Media Nation

Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute has a piece in Editor & Publisher on how technology is being used to open up the editorial page. Every one of the ideas he mentions is worthwhile, from the Seattle Post & Intelligencer’s “virtual editorial board,” to blogs by editorial writers, to offloading worthwhile material onto the limitless space of the Web.

Still, I find the mentality expressed in this excerpt problematic:

OUTING: Editorial pages can open up to more voices by giving them space on the Web. If four people submit Op-Ed pieces on, say, a controversial local land-use plan, then all four can run. A logical approach in a print/online publishing environment is to choose the best for print publication and then refer to additional public Op-Ed essays online. Or, the print Op-Ed page can serve more as a table of contents to what’s published online, with abstracts of each of the four articles and Web addresses for the full articles.

It’s the same space issue with letters to the editor, of course. The online editorial page frees letter writers up from the old tyranny of editorial-page editors. For instance, at the Post-Intelligencer, the policy is that an individual can only have a letter published once every three months in the print edition. Yet for the letters areas of P-I Web site – and the same goes for submissions to the Virtual Editorial Board – a prolific letter writer can be published every day.

What this means is that in time, the editorial page of a printed newspaper becomes a highlights page for a much richer presentation of viewpoints and opinion on its respective online area. Interesting, thoughtful and lengthy conversations on important issues can be boiled down and summarized in print – a “Cliff’s Notes,” if you will, of the full issue discussion online. Online = depth. Print = a quick read.

What is the idea of a daily newspaper? To me, the idea is to present a coherent compilation of the news. In putting together that coherent picture, the editor’s most important job is deciding what to leave out. You want to help the reader who can only give you 15 minutes to navigate through a complicated news-scape, while at the same time providing depth to those who can spend an hour.

But even a newspaper’s most devoted readers need to know that there’s an end – that, at some point, intelligent editors have decided that enough is enough, and that any more would represent a diminishing rate of return. What Outing favors, by contrast, could easily turn into a situation in which the print newspaper declines in importance while the Web edition morphs into a bottomless pit.

The Web provides limitless space. But that doesn’t absolve editors of the responsibility to respect their readers’ very limited time.

He’s back, but he doesn’t know what happened. Stay tuned.

You can’t tell from the transcript, but during last night’s lengthy report on CNN’s “NewsNight with Aaron Brown” about Pat Robertson’s latest outrage – a televised call to assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez – the headline at the bottom of the screen read, “Hugo Who?”

Well, if the public doesn’t know who Chávez is, who’s responsible for that? Could it be, you know, the media?

This Wikipedia article on Chávez seems fair and balanced. If CNN’s not going to tell its viewers who Chávez is, perhaps it can suggest they read it rather than mocking them for their ignorance – ignorance for which CNN is partly to blame.

Just ask Bob Costas.

From the moment that he bought the Atlantic Monthly in 1999, David Bradley has perpetrated the notion that the venerable magazine had been getting by on little more than its reputation. Bradley does it again today in the New York Observer, explaining to my former Boston Phoenix colleague Tom Scocca how he and his first editor, the late Michael Kelly, saved the Atlantic.

SCOCCA: “This is the problem Michael and I used to fret about: What’s its purpose?” said Mr. Bradley. After “what Michael Kelly used to call a great 19th century,” Mr. Bradley said, The Atlantic through the decades had fallen behind a speeding-up news cycle. “It retreated in ambition,” Mr. Bradley said. “And it retreated from the news.”

Thus does Bradley continue to add insult to the terrible injury he inflicted earlier this year, when he announced that he was moving the century-and-a-half-old Boston landmark to Washington, merging operations with the National Journal, which he also owns. (Too bad Oliver Wendell Holmes didn’t name the magazine the Bostonian rather than the Atlantic.)

There’s no question that Kelly and his successor in job if not in title, Cullen Murphy (whose tenure at the Atlantic predated Bradley’s arrival by 15 years, and who’s leaving at the end of this year), did some good work. Thanks to Bradley’s deep pockets, they were able to bulk up the magazine with more newsworthy, timely articles and more big-name writers. But despite a slew of National Magazine Awards (choose “Atlantic Monthly” at “Magazine Title”) under both men, the magazine certainly hasn’t been perfect. I’m not a fan of the redesign Kelly oversaw, finding it more old-fashioned than the still-fresh design he threw out. Articles are longer and more bloated than ever; a piece I might take a gander on at 5,000 words turns into “sorry, no time” at 15,000 or 20,000 words. And then there is the traditionally liberal Atlantic’s increasingly neoconservative bent, a trend that can certainly be attributed to Kelly, and – according to Scocca’s article – perhaps to Bradley as well, given his youthful support for the Vietnam War.

As I think back over the years, the Atlantic articles I remember the most tend to be those published under Kelly’s predecessor, William Whitworth: Ellen Ruppel Shell’s horrifying report on mad-cow disease, published in 1998. William Calvin’s warning that even slight global warming could lead to a tipping point that would plunge Europe into another ice age, also published in 1998. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s “Dan Quayle Was Right,” from 1994, which helped transform the debate over the benefits of two-parent families. The Atlantic won nine National Magazine Awards during Whitworth’s tenure, including the big one, for general excellence, in 1993.

And if Whitworth’s Atlantic was not quite as on top of the news as Kelly’s and Murphy’s, it made up for that by being more consistently surprising. Certainly I never would have read a feature on the crisis in seminaries had it not arrived in my mailbox in 1990 (“The Hands That Would Shape Our Souls,” by Paul Wilkes).

Other than Bradley’s unforgivable decision to move the Atlantic out of Boston, his tenure has been a positive one. But can we please dispense with the fiction that the magazine had become irrelevant before Bradley swooped in to save it? It’s a different magazine from the one he bought from Mort Zuckerman – better in some ways, not so good in others. For Bradley to suggest otherwise is insulting to those of us who are longtime readers.

Danny Schechter’s weblog of progressive news from around the world has been hacked. If you go there now, you’ll see a message from the “Minus-Power Virus Coding Team.” Follow the link to irvirus.com at the bottom of the page, and you get something that looks to be in Arabic, with music.

A “whois” search reveals that the domain name “irvirus.com” is registered in Tehran, Iran. (So maybe the text is actually in Farsi rather than Arabic.) The contact is listed as arash {dot} hosseinian {at} gmail {dot} com. Frankly, I wouldn’t put much stock in this. Interesting if true, as they say – although the fact that the host is also based in Iran suggests that maybe this is for real.

Nothing about this yet on MediaChannel.org, the website that Schechter edits.

Whether you like synthesizers or not (I don’t, much), you should check out the “audio slide show” on Robert Moog that’s been posted at the New York Times website. (Click on “The Music of Robert Moog.”) Moog, who invented the synthesizer, died on Sunday.

What I like most about the Times’ multimedia exhibit, narrated by music critic Allan Kozinn, are the generous sound clips from the Moog synthesizer’s early days: a longish snippet from Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s loathsome “Lucky Man” (on which the synth is used mainly for stupid sound effects), a bit from Wendy Carlos’s “Switched-On Bach” (the wonderfully creepy soundtrack to “A Clockwork Orange”) and the Beatles’ characteristically melodic and restrained use of the instrument on “Abbey Road.”

Amazon.com has some terrific clips from “Switched-On Bach” here. The CD is ranked #154 in sales this hour, no doubt a reaction to Moog’s death.

Correction: Media Nation is reliably informed that the soundtrack to “A Clockwork Orange” was actually a sequel to “Switched-On Bach,” heavily flavored by Beethoven.

It was right around noon on Tuesday, Aug. 9. We had just reached Clarendon Lookout after an exhausting vertical scramble through the heat and humidity. Sweat was pouring off me; my heart was pounding. And there, perched on the rock before me, was a young couple who had arrived shortly before us, looking like they had just stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalogue.

She was chatting away on a cellphone. After she hung up, she apologized and introduced herself and her husband as “Bug and Ms. Priss.” Way back last spring, they had left their home in Memphis in order to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine, some 2,000 miles. As you can see from this, “thru-hikers,” as they are called, have become something akin to marathoners – that is, it’s a Herculean feat, but a lot more people do it than used to be the case. More than 500 a year, in fact. (The thru-hiking experience was documented to hilarious effect several years ago in Bill Bryson’s excellent book “A Walk in the Woods.”)

Unlike most of the thru-hikers we met, Bug and Ms. Priss seemed almost normal. After three and a half days on the trail, our band of three adults and four boys looked pretty bedraggled, but Bug and Priss seemed as though they had done little more than stroll up a hill for a picnic. It turned out that – other than being in far better physical shape than we were – they had stopped by a relative’s house within the past day or so and had gotten cleaned up. Priss told me that they hoped to reach the end of the trail, at Mt. Katahdin in Maine, by mid-September or so, and then relocate to the Carolinas.

Before they moved on, they urged us to look up their trail journal online. If I’d had the presence of mind, I’d have asked them a few questions about how – and why – they would do such a thing. I’d have taken their picture, too. But I did manage to swipe a photo from their site, which I’m sure they won’t mind. I e-mailed them some questions a few days ago, but they haven’t responded; in fact, as you’ll see, they haven’t updated their journal for a bit.

You will see that Bug and Priss are, in fact, Bryan and Bethany Love. Their journal notes that they’re thru-hiking this year to mark their fourth wedding anniversary. Bryan’s first entry, from last August, begins with this:

BRYAN: Currently, I’m a 31 year old pharmacist at a very large hospital in Memphis. I started in my current position fresh from my residency with the intention of only staying a few years, then moving back to SC. Seven years later and I’m still in Memphis. Before continuing on with my professional career, I want to take some time off. What better way to take some time off than to take a little “walk in the woods.” I know most of my colleagues & friends couldn’t understand my desires to spend 4-6 months walking to Maine. Luckily for me, my wife understands completely and is looking forward to the trek also.

You’ll also find photos and even some notes on their gear.

What I find fascinating about this is the need to take part in media of some form even when going through such an elemental, off-the-beaten-track experience as thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. Of technological necessity, this is obviously a new development. I’ve been backpacking since 1968, and the first time I ever brought a cellphone into the mountains was in 2001. Now it’s common, and you see people chatting away wherever there’s a cell signal.

Since Bug and Priss didn’t respond to my e-mail, I can’t tell you exactly how they’re able to blog from the AT. But their e-mail address suggests that they’re using a tiny Pocketmail computer, which taps into the cellular network. Photos, I imagine, are taken on their cellphone. And thus are the Loves able to engage in some DIY media even while hiking from Georgia to Maine.

Our goal, on the other hand, was simply to hike from Bromley Mountain to Mt. Killington in five days – a 50-mile backpacking trip in southern Vermont encompassing the final stretch of the Appalachian Trail in Vermont before it turns east toward New Hampshire, with Vermont’s own Long Trail continuing north to the Canadian border.

On Saturday, Aug. 6, I headed up with three other adults and four 14-year-old boys – all of us from my son’s Boy Scout troop. The trip had been a year in the planning, and for me, at least, it was pure nostalgia: I had gone on two such trips when I was in scouts, and a third as a 21-year-old helping out my old troop. Of course, at 49, I knew the hiking was likely to be more difficult this time around.

Day One was warm but not particularly humid. That, combined with the fact that we were fresh, made for a relatively easy day’s hike, even though it was supposed to be our toughest day on the trail. We spent our first night at the Griffith Lake Tenting Area and our second – following a very easy day of hiking – at Little Rock Pond, a beautiful, deep lake in which some members of our party went swimming. (Not me, though I wished I’d brought swimming trunks.) Little Rock Pond was presided over by Rick, a student at Unity College in Maine who’s majoring in adventure education.

By Day Three, Monday, the weather had turned humid again. And after a fairly easy morning, we had a brutal hike in the afternoon, staggering up an unheralded peak called Bear Mountain. At this point, our backpacks were weighing us down, and there wasn’t much we could do about it: a good deal of the weight was water, and it would have been dangerous for us to carry any less than the two to three liters we were each lugging.

It was also on Day Three that we met “Doc,” another thru-hiker and by far the most colorful character we encountered. A Floridian by way of Woonsocket, R.I., Doc was hiking the entire AT for the second summer in a row. It was unclear what he did for a living, though he mentioned something about working in a veterinary hospital. Doc was middle-aged or older, and he smoked a lot of cigarettes – not exactly conducive to effective hiking. In fact he tended to keep pace with us, whereas most of the other hikers blew past us with depressing vigor. Talkative, profane and filled with wild stories, he told us about growing up amid the gang wars of New Haven and New York City, and of hiking over Mt. Washington at night, bombed on vodka. He was an interesting and engaging guy, although a little Doc tended to go a long way.

We camped for the third night at the Minerva Hinchey Shelter, the only night I decided to stay inside rather than set up my tent. (The shelters along this stretch of the AT are three-sided structures with a roof, but open in the front.) Around 9:30 p.m., someone whom I took to be a thru-hiker made his way into camp and parked his malodorous head about six inches from my nose. The next night, at the Governor Clement Shelter, I was back in my tent.

By far our most difficult stretch was from 3 p.m. on Monday, when we started up Bear Mountain, until 1 p.m. on Tuesday, when we reached the peak of Beacon Hill, a bit beyond Clarendon Lookout. (Beacon Hill refers not to Boston, but to the fact that there’s an airplane beacon on the summit.) These were three extremely difficult uphills, all the harder because they are minor summits that don’t get much attention. In other words, it’s a lot easier to bust your hump when you know ahead of time that you have a tough hike ahead of you.

As we did on Wednesday, Aug. 10, our last day on the trail. That’s when we climbed Mt. Killington, at 4,235 feet the second-highest peak in Vermont. The AT actually skirts around the summit, but we scrambled to the top along a steep, rocky side trail. We had several hours of hiking in front of us, but it was all downhill from Killington. The feeling of accomplishment was palpable.

My apologies for not posting any photos of our hiking party. The four boys, obviously, are all minors, and I don’t have permission to post their pictures. But it was quite a feat for them and an even greater feat for the adults. Only one of us (not me!) was in good physical shape, and none of us enjoys the resilience of youth at this point in our lives.

What I keep thinking about, though, is how much the experience has changed over the past 30 years. It used to be that when you took part in a backpacking trip, you were cutting yourself off from the world – there simply wasn’t any way you would hear about anything, from national catastrophe to personal tragedy, until you emerged from the woods. Now, it’s a given that you’re going to stay in touch.

Maybe not to the same degree as Bug and Miss Priss. But, in fact, all of us were calling our families, and one of the adults even left in mid-trip after he learned that his wife was sick. I checked my voice mail and returned a work-related call. It’s a wired nation, and that applies to the woods and mountains just as much as it does to cities and towns. Is it better? I’m not sure. But it’s different.

There isn’t one, according to a new study that gets an airing in today’s New York Times.

National Education Association president Reg Weaver has a letter in today’s Boston Globe that is disingenuous at best. Following the contretemps over the op-ed published in the Globe earlier this week criticizing the NEA’s campaign against Wal-Mart – an op-ed that turned out to have been indirectly subsidized by Wal-Mart (click here and here) – Weaver writes:

WEAVER: Michael Reitz is not the first to characterize the National Education Association as supporting a boycott of Wal-Mart (“Why target Wal-Mart?” op ed, Aug 16). This is just not true. The NEA, which represents 2.7 million educators, voted to support the “Wake Up Wal-Mart” campaign to educate its members about the retailing giant’s antiworker practices and how its profits are used for anti-public education activities. The effort is about educating, not boycotting: Consumers are simply reminded that when they shop, they have choices about where to spend their money.

Not a boycott? Here is some information on the anti-Wal-Mart campaign that I found on the NEA’s website. Yes, the wording is circumspect, and supports Weaver’s claim that the campaign is not a boycott. Except that the very first sentence begins, “The NEA Executive Committee approved the Association’s participation in ‘Wake-Up Wal-Mart,’ a major national effort organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) …” And the NEA provides a link to the “Wake-Up Wal-Mart” website.

Follow the link, and the very first thing you will find is a graphic that reads, “Send Wal-Mart ‘Back to School’ this summer. Pledge to buy your school supplies somewhere else.”

Drill down a little more deeply, and you can sign an online pledge. It begins: “Because Wal-Mart is failing America, I … pledge to send Wal-Mart ‘Back to School’ this summer by buying my ‘Back to School’ supplies somewhere other than Wal-Mart.”

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “boycott” as follows: “To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with as an expression of protest or disfavor or as a means of coercion.”

By any reasonable definition, the NEA, by taking part in a campaign that asks people not to buy school supplies at Wal-Mart, is participating in a boycott. For NEA president Weaver to deny that is to deny reality.

In light of yesterday’s Boston Globe screw-up, you should read this excellent article (PDF) by Morton Mintz from the current issue of Nieman Reports. Titled “Why Won’t Journalists Follow the Money?”, the article laments media laxity when it comes to identifying industry-funded special-interest groups as – well, as industry-funded special-interest groups.

You’ll note that the Globe’s Beth Daley gets a silver star.

In other developments, the online version of Michael Reitz’s column now begins with this:

Clarification: A column that appeared yesterday by Michael Reitz of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation that criticized the National Education Association’s boycott of Wal-Mart should have noted that the foundation has received grants from the Walton Family Foundation. Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart.

And the Globe today runs a letter (scroll down a bit) critical of Reitz’s column that was written by North Andover resident Bill Callahan, who is described as “a high school teacher and a member of the Brookline Educators’ Union, an affiliate of the National Education Association.”

Ah, full disclosure – it’s a beautiful thing.