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.

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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.

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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 thinks 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

It’s content you want to see!

 Blog
Sep 042010
 

I can’t be the only one who hates when sites only show me stuff based on what I like. “Personalization,” they call it. Choice. Customization. “Navel-gazing,” I do.

Far too many sites and apps are doing this. Based on the ads it shows me, Facebook has me boiled down to a neat consumerist stereotype of a single urban male. Amazon tries it too, although my wide-ranging purchasing habits have it confused about how to pigeonhole me. Even Google News wants to know what sort of news I always read. Do I like international stories? Am I interested in business news, or health coverage?

I don’t want to tell it a thing in case it decides to withhold facts from me just because its algorithms assume I won’t care. And if, for example, I tell it that I only like health stories a little bit, how will the site decide when a story is important enough to make sure I see it? Telling Google what I usually read would subject my “need to know” to the vagaries of either its news staff’s biases or of algorithms based on what’s “popular” (read: clicked on) on a given day. Either way, something is lost. In deciding what’s important to me, I may lose what’s truly important.

I made the mistake of telling the BBC I live in America, because it immediately started omitting Britain-based news, which was a big reason I used it to begin with. Social media, by design, shows you headlines about the things your friends care about, which may expand your exposure in many cases, but depending on your circle, may not expand your range at all.

My app from the AP only wants to spoon-feed me a few stories at a time in a few genres, as if learning what’s important in a news day is as simple as browsing shelves at the Blockbuster. (Which people also don’t do anymore — now, we pretty much have to know precisely what we’re looking for when we walk up to the Redbox machine.)

And this is how we get stupider. We Westerners love our technology, and when we embrace its ability to “personalize,” we can unwittingly also embrace a shallower intellectual narrative. “I know what I like, so don’t give anything else.” “Challenges confuse me.” “I don’t need to visit the real France because I’m quite comfortable with my Epcot version, thank you very much.”

I’m no Luddite. I love my technology, and I even create “content” for the Internet. But I do miss newspapers, where at least I ran across news that I didn’t know would interest me — or was boring but important. The more my exposure to information is customized to please my pleasure, the less I’ll be given the chance to click on a headline that might have surprised, motivated, or edified me.

Stumbling across stuff that is out of your field of comfort zone is one of the healthiest activities a brain can engage in. Otherwise, how do you find new fields of interest?

Reading the news can be like travel itself. With any journey, including an intellectual one, you are challenged, and with exposure to new people and places, your interior blank areas are colored in. It expands what you know and embellishes upon what you merely thought you knew.

And just because I don’t usually read certain kinds of news doesn’t mean they’re not important to know.

These are tough times for renaissance types, but they’re great for dilettantes.

Google's personalization quiz: the path to a shallower me

“Curators of Talent”

 Blog
Jun 282010
 

Two weeks ago, a knucklehead muckety-muck at Forbes announced to TechCrunch that it was going to cut back paying journalists. It no longer wants to engage seasoned professionals to research and craft expensive articles. Instead, it planned to get its stories from a thousand unpaid bloggers. It’s going crowdsourced, the empty suit said, and “Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent.”

If Forbes has become so brazenly lazy as to codify its impotence into a mission statement, I can no longer assert that journalism is dying. It died when writers agreed, with no mass objection, to give their work away like that.

You’d expect a journalist to defend a journalist’s paycheck. But my biggest fears aren’t only about the future of quality work. Stories that are properly funded are properly done, yes, and career journalists have the contacts and access that trust creates. So obviously, that’s certainly a different debate worth having.

No, right now, my biggest objection is about quality of life for any fool who agrees to this arrangement.

I know of no researcher can sustain him or herself on a policy of “give it away for free.” I know dozens of young writers who are blogging at their own expense and losing money, or working for free or for too little. Most of them think that will get them noticed. Most of them will give up before it does.

People sometimes ask me how they can be a travel writer, and I used to suggest they work for free a few times to get some clips together. That advice is probably too dangerous now that publications like Forbes want to brutally rape the eagerness of starter writers.

The ugly truth is that when you work for free to help a publication inflate the public impression of its output and grab emptily at clicks, you won’t find the kind of editor oversight for you to learn much. You’re the equivalent of a firewoood chopper, not a reporting apprentice, and your efforts will be quickly thrown on the fire and burned up for an hour’s worth of fuel.

Dumbasses

Each “clip,” or a sample of writing, is also devalued. It used to be that the publication that published you was a mark of the quality of your research and reliability. Now that Forbes, and other outlets, simply demand quick words to toss into the maw of their daily publication furnace, the imprimatur of their name means next to nothing. When you participate in “crowdsourcing,” the by-product is that you become indistinguishable from the crowd.

This new formula for payment cannot be sustained, and although many fledgling writers think they’re wedging their foot in the door of the career of their dreams, in fact, they’re the co-authors of a new literary underclass that they won’t be able to escape.

Over the past decade, the media has fragmented into hundreds of tiny shards. Where a city might have once had five or six major news outlets, now there are dozens, even hundreds. The size of the pie hasn’t increased, but market share has plummeted, and with it, resources.

So now Forbes wants to get away with paying contributors nothing or nearly nothing, and it wants to be applauded for justifying it with a fancy word like “curators,” as if this laxness somehow makes it cutting-edge.

Companies refuse to admit the game has changed. They cling to their glory days, and they want to appear to operate with the same output and esteem even though their accounts are harshly diminished. Harlan Ellison recently appeared in a video rant that chastises companies for trying to bleed artists of every level and stripe.

Ellison’s explosion is warranted, but theatrics aside, blaming companies is only half helpful. We are equally guilty because we indulge this charade. Backed into a corner by the recession and by the realities of a shattered media system, we accept nothing or nearly nothing for our hard work. The pillars of Versailles are rotting but we donate cans of gold paint to cover then up and make it look like we still dwell in an intact palace.

“Curators of talent”?

I’ll say. Increasingly, talent can only be found in museums.

How travel writing is becoming something by and for the wealthy

 Articles, Blog
May 182010
 

On Saturday, I pretended to go to Portland, Oregon. There was a conference of travel editors going on, and because they were all using the Twitter tag #satwpdx, I was able to follow what the various speakers were saying. (Go to a professional conference from a diner table at the Star on 18th!) That was $1,000 saved!)

First, someone started telling the gathered that they will not hire writers who have accepted free trips or parts of free trips, such as if the hotel comps a stay for them. I find this policy insulting on several fronts. Primarily, it assumes I’m a shill with no editorial principles of my own, and that I’d be a pushover for any freebie. I know this isn’t true. There’s a P.R. agent who recently told me that her boss was afraid to invite me to something because they suspected I would be nasty about the product. (I didn’t know this until after I’d gone. And I wasn’t nasty.)

No one bats an eye when the White House Press Corps is given special access to the President and his Cabinet, although, as George W. Bush’s treatment of Helen Thomas proved, you can certainly lose that access if you displease the President. Because that’s what a travel industry comp is: access. It’s the same as when an electronics company sends or loans a product to a technology blog for review. It’s access to the product. It just so happens that you can’t send travel to the journalist. They have to go to the product.

Yet, perhaps because of industry snobbery from “real” journalists, it’s assumed that travel writers are always going to be swayed. Well, any editor worth anything has a stable of reporters he or she trusts. It’s only the bad editors who keep hiring writers who just want freebies.

You’d be able to spot whitewashing from a White House Press Corp reporter as quickly as you could call cheerleading in a tech reporter’s blind rave, and you can see it in a travel writer, too. Appraising things for how I see them is what has made some public relations people wary of me, I guess. Ultimately, that’s not what they want me to do, and I know that. But my editors know I’m there to do my job.

She'd better be nice to him, or she's out

Nowadays, few publications have the cash to properly pay for hotels and airfare and other expenses themselves. Traveling is expensive. Yet they also won’t allow freebies. Travel writers are usually forced to pick up the financial slack themselves.

So, to Portland, I tweeted:

If pubs say all #travel must be fully paid, are we in an age when it helps for writers to be wealthy? How might that skew coverage?

I think it’s more than a fair question. It’s one that needs to be asked.

If the magazine won’t pay, and comps are forbidden, that means your writer had better be rich. And rich writers will mostly report on one kind of product. If you don’t believe it can skew coverage, pick up the New York Times Sunday Travel section. The Times bans the acceptance of all comps. And you can see the sort of product it mostly covers: stuff appealing to the upper or upper-middle class, or at least to travelers with those kinds of pretensions.

(I know more than a few publications that won’t accept comps, but will allow writers to take comps if they take them on behalf of another publication as long as they aren’t told about it. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the general comp policy is mostly for appearances.)

Soon in Portland, one of the speakers, an editor of a big national publication, apparently told everyone that now that he’s getting away with paying writers only 50¢ a word — $1.50 less than he used to — there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle. Writers are getting less money for their stories, and they’re putting up with it because, quite frankly, the reduction in outlets has made them desperate.

This had me riled up. Travel writing is already one of the least cost-effective forms of journalism there is. It requires too much time and hits you for too many ancillary costs. If you don’t pay writers a decent wage, you’re just making the whole genre something for the elite to dabble in. I tweeted out:

If you pay writers a pittance, you’re ensuring many must be independently wealthy, and that, with expenses policy, skews stories.

Those two tweets were enormously popular. They were retweeted by strangers for two days, and I gained more than 50 new followers.