Category: Uncategorized

WRKO’s long, painful decline

Because I’m on the wrong side of 50, you’ll have to indulge me for a few moments as I remember what WRKO Radio (AM 680) used to be. Twenty years ago, you had Janet Jeghelian and Ted O’Brien in the morning, Gene Burns during the midday and the late, great Jerry Williams in the afternoon. Jeghelian and O’Brien later gave way to Marjorie Clapprood and Pat Whitley without missing a beat. It was great radio, and you really weren’t tempted to change the station at any point during the day.

Now? Howie Carr is a pipsqueak compared to those towering figures, but at least he has some ties to that golden era. It was Williams, after all, who gave him his start. And Carr is a huge talent, even if he’s squandered it over the years, devolving into a homophobic race-baiter with a lazy show that usually sounds like it took all of five minutes to put together.

Even so, Carr is really all WRKO has. Now, with Carr leaving this October for WTKK (96.9 FM) — a deal we have to assume will come to fruition, despite some contract hassles — the folks at Entercom might as well turn out the lights, especially once baseball season is over.

(Disclosure: I was a regular paid guest on a late-morning show hosted by Whitley a few years ago, and one Saturday picked up a few bucks hosting a liberal program ‘RKO was then running. However, despite what N. thinks, I never had any sort of tryout at ‘RKO or any other radio station.)

The Herald, of course, is firmly in Howie’s camp, as he is the tabloid’s star columnist. But I wonder if Carr will be tempted to stop writing, or at least to cut back. A morning drive-time show typically is more heavily produced than an afternoon show, with guests and interviews. Maybe he thinks he can wing it. But if he’s going to justify the money ‘TKK is paying him, he’ll need to work harder than he has at ‘RKO in recent years.

Still, I’d rather have ‘TKK’s problems than ‘RKO’s. By far the two most important segments of the day are the morning and afternoon commutes. Consider:

  • In the morning, Carr will compete against former Massachusetts House speaker Tom Finneran. As I told the Globe’s Carolyn Johnson, ‘RKO has already done much of ‘TKK’s promotional work by playing Finneran’s hiring earlier this year as a phony feud between the two men. My heart’s with Finneran, but my head is with Carr. Howie is going to beat the overly loquacious Finneran like a drum.
  • In the afternoon, Jay Severin will have a clear field. Severin was actually ahead of Carr in the ratings a few years ago, then left to go national. Severin hasn’t been able to duplicate that feat since his return, but now he’ll have no competition.

As much of a coup as this is for WTKK, I would argue that station managers made a mistake by not giving the morning show to Margery Eagan and Jim Braude, who are on from noon to 3 p.m. Two can be better than one in the morning, and I think they’d do a better job of handling the fast pace, the guest interviews and the like that are characteristic of a good show in that time slot.

And what of the state of talk radio in Boston? Not good. With Paul Sullivan having semi-retired from WBZ (AM 1030) in order to take care of his health, by far the best talk-show host in Boston now is Tom Ashbrook, of “On Point,” on WBUR (90.9 FM). Ashbrook is very good indeed, but “On Point” is more of an interview program than it is a talk show; and because it’s syndicated by NPR, there’s not much local flavor. I’d love to see Christopher Lydon take Sullivan’s slot on WBZ, but, frankly, I can’t imagine its happening.

This would be a great opportunity for WRKO to try liberal talk, despite its long-term commitment to Finneran, a moderate conservative. Pair Finneran with a liberal co-host; run Stephanie Miller‘s and Ed Schultz‘s syndicated shows during the midday; and then come back with a talented liberal local host during the afternoon drive, and ‘RKO would have something with which to counter ‘TKK’s mostly right-wing lineup.

But I suppose that would make too much sense.

Howie Carr photo (cc) by Paul Keleher. Some rights reserved.

Is Howie really leaving WRKO?

Most local radio stations are notoriously slow in updating their Web sites. So it probably doesn’t mean anything that WRKO has kept its HowieCarr.com page up, or that WTKK has announced nothing. But still.

Brian Maloney, the “Radio Equalizer,” runs with an unsourced item claiming that WRKO program director Jason Wolfe was rather upset to learn of Carr’s departure. Interesting if true.

But is this really a done deal? Carr’s lawyer says it is, but the Herald’s Jessica Heslam quotes WRKO (and Herald) flack George Regan as saying, in effect, not so fast. Says Regan:

Howie Carr is under contract to Entercom. He is a tremendous asset to WRKO and Entercom has every intention of retaining his services for many years to come. Any report suggesting a change is incredibly premature.

Hmmm. Maybe Wolfe was on to something when he said, according to Maloney’s account, “We had a f–kin’ deal! He’s not goin’ anywhere!”

Hoyt gets results

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, writing on Sunday:

Susan Chira, the foreign editor, … acknowledged that the paper had used “excessive shorthand” when referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. “We’ve been sloppy,” she said. She and other editors started worrying about it, Chira said, when the American military began an operation in mid-June against what it said were strongholds of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

On Thursday, she and her deputy, Ethan Bronner, circulated a memo with guidelines on how to distinguish Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia from bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.

New York Times reporter David Sanger, writing today:

Officials say that Mr. Gates has been quietly pressing for a pullback that could roughly halve the number of combat brigades now patrolling the most violent sections of Baghdad and surrounding provinces by early next year. The remaining combat units would then take up a far more limited mission of training, protecting Iraq’s borders and preventing the use of Iraq as a sanctuary by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni Arab extremist group that claims to have an affiliation with Osama bin Laden’s network, though the precise relationship is unknown.

Brown unbound

Rachel Sklar has a good interview in the Huffington Post with Aaron Brown, who’s finally free from his CNN contract and, thus, can (1) talk and (2) look for a job. Brown is one of my favorite TV journalists, but, unfortunately, he comes across as diffident about returning to the trenches. Then again, Brown tends to sound diffident about everything, which is one of his quirky charms.

Wikipedia, probability and community

I’m sure I’m far from the only person to have a conflicted relationship with Wikipedia. Yes, I know that at least one prominent study found that the user-produced encyclopedia is about as accurate as the venerable Britannica. I also know that Wikipedia can be mind-bogglingly wrong — sometimes only for a few minutes or a few days, until an adult (I’m talking about maturity, not age) undoes someone else’s vandalism. But that’s not much consolation if you’re the victim of that bad information.

I tell my students that Wikipedia can be a great starting point, but that they should use it to find more-authoritative sources of information, not cite it in their papers. As for me, well, I’ve been known to link to Wikipedia articles, but I try to be careful, and I try to keep it to a minimum.

This week’s New York Times Magazine includes a worthwhile story by Jonathan Dee on the emergence of Wikipedia as a news source. Dee reports on a small army of activists (one is just 16) who jump in with summaries of major news events even as they are unfolding. These activists come across as admirably dedicated to the idea of fair, neutral content; many look for vandalism after a major news event takes place, such as the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, a favorite target of those who opposed his homophobic, right-wing views. (Yes, if I wrote that on Wikipedia, someone would edit those descriptions out.) But I would still have a nagging sense that something might be very wrong.

So what is the real difference between Wikipedia and a more traditional encyclopedia such as the Britannica? It’s not just the notion that anonymous and pseudonymous amateurs write and edit Wikipedia articles, whereas Britannica relies on experts. That’s certainly part of it, although if that were the entire explanation, Wikipedia would be worthless.

The more important difference is the idea of community-based, bottom-up verification (Wikipedia) versus authority-based, top-down verification (Britannica). Each has its purpose. The question is why the community-based model works — or at least works often enough that Wikipedia is a worthwhile stop on anyone’s research quest.

To that end, I want to mention a couple of ideas I’ve run across recently that help explain Wikipedia. The first is a 2006 book by Wired editor Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” in which he suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is based on probability theory rather than direct verification. The more widely read a Wikipedia article is, the more likely it is to be edited and re-edited, and thus be more accurate and comprehensive than even a Britannica article. But you never know. Anderson writes (I’m quoting from the book, but this blog post captures the same idea):

Wikipedia, like Google and the collective wisdom of millions of blogs, operates on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics — a matter of likelihood rather than certainty. But our brains aren’t wired to think in terms of statistics and probability. We want to know whether an encyclopedia entry is right or wrong. We want to know that there’s a wise hand (ideally human) guiding Google’s results. We want to trust what we read.

When professionals — editors, academics, journalists — are running the show, we at least know that it’s someone’s job to look out for such things as accuracy. But now we’re depending more and more on systems where nobody’s in charge; the intelligence is simply “emergent,” which is to say that it appears to arise spontaneously from the number-crunching. These probabilistic systems aren’t perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They’re designed to “scale,” or improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.

Anderson is no Wikipedia triumphalist. He also writes: “[Y]ou need to take any single result with a grain of salt. Wikipedia should be the first source of information, not the last. It should be a site for information exploration, not the definitive source of facts.”

Right now I’m reading “Convergence Culture” (2006), by Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. Jenkins, like Anderson, offers some insight into that clichéd phrase “the wisdom of the crowd,” and why it often works. Jenkins quotes the philosopher Pierre Lévy, who has said of the Internet, “No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity.” Jenkins continues:

Lévy draws a distinction between shared knowledge, information that is believed to be true and held in common by the entire group, and collective intelligence, the sum total of information held individually by the members of the group that can be accessed in response to a specific question. He explains: “The knowledge of a thinking community is no longer a shared knowledge for it is now impossible for a single human being, or even a group of people, to master all knowledge, all skills. It is fundamentally collective knowledge, impossible to gather together into a single creature.” Only certain things are known by all — the things the community needs to sustain its existence and fulfill its goals. Everything else is known by individuals who are on call to share what they know when the occasion arises. But communities must closely scrutinize any information that is going to become part of their shared knowledge, since misinformation can lead to more and more misconceptions as new insight is read against what the group believes to be core knowledge.

Jenkins is writing not about Wikipedia but about an online fan community dedicated to figuring out the winners and losers on CBS’s “Survivor.” But the parallels to Wikipedia are obvious.

I’ve sometimes joked that the madness of the mob must turn into the wisdom of the crowd when you give everyone a laptop. The Jenkins/Lévy model suggests something else — “shared knowledge” defines a mob mentality; “collective intelligence” is the wisdom of the crowd. At its best, that what drives Wikipedia.