By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Never mind Mr. Fussy. Following his snarky take on citizen media today, Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam has been redubbed Mr. Grumpy by the redoubtable Jay Rosen.
Unlike the clueless Timothy Rutten, I suspect Beam is waiting for the hate to roll in like a 6-year-old waiting for Santa. This should be worth watching. Although is it possible that, so far, no comments have been posted to his column?
Newspapers executives have the right to charge whatever they want for their products, be it the print edition, Web-site access or speciality channels such as Kindle and mobile editions. The public, in turn, has the right to decide whether to buy or seek its news elsewhere.
What news organizations do not have a right to do is raise the price of what they produce by creating artificial scarcity through an illegal cartel.
Thus it was that Los Angeles Times media columnist Timothy Rutten’s latest commentary became the talk of the Twitterverse over the weekend. Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, Vin Crosbie and I were among those kicking Rutten’s column around.
Rutten, in calling for an exemption from federal law so that newspaper companies can collude on a plan to charge for online access, made some important points about government’s role in fostering a free and independent press. In particular, he singled out the favorable postal rates going back to the earliest days of the republic as a key factor in the rise of a vigorous Fourth Estate. (Paul Starr, in his 2006 book “The Creation of the Media,” traces those postal policies to Colonial times, and identifies them as an important reason that newspapers and magazines became a mass medium in the United States in a way that they never did in Europe.)
But Rutten undermines his argument with unwarranted arrogance, including flashes of anger, at what has happened to his business. Here is a particularly choice passage:
[I]f Congress acts as it should, it will do so not on behalf of newspapers but for their readers. The press, after all, does not assert 1st Amendment protections on its own behalf but as the custodian of such protections on behalf of the American people.
Stating that the press is the “custodian” of the First Amendment is breathtaking not only for its insular cluelessness, but also because it goes against basic constitutional principles. Rutten should re-read the Supreme Court’s landmark Branzburg v. Hayes decision of 1972, in which Justice Byron White explained in ringing language why it would be wrong to grant journalists a constitutional privilege to protect their anonymous sources:
[L]iberty of the press is the right of the lonely pamphleteer who uses carbon paper or a mimeograph just as much as of the large metropolitan publisher who utilizes the latest photocomposition methods.
I don’t think White got it entirely right — surely certain types of journalism could be protected, as opposed to a professional class of journalists. But he’s inspiring in his assertion that the First Amendment belongs to all of us, and that we the people, not the press alone, are its custodians. Today, of course, the pamphleteers are armed with computers; they are legion, and they are not lonely.
Like Rutten, I want to see the newspaper business find a way out of the mess it’s in. Outside of newspaper Web sites, sources of news that consumers do not have to pay for — principally television and radio stations and their Web sites — do a fine job with the basics of local coverage.
But let’s take the Boston Globe as an example of two entirely different dilemmas. Yesterday’s edition included two stories that required a considerable amount of journalistic enterprise — a deep analysis of Boston Mayor Tom Menino’s development record and an investigative feature into the death of 7-year-old Nathaniel Turner, whose father has been charged with his murder. Those are the types of stories that are too expensive to do in the world of fast, cheap Web journalism.
On the other hand, have you seen the new WBUR.org? Combining news from its local staff with reports from NPR, the station’s Web site has the makings of a high-quality online newspaper. If the Globe started charging for access to Boston.com, maybe the Boston Herald would follow suit. But WBUR (90.9 FM), as a public station with hundreds of thousands of listeners, is going to keep its Web access free — as will New England Cable News and the city’s broadcast television and radio stations. Given that there is a considerable amount of overlap in the Globe’s and WBUR’s audiences (affluent, well-educated, liberal), the Globe would charge for Web access at its peril.
Absolutely no one knows the way forward for the troubled newspaper business. My own hope is that, once the recession ends, newspapers can thrive through a combination of smaller-circulation but more-expensive print editions, subscription fees for non-Web speciality products for the Kindle, cell phones and the like, and a more imaginative approach to Web advertising.
What makes no sense whatsover is the Rutten plan: a backroom deal to charge for something that readers have made clear they are not willing to pay for.
Four years ago, Jay Rosen dropped in on a media-criticism class I was teaching at Northeastern University for a discussion about blogging.
One point he made I thought was particularly salient: the 97 bazillion blogs Technorati claims to be tracking are often used by critics as a way to discredit blogging. After all, how could anything so common be of much value?
Still, it’s hard to quantify the number of blogs that matter to news folks — that is, blogs doing some type of journalism, even if it’s just commenting intelligently on the news. When asked, I generally respond that it’s certainly in the hundreds, or even the thousands, but definitely not the millions.
So I was interested to see more useful Technorati numbers appear in a New York Times story today about bloggers who quit because they quickly learn that it’s hard work, or that it’s no way to make money, or that they decide revealing personal details about themselves isn’t such a good idea. (Not that that has anything inherently to do with blogging.) To wit:
Those numbers make far more sense, and show that blogging is something that a small subset of dedicated amateurs (and a few professionals) take seriously. As Rosen suggested, the Golden Arches approach is a way of marginalizing rather than elucidating.
No one spoke the word “crowdsourcing.” But that was the theme of a presentation Thursday evening by “Frontline” producer Rachel Dretzin, whose next documentary, “Digital Nation,” will be a collaborative effort between her team and visitors to the “Digital Nation” Web site. “Digital Nation” is an attempt to explain how our dependence on — and obsession with — the Internet is changing our culture for better and for worse.
Dretzin is putting all of her footage and interviews online. There’s a blog tracking progress of the documentary. A series of interactive chats is under way. And folks are encouraged to submit their own video and audio commentaries about the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of online existence. There’s even a recommended “Digital Nation” hashtag (#dig_nat) for Twitter users.
“There is absolutely no way to be an expert. This is all of our story,” said Dretzin in an appearance at WGBH-TV (Channel 2), where “Frontline” is based. (Disclosure: I am a paid contributor to another WGBH program, “Beat the Press.”)
The idea, she added, is that rather than making the film in isolation and then getting reaction from the audience, the reaction would come first, followed by the documentary, which will come out sometime in 2010. “It’s an experiment for all of us,” she said.
Dretzin’s last “Frontline” film was 2008’s “Growing Up Online.” As was the case with that film, the author Douglas Rushkoff will be the on-camera correspondent in “Digital Nation.”
Collaborative journalism that combines the efforts of professionals and amateurs — sometimes called “crowdsourcing” — is one of the more promising developments to arise from Internet-based news ventures. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, a leading new-media thinker, refers to such amateurs as “the people formerly known as the audience.”
The challenge for Dretzin is to integrate what the former audience has to say into her film, rather than merely featuring it as an online adjunct.
Poynter’s Bill Mitchell has an interesting piece on potential tax problems for the Huffington Post with regard to the new $1.75 million investigative-reporting project it announced last week.
The conundrum is that HuffPo is a for-profit, while the Huffington Post Investigative Fund is a non-profit. If it looks like the non-profit entity exists mainly to serve the for-profit, there could be a problem. That’s one of the reasons why the people who are in charge of the investigative project, Nick Penniman and Jay Rosen, say their work will be available to everyone, not just HuffPo.
Rosen and proto-blogger Dave Winer talk about the project in their weekly podcast. (Excuse my self-promotional indulgence; I come up, but only for a minute or two.)
Simply in terms of image, this is a great move for the Huffington Post, whose aggressive aggregation of other content, in my view, brings it right to the edge of copyright violation. “Someone is going to sue the Huffington Post,” the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Joshua Benton recently said.
By giving back and producing original content that everyone can use, HuffPo may be able to quiet the critics. Just as long as it can keep the IRS happy at the same time.
POLK CITY, Florida (CNN) — At a boisterous Sarah Palin rally in Polk City, Florida on Saturday afternoon, one name was surprisingly absent from the campaign décor — John McCain’s…. [T]he GOP nominee’s name was literally nowhere to be found on any of the official campaign signage distributed to supporters at the event.
Literally! Oh, wait — never mind. (Via Jay Rosen’s Twitter feed.)
Jay Rosen got an answer out of Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief, David Corn, as to why the magazine is asking the question “Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history?”
Corn points to a speech Obama gave earlier this year in which he conjured up visions of the American Revolution, Abolition, the Depression, World War II and other patriotic touchstones in order to drive home his campaign theme of “Yes we can.” MoJo has since added that in the form of a blog post from February unsubtly titled “Barack Obama’s Messiah Complex.”
I’m not going to reproduce the Obama speech excerpts here, because you can just follow the links. But I do want to consider Rosen’s three questions:
Which comes closest to your view?
1.) Sure enough, Obama in this except “compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history” and Mother Jones caught him at it, puncturing the Obama hype. Good for them!
2.) No, Obama does not “claim that his campaign is comparable to the great progressive movements in U.S. history.” Not even close. Mother Jones is engaging in the kind of audacious hype it claims to be opposing. Bad move.
3.) It doesn’t matter whether Obama actually said anything like that because his supporters believe his campaign is a movement of transcendent historical importance, and that’s what Mother Jones really meant, it’s just that the editors phrased it badly, attributing to the candidate claims that have been made by others about him.
Jay thinks the correct answer is #2. Strictly on a factual, non-emotional basis, I agree. But it’s more complicated than that. I think the truth is #2 plus a strong dose of #3, along with at least a slight whiff of #1.
All politicians invoke great moments in American history, as Obama did. But Obama has gone farther by explicitly drawing parallels between his candidacy and those moments. It’s understandable — the election of an African-American as president would rank as a stunning achievement for our race-benighted culture. But it’s got nothing to do with Obama personally.
The thing is, I think Obama understands that, and I think David Corn and company understand it, too. So the question becomes why journalists would compress Obama’s argument into a shallow soundbite that makes it sounds like Obama thinks of himself as a combination of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s not so much that MoJo is completely wrong; it’s that the magazine is being reductionist and stupid. Why?
By the way, I know Corn and have a lot of respect for him. We spent part of the afternoon on Election Day 2004 at a Starbucks near Copley Square, picking out John Kerry’s cabinet for him. But to the extent that he agrees with this particular editorial decision, well, I think he’s wrong.
Mother Jones magazine asks: “Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in U.S. history?”
Jay Rosen asks: “Has Obama compared his campaign to the great movements in progressive history (like civil rights?)”
Media Nation asks: Where is the evidence for Mother Jones’ premise? Perhaps Obama did say such a thing, but I don’t remember it. Let’s have the precise language.
Update: Welcome, Huffington Post and PressThink readers. Here’s my latest on the subject.
I’m debating Jay Rosen on the controversy over Mayhill Fowler, the citizen journalist who quoted Barack Obama on “bitter” white people who “cling” to religion and guns and, more recently, who prodded Bill Clinton into going off on Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum.
The question: Are citizen journalists bound by the same ethical rules as mainstream reporters? Read the set-up, then see the comments. Feel free to weigh in.
For several years now, Jay Rosen has been advancing the theory that former White House press secretary Scott McClellan was not just unusually inept and uninformed; rather, he was part of a deliberate strategy on the part of the Bush administration to “de-certify” the press. Forcing journalists to rely on someone as buffoonish and out of the loop as McClellan, Rosen argued, was a way of underscoring the media’s unimportance in the Bush-Cheney worldview.
In the end, it didn’t work, and the White House was eventually compelled to hire a more conventional press secretary, Tony Snow, and grant him the kind of access and influence that press secretaries traditionally have. But when President Bush was at the height of his political powers, the McClellan strategy worked just fine.
Now Rosen — like McClellan — is back. And what Rosen finds stunning is that McClellan himself seems to have adopted Rosen’s analysis. That is, McClellan now understands that he was a mere pawn in a much larger game. And despite his still-evident shortcomings, he has come to realize that he doesn’t like it one damn bit. After all, it was he who was transformed into a fool, along with the media. Journalists still don’t understand that (or maybe they do, given their hostile response to Stephen Colbert’s epic performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2006). McClellan, though, understands it all too well. Rosen writes:
I never expected McClellan to write a book about being the jerk at the podium for Bush, or to make connections between his experience and the larger wreckage of the Bush presidency. He’s not only done that; he’s clearly ready to hit the circuit and explain himself.
Watching Keith Olbermann interview McClellan last night about McClellan’s book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” it was striking to see McClellan’s self-awareness, something you never would have imagined when he was working for Bush. He is clearly in the midst of a sea change in his political thinking, as he told Olbermann he may even support Barack Obama for president this fall.
I wish I’d caught all of Olbermann’s interview, but I’m not going to miss McClellan’s appearance on “Meet the Press” this Sunday. Memo to Tim: Ditch the slides showing he said one thing then and another thing now. We already know that. The man’s got a story to tell. Let him tell it.
Photo (cc) by Dave Winer and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
