trade too.  But my beef is that NPR had two stories on the financial crisis in today’s Morning Edition program — the other was on the way Senate filibuster rules are impeding reform — and both missed the story with more significance to the question of how bad and how soon the next crisis will be. And that’s not good enough.

*Within which I also found today, to my far-from-solitary surprise, a pointer to Mark Helprin making sense.

**For a good explanation of one of the garden variety uses of short selling for ordinary investers, or more precisely, the writing of put options, see Burton Malkiel’s passage on the use of options in his occasionally controversial classic, A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

Image:  Jean-Marc Nattier, “Marie Zéphirine de France”  c.1753

Galt’s Gulch: Or How the core Republican Idea is Destroying the American Way of Life

This, from the Denver Post, on the city of Colorado Springs’ discovery that taxes actually pay for things that people, you know, need and use. (h/t Atrios).

This is, among other things, what folks like Megan McArdle never seem to get — not merely that governments do things that (a) private entities won’t and or can’t and (b) that are necessary if you are, say, going to have thousands or millions of folks living in close proximity to each other, and (c)  those things that need to be paid for — by the people in common, that is to say, by government — include a bunch of stuff essential for a sound economy and any chance of achieving what is commonly thought of as the American way of life.

That is — it might be hard to quantify the contribution of adequate street lighting to GDP — but ask yourself what it would do to retail sales to have pools of darkness every thirty feet along a commercial street.

Or — it may not show up on a a monthly report of manufacturing output, but ask yourself whether the long-tail consequences of a diminished police presence in a factory district might include an impact on that district’s safety, and hence production — or if a change in fire response times could translate into altered insurance costs.

And you don’t even have to ask the speculative question about the value of investment in school facilities and in the quality of public schooling as discovered in very real dollars in the home valuations realized by property owners in the relevant districts.  That’s on that answers itself.

See e.g. this recent NBER working paper for an account of facilities spending (institutional access required for the full paper. Abstract here.) (That there is a lot of complexity in the area of the private and public economic value of education I willingly concede. But the broad picture of improved schools = higher property values appears to hold.)

It is possible, if you are a true believer, to imagine a gated world in which the “accomplished” secure for themselves all those qualities of life they seek on piece-work/piece-paid basis.  Dystopic science fiction turns on this conceit, among others.

But I’m a believer in Jane Jacobs work. And the key message of her Cities and the Wealth of Nations is that you need thriving, diverse (in every sense of the word), and ambitious cities to generate the range of activities that produce both healthy economies and polities.

To get that, you need some sense of a common stake in the civic enterprise.  You need to be willing to pay to keep the streets lit, potholes filled, police on their shifts and schools capable doing more than riding herd on the pre-unemployed.  Any society can tolerate some proportion of the unconsciously lucky in the delusion that their comfort is insulated from any external shock.  It cannot survive when that belief becomes an epidemic psychosis with an incidence >50% in one of our would-be ruling parties.

Don’t believe me?  Just ask the good, tax-averse citizens of Colorado Springs.

Image:  Wojciech Gerson, “Merchants in Danzig” 1865.

Must Read From David Leonhardt: Why Health Care Reform Matters, or How the GOP/Lieberman hate America Edition.

In today’s NYT, Leonhardt — one of the few really good economics reporters out there right now — writes about the “innovation gap” induced by the catastrophic failure that is the American health care “system” as it stands.  In doing so, he documents, once again, how the modern Republican party is, in essence, a traitor to the American dream.

In essence, Leonhardt is reporting about the largely unmentioned elephant in the room:  absent comprehensive reform of health care, the terror of losing or of failing to secure adequate insurance makes the US labor market increasingly rigid.  As Leonhardt reports:

It is impossible to know how much economic damage these distortions are causing, but they clearly aren’t good. Economic research suggests that more than 1.5 million workers who would otherwise have switched jobs fail to do so every year because of fears about health insurance. Some of them would have moved to companies where they could have contributed more, and others would have started their own businesses.

…Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, told me, “There clearly are people who choose to stay in their jobs due to the fact that they don’t have insurance portability.” Just consider the economic research showing that people married to someone with health insurance are more likely to work at small companies than people who aren’t so lucky.

Leonhardt does a good job of mapping in cartoon fashion what we could aim for at this point in the health care debate, quoting my MIT colleague John Gruber saying “Take the Senate on cost control and the House on affordability …and you’ve the best possible bill.”

Certainly, the central moral and social rationale for health care reform is the fact that too many Americans sicken, go bankrupt, and die for lack of access to care.

But what makes this article at once so obvious and so necessary is the light it shed on this fact:  the reason we need to get going on the health care bill now, and then defy the “once every twenty years” meme for improving what we get, is that the wealth and hence power of the America our children will inhabit depends on real, ultimately transformative changes in how Americans get covered and cared for.

So the next time you read statements like this, ask yourself why the Republicans in Congress (and too many outside it) hate America so.

In any event. read the article.  It’s worth your time.

Image:  ”A Proper Family Re-Union.” This immediate post-Civil War cartoon shows Satan welcoming Benedict Arnold and Jefferson Davis to Hell. Artist unknown, 1865.

Oddly Satisfying Factoid of the Day: Gerald Ford’s last laugh edition

Via this piece on newspaper obituary practices in Slate, I learned that Gerald Ford outlived the writer of at least one of his obituaries by eleven months.

Now that’s commitment.

Image:  John Everett Millais, “The Vale of Rest” 1858

On Wise Latinas, Identity and Experience, Civic Media, and the Lethal Stupidity of the Right

Another update from the Knight/MIT Future of News/Civic Media conference.  In the final plenary, one of the speakers noted that one of the ways that local and or civic media engages audience is across common experience.

Well, duh…except that the idea of experience and identity advanced in the comment was one with actual meaning, as opposed to the dangerous (lethal) mindlessness of the view captured in mainstream versions in the  Latina=racist nonsense spewed over the Sotomayor nomination.

Here’s the example:  Imagine someone in town, living on the good side of the community with an annual income of 100K.  Now imagine another person, working poor, renting across town.  Not members of the same community, right?  Different identities across all the “important” axes, perhaps.

Now imagine they both are parents of six year-olds with leukemia.

Speaking as a parent of a (thankfully, touch wood) healthy child, there is no doubt as to the identity of such parents.  They are people with sick kids.  Everything else is secondary.

And there is no doubt that the experience of taking care of your kid, and your spouse, yourself will without doubt give you a quality of wisdom on issues like the current state of American health care, that the parent of a healthy kid will never quite match.  Sympathy is no substitute for empathy (not that I wish the opportunity for empathy in this circumstance on anyone).  Lived experience makes a difference (duh!) and ranges of experience represented in power…and in the creation of media…the consumption and or participation in the making of information … and so on.

And clearly, as a background for creating media applications that have an economic rationale and an intellectual or informative purpose, the most diverse view of connections of identity, self, and experience is not just useful, but essential.

And that’s so airy that I wince at my own words:  but what I’m trying to say is that when I first got involved in pull media, a VOD project called MagRack, the idea was to narrow cast on a very crude definition of interested populations.  We had no real data to help us refine our groups.  Now we do — and clearly one of the pro-active steps we can take to create an economically possible new media environment is to think creatively how to create communities across interests that conventional “census”-like categories (Latino/as, wise or not; RV owners etc.) don’t capture.

That’s still pretty airy, which is a state of mind conferences like these encourage — born in part of a sense of glorious unanchored possibility in everyone’s good ideas.  But I don’t think (I hope not, anyway) that it is entirely stupid.

Image:  “Passer Payez”, a ca. 1803 painting by Louis-Leopold Boilly.

THe Future of News and Civic Media: Digital story telling/complex investigative stories on the web session.

William Buzenberg, Center for Public Integrity honcho, is speaking at a “barcamp” at the FN+CM conference at MIT.  What follows is an attempt at a live-ish blog:

First up:  Bill talks about a computer/assisted reporting project on the subprime lenders, “The Subprime 25” — real story was that the banks we are bailing out invested in the big bad 25…all of which are now out of business.

He is going through the mechanics of reporting.  1)  took 3 months just to gather the data on the 25 lenders and the 7 million mortgages…and the SEC documents that helped uncover the underwriters, from Lehman on down.

William takes us through both the contents of the story(ies) — with material like heat maps to show where subprime was happening — and who was doing it…

At the same time he spends some time talking about how to get this stuff out in the web ecosystem…went too fast to capture, but the idea was to catch both traditional media and places like Huffington post.

Mostly, though, this is superstructure.  The story and the reporting he describes in tracking who did what to whom in a large and complex story are familiar…investigative reporting is investigative reporting; the value add of web-based distribution is clearly significant, but by far the larger and harder task is just working the story in the first place.

Now Bill is facing questions on the display and the penetration of the story and whether or not people will actually find the material.  One example Bill used as something that didn’t work as well as he hoped was this set of cards with a “more info” feature.

He did talk about the creation of an e-book available for five bucks or so through the site and Kindle — but it has not produced all that money.

More questions are coming about the searchability and linkability to parts of the story.  Basically it’s all or none.

William now wonders about whether the amount of work — fact checking thousands of words, triple editing and so on is overkill for a web in which folks want it right now…but that gets at the heart of the new v. old journalism debate.

Switch of story:  we’re now looking at the pentagon travel story…took him about a year to get all the information from initial FOIA, through students (i.e. free or v. cheap labor, I assume) working through the results, to final organziation and cleaning up of the information.

This is a very simple, clear story — but still a year in development.  Again, the story being told here is that the investigation is what makes investigative reporting work.

William now talks about the evolution fo the Center for Public Intregrity — began as an investigative service to the MSM, now with the emergence of the web, issue of getting platforms to use it.  This gets to the ecology/economy of news on the web. One point:  he wants to give his stuff to the places that will find audiences.  So bloggers — have at it.

One of the technical issues that Buzenberg is now focusing on is the future of journalism as the creation, manipulation and drilling down through large data bases.  For his organization…that means subcontracting to folks like Palantir to do the database infrastructure work.  Hence, he argues on some level (this is me) the argument about the economics of newspapers is secondary. The digital revolution is transforming the back rooms of journalism as well as the boardrooms — and getting that going requires matching old line investigative skills with data and digital distribution chops.

11:30:  A bit of unintended comedy — how to point the browser to another site.  This is MIT!  This is the future of journalism!  Be afraid!

Gregor Hackmack now takes the stage.  Hackmack is the co-founder of Parlamentwatch.com.  He presents this as a tool being used to connect citizens and representatives, displaying crucial legislative data about German and now Europe-wide parliamentarians, allowing constituents to find their particular representatives, and then pose questions.  Both questions and answers are published.

Some of the issues are data display– parliamentarians are ranked by number of questions answered and (if I caught this right) by the amount of discussion on any given politician.  The site can also organize questions by theme rather than respondent.

Question:  how does the website get known?  One way is through a partnership w. Der Spiegel and a widget connecting Spiegel stories that have a political element and the Parlamentwatch website.

Conceived of as building a repository of voter memory — nice phrase.

For an English language versions, see Ireland’s Candidate Watch.

Again, the emphasis is on building a body of data that may satisfy an enduser need, but is really accumulating into a point of access into stories for journalists.  This, even more than Public Integrity’s project is a kind of middle-man in the new journalistic infrastructure:  if data will drive new journalism, this is a way to construct data as well as archive or organize it in a way that catalyzes stories.

11:45:  question time.  Hackmack is talking now about how a change in the electoral law in one state in Germany to allow voters to alter party lists of candidates created a need to provide information about the candidates and parliamentarians…and beginning in the Hamburg era in 2004, they moved the idea of Parlament Watch national in 2005.

Problem, as always:  where’s the money?  Offered profile upgrades to 2000 candidates — paid 100 euros to get picture up on the site.  They were able to raise about $25,000.  Hackmack and his colleague, two guys with computers, leveraged that to a larger donor base, advertising — with an ingenious opt out that tells a user how much money they cost the site by withholding one click (.o4 Euro in the demo presented here); and a kind of membership involvement — currently about 600 members, with a goal to reach 1,000.

In other words just about anything that works.

Now question comes up on multi skilled journalists:  Buzenberg wants reporters that can write, report, shoot and blog.

I’m dubious for certain applications at least.  ENG shooting is a real skill, and documentary work, especially: I’ve done enough documentary work to know that the skills required for visual story telling are not the same as those for the core journalistic practices that Buzenberg describes as the backbone of his center’s projects.  I’m a believer in a more team based approach, working a documentarian/video news person with an investigative person or team.

12:05  Buzenberg — there is a technological solution to everything that is wrong with journalism today; we should just go for it.  You don’t need to bat an eye at 350 million mortgages.  He’s working on a medicare/medicaid story with more technologies.  In this context Buzenberg walks back the claim that new hires need to do everything.  To get to computer-assisted journalism (his phrase, and another nice one) you need a team including traditional journalists — editors and the investigators — with web designers, coders, videographers, data base folks and so on.

Buzenberg — talks about the international network of investigative journalists….on a tobacco underground story — all be done, with just 30 folks in Washington, connecting virtually to “the jedi knights of journalism” for a story that has global reach.

The point — where I find a very familiar investigative journalistic approach in what’s been described here, Buzenberg and Hackmack both point to the extraordinary multiplier that the web allows for this work.  The key, I think, in this argument, is the degree to which the connectivity side of the web (as opposed to the distributive function) powers this extreme amplification of journalistic effort.  People and data are at a (clever) persons fingertips…thus permitting a different set of stories to be approached.

Buzenberg now talks about his location in the ecosystem:  if a newspaper does something, the center does not have to do it — but there is an enormous “middle ground” (his phrase) where an investigation can find plenty to sink its teeth into.  Watchdog role is available, e.g. (references the Pentagon travel story as an example).

Do people care about such transparency?  Does it matter if they do?  Buzenberg replies that watchdog journalism is about holding powerful transparent.  (All this in response to a rather defeatist question about whether or not people care about the stories that document official wrongdoing.)

ProPublica guy talks about the value of putting information people together with journalism.

Buzenberg talks about a concept called an impact grid as a tool of measuring how a project has penetrated the media space.  Traffic, hits, links and so on — wants to get his journalists thinking about that grid at the start of the project as well as the end.

The reach can be achieved in different ways:  briefings on the hill; ngos etc.  So one issue is what that community is interested in.  Did a pesticide story that took a year of FOIA stuff and a suit — but that is now valuable for an advocacy community (which the Center for Public Integrity is not.)

The question comes up again — is anyone reading the stuff?  Shouldn’t investigative journalists find out from the public what they want to have investigated?

Answers range from crowd sourcing is doing that, to the fact that folks respond to big investigations.

And with that, we’re done.