Cool USB flash drive press kit designs

 Blog
Mar 312013
 

I get a lot of press kits on USB drives. A decade ago, when they replaced paper kits (thank goodness), they were uninspired and utilitarian, and they often stored as little as 256 MB of information, so they didn’t hold much interest even in re-use. Now, even a standard stick drive can contain 2 to 4 GB and they compete to be memorable. Even though they publicize American attractions, nearly all of them are still made in China.

I saved a few of my favorites.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Who knows — maybe I’ll add more cool designs as I run across them.

Are Disney’s Magic Kingdom Google Maps images fake?

 Blog
Mar 252013
 

What’s the deal with these bird’s-eye photos of Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida? They appear on Google Maps when you zoom in and click “Satellite.” They seem fabricated. Why?

1. Parades don’t do that.

MKOverviewGM

Check out the configuration of the parade. Normally, the enter the Hub from the bridge at 10 o’clock, travel clockwise, and exit at 6 o’clock. Here, the floats go round and round the entire Hub as if it’s a carousel. In real life, floats pack together, with lots of dancers between them, and with no large gaps. But look:

Continue reading »

Why ‘travel writing’ can cease to exist

 Blog
Mar 192013
 

I have a confession: I haven’t read a travel book in years.

I’ll dip in. But I usually can’t get myself enthused enough to finish. For a while, I wondered if something was wrong with me. I’ve worked in travel journalism for 13 years. Why do I get bored by travel writing?

It may say something about my poor introspection, but it took many years to figure it out.

For me, travel is about the place, not someone’s reaction to it. I would rather cut out the middle-man.

Travel isn’t just about vacations. It’s a study of history, food, people and nature. That’s why it’s inexhaustible.

So although I don’t read travel books, I am voracious about non-fiction books. Books about the history of salt, about Reconstruction, about a guy who grew up in Bombay, about the banana trade, about the heyday of silent movies in Hollywood. I always have at least 8 to 10 in the dugout, waiting for their turn to step up and knock me into their world.

All are the stories of other places. Isn’t that the essence of travel?

The concept of “travel writing” is so limiting. Far fewer people want to read about the act of travel (the revenue figures are cratering) but reading about the world has never gone out of style. The act of travel is a personal process, and it often involves details (taxicabs, tickets, uncomfortable beds) that obstruct actual learning. If you drop the “travel” and are just a “writer,” you haven’t lost a yard of territory. You are still covering the whole planet.

Continue reading »

How Ann B. Davis changed my life

 Blog
Jan 232013
 
One day, I talked to Alice on the phone

One day, I talked to Alice on the phone

I was a cub reporter for Entertainment Weekly. Now and then, I got juicy feature assignments such as the review of Saving Private Ryan on video or a rare interview with Christian Bale, but as a cub reporter, I was more often asked to create those little sidebars and boxes that the more experienced staff writers had no interest in doing. Today, twentysomething idealists sweat at long benches, hammering out posts to chase the day’s hot search terms. But then, I worked the phones for “Rent Check,” in which I asked famous people what movies they had rented recently. It was a grind and pretty dumb stuff, but there were fringe benefits.

I talked to some good people. Jerry Springer told me about his family’s tragic history with the Holocaust. Alex Trebek cryptically alluded to a dark period in his past. Don Knotts passed, saying he’d let the younger folks have their say, but my favorite “get” was Ann B. Davis.

In her own way, she was more reclusive than even Christian Bale. She had found God, retired from the rigors of television, and spent most of her time dwelling with an Episcopal community in Pennsylvania. She seemed mistrustful of secular life. This interview thrilled me: In middle school, I watched 90 minutes of The Brady Bunch every day on Channel 56 in Boston. I could tell you within two lines of the opening which episode it was. I even kept a handwritten checklist of them all. Ugly Aunt Jenny? Hatch mark. Bobby loves Jesse James? Hatch hatch. Cousin Oliver the Jinx? Hatch. (I hated that one.)

Anyway, I interviewed Ann and asked what she had watched recently. One of her answers was Tender Mercies, and the reason she gave was that Robert Duvall plays a man who faces difficult choices and makes the right one. Duvall was a good Christian man, she told me, and being a Christian woman, she admired his work and would see anything he was in. Her sense of faith, decent but not preachy, permeated her responses, which I appreciated, since I knew there were millions of Americans that would identify with her thoughts. Her movie selections felt as nurturing as Alice herself. Continue reading »

The night I jilted Gloria Steinem

 Blog
Jul 302012
 

Gloria Steinem and David Bale

I don’t have many regrets in my life, and I’m thankful for that. But I have one enormous one, and if I could take it back, I would. However, like all regrets, it is indelible.

I was a young reporter for Entertainment Weekly, spending my days jockeying for space in cubicles left empty by vacationing assistants and hoping I could fly under the radar long enough to be noticed and get a promotion that would make my parents proud. Whenever I wasn’t fact-checking, I spent my time hunting for the clever story angles that were too big for the staff writers, who were handed the big movie star feature interviews the way raw fish is hand-fed to Shamu.

Trawling one day over the Usenet message boards — the Internet’s messy afterbirth, soon to be tidied up — I noticed a mostly unknown young British actor named Christian Bale had a disproportionately large number of message threads devoted to him. Mel Gibson, three; Chris O’Donnell, two. But Christian Bale had eight. I had discovered the first male Hollywood actor with a major online following. Continue reading »

Welcome to the Low Self-Esteem Economy

 Blog
Mar 212012
 
Clip Art suited man extending middle finger

"At our company, you're Number One!"

By now you’ve probably heard about this week’s news gossip that some business are now demanding the Facebook passwords of new job applicants so they can snoop around their private lives and approve of their private lives before hiring them. The media is noticeably short on names of specific companies that are actually doing it, but the debate has been opened — if you consider radio-button Internet polls to be debate.

Still, about 10 percent of people who responded to this Detroit Free Press poll said that, sure, they’d be wiling to surrender private password information in order get that elusive job. Granted, this is in Detroit, one of the most arid wastelands of the American employment ecosystem, and where people have lost dignity in a thousand ways long before clicking “vote.”

We’re sacrificing dignity because if we don’t, we won’t eat. Welcome to the new Low Self-Esteem Economy, in which the feeling that we’re lucky to get crumbs is a commodity employers can cash in.

The Huffington Post is building a news empire partly on the back of free labor; it doesn’t pay many of its writers and aggregates stories from other places. (It’s by no means the only publication doing this.) When a strike was called by the Newspaper Guild of America against it last year, its in-house flack said, “nearly all of our bloggers are happy with the arrangement, and happy to access the platform and the huge audience it brings.” Arianna Huffington herself, a famous liberal, blurted out a decidedly un-liberal denigration of a labor dispute, telling the media, ““Go ahead! Go on strike! What does it matter?… [N]o one really notices!” Maybe she was right. Five months later, the boycott was called off.

The message, of course, is that reporters and writers are lucky to get published at all. To accept any of this, you have to first accept that you’re not worth better.

I’m not sticking a knife in these companies for trying to get something out of people. I suppose that testing the limits of exploitation is the American way. It’s the bottom line of the free market system: Try to bleed profit out the other guy to the point where he cries foul — and there you find your market price.

I’m saying, with great concern, that we are happy to go along with it now. We are afraid to cry foul lest we go jobless.

A few people are objecting. There’s the former intern at The Charlie Rose Show who’s suing over alleged wage law violations. Who knows how much traction that’ll get, because as a culture, we accept no-wage situations when we’re beginning our careers. (I myself had two internships in the media when I was starting out; one at The Village Voice was unpaid, which I left the minute I landed a paid one at Entertainment Weekly, which indeed turned into an actual job with benefits.)

The trouble is that more and more of us are being told by powerful businesses that because the economy remains in a muddle, we’re all the equivalent of rank beginners.

Can you imagine if, say, Ernest Hemingway’s publishers refused to pay him for his first book, The Sun Also Rises, because he was “lucky” to see his name on a book at all?

If you have a great job right now, congratulations. Don’t brag too much about it, because many businesses already have us making huge sacrifices to retain our paychecks. We’re doing the work of all those who were fired in recent years. The trouble is that that employers have learned how to squeeze more out of us. While many of us toil to take one for the team, quaking in fear of retrenchment, the reality is that right now, corporations are recording record profit margins.

Economists fear that skeleton crew staffing has become the “new normal,” and that employers have seen they can wring maximum profits from minimum resources by demanded sacrifices from all. The Sword of Damocles, that mythic motivator that feeds on groveling, convinces us to give a lot of things we didn’t have to give up 10 years ago. Since businesses are racking up profits, why sheath the sword and hire more people again? Just as businesses have learned to operate under these lean circumstances, our tolerance as workers may have stretched so far it can never snap back to normal again.

What we’re seeing is a transfer of blue-collar terrors to white-collar résumés. Factory workers lived with oppression for generations, and they struggled with ways to fight back for just as long because often, there were few alternatives in their towns. Now cubicle professionals are being stretched to their hourly limit, losing already dwindling benefits, or donating labor without pay because the employers have convinced them they’re blessed for the privilege. It’s the old story with new middle-class players.

But, just as American factory workers learned long ago, it’s hard not to notice where the fruit of our labors is going.

I can only hope we’re nearing the end of this period an American industry that is underwritten by the low self-esteem of its workers. As the economy firms up, it will be more difficult for employers to hold onto this “new normal” of under-staffing and perennial internships. There comes a point, as people age and see their professional dreams wither, that they refuse to believe the manipulative lie that they’re simply lucky to have a job at all.

;

Vacation days around the world

Food for thought: Most American businesses only give about 10 days of vacation a year, and they don't even have to do that. Also: When you're dead, you're dead forever. (Source: CNN)

Signs that your favorite website is a post mill

 Blog
Feb 032012
 

See the recent graduates huff and puff at the grindstone so that Google is swarmed with the domain they serve

The Twitterverse loves congratulating itself over the speed and reach of its favorite toy, but it leaves out one important fact: There’s a lot more bad journalism now than there was before the social media revolution.

While social media has the power to spread snippets of potentially useful information far and wide, many of the updates link to some truly awful reportage. That is, if people click on the link at all. Analyst Dan Zarrella found that tweeted links have a less-than-10% click-through rate, meaning fewer than one in ten people bothers to absorb more than a headline. The number of people who bother to read more than a sentence or two on Facebook is similar.

With numbers like this, it’s hard not to begin to see poorly executed social media as gossip, refined.

Because much of the time we only see information 140 characters at a time, we don’t realize how wobbly are the underpinnings of the headlines. Even on the relatively rare instances when we click through on a link we read, we’ve become so habituated to scanty details that we some of us have never grown up with the ability to discern a professionally researched, ethically sourced story and something slapped together to harvest a click.

The bulk of our news is now bulk news. These are the post mills.

Corporations have laid off their full-time reporters by the thousands. They devote no resources to deep investigation, or if they do, it’s only to a few figurehead hires. Rarely did someone who works at the site you’re reading actually pick up a phone to validate the story it is recycling. Instead, you will notice, it passes the buck and links to where it found it. And thus, Web rumors circulate daily. A significant chunk of the New Media machine disseminates squibs and filler in a mandate to crank out topical information, harvest clicks while the getting is good, and move on.

These sites require writers to pump out five or more posts a day — not enough time to properly research, and not enough time to even leave their desks to sift through government files, attend press conferences, or cultivate contacts.

I won’t name names. I don’t need to. Here are 10 warning signs that your site may be a post mill that trades in glorified gossip.

A post mill:

– Links to original reporting another site did. Usually the writer places not so much as a single phone call to get a response or to fact-check. They might quickly consult a website. With post mills, you’ll often find yourself clicking backward from site to site, Escher-like, before you can finally locate the one that reported the story to begin with. Let’s hope it did it properly, because it can be hard to find the beginning of the research trail.

– Doesn’t pay its writers, or it only pays a few of them. If it does pay them a living wage, it may make a show of it to ward of a reputation as a post mill. Some of the aspects of the post mill, such as relentless working conditions for the young people hired to staff them, are not evident on the home page.

– Has high writer turnover. This is sometimes a sign that websites pay (if they do) according to how many views their posts attract. Given the post mill’s onerous daily quota, writers burn out faster. Commission systems also create an incentive to dangle scandalous or scary posts that are designed to stir reader fears or outrage, which in turn has them reposting them in alarm, delivering the post mill the clicks it craves.

– Often covers press releases. These can be collected and processed with a minimum of effort. Readers won’t often recognize the story as a press release rehash, but if a bunch of sites post the same story on the same day with the same details, it’s usually because a miller turned PR puff into news. Or they “aggregated” it from another site. Either way, the emperor has no clothes.

– Front-loads hot, SEO-friendly words in the headline and early grafs. During the writing process, the editors probably consulted Google Keywords to tip potential clicks in their favor, or its editors know what works. This isn’t necessarily a bad practice. Newspapermen do something similar all the time with their headlines, of course, but sexy headlines that attract clicks are a primary M.O. of a post mill.

– Gravitates toward crime and weirdness. Controversy and weird videos are a sure sign a post mill is click-baiting. I see several of the major “travel” sites trafficking mostly in airplane mishaps and airport infractions, posting very little industry and destination expertise at all. Highlighting controversy because people click on it does nothing good for public discourse, and in fact, it often gives power to idiotic arguments that don’t merit endless debate in a society with plenty of real problems to confront.

– Frequently wanders off topic. A post mill often has a lax editorial directive that enables what I call search trapping, which is posting anything, often with not even tangential connection to the theme of the site, to cash in on the hot subject of the moment.

– Often keeps posts really short. The less reporting, the shorter the writing time, the quicker a mill can search trap. If you finish reading a post and you have some basic questions unanswered, if there were no quotes that aren’t attributed to some other publication, or if you have to click from that brief story to someone else’s website to get the full details, you might be reading a post mill.

– Publishes top 10 lists with no methodology. If you’re not finding new stories, you have to rehash old ones, and if you list 10 subjective things, you have 10 chances to pop up in Google searches. They’re also highly shareable because readers are now used to the unchallenging buzz of the meme. They’re not all bad, and I have written quite a few of these myself for reputable publishers such as the BBC and Travel + Leisure; you can recognize the milly ones for their utter lack of factual meat.

– Has lots of sister sites. This is a sign that a publisher is trying to corner a bunch of topics at once, and a business with a split focus like that is more likely to be financially, and not journalistically, obsessed. Not a sure sign, but like everything on my list, it could be a flag.

•

Don’t get me wrong. Not all post mills are bad. Some do a very good job of aggregating news that would otherwise escape wider notice. There’s also nothing wrong with using tools to get more clicks. There is something wrong, though, when there is precious little expertise, reporter access, or eyewitness validation supporting the content.

Post mills can undermine the Fourth Estate, allow marketing and PR departments to manipulate our media as their mouthpiece, and leave the watchdogs sleeping. An entire generation of people is growing up without an understanding that the people who bring them their news have hastily recycled it, without checking how it got to them. Even the esteemed news outlets devote minutes and column inches to recycling what Joe Blow said about a topic on Facebook or Twitter. Gossip and news are becoming indistinguishable.

We have developed a news system in which everyone assumes that someone else is doing the heavy lifting. Somewhere, we think, there’s a group of people who vetted and researched what we read. In actuality, a lot of it just came off the grindstone.

Seven things Facebook and Google get wrong about you

 Blog
Jan 102012
 
The Genius of Electricity, Edison Labs, West Orange, NJ

Pride in new technology always seems laughably callow later: Thomas Edison bought the “Genius of Electricity” sculpture at the Paris Exposition of 1889 (West Orange, NJ)

Facebook’s ever-changing look, including Timeline, could be called a triumph of simplification, which is to say a train wreck for easy choices. Love it or hate it — and I, for the record, find it a turn-off — we can’t shake the feeling that things are changing rapidly and to such an arcane degree that it’s a waste of time to figure out how to harness it. Here’s some news: Facebook is applying filters across every aspect of its interface for a very good reason

Facebook’s CFO and public relations tap-dancers tell you it’s about giving you personal choice. But that’s not the most important side of the story. No, Facebook is changing mostly because it sells ads when it railroads you into a new system that limits and labels your usage.

Most of the major sites we use now purport to be able to “customize” what they show you based on what you’ve looked at before. But this worrying fascination with personalized content is built on some logical lapses about who we are and what our behavior really exposes about ourselves.

I’ll be quick since I know you have headlines to barely gloss on Twitter, but there are seven essential fallacies that the whippersnappers at Facebook think are true — but aren’t.

1. If you don’t click on a link, you’re not interested.

I can tell this just from my own web stats on this site. While my post about a cool interactive 1924 aerial map of Manhattan had lots of traffic, relatively few people took things further and clicked on the actual source map at NYC.gov. Simply learning about the map was enough for most people. That’s the way it is with links. We read the headlines and we read the lead paragraph. Much like the inverted pyramid of newspaper tradition, we can glean the basics from the leading edge of a story without having to read further. So a click is not representative of interest, but only of a certain kind of interest. Sometimes, it’s merely an indication the headline was confusing and we needed to understand what was going on. Yet Facebook, Google, and most trendy Web media outlets use a click as their measure of us (as I wrote about in my “The Tyranny of the Click” post). It’s a fallacy.

2. You primarily want to hear from the same group of people.

So if we agree that a click doesn’t equate with whether I care or who I am, it stands to reason that my lesser-known acquaintances and friends are of interest to me even if I don’t alway interact with them. That’s why I friended them to begin with. In fact, often I use Facebook to keep tabs on people I don’t know very well yet, but would like to. If there’s one thing Facebook is good for, it’s what I call passive affection. (“Facebook’s Gift to Society: Passive Affection” is a favorite post on this blog.) Yet Facebook’s algorithms decide who is important in your life based on your interactions, and they hide all others until you happen to notice they’re missing.

3. You only want to know about things you already like.

In the old days, you’d thumb through a newspaper and even if you didn’t bother to read the articles, you at least were exposed to the headlines so you had a sense for what was going on in the world. Not anymore. Even Google’s search, which we all think of as a raw resource, delivers different results from person to person, which was exposed in Eli Pariser’s depressingly prescient TED talk about “filter bubbles.” Now, two people entering the same simple term in Google will be shown two different results page based on their past usage. This self-selection for the familiar threatens to make us all shallower and more ignorant. I despaired over this same development in “It’s Content You Want to See!“.

4. You want your activities to be turned into ads.

Of course, the reason all of this is happening is Facebook and Google want to be able to tell advertisers what you’re clicking on so they can make more money off you. That’s why they’re doing everything they can to exclude stuff they don’t think you will click on. The need for newspaper advertising was gutted once our consumer economy discovered instant Web search (I wrote about that in “How the Web Destroyed our Economy“), and now advertisers are successfully horning in where they know they’ll find us: on social media. It’s a well-worn argument that most people would rather preserve their privacy than have their activities sold piecemeal. Even setting aside privacy concerns as a matter of transition into a new digital age, the tactic of commodifying our clicks is logically flawed. Because what I click on is not necessarily representative of what I like (see Point #1), most of the time the targeted ads I’m shown are insultingly off-target anyway. I often click on things I have no knowledge about, naturally, because I want to learn about them, so it makes little sense to use that click to market to me later. It’s bad enough that I can’t find what I want in the stores anymore because the modern customer service default is, “Go look online.” Now even my own online life is being used to crowd out the things I do want to see in favor of ads for things I don’t want.

5. You care mostly about today.

This is one good thing about Facebook’s Timeline, which I otherwise hate: It allows you to go back so that stuff you said can be found. Lots of people despise this very fact about it, and it still only gives you the illusion of preservation, since none of it will ever be written down in a certifiably preserved form that isn’t subject to accidental deletion (my concern in “You Are Being Erased“). But Twitter, unlike Timeline, is intentionally temporary. It’s nearly impossible to track down a tweet once it’s a few days old, and even the most powerful programs can’t dredge up a tweet from several years ago unless an outside entity happened to archive it at the time. The result is that we are relentlessly tossing important thoughts on the discard pile simply because the design of our sites knocks them downward, off the table and out of sight. For social media to truly reflect us as humans, it must learn to be about all of us, the before and the after, and not just hook into our prurient interests.

6. Algorithms can predict intangible things about you.

Dating sites boast that their mathematical formulas can pair you with the perfect mate based on questions you have answered. But there is far more that goes into attraction. The echoes of your grade school sweetheart, the reverberation of your upbringing, the whiff of pheromones, the pang of past traumas… none of these can be quantified by a whiz kid programmer. We can’t even predict them ourselves; it’s metaphysical chemistry. We are amalgamations of our experiences. We also, it bears noting, tend to feel “on the spot” when we answer these questionnaires, and we respond with an idealized version of ourselves in mind. So because the questions miss the mark, and because they can’t be answered with the honesty and nuance required anyway, they’re extremely rough. That’s one reason it was so offensive when OKCupid sent me an email saying that from now on, it would show me fewer “ugly” people. How does it know what I find attractive? What we find seductive in others’ faces has many mysterious origins.

7. You love customizing sites.

I’m busy. So are you. I don’t have the energy or the inclination to comb through my Facebook Timeline and select cover images, prune bygone updates and photos, and set subscriptions and visibility levels for all of my friends. After all, the last two, three, and four times I went through the trouble of setting everything the way I liked it, Facebook changed everything overnight, neglected to write instructions, and buried the alert in its privacy notice. Now, nearly every site you use on a regular basis thinks nothing of radically altering its user interface, proclaiming the upheaval an improvement, and then assuming you have the will to think of every possible new privacy violation, cut off every new loophole, and search out every available preference. The people who code these sites assume you will be excited about customizing your usage because they live in a world where computer geeks are overly rewarded, so they assume you are not only tolerant of their endless retroactive patching of blatant weaknesses, but that you admire them for the changes. Your time is their toy.

Such is our era’s technological arrogance. Such are these smug, benighted programmers.

 

 

If it happened online, it still happened

 Blog
Nov 222011
 
Techno-Sphere Swatch

This was the Techno-Sphere Swatch. I owned one in the late '80s. It, too, is obsolete.

There’s pervasive concept that things that happen online deserve a whole different set of words to describe them. We contend daily with new words that there really don’t need new words for, such as hyperlocal, content, and that gossipy reduction of a complex social trend, meme.

In the beginning of our collective online existence, techies invented scientific-sounding new coinages as a way of legitimizing their offshoot world. But now that world has essentially merged with the Real Time world, but the colloquial segregation endures. For a movement that likes to view itself as expressively free and nimble, the onliners quickly burdened their communication with a lexicon of stultifying jargon, and they stubbornly resist using everyday language. Their writing is often as impenetrable and lifeless as the memos shuffled around in a mammoth corporation.

That’s annoying, but it’s not where the divisions end. The online world is treated like a separate kingdom even by those reporting on it.

Keep your ears open during the next newscast. Again and again, events are reported as being a story “online.” It instantly diminishes whatever happened.

If it’s a story, it’s a story, period. Why do we keep pretending that online happenings happen in some other universe?

When they talk this way, it’s as if TV journalists are still contorting to prove that they even know what the Internet is. We’re hip to the Twitter, gang!  So hip, in fact, that it’s going to take 45 minutes away from reporting news to make sure you’re aware it knows what Sassypants87 tweeted about Taylor Lautner.

Its probably a form of Luddism to hold technology in a separate sphere from the rest of life. But that’s what we are still doing, 15 years after most of us adopted email and the Web fully into our lives.

The TV news channel journalists would probably excuse themselves by saying they always name the source as a way of citing sources, but their patronizing presentation hints that’s not quite the simple truth: They often show Web comments on a separate screen, complete with the logo of the originating site. They condescend, they switch into a new style. It’s not as if they broadcast the logo of a newspaper if it happens to run salacious or controversial remarks by a political candidate.

If you wonder if I have a point, it may be that you haven’t noticed. Go ahead, listen. On Twitter, Kardashian defended herself… Here’s what the candidate said on Facebook… Nine times out of 10, you could strike the “online” or “on Facebook” from the script of any TV report. It doesn’t matter anymore. They said it no matter where it appeared. Our online lives are integrated with our other lives.

So much news is drawn from the Web these days, anyway (kitty-cat YouTube videos on NBC Nightly News? really?), that surely by now it’s redundant to keep repeating it in many cases.

If it happened online, it still happened. The Internet is part of our lives. Let’s absorb it, accept it, and start talking that way. All of us.

The Tyranny of the Click

 Blog
Feb 242011
 

A 1942 War poster. Ironically, it was referring to unions

Do you even know what’s happening to your news? Media companies are tracking the hot terms that people are searching for from minute to minute, and when those terms come up on their computers, there’s a little button. Hit that button and a new rough draft is created with those search terms as the topic. That way, by focusing on coverage of what’s hot, “news” organizations catch viewers.

You don’t hear about things because that thing is necessarily important. You often hear about it because people are searching for it on Google today. This way, Nicole Richie’s wedding is covered more than Richard Holbrooke’s death.

Until a few years ago, your newspaper would send someone to cover the City Council meeting because it was an important service to the community. Not everyone would read that story about the meeting. They might flip right past it on the bus or in the coffee shop. But the City Council members watched their step because a journalist was watching. That’s what they called journalists: watchdogs.

Not anymore. Once media outlets gained the ability to actually know how many people click on each story, the temptation was too great. Rather than presenting news because it’s sometimes the best thing to do for our country and our communities, the news has been nearly completely monetized by corporations. And, as we know, pretty much every news brand is owned by a corporation.

Recently, Nikki Usher, writing for the Nieman Journalism Lab, took a contrary point of view in her post “Why SEO and audience tracking won’t kill journalism as we know it.” The crux of her argument was this: “…journalists, for too long, have been writing about what they think their readers ought to know, and not enough about what their audiences want to know.”

I wonder if she’s a parent, and if she is, whether she raises her kids that way.

Let’s not paint a misty picture of that dinosaur, the old-fashioned newsroom. Even newsprint men wrote a lot of stories merely to feed the appetite of what people wanted to know. Too many. That’s been one of the pillars of the paper since the days of Yellow Journalism, when Helen Jewett’s hatchet murder was the crap du jour.

So Usher has conveniently edited her portrait of historic journalism. She also doesn’t quash any of my SEO fears; she affirms them. She merely looks down her nose at the healthy watchdog function of traditional journalism the way a 7-year-old sniffs at spinach. She also unwittingly succumbs to one of the oldest journalistic tricks in the book: Be contrary, and you’ll be read. Perhaps it’s the same impulse that makes me want to contradict her on my blog.

It’s certainly true that newsrooms are catering to clicks. Yes, journalists in even the best newsrooms craft news they feel is important. It’s a critical function of editors and writers — and merely by choosing what’s important enough to cover they reveal, by definition, a bias that cannot be removed from journalism.

I know there’s an overclass of largely educated, information-hungry people who swear Twitter is uncovering the world’s great ills and revolutionizing revolution, but I would argue that most of its successes have been at shining additional pinpoints of light on areas already in the spotlight. It’s certainly not reaching a wide enough audience to right the wrongs of the local City Council, and there’s no one behind it who can dive into a sleazy corporation’s file cabinets and come up a month later with redemption clutched in their fist.

And since Twitter posts only reach the people who have elected to follow their chosen writers, until there’s a wayward re-tweet to filter out to a new audience, posts actually serves to isolate people in their own bubbles of self-interest. I wrote about the growing intellectual dangers of “personalized” content here last fall.

When you make news too social and slavishly desperate for clicks, the watchdog stuff doesn’t get seen. Oddity wins, not boring old justice, and great stuff gets lost every day. You’d have gulp many gallons of the social media Kool-Aid to think that the much-touted “democracy” of the Web solves all ills. It doesn’t, just as unchecked capitalism can create some pretty hefty poverty problems for the lowest rungs of society.

And the City Council meeting goes uncovered, and the greedy government and corporate ravens rampage without notice. Even if a writer gets the whiff of shady back-room deals or wrongdoing masked by by a thicket of impenetrable paper, the low margins of the Web mean that no one’s paying anyone to put the time and elbow grease into an investigation. When writers get $15 a post, how could they?

Click-derived stories and social media gossip are rapidly leading us to an even larger echo chamber than the one we’re living in now, where newsrooms pump out stories on topics they see appearing on Google Trends, to masticate regurgitated topics of proven tastiness, and to chime in, not break stories. Hollywood began subsisting on recycled rehashes a half-decade ago. Now it’s the news’s turn.

American news coverage has always struggled between profit motives and watchdog service. But the Web made response measurable. Now pure capitalism rules all, and there’s no room for that do-gooder parasite, the watchdog.

Be careful, America. Darwinism is not democracy.

Left to our own devices, we're seduced by the latest ones

 Older Entries