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| Monday, May 19, 2003 |
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Wanted: a Nunberg blog 
| | Hey, remember when Dave challenged Larry to start a blog? (No time to look up the links, but they're back there.) Look what happened. Maybe Larry could slip Geoffrey a local message there at Stanford and tell him what blogs are all about. |
Understanding the new world
| | When I was young and admiring of big-time critics, I longed to write snarky, sarcastic and dismissive reviews of bad books, bad movies, bad sports teams, bad whatever. After I became a newspaper reporter, and a writer of editorials (for the smalltime daily Wayne Today, in suburban New Jersey — good gravy, it still exists), I learned quickly how easy it is to do real damage with a typewriter or a photograph (I was a photographer for the paper, too), even when doing solid investigative reporting. Later, I read "Toward a Journalism of Conciousness," by Daniel Patrick Miller, in The Sun, and it hit home. Miller wrote about his days as an investigative reporter in San Francisco, and how often truth was obtained by lying — for example, by befriending or otherwise earning the trust of a source for the purpose of exposing that source in the published story. The movie Absence of Malice did an outstanding job with the same subject. |
| | Journalism is complicated. It has high moral purposes, but there are often moral compromises committed in pursuit of those purposes. Often those compromises are highly prejudicial. And often we're operating those prejudices when we think we're getting at truth. Finding truth in the results often isn't easy. |
| | Take the case of Shaping Retail Tastes at Big Retail Chains, by David D. Kirkpatrick in the New York Times (read it now, before it scrolls behind the paywall). It says big publishers and record labels (along with everything else Wal-Mart carries) depend excessively on Wal-Mart and other big chains. It says Wal-Mart's generally conservative "family-oriented" selection of goods influences culture. That all makes sense to me, but Susanna, Glenn and Scott all consider the piece typical of the Times' elitism. |
| | What's the real story here? Do the big chains drive culture or just follow it? Or both? Why? How much? Were Kirkpatrick and the Times doing a tar-job on Wal-Mart? Is it wrong to ask to ask any of these questions? Or to jump to conclusions? And hey, can a Times reporter take a piss without somebody seeing Howell Raines' working the zipper? I dunno, but I'm sure we need to keep asking. And calling each other on our shit, too. [Note: Brian Hess answers the questions, both succinctly and at length. Very worth reading.] |
| | Wal-Mart had sales of close to $200 billion a year before I saw my first one (hey, I'm an urban animal), and that was after I had a chance meeting with Lee Scott, Wal-Mart's CEO, at a retail conference in Lucerne where we were both speaking. I gave the opening speech on Day One, and at breakfast on Day Two this guy buttonholed me. We talked briefly about something or other, I forget what. Then the same guy gave the opening keynote on Day Two. The guy was Lee Scott. |
| | Later while my wife and I were having sandwiches outside at lunch, Lee sat down and joined us. He was a very down-to-earth guy, honest and likeable. Among other things, he told me what I had said in my speech about companies having souls was absolutely true. Wal-Mart had a soul. It was, in its heart, still a five-and-dime from Bentonville, and old Sam Walton's spirit was still running the company. For better and worse, Wal-Mar still expressed what Sam was all about. Country sensibility, friendliness, low prices. Fine architecture and a taste for The Better Things were low priority at best. High priorities included giving jobs as greeters to old people, and leading employees in the company cheer. |
| | Not long after Cluetrain came out, one of the first letters I received was from a guy who said his mother's love of Wal-Mart (she drove 40 miles from some rural town to be greeted by her friends at the store door) was evidence that Wal-Mart was a very clueful company. Go refigure. |
| | I've hardly studied the matter since, but I do believe it's possible for Lee Scott, David Kirkpatrick and the late Sam Walton to all be right about the company in their own ways. |
| | Where I'm going with this is toward the soul of the Web. It's different than traditional publishing. It's different than the record industry. It's different than everything that feels threatened by it. But it's very similar to something on which we all stand today. It's a world. And that world isn't here to protect the incumbencies that currently prevail in business, religion or anything else. It's here for another reason. And we need to understand that reason before we go regulating the life out of it. |
Printwash, cont'd
| | OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century's journalism-as-lecture model, where organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn't, into something vastly more bottom-up, interactive and democratic... |
| | Even taxi drivers who don't have time for newspapers have heard of OhmyNews. The site draws millions of visitors daily. Advertisers are supporting both the Korean-language Web site ( www.ohmy news.com ) and a weekly print edition, and the operation has been profitable in recent months, according to its chief executive and founder, Oh Yeon-Ho. |
| | Oh is a 38-year-old former writer for progressive magazines. With a staff of about 50 and legions of ``citizen-reporter'' contributors -- more than 26,000 have signed up, and more than 15,000 have published stories under their bylines -- Oh and his colleagues are creating something entirely new. |
| | Oh's rise from underground-magazine writer to powerful media figure has any number of ironies. |
| | One is that the government he disliked was instrumental in wiring the nation for high-speed data access, creating the conditions that ultimately gave OhmyNews an opening. In this wired nation, more than two-thirds of households are connected to the Internet, most with high-speed links. The Internet is an always-on part of everyday life, not an afterthought. |
| | There's the way he came to realize that he should start OhmyNews. He went to the United States from 1997 to 1999 to get a master's degree at Regent University in Virginia. The school's president was Pat Robertson, the evangelist and right-wing political figure. |
| | To know America, Oh says he was told by a journalist friend, you have to know how the conservative right operates. In Robertson's case, part of the operation was counteracting what conservatives saw (and continue to see) as a liberal-oriented mainstream press. Robertson's method was to start his own media outlets. |
| | Regent offered media courses. ``I learned their techniques,'' he says. ``But my approach is quite different.'' |
| | In one course, students' homework was to create a new media organization, at least on paper. Oh's imaginary company was the genesis of OhmyNews. (``I got an A-plus,'' he says wryly.) |
| | The vision was to use the Internet, which was then growing like crazy, to tap the power of average people who, Oh strongly believed, didn't back South Korea's government and weren't represented by the conservative media companies that controlled about 80 percent of daily circulation. |
| | The easy coexistence of the amateurs and professionals will, soon enough, seem natural. Publications like OhmyNews will pop up everywhere, because they make sense, combining the best of old and new journalistic forms. |
| | OhmyNews is an experiment in tomorrow. So far, it's looking like a brilliant one. |
| | [Later...] Now I'm on the phone with David Sifry (of Technorati, both currently subjects of a Steven Johnson piece in Wired), who says there are all kinds of compromises possible. For example, the Times could do a deal with Google in which the archives would be exposed only to Google; and users could, after clicking through, pay for reading the full article. This would probably involve some kind of revenue sharing arrangement. But it could be done. The result would then be pay-per-click. Which Google might not want to do, but Overture might want to do. See? It's more complicated than it appears. |
| | By the way (this also from David), if you're looking for an example of what exposed archives can do for a newspaper, consider the Guardian and it's own weblog. |
| | [Later...] Geoffrey Nunberg's piece wasn't the only one on blogs in the Sunday times. Here's the other one. And here's Josh's response. Mine is that the piece, like Nunberg's, trivializes blogging by changing the subject. Both carry a subtext that says bloggers aren't serious, and blogging is not Serious Journalism. Also that blogging is, in some way, a threat. By the way, this was Nunberg's second slam on blogs. The first came on Fresh Air last December. Here's what I wrote about it at the time. The link to the piece, of course, goes nowhere now. |
| | In short, the problem isn't blogs or Google, the problem is that large publishers are unwilling to embrace the web. The way to fix that is for publishers to make changes, not Google . Use mod_rewrite to hide that ugly CMS, put content in it's permanent location the FIRST time you publish it, let the search spiders walk your site, read some documentation about search engine placement, leave your archive content visible. Or don't. That's a business decision. The lessons authoritative content creators need to learn are the same lessons consumer-facing ecommerce companies already learned; embrace the medium or die. |
| | Or almost. These guys aren't like the e-commerce companies, since they had a going business in the first place, and still have one. But they do miss out on opportunities that only get larger (and make them look smaller) over time. |
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