NY Times to Readers: Drop Dead

The New York Times has opened a few of its stories–tentatively, selectively–to comments from the public. Between the public and these stories the Gray Lady has installed four part-time staffers whose job it is to uphold the quality of public discourse.

Quoted in Editor & Publisher, Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations of The New York Times Company, said: “A pure free-for-all doesn’t, in my opinion, equal good. It can equal bad.”

In the same E&P story, Kate Phillips, editor of the Times’ Caucus blog: “I almost wish we could go back to the days when we never heard their [readers'] voices.”

NYT public editor Clark Hoyt told Editor & Publisher that the paper finds itself “struggling with a vexing problem. . . How does the august Times, which has long stood for dignified authority, come to terms with the fractious, democratic culture of the Internet, where readers expect to participate but sometimes do so in coarse, bullying and misinformed ways?”

To which I say, to adopt the sort of uncivil language Sulzberger & Co. would never permit on their site: Bite me, you LOSERS!!!!!

Ahem.

To recede back into reasoned discourse: the Times’ employees’ diction and thinking betray an institutional viewpoint that suits it very poorly, in the first instance, for the Internet: Get this: The new medium has obligated the Times to comes to term with a democratic culture! Far worse, it’s a . . . .fractious one! Oh, how vexatious! After all, the Times is “august,” and it stands for “dignified authority”!

Frankly, the Times also betrays an institutional self-infatuation that suits the paper very poorly for. . .well, just about anyone with self-respect.

Nisenholtz, Phillips, and Hoyt ooze supercilious condescension. Readers–unlike the staff members of the New York Times, except maybe Judith Miller, Jayson Blair, and. . .[you get the idea]–can be misinformed!

Readers can be coarse!

And the culture can be–absolutely unlike the Times, which has never used its power to beat up on a weaker opponent that can’t protect itself–full of bullies!

I have previously praised the Times for its sophisticated use of web technology: Its Debate Analyzer tool is a breakthrough product. Its My Times feature demonstrates advanced understanding of the need to provide user control of content in the digital age.

But its policy regarding reader comments reveals a very important way its current management is poorly prepared for the rising era of communication.

At a time when the newspaper is shedding veteran reporters, and in need of developing highly skilled multimedia journalists, devoting 2 slots to sweeping back the sea with a broom is a bad decision. It’s sort of sweet, or silly, or just plain batty. It’s the stockholders’ money, and if they’d rather spend it shielding reader comments from view rather than funding journalism, that’s their business.

But the paper’s motivation for vetting the comments, as summarized by Hoyt–to uphold the appearance of dignity or augustitude or whatever–betrays a withering contempt for readers.

It shows a lack of confidence in the very people the Times’ advertising group is always bragging about: the national intelligencia, the “thought leaders,” the discriminating cosmopolitans and patrons of the high arts.

It is a rather transparent form of censorship–the Fourth Estate squelching the voices of the undignified masses in the name of political and economic self-interest–and vanity.

It is a window into an institutional culture that is made ill, deep down, by the unpleasantness of contemporary public life.

It is, in the end, not an expression of dignity. It’s an expression of cowardice.

Writers’ Strike: Imminent Proof that Web Video is Hideo

As regular readers of this blog [both of you!] know by now, I am bearish on Web video. More specifically, I think the idea that people will watch many half-hour or hour-long TV-style programs on their computers is bull. I believe it’s a hopeful, consensual group delusion among VCs, broadcasters, and 2.entrepreneurs.

And so for purely selfish reasons I hope the writers’ strike against TV production companies continues. Why? As the strike goes on and broadcast fare dries up, several things are likely to happen:

1. Services like Hulu, NBC/News Corp’s platform for delivering standard TV content, will face an early test of value as online delivery mechanisms for network television content. Hulu is still in carefully guarded beta, so the data certainly won’t be conclusive. Similarly, Joost, is just launched and still awfully content-thin. But you can view plenty of broadcast video online at NBCDirect (also beta) or just off the main NBC website. There are other similar opportunities for online episode viewing at various broadcasters’ and programs’ sites. And YouTube is loading up on “real” TV content. The key question: Will TV viewers turn to these services as the writers’ strike continues and broadcast and some cable content goes gray? My guess: No.

2. Projects like QuarterLife [the MySpace series of 8-minute minisodes that's pretty much about web video, from the creators of thirtysomething] will get an early proof-of-concept opportunity. Will folks who have turned away from the rerun-rich plasmatron go online to view even this program, which is crafted so specifically for online users and for this moment in time? Word just came out that the series will run on “real” NBC in January, so the online version will get a boost from the established broadcast medium. I still foresee no huge audience for it.

3. We’ll find out how many sofa spuds generally really do boot up their computers as the reruns continue. This will provide some data to test the widely accepted hypothesis that TV viewership is down because viewers are spending the time on the web instead.

My self-serving prediction: The remote control operators in the household will stay right on the couch and simply watch more “unwritten” cable, premium movie channels and on-demand content. The beneficiaries of the writers’ strike won’t be Hulu, Joost, YouTube or other web video schemes. They will be the The Discovery Channel, History Channel, the BBC, TVland, Survivor (it’s still on TV, really!), the Biggest Loser, and local cable systems’ on-demand fare.

Oddly enough, if I am right, the whole strike is meaningless anyway. It’s based on the idea that web users in huge, monetizable numbers will view half-hour and hour-long broadcast content on their computers.

Which means either I am wrong–at least a 50-50 chance, I’d say–or that those writers are out there pressing for a fair chunk of revenues that may never come.

Unpaid Content and Delusions of a Print Renaissance

The Washington Post today publishes a good rundown on various media institutions’ recent abandonment of the strategy of charging for content online. The mainstream capitulators-to-reality include the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Salon, the Washington Post’s own Slate, and the British publications The Economist and Financial Times.

All decided that the bigger audience free access creates would produce more revenue, via advertising, than from online subscription fees.

Yet even among those who have opened their gates to the public, some visions of the future remain blurred.

Economist.com publisher Ben Edwards told the Post’s Frank Ahrens that there are benefits to going free beyond aggregating more eyeballs.

“Part of my job as publisher is to create the very best possible experience for people so they can advance into a deeper relationship with us,” Edwards said. “Eventually, they can transfer over to be a print subscriber.”

It’s not clear whether Edwards was tossing a bone to some print-loving C-level executive, or whether he believes this himself.

But holding out hope that online users who discover the Economist’s content online will be moved to subscribe to the pulp version strikes me as, to be unkind, delusional. This is to suggest that publishing online will eventually spark. . . .a print renaissance!

Hang tough, everyone. We’re giving our content away online, but print is coming back!

FaceBlogLinkedWikiVibesGroups: Mommy, Make It Stop

New media salonista Amy Gahran recently wondered aloud in the “My Questions” module of her Facebook page whether she should create a Facebook group for readers of her popular blog, Contentious.

Jim Lackey–a Facebook friend of Amy’s, but not of mine [note to Jim: Since we're both friends of  Jim Brady, he of washingtonpost.com fame, I  really ought to "friend" you soon]–responded to Amy’s query this way:

One potential drawback: If you start a new Facebook group and I join it, does that mean I’ll feel like I have one more group to check on? I’m already in too many groups that I never have time to visit!

To which I say: Testify, brother! You’ve asked the question of the moment.

I, like Jim–and Amy–and [I'm guessing here] you–are beginning to suffer social network circuit overload. It is the ‘07 version of the ‘06 RSS feed flameout, of the ‘04 bookmarking debacle, and the ‘02 e-mail catastrophe.

Take my social networks, please:

• Joining blog reader communities was a kick at first–I regularly ventilated my opinions at about five. Then I launched by own blog, and needed to tend to that community.
• Next came LinkedIn, with its invitations, closed-circuit e-mails, questions and “see who’s checked out your profile” gimcracks.
• NetVibes isn’t so much of a community, but it sends me dozens of RSS feeds, some from blogs whose communities I still participate in.
• Next up, Facebook, and all the good people I’ve gathered there, followed by the inevitable Facebook groups that spawn additional interactions with like-minded strangers.
• Oh, and the wiki I’ve set up for about a dozen folks I’m collaborating with on a year-long project. Lots of discussion threads to follow there.
• Oh, I forgot, the Technorati tags I track.

It’s getting to the point where I hardly have time for my full-time job, which of course is tending my e-mail inbox and writing my blog.

The point is that this is unsustainable, for me and all of us who have been sucked into the social network vortex. We have become servants of a networks of networks of our own making.

The only way to regain control at this point is to drop out, tune out and log out. Or, less apocalyptically, pick one or two communities that matter the most personally and professionally and [respectfully, regretfully as appropriate] step away from the rest.

So: Amy, please don’t set up that Facebook group. And Jim, please don’t be offended if I don’t friend you on Facebook. If you want to talk, just drop me an e-mail.

Reporters Are Not Doomed, But Their Habits Must Die

Back when John Kelly and I were friends. . .

No, just joking, of course! John and I have the sort of friendship that can easily withstand a strong professional disagreement, especially one in which he is so tragically wrong. [See this entry of mine in response to John's entry on the whole are-reporters-doomed controvery.  John responds to my entry too. Clearly neither one of us gets out much.]

Here is why journalism must change far more than the conservative wing understands, and why the sentimentalists who protect the status quo actually do the future of journalism harm.

Today there was a major earthquake in Chile. The New York Times (just to pick on the big dumb kid at the back of the class) has a 16-graf news story on its Web site. It has a map, a photo and two hyperlinks, one to a Chile Travel Guide entry, one to a link explaining the U.S. Geological Survey. (There are utterly unwholesome motivations for providing these inline links, but I won’t get into that here.)

A skilled multimedia news editor would have quickly fired up the ol’ browser the moment the news crawled across the wire and tracked down some shaky-cell-phone video. She’d have posted a Google map of the affected area and put a fast-typing staffer on the task of harvesting the best UGC and geotagging it to the map. She’d have her most ferociously focussed, grizzled newshand craft 300 highly compressed and brilliant words, culled from news service reports and UGC, like those newsmagazine write-throughs but done in real time. She’d link to a flickr photo gallery that aggregates images in real time. She’d create a newsbox that updated all day with the latest facts, and have an editor from the South American desk scour for blog entries of the moment.

This is not radical: CNN, whose multimedia production work I’ve admired before, produced a solid multimedia package on the earthquake of the sort I describe.

But at the New York Times, some poor, habituated, hidebound, put-upon schweck in the  newsroom did what she and legions before her have done for decades: Order up a 15-graf ho-hum, put a postage stamp photo on the page and a dead .gif map, and be done with it.

If this is the baby, then I say pitch it out with the bathwater–and smack its shabby butt on the way down.

Editors and writers will continue to create these legacy news reports for as long as they can get away with it. Not because they are better, not because they’ve thought it through, but because. . .well, nobody’s told them they have to do it a new way. Or they don’t know how. Or they are tragically sentimental. Or they are suspicious of the frisky young-uns with the stylish eyewear who know how to do this stuff.  Nobody–nobody–would say that 16-graf wordstring is better journalism than the multimedia package our talented producer cited above would create. And the good one is probably cheaper to produce.

The multimedia production simply requires a different skill set than the one you find widely distributed in the Times’ and other conservative newsrooms. It also requires alert and flexible management by the folks in the big offices.

We can discuss the role of investigative journalism–how the essential reporting of public affairs and the vital task of holding power accountable can be funded and carried out in the digital age.

But I don’t think there is any justification to continue to produce single-color, one-dimensional news reports on a daily basis. No, not every story is worth the scramble-the-jets multimedia treatment. But those that are should get it. Every day. Not on special occasions. That’s how you’ll build the loyalty of intelligent and discriminating readers on the web.

Failing to embrace the new media tools as a matter of course, as a method of daily business, only continues to marginalize the very media institutions that need to survive if there is to be thoughtful, principled journalism in the digital age. Too many of these outfits seem to be riding their revenue curves to the bottom of the chart and complaining about how kids today don’t read newspapers.

To cite a famous quotation from, god help me, Lee Iococca: It’s time for top newsroom managers to lead, follow or get out of the way.

The YouTube Killer: Shut Up Before You Get Started

Brace yourself for a wave of reflexive, poorly informed censor-the-Internet blowback.

What will bring this about? News that a Pennsylvia a 14-year-old being prosecuted for an October school shooting plot had communicated online, via MySpace and YouTube, with the teen in Finland who last week killed eight fellow classmates. Here’s a good report from ABCNews.com

And here is just one example of the response that is forming, from a reader’s online posting on the site of the UK’s Register newspaper:

Now consider what would happen if such manifestos, photos and personal testaments of mass murderers were put in the same category as child pornography with reproduction and distribution banned and heavy penalties applicable.

I’m probably preaching to the choir here, as blog readers are unlikely to be censorious by nature. But to make three points:

• Viewing the web, or social networks, or YouTube as accessories to murder or intent to murder is like blaming the telephone in the case where conspirators call each other to coordinate. Or to extend the argument to its absurd extreme, to accuse pen and paper as complicit in the Columbine killings, which were foretold in diary entries.
• As the history of child porn prosecutions has shown, law enforcement has had great success using the Internet as a way to identify potential perps, gather evidence, conduct surveillance, arrest and prosecute producers and consumers of child pornography. The online transactions themselves draw a trail directly to the sickos.
• There is a good argument that use of such immediate and ubiquitous technologies can encourage copycat actions and even enable conspiracies, which the Pennsylvania-Finland cases suggest. But the problem is, all communication has become ubiquitous and immediate. The attempt to slow and prohibit only communications about “acts of terror” is only going to divert vast sums of money to lawyers, and create full employment for privacy/censorship talking heads. Child porn is fairly easy to identify. “Intent to kill” and “acts of terror” are nearly impossible to identify with sufficient precision to permit constitutional legal action.

To draw, with apologies to all, on the rhetoric of the gun lobby: The Internet doesn’t kill people. People kill people.

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