Hatch Show Print in Nashville: iconic style, letter by letter [WATCH]

 Blog, Video
Jan 252013
 
Hatch can reprint its greatest hits using the same elements

Hatch can reprint its greatest hits using the same elements

You may not know the name Hatch Show Print, but you know the style. Its block letters are visually synonymous with Nashville and country music history. When Hatch began business in 1879, Nashville was the fifth-largest printing center in the United States, and at that time, hand-assembled letterpress was how printing was done.

The middle years of the 20th century were hard on letterpress. Newer technologies rose to supplant the inky, time-consuming moveable type method, and both machines and their output were trashed. But Hatch’s curator and chief designer, Jim Sherraden, saw beauty in its imprecision, and he rebuilt the faltering business into an indispensable institution.

To someone in the 1880s, the blocky letterpress style that filled every handbill and advertisement simply signified disposable culture. Today, with so few practitioners, Nashville virtually owns the look.

I was lucky enough to be invited behind the scenes of Hatch Show Print.

The video shows you just how damn cool it is:

This graphic design stalwart merits its own book: Hatch Show Print: The History of a Great American Poster Shop. I want one.

Hatch Show Print

Letter by letter, page by page, we leave history behind

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 »

Why I prefer books

 Blog
Jan 222013
 
Bookstore, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

Bookstore, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

Books are benevolent furniture. They are organic, and like wood, they give a room a certain vibration. I do not trust anyone who doesn’t own any books, and if, when I visit someone’s home for the first time, I learn they only own coffee table books to arrange as conspicuous advertisements of their consumer preferences, I instantly become sensitive to their other flaws.

I do not like downloading books. I am aware the industry is headed that way and my preference puts me at an increasing disadvantage, and that disadvantage verges on tragic the longer I remain someone who likes to be published. E-books now have a market share of 22%, says Publishers Weekly. Considering Amazon.com itself as a market share of 27%, this era is even grimmer for bookstores than it is for books. I don’t like that, either.

I am told that I should embrace e-books. I am told this by publishers, who stand to save a fortune in manufacturing and shipping costs, and their profit-maximizing fantasy for me is repeated like a mantra from the many slavering tech junkies who swarm Twitter to praise any digital development as the tonic for all perceived ills. Never mind the fact that nearly no celebrated app or website or device is nearly as useful in practice as it is in its celebration, and most usually die off faster than the spring dandelion scourge. They’re like Hindu gods, these apps, or Catholic saints, each one designed to minister to another failing we forgot we had, and all of them in the long run impossible to satiate into permanent domesticity.

When I read a book, I can easily refresh my memory by flipping back to something I previously read. I have to make notes that remind me my mortgage is due, but my subconscious remembers that the passage I want fell this deep in the book, near that corner, on this side of the spine. If I try that with an e-book, I lose the sense of spatial relationships that usually governs my wits. I flail around the scroll bar like a bird in a hall of mirrors.

Continue reading »

Who is this Paul McCartney guy?

 Blog
Feb 132012
 
who is paul mccartney tweets

He's the walrus, and he's still missing, apparently.

The weirdest thing happened when Google came in: Cultural literacy went out. When I was 19, the Web was in its infancy, but I daresay my knowledge of my culture was much broader and deeper than nearly any 19-year-old I know today. Last night on the Grammys, when Paul McCartney took the stage, legions of incurious young people took to Twitter to wonder aloud who he was. Universally, they had the same self-defense.

“That happened before I was born.”

As if that’s an excuse. The Beatles were before my time, too, but I still know about them. In fact, there are a lot of things that happened before my time that I still know about, including but not limited to the Civil War, Warren G. Harding, the World’s Columbian Exposition, and the Stage Door Canteen.

Lest this come across as a Get Off My Lawn rant, I think there may be a cultural reason for the self-enforced stupidity we’re seeing in American youth, and moreover, for a stubborn failure to perceive that mouth-breathing ignorance as a failing. When I was a kid, we had three network channels, plus a few random channels in the double digits where you would find grainy re-runs of The Brady Bunch, The Monkees, and I Love Lucy. When your cultural outlets are that distilled, everyone tends to be exposed to the same stuff.

Today, kids have 600 channels. None of them are on the same page (not even the same Web page). It’s hard to blame them if they don’t know what to consider relevant. They have only word of mouth to prompt them.

But it’s easy to blame them for wearing their ignorance like a badge. I forgive them for not knowing, but I can’t understand why not knowing doesn’t upset them, or at least pique their curiosity. This generation has Google and Wikipedia, yet it’s the least inclined of all to actually use them. We have created for ourselves tools beyond our ancestors’ abilities to imagine, tools with the potential of transforming and enlightening mankind forevermore, and yet we utterly lack the agency to activate them.

If you don’t know something, Google it. A decade ago, even that advice seemed like a short cut. Today, people aren’t even bothering to do it at all.

It’s as if knowing the information could be at our fingertips is enough, and actually accessing that information is a formality we need not engage.

There are kids who use these to sponge up understanding of the world into which they were born. But too many of them merely crowdsource remedies to their ignorance, ensuring that the most enduring aspects of our culture are those few topline facts we all agree on. American culture is becoming no richer than the 200-odd standard songs on a Clear Channel rotational playlist.  I suppose this is the same shallowness that Hollywood depends on to pump out remake after sequel, with nothing original to inspire future generations of recyclers.

There’s a dissertation to be written about this phenomenon, no doubt: the fantasy that owning an encyclopedia automatically makes you smart. The queasy realization that the upcoming generation measures the worth of something based on whether they overheard someone talking about it or saw it reposted somewhere.

I want to say: Paul McCartney was a Beatle. Spelled that way. They broke up before you were born. They broke up before I was born, too, but I still know all about them.

They were important, but it’s also true they were not nearly as important as many other things you will never know about because you will not be accidentally exposed them on the Grammys.

And because you do not care about reaching for anything that is not placed in front of your face, you are doomed to live small. You are the perfect consumer.


 

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.

 

 

How the Web destroyed our economy

 Blog
Mar 292011
 

Crappy job postings: Ernest Shackleton's ad solicited some 5,000 responses anyway

You’re going to think I’m nuts. But I’m growing convinced: The Web has trashed the American economy.

Back in the ’20s, mass production transformed the way we made and bought things. Henry Ford and his magnate brethren learned how to make vast quantities of consumer items quickly, and to sell those consumer items, they had to advertise to the masses. A symbiotic relationship was born and, in tandem, production and advertising became the twin cylinders of our economic engine. By the 1950s, our consumer society reached its apogee. Today, the capitalist formula is so perfect that many Americans would rather live deep in debt than within their means. Gotta have the latest stuff, or at least die pretending you do!

And then the Web came in. Online shopping mushroomed and today, it’s taking over. Last Cyber Monday, online shopping hit a new high of $1 billion in sales on single day. While we were busy chattering about what a novelty digital commerce was, it was sticking daggers in Mom and Pop’s backs.

Observers like to claim that newspapers and magazines are dying because Web journalism and social media are making them irrelevant. But I think they’re wrong about the true nature of what’s happening. They’re distracted by the shiny new baubles of Twitter and Facebook, and mistaking demolition for revolution.

Yes, the Web has impacted print media. Of course it has. But I think it’s because the Web eliminated advertising as a crucial medium. Why would a wicket manufacturer want to spend tens of thousands for display advertising when it could spend nearly nothing and simply appear at the top of the heap in a Google search? The great ad man, once an archetype of American business, is now something of a hobbyist. Advertising positions are skewing more toward marketing ones in which companies learn not how to master the art of the ad, but how to manipulate free social media gossip to work in their favor.

The end result: Far less money is now changing hands in everyday commerce.

Without advertising, one of the legs has been kicked out from under our economic dinner table.  Without advertising, too, millions of Americans will suffer from lost work: journalists, writers, actors, producers. Without big-ticket advertising, the few surviving media outlets that remain must hack budgets so far to the bone that previously professional positions will be filled by people getting bony wages. More businesses expect to be able to do things for free, and that includes staffing.

cart keyboard button online shopping

All the advertising a business needs these days

If you think that’s a scary prophesy, I hate to tell you it’s already true: An editor of one of the nation’s biggest travel magazines got up in front of the Society of American Travel writers conference last spring and said he’s getting away with paying writers 50¢ a word when a few years ago they got $2 a word. They’re lucky. One of the biggest “news” sites in the world doesn’t pay most of its contributors a cent. In a masterstroke of mining low self-esteem for profit, it tells writers that their payment is the opportunity to see their name on their website for free. All this is now reality because advertising is becoming a memory.

About six months ago, a friend of mine, who has worked in TV, newspapers, and in digital media, said something ominous to me: “I think the dirty little secret of Internet journalism is that no one really knows how to make money from it.”

Six months later, she was laid off by the troubled media corporation that employed her to save it. She was replaced by a kid right out of school whose chief skill is the mastery of SEO. In a downshift analogous to American commerce as a whole, another high-level position became a cottage-industry job, and standards descended with it.

First we were hit by outsourcing. Now we’re being slammed by downsourcing.

Even when I go to brick-and-mortar stores, I find the retail clerks have capitulated to the Web. So often these days, when I look for something that’s not in stock, I’m answered with a passive shrug. “You can find it online,” they tell me, absolving themselves of making a sale despite the fact I have cash in hand.

I would like to know if anyone has ever done a study to see how much money American businesses lose each year because customers refuse to return home, order the item online, pay the shipping, and wait.

The reason no one knows how to make much money off Internet journalism so far is that there are few advertising dollars behind it. Readers and businesses alike are finally used to getting everything for free. In a world where consumers can find what they’re looking for without outside assistance, they’re just not as necessary as they used to be.

Half the engine of our economy was removed even as we’re rocketing down the highway at 95 miles per hour.

It’s mad, man.

Daniel Radcliffe’s rapture at meeting Liza Minnelli (makes me giddy, too)

 Blog
Mar 282011
 

I am beginning to think that Twitter appeals to the lazy guy in me. Instead of posting something here, I tweet it (@bastable) because that’s quicker and shorter. But so many of my activities are not being properly preserved except at the Library of Congress.

Last night, for example. I went to the opening party for the Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at the Plaza Hotel. I was helping my friend Ken Kleiber (of the beloved New York City cable show “That’s Kentertainment“) shoot red carpet interviews with the cast and creatives. One journalist acquaintance spotted me and asked who I was interviewing people for. No, no, I said. This time, I’m behind the camera.

And because I was behind the camera, I captured this moment which, for some reason, I find endearing and hilarious: Daniel Radcliffe, Mr. Harry Potter himself, meeting Liza Minnelli for the very first time. Since everyone else was embroiled in their own interviews with other cast members, I managed to capture the hug and the expression of absolute rapture on this kid’s face when he met her. The kid had just opened his own Broadway musical as an above-the-title lead, he’s facing an adoring squad of flashbulb-popping, ass-kissing entertainment journalists — and yet he nearly bites his tongue off with excitement at meeting Liza.

Here are some screen grabs of his delirious moment:

Daniel Radcliffe meeting Liza Minnelli

Daniel Radcliffe meeting Liza Minnelli

You can see a lot more pictures of Daniel’s giddy schoolboy fancrush on Ken’s website.

There were some other standout moments. Like when Neil Simon, for some reason, got onto the red carpet to give interviews (he didn’t write the show). To get him chatting, Ken asked if they had seen the show, and his wife sarcastically pipes in, “No, we were all dressed up and walking past the Plaza and saw there was a party, so we wandered in. What do you think?” Then, to my surprise, Neil told Ken that the show wasn’t the greatest thing he’d ever seen. Guys, if you’re going to crash the red carpet, at least play the media game nice.

It just confirms my theory: Like postage stamps, theatres should not be named after the living. With all due respect.

Neil Simon and his wife

And then there was the moment that Michele Lee, who was the ingenue in the 1967 movie version, put down her glass of red wine to do an interview by the light of an iPad. (Strangely, the guys next to us in the line had no proper lights — they used an iPad set to a blank screen.) She snatched it up and said it was all part of her best advice for staying in show business: “Bring your own light!”

Michele Lee and an iPad

I shot this while I was shooting Daniel. Damn, he’s English. Having also covered the red carpet at the opening of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, I can attest that he gives more attention to the journalists on the red carpet than anyone else I’ve ever seen. He was there for more than an hour and I don’t think he even went to the party it was supposed to be a part of. He’s just an all-around mensch.

Daniel Radcliffe
Here are Ken and me after the professional camera hogs left:
Ken Kleiber and Jason Cochran

Sometimes New York is such a kick that I hate myself for the times I curse it.

Somewhere right about now, Daniel Radcliffe is probably playing Liza with a Z and agreeing with me.

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

“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.