An Australian news channel used my fake Parallels-on-an-iPhone graphic on a recent newscast. Hee. (thx, amos)
A list of the top one articles by Neal Pollack about how sportswriters should stop writing about the NBA MVP race and, oh yeah, lists of stuff are dumb:
Sportswriters and pundits, on the other hand, are treating the MVP race with the gravitas of a presidential election. That's because they make up the Electoral College. When they're debating who's going to win the award, they're not really talking about who they think the best player is; they're talking about whom they should pick as the best player. It's the ultimate circle-jerk of sports-guy self-regard.
Google Earth now displays location-specific news from the NY Times.
I read a lot of news by surfing the Internet, as do many of my colleagues and friends, and I've always dreamed of a way to browse news based on geography. What's happening in Paris today? What are the top headlines in Japan?
Our collective recent history, online
In past few years, several prominent US magazines and newspapers have begun to offer their extensive archives online and on DVD. In some cases, this includes material dating back to the 1850s. Collectively it is an incredible record of recent human history, the ideas, people, and events that have shaped our country and world as recorded by writers, photographers, editors, illustrators, advertisers, and designers who lived through those times. Here are some of most notable of those archives:
Harper's Magazine offers their entire archive online, from 1850 to 2008. Most of it is only available to the magazine's subscribers. Associate editor Paul Ford talks about how Harper's archive came to be.
The NY Times provides their entire archive online, most of it for free. Most of the stories from 1923 to 1986 are available for a small fee. The Times briefly launched an interface for browsing their archive called TimesMachine but withdrew it soon after launch.
Time Magazine has their entire archive online for free, from 1923 to the present.
Sports Illustrated has all their issues online for free, dating back to 1954.
The Atlantic Monthly offers all their articles since Nov 1995 and a growing number from their archive dating back to 1857 for free. For a small fee, most of the rest of their articles are available as well, although those from Jan 1964 - Sept 1992 are not.
The Washington Post has archives going back to 1877. Looks like most of it is for pay.
The New Yorker has free archives on their site going back to 2001, although only some of the articles are included. All of their articles, dating back to 1925, are available on The Complete New Yorker DVD set for $40.
Rolling Stone offers some of their archive online but the entire archive (from 1967 to 2007) is available as a 4-DVD set for $79.
Mad Magazine released a 2-DVD set of every issue of the magazine from 1952-2006.
And more to come...old media is slowly figuring out that more content equals more traffic, sometimes much more traffic.
Update: Nature has their entire archive online, dating back to 1869. (thx, gavin)
Buzzfeed gets a little love in this week's New Yorker article about the "death and life of the American newspaper".
The Huffington Post's editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the "mullet strategy." ("Business up front, party in the back" is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) "User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks," Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to "argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands."
Here's the mullet strategy page on Buzzfeed. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Buzzfeed.)
The NY Times launches TimesMachine, an alternate look into their vast online archive. It's basically an interface into every single page of the newspaper from Sep 18, 1851 to Dec 30, 1922. The advertising on these old pages is fascinating.
Update: For whatever reason, the Times has taken TimesMachine offline.
An official decision has been reached in the Long Bet between Dave Winer and Martin Nisenholtz of the NY Times. The bet was made in 2002 when Winer asserted that:
In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 02007, weblogs will rank higher than the "New York Times" Web site
Winer won the bet but it's worth noting that the Times has a growing stable of good blogs itself. (via workbench)
91-year-old NPR man Daniel Schorr has had it up to here with you kids and your internets. [Warning, print link to avoid stupid registration window.]
Q: In some commentaries, you touch on the latest journalistic trends, sometimes in not so complimentary a way. Such as blogs and citizen journalism. Is this a form of news gathering that you embrace?
A: I can't embrace it. Not after what I've been through at the hands of the copy editors' desks. I have suffered many, many arguments about what I've wanted to say -- whether it was grammatically correct, factually correct and all of that -- and I want everybody to have to experience what I experienced. But today, your blogger is totally free. He is his own reporter, his own editor, his own publisher, and he can do whatever he wants.
A person like me who believes in the tradition of a discipline in journalism can only rue the day we've arrived at where we don't need discipline or anything. All you need is a keyboard.
He suffered, so you should too, you undisciplined mouthers-off! Update: A reader writes: "You are not giving the man the respect he deserves. He did not suffer--he honed his craft in an environment that expected professionalism, balance and honesty. What is unfortunate today is that today's professional media are not held to the same standards. Most, if not all bloggers, do not rise to the quality of a Daniel Schorr. Unfortunately, neither do most of his younger colleagues."
Useful Incremental Advances In The State Of Journalism
When I go back and read journalism from the '70s and '80s, I can see that there has been little, if any, innovation in the form since. But! While they may not be drastically "new," there are at least two bits of excitement in internet journalism today that seem somewhat radical. First, Brian Lam at Gizmodo talks overtly about the twisted relationship between tech companies and journalists. ("As one reporter put it while chiding me, 'Journalists are guests in the houses of these companies.' Not first and foremost! We are the auditors of companies and their gadgets on behalf of the readers.") And over on another Gawker Media blog (my former employer, and one that I have deeply conflicted feelings about), Jezebel's Tracie Egan writes an astounding and reallly not for the faint-of-heart (or crotch) account of schtupping this guy she met in Vegas. It's BANANAS. And probably NSFW. And a great read.
For a long time, I wanted to write a profile of the designer Tom Ford—and I realized the only way to do so properly would be to have sex with him and write about it. I sent an emissary to him; he declined the opportunity. I was relieved.
Fantastic and disturbing Esquire article about Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator" series in which people are lured to a house with the prospect of sex with minors, ambushed by a camera crew, and then arrested when they attempt to leave. I can't say much about the article without spoiling it, but a friend who has watched the show says there's nothing redeeming about any of the people on the show, from the show's host on down to the would-be molesters...and how the whole thing is orchestrated off-camera makes it seem even worse. More from Esquire about the article and NBC's rebuttal.
Rogers Cadenhead has beaten me to the punch in calculating the winner of the Dave Winer/Martin Nisenholtz Long Bet pitting the NY Times vs. blogs to see who ranks higher in end of the year search results for the 5 most important news stories of 2007. The winner? Wikipedia.
The Times has really improved their position in Google since 2005...opening up their archives helped, I bet.
Foreign Policy has posted its annual list of The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2007 (unless, presumably, you read Foreign Policy).
Regret the Error's annual list of media errors and corrections is one of my favorites...the 2007 installment doesn't disappoint. The corrections in the UK newspapers are awesome:
An article about Lord Lambton ("Lord Louche, sex king of Chiantishire", News Review, January 7) falsely stated that his son Ned (now Lord Durham) and daughter Catherine held a party at Lord Lambton's villa, Cetinale, in 1997, which degenerated into such an orgy that Lord Lambton banned them from Cetinale for years. In fact, Lord Durham does not have a sister called Catherine (that is the name of his former wife), there has not been any orgiastic party of any kind and Lord Lambton did not ban him (or Catherine) from Cetinale at all.
Henry Abbott at TrueHoop picked up on a policy that Colin Powell had when he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Here's Mike McConnell repeating what Powell told him:
Look, I have got a rule. As an intelligence officer, your responsibility is to tell me what you know. Tell me what you don't know. Then you're allowed to tell me what you think. But you always keep those three separated.
Abbott rightly comments that that's good advice for journalists and bloggers.
A depressing story about the media's coverage of Al Gore during the 2000 election.
Eight years ago, in the bastions of the "liberal media" that were supposed to love Gore -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN -- he was variously described as "repellent," "delusional," a vote-rigger, a man who "lies like a rug," "Pinocchio." Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, "He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters... Everybody kind of let loose on the guy."
I want to believe that news outlets are in the business of news, not entertainment, but it's just not true in most cases. Even more depressing is that blogs, especially political blogs, are even worse in this regard.
Mailer, Cavett, Vidal, and Flanner
On his NYTimes blog, Dick Cavett remembers having Norman Mailer on his show along with Gore Vidal and Janet Flanner. It was a notorious episode; a perhaps more than slightly drunk Mailer lashed out first at Vidal and then everyone else in the room but couldn't keep up with the jeers and witticisms flying at him from all angles.
Mailer: I said that the need of the magazine reader for a remark he could repeat at dinner was best satisfied by writers with names like Gore Vidal.
Flanner: All those writers called Gore Vidal.
Vidal: I know. There are thousands of them, yeah.
Mailer: There are two or three.
Cavett: Who are some of the others?
Mailer [with a dark look]: I don't know.
Cavett: Who wants to host the rest of this show?
Mailer, years later, told me that it was at this point that "in the face of the Cavett wit and Flanner's deft interruption" -- adored by the audience -- and in consideration of his alcohol content, he realized that he was not being skillful at mounting a sustained argument.
In an interview a number of years ago with Cavett, Charlie Rose showed a clip of the incident:
The video should cue up at the clip in question, but if not, skip to 29:00 in. Highly entertaining reading and viewing.
Aleksandra Mir's Newsroom 1986-2000 project features huge hand-drawn reproductions of tabloid front pages. Show is up through Oct 27 in NYC. (via quipsologies)
"The full Ginsburg" is the term for appearing on all five of the big Sunday morning political shows: This Week, Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, and Late Edition. The term is named after William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky's attorney and the first person to complete this political Pokemon collection. According to Wikipedia, four individuals have completed the full circuit: Ginsburg, Dick Cheney, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton. Source: Brouhahaha, The New Yorker.
RU Sirius asks: Is the net good for writers? Ten professional writers weigh in.
I like to develop topics, approach them from different, often contradictory angles, and most of all, I like to polish the shit out of them so that the flow and the prose shine and bedazzle. On and offline, I find the internet-driven pressure to make pieces short, data-dense, and crisply opinionated -- as opposed to thoughtful, multi-perspectival, and lyrical -- rather oppressive, leading to a certain kind of superficial smugness as well as general submission to the forces of reference over reflection. I do enjoy writing 125-word record reviews though!
My favorite aspect of the piece is the interspersed American Apparel ads...they add a little texture to the discussion.
Mental Floss has an ongoing feature called The First Time News Was Fit To Print, which chronicles the first mentions of famous people, places, and events in the NY Times. Among the topics covered so far: The Simpsons, Kobe Bryant, and Starbucks.
Louisiana pastor Eddie Thompson feels that the media and activists have gotten the story wrong about the Jena Six. In this article, he attempts to correct some of the misconceptions and erroneous statements made about the case.
The actions of the three white students who hung the nooses demonstrate prejudice and bigotry. However, they were not just given "two days suspension" as reported by national news agencies. After first being expelled, then upon appeal, being allowed to re-enter the school system, they were sent to an alternative school, off-campus, for an extended period of time. They underwent investigations by Federal and Sate authorities. They were given psychological evaluations. Even when they were eventually allowed back on campus they were not allowed to be a part of the general population for weeks.
(thx, james)
Is lazy reporting hurting the visual arts? Jonathan Jones argues that almost all reporting about art takes one of six forms: expensive art, graffiti, plagiarism, earth-shattering discoveries, and restoration. Looking back through kottke.org's art tag page, I am guilty of linking to stories of all those types. Eep.
First NY Times restaurant review, circa 1859?
While poking around in the newly opened archives of the New York Times yesterday, I stumbled upon an article called How We Dine (full text in PDF) from January 1, 1859. I'm not well versed in the history of food criticism, but I believe this is perhaps the first restaurant review to appear in the Times and that the unnamed gentleman who wrote it (the byline is "by the Strong-Minded Reporter of the Times") is the progenitor of the paper's later reviewers like Ruth Reichl, Mimi Sheraton, and Frank Bruni.
The article starts off with a directive from the editor-in-chief to "go and dine":
"Very well," replied the editor-in-chief. "Dine somewhere else to-day and somewhere else to-morrow. I wish you to dine everywhere, -- from the Astor House Restaurant to the smallest description of dining saloon in the City, in order that you may furnish an account of all these places. The cashier will pay your expenses."
Before starting on his quest, the reporter differentiates eating from dining -- noting that many believe "whereas all people know how to eat, it is only the French who know how to dine" -- and defines what he means by an American dinner (as opposed to a French one). Here's his list of the types of American dinner to be found in New York, from most comfortable to least:
1. The Family dinner at home.
2. The Stetsonian dinner.
3. The Delmonican, or French dinner.
4. The Minor dinner of the Stetsonian principle.
5. The Eating-house dinner, so called.
6. The Second-class Eating-house dinner.
7. The Third-class Eating-house feed.
The remainder of the article is devoted to descriptions of what a diner might find at each of these types of establishments. Among the places he dined was Delmonico's, where dining in America is said to have originated:
Once let Delmonico have your order, and you are safe. You may repose in peace up to the very moment when you sit down with your guests. No nobleman of England -- no Marquis of the ancienne nobless -- was ever better served or waited on in greater style that you will be in a private room at Delmonico's. The lights will be brilliant, the waiters will be curled and perfumed and gloved, the dishes will be strictly en règle and the wines will come with precision of clock-work that has been duly wound up. If you "pay your money like a gentleman," you will be fed like a gentleman, and no mistake... The cookery, however, will be superb, and the attendance will be good. If you make the ordinary mistakes of a untraveled man, and call for dishes in unusual progression, the waiter will perhaps sneer almost imperceptibly, but he will go no further, if you don't try his feelings too harshly, or put your knife into your mouth.
According to a series of articles by Joe O'Connell, Delmonico's was the first restaurant in the US when it opened in 1830 and invented Eggs Benedict, Oysters Rockefeller, Baked Alaska, Lobster Newberg, and the term "86'd", used when the popular Delmonico Steak (#86 on menu) was sold out, or so the story goes. O'Connell's history of Delmonico's provides us with some context for the How We Dine piece:
The restaurant was a novelty in New York. There were new foods, a courteous staff, and cooking that was unknown at the homes of even the wealthiest New Yorkers. The restaurant was open for lunch and dinner.
The restaurant featured a bill of fare, which was itself new. Those who dined at inns were fed on a set meal for a set price. As a result, everyone was fed the same meal and were charged the same price, whether they ate little or much. In Paris, however, restaurants offered their patrons a "bill of fare", a carte, which listed separate dishes with individual prices. Each patron could choose a combination of dishes which was different from the other patrons. Each dish was priced separately. Thus, the restaurant was able to accommodate the tastes and hunger of each individual. The various dishes and their prices were listed on a carte or (the English translation) "bill of fare". Today, we call it a menu.
And from Delmonico's developed many different types of dining establishments, which the Strong-Minded Reporter set out to document thirty years later. Contrast his visit to Delmonico's with the experience in the "sandwich-room" at Browne's Auction Hotel, an eating-house:
The habitués of the place are rarely questioned at all. The man who has eaten a sandwich every day for the past ten years at the Auction Hotel no sooner takes his seat than a sandwich is set before him. The man who has for the same period indulged daily in pie or hard boiled eggs (there are some men with amazing digestion) is similarly treated. The occasional visitor, however, is briefly questioned by the attendant before whom he takes his place. "Sandwich?" or "Pie?" If he say "Sandwich," in reply, the little man laconically inquires, "Mustard?" The customer nods, and is served. If his mission be pie, instead, a little square morsel of cheese is invariably presented to him. Why such a custom should prevail at these places, no amount of research has yet enabled me to ascertain. Nothing can be more incongruous to pie than cheese, which, according to rule and common sense, is only admissible after pie, as a digester. But the guests at the Auction Hotel invariably take them together, and with strict fairness -- a bite at the pie, and a bite at the cheese, again the pie, and again the cheese, and so on until both are finished.
The experience of being a regular has barely changed in 150 years. And finally, our intrepid reporter visits an unnamed third class eating-house:
The noise in the dining hall is terrific. A guest has no sooner seated himself than a plate is literally flung at him by an irritated and perspiring waiter, loosely habited in an unbuttoned shirt whereof the varying color is, I am given to understand, white on Sunday, and daily darkening until Saturday, when it is mixed white and black -- black predominating. The jerking of the plate is closely followed up by a similar performance with a knife and a steel fork, and immediately succeeding these harmless missiles come a fearful shout from the waiter demanding in hasty tones, "What do you want now?" Having mildly stated what you desire to be served with, the waiter echoes your words in a voice of thunder, goes through the same ceremony with the next man and the next, through an infinite series, and rushes frantically from your presence. Presently returning, he appears with a column of dishes whereof the base is in one hand and the extreme edge of the capital is artfully secured under his chin. He passes down the aisle of guests, and, as he goes, deals out the dishes as he would cards, until the last is served, when he commences again Da Capo. The disgusting manner in which the individuals who dine at this place, thrust their food into their mouths with the blades of their knives, makes you tremble with apprehensions of suicide...
The entire article is well worth the read...one of the most interesting things I've found online in awhile.
Update: According to their web site, a restaurant in New Orleans named Antoine's claims that they invented Oysters Rockefeller. Another tidbit: from what I can gather, the Delmonico's that now exists in lower Manhattan has little to do with the original Delmonico's (even though they claim otherwise), sort of like the various Ray's Pizza places sprinkled about Manhattan. (thx, everyone who sent this in)
Gems from the archive of the New York Times
Now that the NY Times has discontinued their Times Select subscription program and made much more of their 150+ years of content available for anyone to read and link to, let's take a look at some of the more notable items that the non-subscriber has been missing.
- Access to the last two years-worth of columns from the NY Times' noted Op-Ed columnists, including Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, and Paul Krugman.
- The first mention of the World Wide Web in the Times in February 1993. According to the article, the purpose of the web is "[to make] available physicists' research from many locations". Also notable are this John Markoff article on the internet being overwhelmed by heavy traffic and growth...in 1993, and a piece, also by Markoff, on the Mosaic web browser.
- Early report of Lincoln's assassination..."The President Still Alive at Last Accounts".
- A report on Custer's Last Stand a couple of weeks after the occurance (I couldn't find anything sooner). The coverage of Native Americans is notable for the racism, both thinly veiled and overt, displayed in the writing, e.g. a story from September 1872 titled The Hostile Savages.
- From the first year of publication, a listing of the principle events of 1851.
- An article about the confirmation of Einstein's theory of gravity by a 1919 expedition led by Arthur Eddington to measure the bending of starlight by the sun during an eclipse.
- A front page report on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, including a seismograph of the quake which the Times labeled "EARTHQUAKE'S AUTOGRAPH AS IT WROTE IT 3,000 MILES AWAY".
- The first mention of television (as a concept) in the Times, from February 1907. "The new 'telephotograph' invention of Dr. Arthur Korn, Professor of Physics in Munich University, is a distinct step nearer the realization of all this, and he assures us that 'television,' or seeing by telegraph, is merely a question of a year or two with certain improvements in apparatus."
- First mention of Harry Potter. Before it became a phenomenon, it was just another children's book on the fiction best-seller list.
- Some of the output by prolific Times reporter R.W. Apple is available (after 1981, pre-1981).
- A report during the First World War of the Germans using mustard gas. Lots more reporting about WWI is available in the Times archive.
- Not a lot is available from the WWII era, which is a shame. For instance, I wish this article about the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima was available in the Times archive. Nothing about the moon landing, Kennedy's assassination, Watergate, etc. etc. either. :(
- On The Table, Michael Pollan's blog from last summer about food soon after the publication of The Omnivore's Dilemma.
- Urban Planet, a blog about cities from Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map.
- Oddly, The Principles of Uncertainty, an illustrated blog by Maira Kalman isn't available anymore. Update: Kalman's blog is probably unavailable because it's due to be published in book form in October. (thx, rafia) Further update: Kalman's blog is back online and wonderful. The culprit was a misconfiguration at the Times' end. (thx, rich)
- Several other previously unavailable blogs are listed here and here.
- It looks like most of the links to old NY Times articles I (and countless other early bloggers) posted in the late 90s and early 00s now work. Tens of thousands of broken links fixed in one pass. Huzzah!
I'll also note that this move by the Times puts them in a much better position to win the Long Bet between Dave Winer and the Times' Martin Nisenholtz at the end of this year.
In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.
As of the end of 2005, the Times was not faring very well against blogs.
Update: One more: a report on the sinking of the Titanic. A small mention of the sinking was published in the paper the previous day.
No more Times Select. The NY Times finally admits what everyone else knew two years ago and stops charging for their content. Additionally, all content from 1987 to the present and from 1851 to 1922 will be offered free of charge.
What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com.
How did that change not happen for the Times when it happened to the entire rest of the web 3-4 years ago?
Edward Tufte highlights some infographics done by Megan Jaegerman for the NY Times in the 90s. Tufte: "Her work is elegant, smart, finely detailed, inventive, and informative. A fierce researcher and reporter, she writes gracefully and precisely. Her best work is the best work in news graphics."
Great clean, simple design for the Le Monde Diplomatique newspaper. Here's some more info on the publication.
Roy Pearson, the judge who is suing his former dry cleaner for $65 million in damages for a lost pair of pants, started crying in court today when describing the moment when the dry cleaner tried to give him the wrong pants. And this was after a witness called by Pearson likened her treatment by the dry cleaners to Hitler's treatment of the Jews. The judge should have invoked Godwin and declared a mistrial. Also, nice headline from CNN: Judge aims to have pants suit ironed out next week. Haw haw.
Christopher Hitchens on his forced contemplation of Paris Hilton. "Hilton is legally an adult but the treatment she is receiving stinks -- indeed it reeks -- of whatever horrible, buried, vicarious impulse underlies kiddie porn and child abuse."
A rerun, because it came up at dinner the other night: EPIC 2014, the recent history of technology and the media as told from the vantage point of 7 years in the future. "2008 sees the alliance that will challenge Microsoft's ambitions. Google and Amazon join forces to form Googlezon. Google supplies the Google Grid and unparalled search technology. Amazon supplies the social recommendation engine and its huge commercial infrastructure."
An interesting somewhat-inside look at Google's search technology. I found this interesting: "When there is a blackout in New York, the first articles appear in 15 minutes; we get queries in two seconds." No matter how hard CNN or Digg or Twitter works to harness their audience to break news, hooking up Google search queries to Google News in a useful manner would likely scoop them all every time.
A tale of two cities
From the Travel section of the NY Times this past weekend, 36 Hours in Baltimore:
Baltimore is sometimes the forgotten middle child among attention-getting Eastern cities like Washington and New York. But a civic revival, which began with the harbor's makeover 27 years ago, has given out-of-towners reason to visit. Yes, there are wonderful seafood restaurants, Colonial history, quaint waterfronts and other tourist-ready attractions. But Baltimore's renaissance has also cultivated cool restaurants with innovative cuisine, independent theaters that showcase emerging talent and galleries that specialize in contemporary art. In other words, Baltimore is all grown up, but it's still a big city with a small-town feel.
And from last week in the Baltimore Sun, 'Desperate' plan to slow crime:
Large swaths of Baltimore could be declared emergency areas subject to heightened police enforcement - including a lockdown of streets - under a city councilman's proposal that aims to slow the city's climbing homicide count.
The legislation - which met with a lukewarm response from Mayor Sheila Dixon's administration yesterday, and which others likened to martial law - would allow police to close liquor stores and bars, limit the number of people on city sidewalks and halt traffic in areas declared "public safety act zones." It comes as the number of homicides in Baltimore reached 108, up from 98 at the same time last year.
Scientists confirm what every TV news network, conservative radio commentator, and blogger already knows: "Repeated exposure to one person's viewpoint can have almost as much influence as exposure to shared opinions from multiple people. This finding shows that hearing an opinion multiple times increases the recipient's sense of familiarity and in some cases gives a listener a false sense that an opinion is more widespread then it actually is." (via snarkmarket)
Jonathan Rauch on politics, journalism, and mistakes
This recent interview of journalist Jonathan Rauch is full of good stuff. On bad predictions and making mistakes:
Everybody makes [mistakes]; it's par for the course. What I have learned is not to be too sure I'm right. The world is much more surprising than we give it credit for. That's part of my political philosophy, my philosophy of life. That's really fundamental to it: Trial and error is really the only thing in life that works ultimately over the long term. Journalism is like that, too, so we need to be honest about our mistakes. We often aren't enough. Everybody makes mistakes. And we need to be a little bit cautious about making predictions.
On real journalism vs. opinion:
There's a very talented, hard-working press corps and, of course, it represents only a small fraction of the people who are doing [journalism]. I think all the major newspapers are doing it well. Not a single one is doing it badly, the ones that are committing resources to it. The larger fraction are the parasites, the bloggers, commentators, opinionizers -- I don't exempt myself -- who are feeding off of the real news that the press is providing. That larger sort of commentariat is not doing a very good job.
The future of real journalism:
What I worry about is what everyone in my business worries about: Who's going to fund the real reporting? The magazine and newspaper business was a cross-subsidy. You had the advertising, particularly classified, and you had a local market, which subsidized the gathering of news. That model is breaking down because the bundle is breaking into pieces and it's hard to see in the long run who funds the kind of large-scale news reporting operations that the major papers have run if the advertising is all going online and if people can all get the news for free at Yahoo.
On extremism in American politics:
The [political] system has been rigged by partisan activists to their advantage. They participate in primaries. General elections don't matter because they've gerrymandered the congressional districts. They have the advantages of energy and being single-minded and they use these wedge issues which they're very good at and which both sides conspire in using in order to marginalize the middle. The result of that is the turnout among moderates and independents is down; turnout on the extremes is up. The parties are increasingly sorted by ideology so that all the liberals are in one party and all the conservatives are in another. That is a new development in American history.
On getting out of the way of a story:
I'm not a fan of the idea that the journalist and the journalist's attitude should be front and center. I think that a good journalist's duty is to get out of the way. The hardest thing about journalism -- the hardest thing, a much higher art than being clever -- is just to get out of the way, to show the leader of the world as the reader would see it if the reader were there. Just to be eyes and ears. Calvin Trillin, another writer I greatly admired who steered me towards journalism, once said that getting himself out of his stories was like taking off a very tight shirt in a very small phone booth. He's right.
And lots more...I recommend reading the entire thing, especially the exchange between Rauch and the interviewer about personal political identities that was too long/difficult to excerpt here. Much more from Rauch here.
The content of the O'Reilly Factor was recently analyzed and compared against "rhetorical techniques identified as elements of propaganda by the now-defunct research group Institute for Propaganda Analysis". The findings indicate that host Bill O'Reilly called someone a name almost 9 times a minute.
What a group of copy editors thought of the best headline ever (Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo). "For the the Han solo hed to work, there'd have to be a reason for the allusion to Star Wars. Since there isn't, it's a forced attempt to be clever. Your average rap artist has a far better grasp of cleverness than whoever wrote that headline." (thx, braulio)
I know it's only 2007, but this is the headline of the decade. For a story about people crossing a tightrope strung across the Han River in South Korea, AP came up with this masterpiece: Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo.
MadLibs-style template for writing general interest news stories about "weird" subcultures. "[Bizarre pseudonym], otherwise known as [male person's name #1] a [number between 15 and 75]-year-old software engineer, was dressed in [costume or armor piece] as he waited in line to pay the $[your age + 50] fee to carouse, enjoy [exotic or fictional food], and discuss [oddball topic] with others drawn to this, the greatest spectacle in the tri-state region involving [entertainment franchise]."
Last 100 posts, part 7
It's been awhile since I've done one of these. Here are some updates on some of the topics, links, ideas, posts, people, etc. that have appeared on kottke.org recently:
Two counterexamples to the assertion that cities != organisms or ecosystems: cancer and coral reefs. (thx, neville and david)
In pointing to the story about Ken Thompson's C compiler back door, I forgot to note that the backdoor was theoretical, not real. But it could have easily been implemented, which was Thompson's whole point. A transcript of his original talk is available on the ACM web site. (thx, eric)
ChangeThis has a "manifesto" by Nassim Taleb about his black swan idea. But reader Jean-Paul says that Taleb's idea is not that new or unique. In particular, he mentions Alain Badiou's Being and Event, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. (thx, paul & jean-paul)
When I linked The Onion's 'Most E-Mailed' List Tearing New York Times' Newsroom Apart, I said "I'd rather read a real article on the effect the most popular lists have on the decisions made by the editorial staff at the Times, the New Yorker, and other such publications". American Journalism Review published one such story last summer, as did the Chicago Tribune's Hypertext blog and the LA Times (abstract only). (thx, gene & adam)
Related to Kate Spicer's attempt to slim down to a size zero in 6 weeks: Female Body Shape in the 20th Century. (thx, energy fiend)
Got the following query from a reader:
are those twitter updates on your blog updated automatically when you update your twitter? if so, how did you do it?
A couple of weeks ago, I added my Twitter updates and recent music (via last.fm) into the front page flow (they're not in the RSS feed, for now). Check out the front page and scroll down a bit if you want to check them out. The Twitter post is updated three times a week (MWF) and includes my previous four Twitter posts. I use cron to grab the RSS file from Twitter, some PHP to get the recent posts, and some more PHP to stick it into the flow. The last.fm post works much the same way, although it's only updated once a week and needs a splash of something to liven it up a bit.
The guy who played Spaulding in Caddyshack is a real estate broker in the Boston area. (thx, ivan)
Two reading recommendations regarding the Jonestown documentary: a story by Tim Cahill in A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg and Seductive Poison by former People's Temple member Deborah Layton. (thx, garret and andrea)
In case someone in the back didn't hear it, this map is not from Dungeons and Dragons but from Zork/Dungeon. (via a surprising amount of people in a short period of time)
When reading about how low NYC's greenhouse gas emissions are relative to the rest of the US, keep in mind the area surrounding NYC (kottke.org link). "Think of Manhattan as a place which outsources its pollution, simply because land there is so valuable." (thx, bob)
NPR did a report on the Nickelback potential self-plagiarism. (thx, roman)
After posting about the web site for Miranda July's new book, several people reminded me that Jeff Bridges' site has a similar lo-fi, hand-drawn, narrative-driven feel.
In the wake of linking to the IMDB page for Back to the Future trivia, several people reminded me of the Back to the Future timeline, which I linked to back in December. A true Wikipedia gem.
I'm ashamed to say I'm still hooked on DesktopTD. The problem is that the creator of the game keeps updating the damn thing, adding new challenges just as you've finally convinced yourself that you've wrung all of the stimulation out of the game. As Robin notes, it's a brilliant strategy, the continual incremental sequel. Version 1.21 introduced a 10K gold fun mode...you get 10,000 gold pieces at the beginning to build a maze. Try building one where you can send all 50 levels at the same time and not lose any lives. Fun, indeed.
Regarding the low wattage color palette, reader Jonathan notes that you should use that palette in conjunction with a print stylesheet that optimizes the colors for printing so that you're not wasting a lot of ink on those dark background colors. He also sent along an OS X trick I'd never seen before: to invert the colors on your monitor, press ctrl-option-cmd-8. (thx, jonathan)
Dorothea Lange's iconic Migrant Mother photograph was modified for publication...a thumb was removed from the lower right hand corner of the photo. Joerg Colberg wonders if that case could inform our opinions about more recent cases of photo alteration.
In reviewing all of this, the following seem related in an interesting way: Nickelback's self-plagiarism, continual incremental sequels, digital photo alteration, Tarantino and Rodriquez's Grindhouse, and the recent appropriation of SimpleBits' logo by LogoMaid.
Apr 19, 2007 • tags: cities kottkedotorg kenthompson securitynassimtaleb nytimes journalism katespicer food twitter music lastfm movies caddyshack jonestown maps videogames games globalwarming nyc nickelback mirandajuly noonebelongsheremorethanyou backtothefuture desktoptd energy dorothealange photographyUpdate: In an earlier iteration of this post, I incorrectly identified the woman in the photo as a Palestinian...she is a Jewish settler. (thx to everyone who wrote in)
Michael Pollan has some good advice for writing about nature and science. "So choose your first person deliberately. Too many newspaper first persons -- and a lot of magazine first persons too -- are written in the voice of the neutral feature-writer. They're the voice of the Journalist. That is the least interesting first person you have. Nobody cares about journalists. They're not normal people. So choose a first person that draws on a more normal side of your personality. And think about which one will help you tell the story. You'll see that in very subtle ways it will shape your point of view and your tone and unlock interesting things."
The WTFCNN blog takes CNN to task for their increasingly non-news news headlines. I'd highlight quite a few more things...all the Britney and Anna Nicole headlines for a start.
Universe is another pretty but useless data visualization of the news. See also: just about every other data visualization of the news.
Nice positive review of Monocle, a new monthly magazine that would "bond and glue all the people that roam the world". I finally got my hands on the first issue the other day and it is quite something. "Overall, Monocle comes across as fresh, original, careful not to be influenced in its editorial choices by the media system's herd logic (no stories on the 'hot topic of the moment', and zero -- zero! -- celebrities and people gossip)."
Each day, Brass Tacks Design chooses an exemplary newspaper front page and explains why it's so good. (via newsdesigner)
How the newspaper gets made: 1. The Washington Post runs an article on Dec 24, 2006 about how the New Yorker picks its cartoons, which article mentions in passing that several of the magazine's cartoonists gather weekly at a Manhattan restaurant. 2. Three weeks go by. 3. The NY Times publishes a piece profiling said weekly gathering of the cartoonists at the Manhattan restaurant.
Malcolm Gladwell on the difference between secrets and puzzles, particularly as it relates to something like the Enron scandal. I think this is one of the more interesting pieces from Gladwell in recent years. Having lived in California during the blackouts and the absurdly high electricity bills, I want Skilling's head as much as anyone, but Gladwell has a good point here. There's more on his blog, including a question: "According to the way the accounting rules were written at the time, what specific transgressions were Skilling guilty of that merited twenty-four years in prison?" Also note the similar themes to one of my favorite articles from last year, The Press' New Paradigm.
In the WSJ, Dow Jones Chairman Peter Kann lists "10 current trends in the mass media that ought to disturb us". "There are too many instant celebrities. Too many two-day crises. Too many 'defining moments' from people in search of instant history. In a world where everything is considered critical, nothing needs to be taken very seriously."
The top 10 underreported news stories in 2006, including US funds going to the Taliban and Israel & Iran holding secret talks.
The year in errors
Every year, Regret the Error1 publishes a roundup of the year's media errors and corrections. I didn't think anything could beat these corrections from the 2005 list:
Norma Adams-Wade's June 15 column incorrectly called Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk a socialist. She is a socialite.
The Denver Daily News would like to offer a sincere apology for a typo in Wednesday's Town Talk regarding New Jersey's proposal to ban smoking in automobiles. It was not the author's intention to call New Jersey 'Jew Jersey.'
but the 2006 collection is a strong one. Here are some of my favorites:
A correction in this column Thursday about a June 14 Taste section recipe for French coconut pie incorrectly suggested that the recipe called for a pint of vodka.
In Wednesday's Taste section, a Washington Post recipe on Page F7 included an incorrect cooking time for carbonada (braised beef with onions and red wine). The dish should be cooked for 2 1/2 hours, not 10 to 20 minutes.
Because of an editing error, a recipe last Wednesday for meatballs with an article about foods to serve during the Super Bowl misstated the amount of chipotle chilies in adobo to be used. It is one or two canned chilies, not one or two cans.
A story in the July 24 edition of the Sentinel & Enterprise incorrectly spelled Sheri Normandin's name. Also, Bobby Kincaid is not a quadriplegic.
The regional court in Duesseldorf ordered the weekly WirtschaftsWoche to print a correction to an article that claimed Piech wore "garish ties with hunting motifs" and did not know the exact number of his children from various marriages, a court spokesman said. The magazine, owned by the Handelsblatt group, had published a picture of Piech wearing a tie with a picture of a man with a gun and an elephant. It quoted Piech as saying in an interview that he had sired "about a dozen children. The exact number is not known". The court accepted Piech's argument that his comment had been meant ironically and that the motif on his tie was not a hunting motif...
Mr Wakefield is not and never has been a member of the Communist Party. The error is regretted.
In a March 17 story about protests planned against the Iraq war, The Associated Press erroneously identified Jeremy Straughn as a political socialist at Purdue University. He is a political sociologist.
She's got the patent resume of somebody that has serious skill. She loves football. She's African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. A big coon. Oh my God. I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that. [He meant "coup".]
Recent articles in this column may have given the impression that Mr Sven Goran Eriksson was a greedy, useless, incompetent fool. This was a misunderstanding. Mr Eriksson is in fact a footballing genius. We are happy to make this clear.
I especially like the recipe ones...just the thought of some unsuspecting reader eating her meatballs with all those chilies or the fellow debating whether he should serve his obviously raw braised beef to the rest of his family. Be sure to check out the whole list.
[1] When I first posted this, I misspelled "Regret" as "Reget". (No, really!) I deeply regret the error. (thx, mauayan)↩
Pro baseball player Don Carman wrote up a list of stock responses to reporter's questions...it reads like a script for almost every locker room interview I've ever seen. "We're going to take the season one game at a time."
Cool slideshow of 221 years of mastheads from the London Times. (via newsdesigner, who has more on the recent Times refresh)
Some musings on the future of the newspaper in The Atlantic. "The barbarians, on the other hand, don't seem to care; they'd rather get the news they want, not the news the mandarins say is good for them."
15 ways to improve your newspaper business. "1. Go out in street, see news, write it up."
Gothamist Maps uses Google Maps to pinpoint news alerts (fires, robberies, car accidents, etc.) on a map of NYC. Pretty cool.
R.W. Apple, longtime and beloved political and food writer for the NY Times, died early this morning aged 71. "In the interests of efficiency, The New York Times recently equipped its main office with...a 185-pound, water-cooled, self-propelled, semi-automatic machine called R. W. Apple Jr." Here's Apple's last piece for the Times, on the cuisine of Singapore.
Update: The NY Times put up a piece that Apple filed right before he entered the hosptial that they were going to run later in the fall: The Global Gourmand.
Update: Ed Levine wrote a nice personal remembrance of Apple. See also Trillin's article on Apple from the New Yorker.
Michael Kinsley: do newspapers have a future? "Newspapers on paper are on the way out. Whether newspaper companies are on the way out too depends."
Poincare conjecture battle continues
Last month I covered the hubbub surrounding the still-potential proof of the Poincare conjecture. The best take on the situation was a New Yorker article by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber, detailing the barest glimpse of the behind-the-scenes workings of the mathematics community, particularly those involving Grigory Perelman, a recluse Russian mathematician who unveiled his potential Poincare proof in 2002 and Shing-Tung Yau, a Chinese mathematician who, the article suggested, was out for more than his fair share of the credit in this matter.
After declining the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of mathematics, Perelman has quit mathematics and lives quietly in his native Russia. Yau, however, is upset at his portrayal (both literally and literary) in the New Yorker article and has written a letter to the New Yorker asking them to make a prominent correction and apologize for an illustration of Yau that accompanied the article. From the letter:
I write in the hope of enlisting your immediate assistance, as well as the assistance of The New Yorker, in undoing, to the extent possible, the literally world-wide damage done to Dr. Yau's reputation as a result of the publication of your article. I also write to outline for you, on a preliminary basis, but in some detail, several of the more egregious and actionable errors which you made in the article, and the demonstrably shoddy "journalism" which resulted in their publication.
The letter, addressed to the two authors as well as the fact-checker on the article and CC'd to David Remnick and the New Yorker's general counsel, runs 12 pages, so you may want to have a look at the press release instead. A webcast discussing all the details of the letter is being held at noon on September 20...information on how to tune in will be available at Dr. Yau's web site. (thx, david)
Oh, rejoice and be glad...there will be a season five of The Wire. "Balancing small audiences again critical acclaim, HBO has picked up a fifth season of drama The Wire." The season may focus on the media's role in politics. (thx, mark)
State of Emergency photo shoot from the September 2006 issue of Vogue Italia. The editorial of these fashion photos exceeds that of much photography found in more conventional US news media. (via bb)
Adrian Holovaty, who works at the Washington Post, has some advice for how the news media should function: "newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview". Holovaty argues for more structured data to be offered, not just the typical written story. Matt Thompson previously argued that the press needs a new paradigm, a shift from searching for hidden information (a la Watergate) to interpreting the massive amounts of publicly available data for patterns and stories (a la Enron/WorldCom/etc).
A short interview with Grigory Perelman, the Russian mathematician who proved the Poincare conjecture and turned down the Fields Medal. "Newspapers should be more discerning over who they write about. They should have more taste." (thx pedro)
Steven Johnson lists Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism (So Can We Stop Talking About It Now?) Like Steven, I get frustrated with the rehashing of the same old points around this issue.
Henry Abbott: bloggers give credit, journalists typically don't. "When Sports Illustrated breaks a story that blogs catch on to, SI gets its name and inbound links all over the blogosphere. When blogs break stories, I don't see why mainstream media shouldn't reciprocate."
A couple of months ago, the Guardian ran an article about Timothy Leary that used a "factoid" from gullible.info, a site trafficking in fake facts. The editor of gullible.info alerted the Guardian to the error, but they still haven't corrected the article claiming that Leary discovered a new primary color called gendale.
Independent infographic
The Independent has a great infographic on its cover today depicting which countries support the immediate ceasefire in the Middle East demanded by the UN and which do not:
That message would take up less space as words, but somehow the impact wouldn't be quite the same. (thx, g)
David Remnick on the Bush Administration's sustained assault on the press. "You begin to wonder if the Bush White House, in its urgent need to find scapegoats for the myriad disasters it has inflicted, is preparing to repeat a dismal and dismaying episode of the Nixon years."
@ the movies
Superman Returns
There's a bit of a shout-out to citizen journalism in Superman Returns. Mid-movie, Daily Planet Editor in Chief White, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen look at some photos of Superman spread across the chief's desk. They're great, iconic photos of the Man of Steel in action. White berates Olsen (and I'm paraphrasing here), "these are great and they were taken by a kid with a cameraphone. Whadda you got, Olsen?" Olsen throws his photos down on the desk; the one on top depicts a distant blurry streak across a blue sky.
"Look, in the sky, Chief."
"It's a bird."
"It's a plane."
"No, look, it's..."
Score one for the man on the scene.
Big 10th anniversary package from Slate. It's interesting to see how it has evolved. Here's a slideshow of the design through the years...the stuff about their failed subscription business model and how they lost marketshare because of it is relevent in the ongoing TimesSelect debate.
The changing face of journalism and a comparison of when the press succeeded (Watergate) and when it failed (Enron): "The plenitude of information, not its scarcity, defines the world we live in now. And journalism must change to accommodate that fact."
Mark Glaser to the NY Times: "Chairman Sulzberger, if you seek peace in cyberspace, if you seek prosperity for your company, if you seek to spread ideas online: Come here to this TimesSelect gate! Mr. Sulzberger, tear down this pay wall!" A rebuttal. My take: TimesSelect is a perfectly good business decision for the Times. I just think the alternatives are better business decisions.
Writer Roger Angell on a leisurely approach to reporting. "Shawn didn't have a sense of deadline. [David] Remnick now wants it next week, which is fine. It's that sort of a magazine, and I try to oblige. Shawn thought, Everybody knows what the news is; now tell us something else about it." More on William Shawn.
NPR interview with David Remnick. Here's a newly-released collection of his recent writing, which includes his interview with Al Gore.
If it's the last thing I ever do
Paul notes that a lot of people and organizations are vowing to do things in the news these days. Here's a current sampling from Google News:
Uganda: Museveni vows to fight corruption
Family vows to fight futile-care law
Blair vows smooth handover
Dumars vows to keep top defender Wallace in fold
Bush vows to boost efforts to end Darfur killings
Ontario vows full-time work for all nursing graduates
China Vows to Close Unsafe Coal Mines
Magician Vows to Complete Aquarium Stunt
Sutherland vows to keep making 24
Vodafone Vows to Slash Roaming Charges By 40%
China's Pearl River Smells, but Mayor Vows to Swim
People are doing a lot of urging in the news too:
Prescott urges Labour to avoid "war"
China urges to repatriate "Eastern Turkistan" terrorist suspects
Brussels urges 2007 declaration to break EU constitution deadlock
Report urges support for parents with learning difficulties
Bush urges larger UN role in Darfur
Roche Urges Care Against Online Counterfeit Tamiflu
Day urges Canadians to stock up for crisis
Leave it to President Bush to both vow and urge in the same headline: "Bush urges UN role in peacekeeping and vows to expedite aid".
Update: Nathaniel asks, where's the slamming? Here it is:
Comptroller report slams health system, police and NII
Traffic chief slams taxi fare bungle
Bangla author slams Dhaka
Cardinal Slams 'Da Vinci' 'Disrespect'
Navratilova slams Czech Pres. as anti-gay
UN slams attack on aid worker
Update: Matthew sends in word of "smacks" in the news:
Holliday smacks two homers to lead Rockies over St. Louis
SCOTUS smacks down anti-choicers
Warren Smacks Broadway
Venice smacks Seminole in region opener
Another Zero-Day Bug Smacks IE
Let's be clear: Bypassing Bush smacks of stupidity
Cox's recent Wal-Mart battle smacks of political posturing
Fish Jumps in Boat, Smacks Woman's Face
And Chris offers "blasts" news:
Cameron blasts 'sexy' children's clothes stores
Iran's Leader Blasts US, Calls Democracy a Failure
Trade Group Blasts Massachusetts Call For Office Plug-In
McInally blasts new SFL play-offs
Dean McDermott's Ex-Wife Blasts Him & Tori
Sheehan blasts war, Bush at Town Hall
Environmentalist blasts bug spray
Awaiting the invitable "vows urges blasts slams smacks" headline...
Stephen Baker lists some reasons why journalists should ask dumb questions, but it's good advice for anyone really. My favorite professor in college, his mantra in classes was that there was no such thing as dumb questions.