Excuse the outré reference. I just downloaded the Statler Brothers version of this song for my iPod and had been planning on adding the Carter Family’s, so the lyrics were on my mind when I read Thomas Lifson’s story this morning at American Thinker. Thomas wrote about the latest editorial gaffe at The New York Times, perhaps over-heatedly comparing it to Rathergate.
But never mind. It’s bad enough without the R-word. Some “reporter” (ooo… scare quotes!) for their Magazine named Jack Hitt, in a wildly over-zealous pro-choice article, completely misstated some key facts in a story on the criminalization of abortion in El Salvador. As PJM Barcelona editor José Guardia put it: “The main character was a woman who the Gray Lady said was in prison for an abortion, but was there for killing her newborn baby. The paper had defended the article without bothering to check the readily available court documents.”
Now that was back in April ’06. The Times itself finally fully acknowledged this tawdry business in what appears to be a thorough and honest piece of reporting by its public editor Byron Calame yesterday. Not exactly blog speed, is it? [Isn't it interesting how embarrassing stories suddenly appear on December 31?-ed. You're not talking about John Conyers, are you?]
Which brings me back to “circle jerks.” Some of you may recall that my amigo the NYT’s executive editor Bill Keller – in what I assume was an intemperate moment – once called the blogs CJs. I suggested at the time that there might be a bit of projection in this. That suggestion appears ratified and then some by yesterday’s belated disclosure.
But are blogs any better, you might ask? No, in a lot of ways. To begin with, we don’t have the facilities of the NYT – yet. But that will come in time. Organizations like Pajamas Media and, yes, the Huff Post are just the very early fledgling forms of an emerging new media. The trick is to make that media an improvement on the past (other than in the obvious area of speed). Not an easy thing. Interactivity helps, but that too is filled with obvious traps. In any case, it’s going to be an interesting year at Pajamas Media. We are going to welcome, indeed need, your input.
As for the “circle jerk” reference, we all know what that is about. Money, honey. The NYTimes are a-changin’ and the ghost of Milton Friedman is floating above our heads. All of ours.
UPDATE: Shrinkwrapped continues the discussion (on the couch?).
Ever since getting the NYT delivered to my email box, where the subject line in the email is their hottest story of the day, I’ve come to the conclusion that the NYT staff must be insulated in their stupidity, or are at least devoid of empathy. Nine times out of ten, the headline is about something that I’ve learned about in the blogospere a day or two ago, and is trully old news, with raging debates already well in progress, and in fact losing steam in the face of the next news item, which the NYT can also be depended upon to show up late with.
The nonesensical thing about this is that this is their ONLINE edition that is behind the curve. What, are they simply reproducing the daily that shows up at the newstand? Or are they just inept and slow? I have no idea because I don’t see their dailies.
It’s as if they traded in their horse for a brand new car, but are using a foot pedal to move it instead of a motor.
Except for the news and editorial depts, it’s a damn fine paper. Love the travel section, for instance.
Are blogs better? Depends on what you mean by better. I think all of us on line have a tendency to think we are bigger than we are, we reach more people, are indicative of the thinking of a vast community…but in truth I think that blogs are not anymore representative of the general public than some of the big media is. I very rarely encounter anyone in “real life” who reads political blogs and many of the ones who do have a mixed opinion of them.
For instance a guy told me the other day that he thought every since Rathergate blogs had gotten to be about as bad as media in thinking they are so important.
I am not sure they help political candidates either. The lefty blogs did not help Lamont and I think the right blogs may have hurt the Republicans as well.
The emphasis on ear marks and the refusal to compromise on issues like illegal immigration might have been popular on the righty blogs, but they did not sit well with the general voting public. I think too that we sometimes overlook what is and is not politically viable in the real world, because in our world it is all so simple. Just kill the bad guys and build a wall.
On the left it is simple too, the Republicans are the real enemy. And so we stake out these positions and cling to them with single minded tenacity oblivious to a great deal of the world out there full of people who do not care in the slightest what we think.
However, none of that lets the NYT off the hook for being stupid.
good points, rog’ – as ever.
BTW: interesting critique of pjm over at yargb/flares in the darkenss.
i think it made me think that pjm could use a feature like nro’s corner – where there seems to be a running dialog/debate we can listen in on.
and perhaps pjm could use a forum page – as power line has added.
the key to the blogosphere’s success is that is is by nature a distributed intelligence which can fact check anything, and which — unlike a DT article – afford the reader instant access to the primary materials to judge for themselves the evidence and the arguments.
spheres is a good image to keep in mind here: as newspapers and magazines have sections, so to do the most ambitious of the group blogs. i know yo guys are attempting this with manolo and the other non-political bloggers, but the structure wasn’t right.
blog-readers seem to me to be more interested in multi-faceted bloggers who blog on many topics – and then in the multi-faceted dialogs which might occur between bloggers, and THEN between bloggers and regular readers/commenters.
i think that keller and the nytimes are nearly vestigial and beyond help. and the blogosphere is still in it’s preadolescence.
but soon the blogosphere will be hot and pimple free – and the Antique Media will still be vestigial.
thanks in part to your efforts.
all the best!
What would I use to wrap my dishes and other breakables with if the NYT goes out of business? I thought that’s what it was for.
….and the ads at Macy’s.
Much easier to peruse over coffee.
But I need dishwrapping paper!
It’s worthy of note how the NYT and most of the MSM keeps meticulous count of the dead soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, they give themselves license to reveal classified information further endangering our soldiers.
And yet they seem at a loss to report any stat of the 10ths of thousands lost to Roe vs. Wade every year.
Roger,
PJM is at the forefront of a new direction in Media, and I wish you all the success in the world. Great thing about you being the head of it is that, if you were going to go stuffy on us, you would have already done so. You’re a true liberal.
You ‘da man.
Now I have no facts to support what I’m going to predict, but, concentrating all the mental power that I can bring to bear (a little deprecating humor here, no hubris) on the subject of print media, I say that what is held in store for them is obsolescence, and the banner of the NYT is in the vanguard, slowly, inexorably, leading the way.
The future is online. By the second half of this century, I expect that even hardcopy books and paperbacks will start to fade away, each giving in to EBooks. It isn’t only the technies and nerds that are sourcing the internet for their information and entertainment. The youth of today is already using the internet for that. Online is in their DNA like it never was for us.
Using myself as my own guinea pig, I subscribe to magazines online now, and probably will never go back to the hardcopy versions. The advantages and convenience is considerable: space conservation being first and foremost, plus I can enlarge or diminish the size of the text to my taste, I can save specific articles while discarding the rest…it goes on, all the conveniences.
In the major population centers, like New York, where straphangers by the tens of thousands take the subway to work, the demise will be slowest, as the NYT, TDN, TNYP, and others give the riders something to do while they are commuting to and from work.
But out in the suburbs, where people drive to work, the transition will be faster and is already well underway, I’m sure, with people getting their information and more on line. The most notable effect should be a drop in subscriptions outside of the dense population areas, and I’m sure that print MSM is seeing this now.
In a way, if I was to analogize what I’m evisioning, I’d describe a wide open prairie, endless, and even in the foreground there is room to breathe and shout and stake your place, and still be leagues away, an infinity away, from your nearest neighbor.
To the aspiring blogger, the unlimited terrain is also the biggest drawback – how to get noticed. QUALITY, RATIONALITY, REASON, and good writing will rise to the top.
This blog and PJM are going for the gusto, and I think that Roger is underplaying the dominant role that news blogs will eventually play in providing news for the masses.
My timeframe is around 50 years, at the end of which the transfer of power should be just about complete.
Carl Rove is at it again.
Rove leaked Saddam hanging video to expose Osama’s anti troop surge stand as weak on terror.
Wait a minute. We have a blogger in my ear…. yes, I meant, to embarrass Obama, not Osama. That’s Obama with a b.
My apologies to Muslims everywhere. Wolf?
Electronic books won’t supplant paper books until all of the following are resolved to the readers satisfaction.
Physical convenience: think paperback, smaller may be convenient to carry, but not to read. Weight also factors in here. Screen resolution is also an issue. If the reader can’t curl up with it in a chair, or in bed, then books may be reduced but never replaced.
Cost and Copyright issues: An early digital book version of Alice in Wonderland had a copyright limitation that prohibited reading it aloud. Which makes its value pretty low. Copyright license restrictions could keep the digital book idea strangled for a long time. I note that Barnes and Nobel have a modest stack of classical books that sell for under ten bucks. The salient issue here is, they are all out of copyright. B&N can still make money because they know there is a stable demand, they just can’t charge high prices for copies of these works. If an Ebook distributer thinks they can saddle me with silly license restrictions, I will happily keep on buying real books.
Retention: research has shown that (even for current collage folks) material is retained significantly better when read from book as compared to a screen.
And, of course, there are certain satisfying things about handling a real book. Besides being able to put in random bookmarks, margin notes (which I haven’t done since school), and random skimming.
LarryD – Copyrights are indeed a big problem. MPAA and RIAA, among others, have distorted copyrights from their constitutional intent (yes, they are in the constitution), instead creating a perpetual monopoly (when did the last copyright of significance expire?). Hence, instead of their purpose of encouraging the creation of material, they are encouraging the theft of material, and discouraging the sharing and blending of ideas.
Okay, rant aside, my problem with copyrights on electronic media is the inability to recover lost copies. I am unlikely to lose 100 physical books because a 65 nano-meter transistor fries, but I can put thousands of books, along with their copyrights, on a computer. So that is one commercial problem that has to be solved.
Curling up in bed with a book is good. Ditto with a magazine, which is why I don’t subscribe to the online versions of my favorite mags. I’d also like to curl up in bed with a bag of blogs – say, one PJM’s worth per day, although the temptation to then find a way to respond would disturb my rest.
But… they’ll come. And the NYT will no doubt find a way to put falsehoods into them.
John Moore, I can sympathize with that sentiment, and I will agree that Ebooks will have a much harder time in supplanting the hard copies. In fact, I can envision organizations forming that will have the preservation of books as their mission. However, magazines and newspapers I believe will have no such support.
Curling up with and Ebook is not so farfetched. A couple of weeks ago, while waiting for my mother to get finished at a doctor’s visit, I saw two boys literally curled up on the waiting room chairs. In their hands was an IPOD sized electronic game. They were mesmerized.
Speaking of college, I have a friend who is an instructor at the local community college. Five years ago, all her classes were in house inside a classroom. Now all her classes (she’s handling 6 in this next quarter starting up) are online, and the geography limitations are non-existent, as the three campusses that she holds the classes are hundreds of miles apart.
Nah, curling up in bed isn’t the problem. I already curl up with the laptop all of the time. No, the true barrier is reading in the bathroom. No one has ever been electrocuted by dropping a book in the tub, and a paperback dropped in the loo is not too terrible a loss…
A major problem with e-books vs. real books is the light source. Real books rely on an indirect source. E-books require that you look directly at the source.
This is an admitted problem that can cause eye problems for many.
Additionally “curling up” means changing your position in space. It’s hard to use a laptop on it’s side.
A couple of years ago I saw an interesting presentation by the MIT Media Lab guys on this and they were working on “electronic paper”. Loosely based on NCR paper the idea was that you had one “book” and downloaded a story to that book from your computer. You could then unplug and walk around with the hard copy. When you wanted a different story, you could basically press clear and load something different.
Really cool tech but had a ways to go.
Selecting a color scheme that is conducive to reading text is also of paramount importance. Black on white works best for me, and I enlarge the text so I can sit back and get some distance between me and the computer. I think that the eye discomfort in reading text can minimized by adding distance between the viewer and the screen, and by enlarging the text, thereby minimizing the amount of strain involved. The discomfort may also in some part be due to a learned behavior, those of us who actually did curl up with books and who did read hardcopies of newspapers and magazines (because there was no alternative), and the discomfit may be because of the comparative “newness” of the experience. I find myself slowly acclimating to the online reading, which probably can be better termed “electronic reading” since I generally am offline when I read the magazines that I downloaded.
A poor color scheme can blow a website right out of the water. This blog has an excellent one.