June 4, 2009

On newspapers and paywalls

Posted by johnmcquaid under media | Tags: , , , |
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The other day, I got into a discussion on Facebook over whether newspapers should charge for content on the web. My interlocutors were newspaper types, and they were enthusiastic about charging. To them, it was self-evident that if newspapers spent money generating valuable and socially relevant content, readers (and Google, and aggregators such as the Huffington Post) ought to pony up. Speaking from personal interest, I disagree. As a journalist I want to maximize the number of eyes on, and discussion of, my work. Put a paywall around it and you can pretty much say goodbye to those goals. No chance of “going viral.” As Gawker’s Nick Denton said the other day, “We are egomaniacs. We like to get out in the public eye.” So I found it kind of odd that newspaper journalists seemed so intent on making people pay – setting aside the question of what business model might work, if you’re a reporter, what difference does it make to you if your work is subsidized by advertising or a paywall?

Then I read the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Economic Action Plan. It’s the same point of view I ran into on Facebook, only systematized and turned into a business strategy. The problem with this “we produce something of value and should be paid for it” attitude, though, is that it is just an attitude, one shaped by a sense of grievance and a gut feeling about what is – must be – right and just. This is a terrible way to formulate any kind of complex strategy – George W. Bush made decisions the same way. In this case, the API ignores the real world conditions of journalism, the Internet and e-commerce. Thus this strategy, if pursued, is unlikely to turn out well. I’m a former newspaper reporter – I want newspapers & journalism to survive and thrive. And I’m not against charging for some content if it’s done right. But even I can see this is crazy.

Start with the API’s first recommendation: “Establish a true value for news content online by charging for it.” This is a strange formulation. In a market, prices are set by supply and demand, not dictated by producers. The declaration has an anachronistic, command-and-control, almost Marxist feel to it: we control the means of production, we will set the prices. It assumes a kind of monopolistic position that newspapers no longer hold, as much as they might want to. If your starting point is the assumption your product has “value,” you’d be wise to take a hard look at exactly what that value is on the open market. But the API evidently has not conducted that kind of clear-eyed self-assessment. It sees the economic value of newspaper content as self-evident, of a piece with its perceived social value, and something that must be preserved first, improved upon later.

But the truth is that newspaper journalism has a relatively low market value and its social relevance is in decline. It’s still important – we need eyes on government at all levels, investigations, a space for local and national community discussions to play out. But the form of the newspaper story is stale, and the package it comes in – the selection of the day’s news, calendar, arts, classifieds, etc. – is something many people no longer really need because they can get most of it elsewhere. Meanwhile the relative social importance of newspaper stories – as a forum for political debates, say – has also declined due to ever-fragmenting attention, competition, and a loss of credibility that’s partly self-inflicted.

The API’s answer to this is to double down on existing, loyal newspaper fans: “The real value to newspapers comes from serving … ‘core loyalists,’ the group of heavy users who visit a news site about 18 days a month, two to three times a day. They contribute 85 percent of the page views and user sessions.” But surely this base is already in decline, unlikely to replaced by younger readers.

These problems are severe. The obvious solution to them is to make a better product – leverage the advantages you have, innovate, create something people really want, and thus make yourself important again – and figure out how to sell it. The marketplace of the open web is the ideal forum to test this out. (I acknowledge that many or most such tests will result in failure.) The API report makes some gestures toward innovation – but only after enumerating ways to monetize content. Its basic approach is, we’ve already got a golden goose here, people are stealing our eggs, and we want them back.

That’s the other principal problem – the report urges a crackdown on the cribbing of content by Google, aggregators and others: they should pay or cease and desist. There is plenty of abuse of “fair use,” and original content is endlessly atomized. Perhaps there are ways to police the egregious cases better and/or generate revenue from “republishing” if all are amenable. But is this really a wise foundation for a future-of-newspapers strategy? Here’s how the report envisions the politics:

Many citizens and policy makers regard newspapers as an essential part of the American democracy as evidenced by a recent congressional hearing and a spate of conferences. The sustainability of journalism is important to Americans, and thus, there is a public imperative to ensure, and monetize, the survival of professional news organizations in some form.

You can read this two ways. Either the newspaper industry has civic obligation to charge for content, or society itself must recognize the importance of newspaper content and compel politicians to protect it. The first idea is tendentious, the second naive. The public isn’t particularly sympathetic to tougher copyright enforcement. The lobbying clout of newspaper publishers and media companies is declining with their corporate valuations. Google has lots of money to spend on its own lobbyists. And the current copyright regime is outdated. When it’s reformed, who knows what will happen?

It’s not like the API report contains no good ideas. No doubt there are ways to charge for premium content as it suggests, for example. But your average small or medium-sized paper doesn’t have much (or any) of that, nor does the API give any examples of it. And if your strategy is shaped by an inflexible set of beliefs and an attitude of entitlement, it’s not a recipe for innovation or success. After reading this, I’m more pessimistic than ever about the future of newspapers.

 

June 1, 2009

Why Sotomayor makes the AP uncomfortable

Posted by johnmcquaid under media, politics | Tags: , , , , , |
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Jay Rosen flagged this analysis of the Sotomayor confirmation fight as something the AP should do less of, because it’s not working. And I have to agree. It’s a vague piece of writing that doesn’t really say anything – and, I think, unintentionally reveals the odd biases that shape political coverage.

The ostensible theme of the piece is that Sonia Sotomayor’s life and career are more complex than her supporters are saying, and that the complexities may pose political problems for the nomination. As a topic for analysis this is classic dog bites man: politicians oversimplify reality for political purposes. And in this case it’s faintly absurd. The piece’s nut graph says the White House talks about Sotomayor’s rags-to-riches story but “plays down the riches.” But merely saying “rags-to-riches” indicates the story ends with, well, riches. You don’t need her annual income to know that a federal appeals court judge is successful and reasonably well off.

Then the piece takes a stranger turn, dispensing advice to politicians:

Discussions about Sotomayor and her ethnicity, gender and tax bracket carry risks for supporters and detractors. Unartful criticism by Republicans risks offending voters they’d like to win. Democrats, likewise, need to be cautious about how they conduct the debate in a nation uncomfortable talking about matters of race and gender.

The real issue, I think, is that race and gender also “carry risks” for the AP.

Strip away the faux-analysis frame and the piece contains some interesting information on Sotomayor’s background. Setting her judicial philosophy aside, to me this seems like a typical American success story. But it’s presented here as unconventional and politically dangerous.

Sotomayor didn’t live her whole life in a housing project, makes $200,000 a year and lives in Greenwich Village. That opens her to charges of elitism, the AP implies. She once objected to a lawyer’s job interview questions that implied she owed her success to affirmative action – something the AP puzzlingly treats as contradicting her political activism and pride in her ethnic identity. Finally, the piece raises some murky questions about whether her work on behalf of various Puerto Rican groups might conflict with New York City posts she held, but doesn’t resolve them.

Sotomayor’s career obviously doesn’t fit the binary political world reporters think they live in. In that world, the practice of identity politics is viewed quite negatively. It’s an artifact of the culture wars, one that Republicans playing to middle America have successfully demonized (when not using it themselves). So Sotomayor won’t play in Peoria. At least, the notion that one person can have a record of minority political activism, mainstream professional success and broad national support seems pretty shaky to the AP.

The piece concludes by approvingly quoting Newt Gingrich’s absurd attacks calling Sotomayor a racist. The AP has this upside down: the White House’s presentation of Sotomayor is of course selectively positive. But at least it’s not demagogic.

 

May 22, 2009

The Cheney campaign

Posted by johnmcquaid under Barack Obama, George W. Bush, foreign affairs, government, media
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Dick Cheney’s campaign of retroactive self-justification, culminating in his AEI speech, is bizarre, and not just for its historical footnote-worthiness, its political thuggery, or its graceless, hectoring tone. What’s strangest is that long after the policies he champions were cast aside by his own administration, and the Republican Party repudiated at the polls, he is still able to hijack an important issue with a campaign of pure rhetorical cant.

Let’s be clear: Cheney is not making an argument about what anti-terrorism policies work best. A genuine argument would engage the difficult issues at hand, asking “what is the best way to fight terrorism?” It would marshal facts to support its positions. It would not be layered with half-truths and bursting with straw men. It would endeavor to convince skeptics. Perhaps there are arguments to be made that “enhanced interrogation techniques” are the most effective ways to elicit information, that illegally warehousing and “disappearing” terrorist suspects is the most effective way to handle them, and that only virtually unlimited executive power can guarantee security. But I have never heard such arguments from Cheney or his supporters.

Instead, all we get are angry, contemptuous assertions. Cheney is, by his own account, self-evidently right. His speech did not acknowledge that he or his Bush administrations had committed a single error. It did not acknowledge that principled people might disagree. The only source of disagreement would be the weakness, arrogance and naivete of his critics, including President Obama.

But of course this has almost nothing to do with the real world of devising policies to combat terrorism. The Bush White House itself abandoned torture when it became clear it wasn’t very useful, was probably illegal, and was terribly damaging politically and strategically. If another 9/11 does occur, American officials will think twice before torturing again. And even if they go ahead and do it, what do you think will happen? Almost certainly a rerun of the same disaster that happened the first time. Cheney’s “comprehensive strategy,” as he calls it, wasn’t very strategic: it was series of ad hoc fishing expeditions accompanied by public bluster that got us mostly grief. It was incoherent, an anti-strategy, one man’s fantasy about imposing his will on a dangerous world. (Maybe there were some successes that can be attributed solely to Cheney’s post 9/11 decisions – who knows? But to figure that out we need some kind of truth commission to evaluate the record.)

Cheney’s demagoguery is nothing new in American politics. But what’s striking is the deference and credibility it’s granted by the media-political world. You’d think that there is an actual debate going on, that Obama and Cheney represent two positions with equal weight that Americans have to choose between. Today’s Washington Post is symptomatic: the print edition features a banner headline: “In Dueling Speeches, a National Security Debate.” The main story hits the familiar beats: “Presidential scholars could not recall another moment when consecutive administrations intersected so early and in such a public way.” Okay, but framing it this way ignores the content of the speeches, and recent history. Obama, whatever you may think of his recent compromises on the terrorism front, is at least wrestling with real issues (as this Post editorial correctly points out) attempting to create a legal framework for terrorism suspects. Cheney’s statements, meanwhile, should be treated with skepticism, as he has a record of brazenly uttering untruths in service to a political agenda marked by its determined detachment from reality. Do his words really deserve the respect, with its implication of importance and legitimacy, that they’re getting?

Besides embellishing a legacy, the current Cheney campaign seems aimed at one thing: setting up Obama for the stab-in-the-back treatment in the event of another terror attack. Please. Terrorism is a serious problem. It requires real strategic thinking. Such posturing may be catnip to the press, but it’s virtually irrelevant to the world we live in, and unhelpful to the hard work of protecting us.

 

May 18, 2009

Say it ain’t so, MoDo

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Did Maureen Dowd commit a firing offense by, she says, inadvertently lifting a paragraph from Talking Points Memo? I don’t think so, but what happens hardly reflects well on Dowd or her column.

To recap: Dowd’s Sunday column on the debate over torture contained a paragraph taken nearly word-for-word from a post by Josh Marshall. When a TPMCafe blogger pointed this out, Dowd quickly admitted error and properly attributed the relevant paragraph. The Times ran a correction.

End of story? Surely that’s what the Times and Dowd want, and in all probability their quick response – far superior to the grudging, circle-the-wagons responses to similar problems in the past – will be effective.

But the response raised more questions than it answers. Critics are focusing on the fact of Marshall’s words showing up in Dowd’s column. But in some sense that’s irrelevant. If she had known that paragraph came from TPM, it’s unlikely she would have reprinted it without attribution. (On Imus today, Frank Rich cited this as a reason in her defense.)

But assuming her explanation is true, and she’s soliciting input from friends and cutting-and-pasting it into columns, that’s worse in some ways than cribbing from published work. It meets the dictionary definition of plagiarism: “a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work.” It’s also lazy, shoddy journalism. And it’s virtually undetectable.

Last year Dowd got into hot water for not attributing the reporting work of her assistant. Sunday’s incident gives us an additional window on the slapdash way a MoDo column is assembled. Dowd could be using the vast resources and reach of the Times and her substantial writer’s gifts to produce a great column. That’s the whole idea, right? Instead, it’s like the faux-juice drinks your kids are drinking – perhaps 50% real Maureen Dowd, 50% other ingredients.

 

May 12, 2009

The Philadelphia Inquirer and John Yoo

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The Philadelphia Inquirer’s decision to give a monthly column to John Yoo – author of several “torture memos” offering legal rationales for the Bush administration’s abusive interrogations – is (pick your term): Tone-deaf? Crazy? Morally dubious? Newspapers have made a lot of questionable decisions in recent years, some perhaps unavoidable, some true whoppers. But this is just flat-out wrong.

Many newspapers and other traditional media outlets, fearful of the “liberal bias” charge and watching their audience disappear, have spent the past decade trying to build their credibility with conservatives. There’s nothing wrong with that per se –  they are run mostly by liberals, and we need conservative voices in the political debate. But those efforts went awry during the Bush administration. Confronted by an White House that was wildly overreaching on presidential power, surveillance, torture and the politicization of basic governance, most media lost their bearings. They treated these things as normal, if controversial, activities of government.

Fortunately, the political system self-corrected. But the media’s problems remain. Here is part of of editorial page editor Harold Jackson’s explanation for Yoo’s hiring:

He’s a Philadelphian, and very knowledgeable about the legal subjects he discusses in his commentaries. Our readers have been able to get directly from Mr. Yoo his thoughts on a number of subjects concerning law and the courts, including measures taken by the White House post-9/11. That has promoted further discourse, which is the objective of newspaper commentary.

But other providing a valuable forum for self-justification, I don’t understand what the op-ed page gains with Yoo. There are plenty of talented conservative writers out there. Yoo’s debut column is undistinguished conservative boilerplate.

The only reason Yoo is prominent enough to write a column in the Inquirer is because of his work in the White House Office of Legal Counsel. Hiring him is thus is an implicit endorsement of the legitimacy the legal opinions he crafted there. But those opinions are legally suspect and morally repugnant. Yoo is an advocate of a questionable legal theory of nearly unlimited presidential power, and his memos were instrumental in providing legal cover for techniques that were, by any commonsense interpretation of the word, torture.

Yoo might be a war criminal. At the very least, Inquirer editors should engage that issue directly. Simply hiring him says: we don’t think so. This is an assent to the dangerous notion that if the U.S. government did it, no matter how reprehensible it might be, it must have some legitimacy. That’s sad – and not part of the American journalistic tradition I know.

Update: Wednesday’s New York Times story on this quotes Harold Jackson confirming that Yoo’s hiring was indeed an attempt to address the liberal bias perception: “‘There was a conscious effort on our part to counter some of the criticism of The Inquirer as being a knee-jerk liberal publication,’ Mr. Jackson said. ‘We made a conscious effort to add some conservative voices to our mix.’”

 

May 12, 2009

Back; more on the mountaintops

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Sorry for my absence over the past couple of weeks – I’ve been on deadline, then stay-in-bed sick for most of that time.

Meanwhile: I have an article up on Yale Environment 360 about mountaintop removal coal mining, which I also wrote about earlier this year for the Smithsonian magazine. The Yale piece deals with the recent moves by the Obama administration to crack down on this practice. The thing is, nobody is sure where this is going: it could profoundly change things, or could end up being mostly cosmetic. It depends on how the politics of it play out – we’ll see.

 

April 29, 2009

100 news cycles later

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During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama made clear his distaste of the news cycle and its trivial obsessions. Skeptics said this would hurt his chances: that to win, a candidate must dominate the news day-by-day, minute-by-minute, with attacks that keep the opposition off-balance. Yet the Obama campaign managed to win by emphasizing a longer-term strategy over the hair-trigger approach.

But on Jan. 20, for all intents and purposes President Obama became the news cycle. His ambitions for toning down Washington’s nasty partisan warfare – and with that, creating better prospects for his agenda – depend on his ability to nudge the news cycle away from the cable network- and Drudge-driven obsession with transient panics and cultural outrages. (An obsession that the Bush administration, with its focus on divisive electoral politics, actively cultivated.) On that front, he’s been only partially successful so far. But far more so than most of us would have thought going in.

The media love nothing more than scandal, failure and disaster. But so far Obama has declined to provide them. The White House’s frenzy of activity during the first 100 days – much of it politically and substantively successful, with the opposition in disarray – more or less requires that news about him focus on relaying facts. It’s hard to stick with “who’s up, who’s down” when there’s only one player on the field.

And as Dan Kennedy notes, Obama has been a boon to the media business. It’s more fun and better for ratings to cover a glamorous new president than an unpopular old one. The camera loves Obama, his family, even his dog. His professorial cool is a stark contrast to the at-sea press conference performances of his predecessor. We’re also facing various alarming crises, so for various reasons – information, reassurance – people want to hear what Obama has to say: his prime time press conferences draw an impressive number of viewers. Robert Gibbs’s White House press office, meanwhile, has been strategically smart. It has sat Obama down with conservative and liberal columnists and bloggers, and had the president give non-traditional media (including the Huffington Post) a turn at press conferences. Not surprisingly, these are explicit choices to bypass the insular White House press corps in the shaping of public opinion.

Obama has lagged on the transparency front — the creation of a friendly interface that will allow journalists, bloggers – and everyone else – full access to information and data from the White House and rest of the government.. But the technical obstacles are formidable, so this will take time.

Where is all this going? We probably won’t know until Obama makes his first big stumble and has to fend off the wolves. But a Lewinksy or Rovian gambit seems unlikely from this White House, so that’s progress in itself.

 

April 26, 2009

Enhanced, harsh, brutal

Posted by johnmcquaid under George W. Bush, media | Tags: , , , |
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The staff of the New York Times has done some great reporting on the Bush administration’s torture policies. But there is something absurd about the paper’s internal debate over how to describe what the U.S. did to Abu Zubaydah and other prisoners. Public editor Clark Hoyt recounts the discussions that led to the chosen word of the moment, “brutal”:

The word had appeared a few times before in this context, most recently on April 10, when the Central Intelligence Agency said it was closing the network of secret overseas prisons where interrogations took place. Scott Shane, who covers national security, said he and his editor in the Washington bureau, Douglas Jehl, negotiated over the wording of the first paragraph. Shane wrote that methods used in the prisons were “widely denounced as illegal torture.” Jehl changed that to the “harshest interrogation methods” since the Sept. 11 attacks. Shane said he felt that with more information coming to light, including a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the words harsh and even harshest no longer sufficed. He proposed brutal, and Jehl agreed.

A week later, Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, came to her own conclusion that the facts supported a stronger word than harsh after she read just-released memos from the Bush-era Justice Department spelling out the interrogation methods in detail and declaring them legal. The memos were repudiated by President Obama.

“Harsh sounded like the way I talked to my kids when they were teenagers and told them I was going to take the car keys away,” said Abramson, who consulted with several legal experts and talked it over with Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief. Abramson and Baquet agreed that “brutal” was a better word.

These discussions presume there is a public debate over whether waterboarding is harsh or brutal or torture. But there isn’t a genuine debate at all: it’s obvious that it’s all of those things. The reason the wording is in dispute is classic Orwell: Dick Cheney and others claim that torture is useful in defending American interests and lives, but U.S. and international law ban torture. So the U.S. must torture but call it something else. So we don’t torture. By failing to call torture by its true name, the Times and other media outlets lend legitimacy to a rhetorical scam.

This is an interesting journalism question. A group of public officials – whose record of honesty and credibility on national security matters is already in considerable doubt – insists that torture is not torture but something else. Even if they’re sincere in their assertions that “enhanced interrogation” is key to defeating terrorism, self interest is also key motivation for this stance: they don’t want to be prosecuted for war crimes and don’t want their legacy tarnished. Yet the media establishment feels it must avoid weighing the context and motivations behind these improbable linguistic acrobatics, and so cannot make a rather straightforward judgment.

I can see the reasoning, and Hoyt spells it out: if you start calling torture torture, a lot of people will get mad at you and accuse you of liberal bias. You’re also strongly implying someone has committed a crime, which will stir up even more outrage and perhaps have legal implications. Still, I think these problems have to be weighed against a paper’s basic obligation to tell its readers the truth, and not filter information with euphemisms coined to obscure the truth. By dancing endlessly around the question of whether “brutal” = “torture,” media outlets are only damaging their own credibility.

 

April 24, 2009

Rove tweets on torture

Posted by johnmcquaid under George W. Bush | Tags: , , , |
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Why is the notion of Karl Rove tweeting in defense of Bush administration torture policies so disturbing?

Precautions taken 2 guarantee compliance w/ federal prohibition on torture. U might characterize diligence as overcautious.#TCOT #SGP #HHRS

Yes, I suppose U might be impatient with the amount of legal and bureaucratic activity the Bush White House set in motion to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” if U belonged to the Khmer Rouge or the Syrian secret police (though if U were a Nazi, this fastidiousness would seem nothing exceptional).

But seriously, this is … icky. And on about three different levels. Rove is not a lawyer or an intelligence expert; he is no position to judge the merits of legal memos or other steps taken to justify “enhanced interrogation.” And in general, nothing he says about what went on in the Bush White House can be taken as anything but spin. He’s also a particularly amoral political operative; throughout his career he’s has prided himself not just on winning but on using underhanded tactics to destroy the reputations of his opponents. That such a man is blithely spinning on one of the gravest moral issues before us is ridiculous and chilling, an example of the Bush administration’s elevation of politics above even the nation’s bedrock ideals. That Rove is doing this on Twitter (with hashtags!) just adds a layer of absurdity to the whole thing, while giving a bad name even to the “had too much butter on my pancakes” Twitterer class. Via Alex Massie.

 

April 22, 2009

Torturous debate

Posted by johnmcquaid under Barack Obama | Tags: , , |
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President Obama deserves credit for releasing the Bush torture memos. But his position on torture prosecutions is so muddled it gives nuance a bad name (and just when it was making a comeback). There are so many bad actors it’s hard to figure out how to handle them all, but Obama’s position is, or appears to be: CIA interrogators won’t be prosecuted. The lawyers who wrote the now-infamous memos may be. The top officials who were ultimately responsible – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, others – probably not. And – maybe – there should be some kind of 9/11-style commission to examine this. But Obama is not actually calling for that, just suggesting it.

This makes sense only through the prism of politics – and a complex politics it is, involving constituencies in the intelligence and defense bureaucracies, Congress and the nation as a whole. Obama is trying to please, or to not offend, as many of these constituencies as possible, while at the same time laying down a clear marker against torture.

Obama should be setting the tone for how the country handles the torture issue. Instead, the debate has slipped away from him entirely and taken on a life of its own. Democrats are agitating for investigations and prosecutions. Republicans are arguing that torture works (pivoting from, without completely abandoning, the now-untenable “we do not torture” refrain). And Obama is both parsing up a storm and trying to stay above it all.

I empathize – Obama is trying to accomplish a lot, and the torture debate can only suck attention from much bigger issues, while opening up political and social divisions the president is trying to put behind him. It may even make more sense, in terms of building a lasting anti-torture consensus, to have less accountability rather than more. But this process requires clarity, not endless caveats. How, for example, does Obama’s don’t-prosecute-the-interrogators-policy apply to the period before the legally enabling memos were written? A process has begun here; more disclosures will follow the ones we’ve already seen. It will be messy and politically contentious – exactly the kind of thing we know Obama doesn’t like one bit. But that is how democracy works, and Obama would be advised, to the degree he can, to simply get out of the way.

 

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