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U.S. Soccer gets Twitter

As a freshly minted (2010) soccer fan who has traveled for one U.S. Soccer tournament and hopes to make a second trip this fall, I've had the sense that I was riding a rising tide of American interest in the sport (1 million+ Americans watched Chelsea v. QPR; MLS attendance is up; new wave of soccer-specific stadia being built around the country, etc.). 

But skeptics have a point when they question why this increase in interest is different than previous ones. It's not like Ameirican soccer fans haven't been predicting success for decades, even as the sport's fortunes rose and fell. So am I being rosy-eyed optimisitic?

Well, here's a new reason why I think I might be on to something. The people at U.S. Soccer are smart enough to understand how to use Twitter to promote their brand, and that bodes well. 

If you follow U.S. Soccer (and 334,262 of you do), then you might see a Tweet from the organization offering to add you to a "fan roster" if you plan to attend an upcoming match. If you reply, U.S. Soccer puts your Twitter account into a public list of fans attending that game. 

Here's why that's brilliant.

Soccer fandom, more than any other sport I've followed, is about a shared communal experience. Soccer fans stand, they sing, they bang on drums, they dance in the aisles. That's true at club matches, but U.S. Soccer relies on fans who are willing to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to support our national teams. That means you show up in a city not-your-own looking for a community of fans to join, places to meet, special deals on beer, etc.

Supporters groups like The American Outlaws and Sam's Army help make those connections, but here's U.S. Soccer stepping directly into the matchmaking game. They're not selling something. They're improving their product by improving the fan experience.

That's how you grow a sport today. Not by hyperbolic, expensive carpet-bombing marketing campaigns, but by partnering with your fans in expanding the future of the thing you both love.

Soccer may or may not continue to rise in the U.S., but there's a new generation of fans falling in love with the game here, and if the institutions involved keep making saavy little moves like this one, they might just get somewhere.

 

What if we give it away? (w/apologies to REM)

Today's news about the Media General/Berkshire Hathaway deal reveals just how dire things have become for our newspaper princes. Unable to turn its newspapers around, Media General has traded its print properties and a big chunk of its future value for $142 million in cash and enough financing to refocus its business on its television stations.

With 63 papers (along with their websites) selling for an average price of $2.25 million, its hard to believe that the valuation even comes close to covering the assessed value of the real estate involved. This is a company declaring "Take them! We don't know what to do with them!" (Here's what I like about the deal)

But what I want to talk about is actually this one graph from the NYT story linked above. This is Berkshire Hathaway boss Warren Buffett, talking to shareholders at their last meeting about the need for paywalls at their previously acquired newspaper properties:

“I don’t know of any business plan that has sustained itself that charges in one version and offers the same version free to people,” he said.

Buffett's idea is worth discussing not because it's necessarily wrong, but because it assumes the wrong answer. 

I'm on the record in numerous places with my argument that newspaper companies were giving away content long before the web came along. Newspapers are in the advertising business, not the content business. It they could get you to look at their advertisements without having to pay to put content around them, that's exactly what they'd do. The problem with newspaper websites isn't that the content is available for free, it's that the advertising value of that content is so low that it doesn't make up for declining print profits. 

Print subscription charges cover some portion of the cost of paper, printing and delivery, not content costs, but the paywall advocates have a point when it comes to the consumer's perspective. Subscribers think they're paying for content, even though all they're really doing is defraying overhead. So the strength of the paywall argument is a consumer-mentality argument, not an "our content has tangible value absent advertising" argument.

From that perspective, Buffett's statement has some limited validity. It argues that it's worth hobbling your web products to protect the value of your print product, an idea that's sometimes referred to as The Arkansas Model.

Here's the problem with that, and Charlestonians have been learning this lesson first-hand ever since The Post and Courier launched its paywall on May 1: Most newspaper content just isn't that unique or valuable. In addition to the websites maintained by its television news stations (who will never charge for online content), the city now benefits from a variety of local online news sources. There may be no competition for the title of "local metro daily newspaper," but there's now tremendous competition for news.

As an example, of the 18 promoted content links this hour at The Digitel (a local news and information aggregator), only one of them contained a link to a Post and Courier story, and that link was from a May 2nd update on story that was just updated today ... with a link to a story by The State, South Carolina's top newspaper.

Having done work for The Digitel, I can promise you that this is a significant change. The Post and Courier has articles about some of the same 18 subjects, and in the past The Digitel likely would have chosen to link to those pieces. But nobody links to content that's behind a harsh paywall.

So the P&C is following Buffett's advice, but who are the winners in this competition? Well, basically, everyone who used to be in competition with The Post and Courier for web traffic, particularly The Charleston City Paper, The Charleston Regional Business Journal and a variety of niche sites. 

But here's the part that's most interesting: The Charleston City Paper and the Charleston Regional Business Journal are weeklies. And if you think about their approach to online content in light of Buffett's statement, that fact alone may be more important than the differences in their business models.

Think about it. As a free alt-weekly, The City Paper gives away all its content, both online and in print, which conforms to Buffett's observation even while flipping its conclusions. Meanwhile, the CRBJ charges for print subscriptions and maintains an reguarly updated, locally reported, free website. Again, the CRBJ conforms to Buffett's idea, because nobody conflates a live website and a weekly publication as being different versions of the exact same same thing.

So why aren't these companies pushing for paid content like so many metro dailies?

Because they've worked out a more competitive, more sustainable business model.

The City Paper print edition is valuable. It makes enough revenue to support a small full-time staff and pay for the original content it publishes (much of it written by freelancers). And because you can't break news very often in a weekly in the middle of a competitive media market, the journalists there never really confuse their web product with their print product. They use the web to keep people current if they've got breaking info, and they use their weekly print edition for features and content that's interesting regardless of whether or not it's published in-cycle. 

The CRBJ, which has a nice print-subscription business, used to use the web to compete for timeliness with the daily paper. Now that The Post and Courier has opted to charge for its business content, local business people will have to decide whether online access to the P&C's version of local business stories is $9.99 a month better than getting the same news for free from the CRBJ.

If you take Buffett's statement in a more informed context, it really argues either for giving away everything, or making a clear distinction between your web product and your print product. 

The City Paper -- and other successful, sustainable alt-weeklies around the country -- are proof that you can survive with an all-free journalism model. The CRBJ demonstrates that there's a natural partnership between branded web coverage and a less-than-daily print product. And by staying viable online, both are posititioning themselves to succeed with the next generation of news consumers. In the fight for future readers, paywalled metros have unilaterally disarmed. 

Metro management teams could change their one-bundle-fits-all philosophy -- and their publication schedule -- and find success in similar ways. But as we've seen over the past few years, fundamentally changing what they do isn't typically much of an option for those guys.

My question is, how long will it take for the "Oracle of Omaha" to figure this out?

(Transparency: I worked for The Post and Courier from 1994-2008 and have done freelance work for The Digitel and the company that owns the Charleston Regional Business Journal. I write freelance articles for The Charleston City Paper. dc)

"Recapturing the fun and excitement of journalism"

There's a nice little exchange going on between my friend Steve Buttry and Emily Olson, managing editor of the Register Citizen in Torrington, Conn., about a powerfully evocative question: How can we recapture the joy and excitement that was once part of the group experience of committing journalism?

It's an important question, because what outsiders don't really know about the old world of newspapering is that once upon a time, it was a lot of fun. People (myself included) routinely worked an extra 10 to 15 hours a week without filing for overtime simply because the job could be such a rush.

I'm not suggesting that unpaid overtime is a good thing. I'm saying that a rewarding workplace is a tangible company asset. Neither am I suggesting that everything that made newspapering fun is worth conserving. Many of our Mad Men-era attitudes were ethically irresponsible, intellectually lazy and infuriatingly arrogant. But newsroom morale isn't a touchy-feely issue. It's a quality and productivity issue. 

Steve offers Olson six pieces of advice, then gives news executives four additional suggestions. They're all good, but I'd like to add six items to that list of executive advice, just to get it to an even 10.

1. Stand for something: The best people in the news business are people who came in with a sense of public service and preserved it. That didn't make them all crusaders, but they did their jobs with a sense of commitment to a higher calling, and the industry encouraged those high-minded ideals until its profit margins dropped.

Standing for something today -- to the extent that you demand quality and integrity of yourself and others -- will either burn you out or put you on the next layoff list.

In other words, if you want your people to work with inspiration, try inspiring them instead of disrepecting them. Attitude reflects leadership.

2. Fire all those assholes you promoted: Come on, you know you did it, and you did it on purpose. You promoted the yes-men, the bullies, the vengeful hacks. You gave authority to the sycophants who made you feel good about yourself despite your confusion. You replaced experienced leaders with the wisdom to recognize bad ieas and the integrity to oppose them with sociopaths who would aggressively repeat utter nonsense so long as the job came with a corner office and a small raise. You created a Reign of Terror and you promoted people who would do the dirty work so you could keep your hands clean. "The beatings will continue until morale improves" is a funny joke, but it's not a business plan.

3. Cut back on your publication schedule: You cut your news staff by a third while increasing its workload. Then you mandated "aspirational" weekly story quotas. Plus, once you gave up on trying to kill social media, you raced toward it like a binge drinker who spies an open bar at his nephew's wedding. You enforce senseless policies that encourage smart people to Tweet inanities. You think nattering about your paper on Facebook is somehow going to make money for someone not named Mark Zuckerberg. Meanwhile, you're forcing your overextended staff to churn out depressingly threadbare blogs, unread live-web updates, awkward podcasts, and astoundingly awful video. 

Responding to the problem of the cheap-information glut by trying to produce more cheap information is, to say the least, counterproductive.

What you really ought to be doing is cutting back on the number of print products you publish each week. Put all your breaking news online and do a better job with your websites. Then raise the quality standard for the articles in your one-to-three-times-a-week print products. You don't produce enough interesting, shallow copy to fill seven metro papers a week. But if you had fewer editions, you could write stories that people couldn't find elsewhere, and you might accidentally make yourself relevant again.

As an added bonus, you could drop your Associated Press subscription. Think of the savings!

4. Stop doing stupid stuff: Here's an ugly little secret about your company. You think that a few old men (and a few old women who've joined the old-men club) in your outfit should enjoy a monopoly on all the relevant information and insight into business practices. On the flip side, you have this quasi-religious belief that nobody above the age of 26 understands digital media. So you run around shoving outdated business ideas down people's throats, while promoting callow cleverness with an astounding lack of review.

Treating everyone in between as if their only useful roles are silent-worker-drone or sadistic-plantation-overseer isn't exactly a recipe for fun-time creativity.

You know what really kills journalists' morale? Coming to work and finding out that you're about to make them do something obviously stupid. Again. Or reading a quote from their boss that makes them want to slam their heads against the wall just to make the pain go away.

5. Listen to your insightful peers: I'm awfully hard on the industry as a whole, not because I'm particularly mean or bitter, but because the industry as a whole has earned the nation's disdain.That's not to say there aren't enlightened, courageous, visionary executives out there. I've met a few. But they're outnumbered, outgunned in industry groups, and generally disrespected. Many have given up and cashed out, but a few are hanging on, hoping to make their communities better. They may not be right about everything, but they deserve to be heard, not mocked.

6. Go out of business: Seriously. You can't change, and you really have no interest in changing. You've had years to figure this out, you waited until you were broke to consider the problem, and yet you still don't invest in R&D. You think innovation is surfing the leading edge of the status quo, and let's be honest: All you really want to do is kill Craigslist, make people pay to read your increasingly crappy content online, and jack-up your display-ad rates.

Since you can't do that, you're following the Harvest Model -- cutting costs while you milk every last penny out of your obsolete business before shutting it down. But that will take years, and the longer you take, the harder it will be for competent start-ups to fill the niche you occupy in your local media ecosystem. Shut down, liquidate your physical assets, retire to Florida. You'll enjoy the sunshine, and we'll enjoy the journalism that follows in your wake.

There's an excellent future out there for the American news media, and I'm optimistic that we'll get there, somehow. But the same systemic flaws that are killing the morale of journalists are also standing in the way of that future. I suspect that making newsrooms better places to work again will also make our companies more viable, but I can't prove that. There's just not enough data from actual experiences.

Yet

2012: Google gives birth to the bottom-up Semantic Economy

Back in 2009, while contracted to work on a doomed content-repository project, a flash of insight struck me: The problem with grand visions of the Semantic Web was that they all assumed a top-down structure. One wickedly clever set of rules to wrangle every fact. A global ontology.

It didn't make sense. Global ontologies are like Soviet Central Planning. Rules are meant to be broken. And top-down systems are crashing and burning everywhere you look.

Plus there was another un-fixable problem: Everyone with money to spend on these projects wanted machines to do the yeoman work. Because machines are cheap.

Think about that for just a moment. We're talking about organizing the sum total and nuance of human knowledge, but the entire world assumes somehow that this is a job for machines. That the best way to understand the complex, pattern-based output of human intelligence and language is to assign computers to decode it after the fact.

People think that makes sense because they think computers are magic, not machines. Meanwhile, in the real world, Text Mining Engines aspire to 75 percent accuracy. That's why our content-repository project failed. The client's product specifications couldn't be satisfied via the vendor's pathetic 75 percent accuracy rate.

So one night I asked myself: Could you reach the goal if you flipped the script on every core assumption? Not top-down, but bottom-up? Not machine intelligence, but human intelligence, assisted by machines? Not one "global graph" but many interconnected "directories of meaning" based on capturing machine-readable statements of fact during the production of human-readable articles?

And of course, the answer is yes, you can do all these things, and you can do them profitably, so long as you follow two simple rules: 1. Build tools that make it easy to publish directories of meaning; and 2. Give users the power to make their directories cooperate with other directories.

Once you do that, the need to create perfect top-down rules for knowledge disappears, because you'll have harnessed the power of emergent properties. If you build a good directory, others will want to use it.

What's so hard about that?

But people didn't get it. Most still don't, for lots of reasons -- including our very human inability to hear anything new without forcing it to fit into old assumptions.

They're about to start getting it, though, because now Google gets it.

The search giant has constructed a bottom-up directory of meaning. The company calls the product "the knowledge graph" and the service Semantic Search. Being Google, the company still sees the problem as a data-recovery challenge, but that doesn't matter. Once such directories exist, a semantic economy based on the value of machine-readable definitions is born. Once we begin feeding that market, information becomes a public commodity. And once we give people the power to define the meaning of their own words, and then to share those meanings in a mutually beneficial way, we'll have tapped into the same emergent property that generated Wikipedia.

It's not that complex. It doesn't require any exotic programs. But it does take vision, discipline and the tiny bit courage required to buck the status quo.

My essays on the topic (Semantic Journalism topic).

The Unauthorized Life

The World being the terrifying, beautiful mess that is, we make our way through its mazes less like wandering, wondering, free adults, and more like children hurrying through a bad neighborhood on their way to the store with a shopping list from mother: fearfully, avoiding eye contact, with tangled senses of purpose and possibility and dread. We seek happiness and abundance and approval, but mostly we're avoiding trouble.

Given enough successful errands to the store, eventually we learn the Grants and Limits of our Authorization.

This One is authorized Work and granted the presumed nobility of his daily sacrifice. So Working Man receives his ration of respect in the abstract aggregate, but it never comes addressed with his name on it. Politicians compose hymns to his sainted martyrdom, but Working Man is authorized neither an individual face nor a privately owned voice. He is prohibited the joys and risks of freedom but granted songs that celebrate such notions on FM radio.

This One is authorized Poetry and may Wander Lonely As A Cloud, but Poetry Girl may not exhibit hard edges nor stand solid in the lovely flowing stream of This-and-That citing gear ratios and irrefutable measurements. That's not why the system authorizes poets. Your poetry license authorizes you one, but never the other.

And This One... well, you get the point. This One is mentioned only because Essayists are authorized to process Controversial Thoughts, but required by Convention to list three examples of each.

And so on.

We don't "find ourselves." We receive our authorized roles and then trim away all the bits of Self that lie beyond the edges of the cookie cutter.

If we're lucky, we eventually acquire enough perspective to see Ourselves within the System, with all its rules and enforcers and limits and inevitable gravity.

And then, without any authorization whatsoever, we walk through the walls.

SCOTUS outlook, 2012-16

It's been a weird couple of weeks in American politics, with Republicans claiming that an insurance rule that applies to religiously affiliated institutions is tantamount to an assault on First Amendment religious liberty (despite a guiding Supreme Court precedent from 1993, written by Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, that argues otherwise), followed by a series of bizarre public statements by nominal GOP front-runner Rick Santorum. Clearly the conservative idea of a culture war has returned to contend for our national attention, and will likely continue to receive bandwidth so long as the economy keeps getting better.

Which brings us to another under-discussed issue in the 2012 Presidential election: U.S. Supreme Court appointments.

In 2012, the Roberts Court is made up of nine justices between the ages of 51 (liberal Elena Kagan) and 78 (liberal Ruth Bader Ginsberg). Four of the nine are appointees of Democratic presidents (Kagan and Sondra Sotomayor, Obama; Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer, Clinton) and five were appointed by Republicans (Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, Bush; Clarence Thomas, George H.W. Bush; and Anthony Kennedy and Scalia, Reagan).

Despite the Roberts Court's reputation for partisan division, only about 20 percent of its decisions have come on 5-4 votes. But here's the thing about those votes: Its close decisions have tended to be about the kinds of political and philosophical issues that concern voters, rather than arcane rulings on the finer points of law. It's not that the court is sharply divided on everything -- it's just divided on the really important things. Like the Citizens United ruling, in which all five Republican-appointed justices voted together.

When it comes to those kinds of decisions, the Roberts Court looks depressingly predictable. In 14 of the last 16 5-4 votes, Democratic nominees (Kagan, Sotomayor, Ginsberg and Breyer) have been on one side, and four of the five Republican nominees (Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia) have been on the other, leaving Reagan appointee Kennedy to cast the decisive vote. Not that Kennedy is an equal-opportunity swinger. He decides in favor of the Republican justices more than 60 percent of the time.

Which brings us to the question: How many appointments is the 2012 Presidential winner likely to receive, and more importantly, what effect are they likely to have on the court and the country?

Barring the usual boilerplate about health and personal conscience, it's safe to say that none of the Justices who will be younger than 70 in November 2016 are likely candidates to step down. Only one of the nine justices that the current justices replaced was younger than 70 (the enigmatic David Souter, who resigned in 2009 at age 69). The other predecessors of the current crop of justices were 75, 76, 79 (two of them), 80, 83, 85 and 90 when they either stepped down or died in office. That's an average retirement age of 79.

By this standard, we need only consider four justices as possible candidates for replacement: Breyer, 73; Scalia, 75; Kennedy, 75; and Ginsberg, 78. Three of the four will be 79 or older in 2016.

Of this group, only two-time cancer survivor Ginsberg should be considered likely to be replaced before 2017. Should President Obama win re-election and the right to nominate her replacement, her departure would have little effect on the court's composition -- though her replacement by a conservative justice would almost certainly produce an unbreakable five-member conservative block -- with Kennedy serving only as an unnecessary sixth vote.

However, if we take history as a guide, then there's probably at least a 50 percent chance that the Presidential winner in November will get a second appointment, probably from one of those other three seventy-something justices. And if that justice turns out to be either Scalia or Kennedy and that President is Obama, then we're looking at the first major ideological shift on the court since Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall in 1991.

Weirdly enough, every justice on the Roberts Court except Thomas replaced an outgoing justice with whom he or she was generally aligned in ideological terms. Even Kennedy replaced a swing voter in Louis Powell back in 1988. 

So as you think ahead to November, remember that it's not just the number of appointments that matters, but how a candidate's appointments would affect the makeup of the court. Then consider these two scenarios:

If President Obama wins, the result will likely be a 5-4 liberal majority, or at worst, a continuation of the status quo.

If a Republican wins, the conservative block will grow from four votes and a conservative-leaning swing voter to an ideological 6-3 majority that could endure well into the 2030s.

Now imagine the caliber of nominee that a President Santorum might put forward.

See you in November.

The 20-Step Facebook Political Process

1. Post links to articles and columns from the New York Times, Washington Post, etc..
2. Poorly informed conservative friends post comments reciting arguments proposed by Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, etc.
3. Respond with facts.
4. Poorly informed conservative friends change the subject to other Fox News claims.
5. Respond with facts.
6. Poorly informed conservative friends respond with speculative ad hominem claims about the personal character and true political intentions of various liberal figures.
7. Respond with facts.
8. Poorly informed conservative friends get really pissed off.
9. Post more articles and links from reputable sources of information.
10. Poorly informed and increasingly bitter conservative friends start trolling the resulting comment threads.
11. Respond with facts.
12. Better-informed friends start taking your trolling conservative friends to task, then message you privately to ask what's wrong with your trolling conservative friends.
13. Well-informed conservative friends enter the discussion in an attempt to salvage classic conservative principles from the trolling conservatives' nonsense, making limited, rational and interesting points.
14. Trolling conservative friends blow right past such attempts at intelligent discourse to argue things your well-informed conservative friends never said or implied.
15. Well-informed conservative friends retreat to the sidelines.
16. Trolling conservative friends, now besieged by your better-informed friends, begin complaining about being treated unfairly by mean and uncivil liberals.
17. Respond with facts.
18. Trolling conservative friends unfriend you after making a martyred and melodramatic exit speech, then retreat to the outraged comfort of their partisan echo chamber.
19. Other friends, lurking on these conversations, form conclusions.
20. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Meanwhile, in Portland...

Why Newt won SC: Hatred

 

There's been plenty of punditry on the topic of Newt's "surprise" win in the Palmetto State, but I think it's really quite simple. Bill Clinton won because he felt our pain. Newt Gingrich wins because he channels their hate.

My fellow South Carolinians hate a lot of things, including their prevailing belief that expressing one's hatred in public has been unfairly prohibited by political correctness. There are costs in 21st century America for publicly and explicitly hating blacks, gays, atheists, illegal immigrants, intellectuals and liberals, and so Southern conservatives have learned to speak in code: birth certificates, grades, teleprompters, food stamps, welfare, socialism. The code words express the outlines of their complaint, but not the seething anger that animates their politics.

Not only does Newt understand the immense power of repressed hatred, he also grasps that the one group Americans can still hate publicly without fear of reprisal is "The Media." Newt ran in South Carolina as The Guy Who Really Hates The Media, demonstrating to standing-ovation crowds that when it comes to hating, he's the man.

Of course, Newt has this one little problem nationally, but you know. Politics.

Next stop: Florida.

Romney & Ingraham, 1.20.12: Hoping for bad news

In case the media circus surrounding Newt Gingrich's win in South Carolina yesterday caused you to miss Laura Ingraham's Thursday's radio interview with Mitt Romney, here's a chance to catch up. It's a remarkable glimpse of the dilemma facing the Right today, regardless of its eventual nominee. I transcripted the full text of the most interesting exchange (emphasis mine):

INGRAHAM: Governor, the President and the Vice President, Secretary of the Treasury have said that, look, the economy is getting better, it's creating jobs month to month, it's not growing as fast as anyone wants but it's getting better. You've also noted that there are signs of improvement on the horizon in the economy. How do you answer the President's argument that the economy is getting better in a general election campaign if you yourself are saying that it's getting better?

ROMNEY: Well of course it's getting better. The economy always gets better after a recession. There's always a recovery. There's never been a time anywhere in the world where an economy has never recovered. The question is, has it recovered by virtue of something the President's done, or has he delayed the recovery and made it more painful, and the latter is of course the truth.

The President's policies have made this recession deeper, and it made the recovery more tepid and difficult on the American people. This is the worst recovery we've seen from a recession since Hoover. And President Obama wants to take credit for things getting better. He in fact has made things worse. He's made this recovery take much longer.

But will our economy get better some day? Of course it will. And it will not be thanks to President Obama, it will be in spite of President Obama, and that's of course the message we have to give. If people think the right course for improving an economy is to massively expand debt and the federal government, why they can vote for Barrack Obama. But we know better.

INGRAHAM: But isn't it a hard argument to make if you're saying, like, OK, he inherited this recession, and he took a bunch of steps to try to turn the economy around, and now we're seeing some more jobs, but vote against him anyway? Isn't that a hard argument to make? Is that a stark enough contrast?

ROMNEY: Well, do you have a better one, Laura? (laughs) It just happens to be the truth. (laughs)

We're going to see the numbers in terms of how the economy does. It's very possible, by the way, that the economy will go into a decline again. I mean it's a... I can't tell you that I can predict that it's going to get better, but I think that ... at some point it's going to get better. But I don't think President Obama's helping it. He's been far less effective than he should have been at turning the economy around. I think if we'd elected John McCain we'd be in a much better position today. But do I think that the economy will get better at some point? Yeah. But you know by November of 2012 we'll see if it's gotten better or not.

The key for me is that if you look at what's happened to American employment, the reason that our unemployment rate has come down is because of the number of people who've dropped out of the base of workable, uh, the workforce. And him taking credit for people becoming so desperate that they drop out of the workforce altogether is a very weak position from which he'll be campaigning.

After months of effectively blaming the recession on Obama and "holding him accountable" for the nation's miseries, Republicans are now faced with an increasingly bleak landscape. An improving job market. Surprising growth in the manufacturing sector. Unemployment claims at a four-year low. "Twenty-two consecutive months of private-sector job growth," a White House figure I can't replicate from BLS data, but even its less-sexy alternate isn't bad: job growth for the past 15 consecutive months, and 18 out of the last 22. We added 1.6 million jobs in 2011, and the unemployment rate dropped from 9.1 to 8.5.

To make matters worse for the GOP, despite its hypnotic drumbeat of blaming Obama for everything, the public has consistently continued to acknowledge that our current economic conditions are something the President inheirited, rather than the result of his policies.

The Republican scorched-earth policy in 2010-11 succeeded in limiting the speed of the recovery and damaging Obama's approval ratings (though, interestingly enough, not his favorability ratings), but at an appalling high cost to the nation and the public's view of the GOP as a whole.

And now, after all of this, the economy is improving, the Republican primary season has produced nothing but the prospect of a protracted fight between two unpopular candidates, Occupy Wall Street shifted the national discussion from debt to income inequality, and more than 1 million people in Wisconsin have signed petitions to recall their Republican governor. Reince Priebus must be quietly losing his mind.

After framing 2012 as an economic question, the crisis for the GOP is that they can't publicly cheer against the economy, and the economic data is improving to the point that even their hyper-partisan media supporters can't ignore it. So while they'll cross their fingers and hope for bad news in the coming months, what do they do in the meantime? Based on Romney's response, perhaps they'll draw on a discordant note from the otherwise positive November 2011 jobs report: that the improvement was an accounting trick based on discouraged workers leaving the workforce.

That's not an entirely incorrect observation. Discouraged workers do drop out of the market, and the ratio of job openings to job-seekers remains above 4-to-1 for the third consecutive year. It's a tough recovery, following the worst recession since the Great Depression, which is why getting this stuff right is important.

But the bottom line on Romney's claim that "the reason that our unemployment rate came down is because of the number of people who have dropped out of... the workforce" is that he's flat wrong. The size of that workforce -- the number of Americans who are counted as employed or looking for work -- grew in 2011. Yes, there were month-to-month fluctuations, like the drop emphasized by Republicans in the controversial November jobs report, but the workforce grew again in December, even as the unemployment rate dropped for the fourth consecutive month.

By the Bureau of Labor Statistics' numbers, the Civilian Labor Force stood at 153,250,000 Americans in January 2011. By the end of December, that figure had risen to 153,887,000. That's an increase of 637,000 people. And despite having to include all those new people in the pool of workers, the national unemployment rate dropped by 0.6 percent.

But it gets worse for the GOP.

Republicans have spent three years dismissing out-of-hand any Democratic assessments of federal policies that included estimates of "jobs saved," instead favoring absolute numbers framed from their least-flattering perspective. By opening their critique to say that "Things are improving, but we would have done better," and moving away from their context-free assault on the President's economic numbers, they are moving onto a battefield in which the ground favors the Democrats.   

This doesn't mean Obama wins in the fall. But it does mean the planets are re-aligning.

Change

"I know you are taking it in the teeth, but the first guy through the wall... he always gets bloody... always. This is threatening not just a way of doing business... but in their minds, it's threatening the game. Really what it's threatening is their livelihood, their jobs. It's threatening the way they do things... and every time that happens, whether it's the government, a way of doing business, whatever, the people who are holding the reins - they have their hands on the switch - they go batshit crazy."

-- John Henry to Billy Beane in "Moneyball."

Nation's cats dissatisfied with food, toys, sleeping arrangements

Owner approval ratings hit all-time low

Dec. 21, 2011

For Immediate release

By Frank Comment

TRENTON, NJ – A majority of America's cats* are disappointed with their quality of life, with 57 percent expressing displeasure with their food, 53 percent describing themselves as “bored” or “very bored” with their current collection of kitty toys, and 51 percent indicating that they are currently looking for a better place to sleep.

The key satisfaction numbers continued a downward trend in the annual Wall Street Journal/Cat Fancy Feline Opinion Survey, conducted Dec. 16-19 by Cat Dynamics Research Associates Inc. and funded by the I Can Haz Cheezburgers Charitable Trust.

The trend correlates to continuing declines in Cat Owner Approval Ratings, which have been in retreat since the Clinton Administration. Those ratings dipped to an historic low in the 2011 survey.

Next we have some questions about your relationship to your human staff. [RANDOM ORDER]

C. In general, how would you rate your human(s)'s overall job performance over the past 12 months?

This result renders a Composite Approval Index (CAI) of 40 percent, the worst CAI recorded in the 57 years since Cat Dynamics Research Associates added the question to its annual survey. The response was also the most negative ever recorded in the Waking Respondent Segment Measure (WRSM), with 89 percent of cats who happened to be awake at the time of the survey offering a negative assessment of their owner(s).

“America's cats are not amused,” said Isabelle C. Francis, President and CEO of Cat Dynamics Research. “To be more accurate about it, those who are awake are not amused. So far as we can tell.”

The poll was conducted by bothering 1,634 adult American cats between Dec. 16 and Dec. 19, 2011. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 50 percent.

Complete poll results here.

*Based on responses from cats that were able to wake up for or stay awake through survey interviews.

 

 

 

Divided government, Parte Deux (2012 Senate overview, with spreadsheet)

It's not exactly news that elections can be weird, but when it comes to U.S. Senate "classes," it's the norm. This has to do with Senators' six-year terms and the ups and downs of presidential and mid-term election cycles. 

Here's why: Only 33 of the 100 Senate seats are up for re-election in 2012, and because of those presidential/midterm cycles, there's a distinct rhythm to these things. This is Class I, which picked up eight seats in the notable 1994 Republican Revolution election. This meant that when it came time for Class I to stand election again in 2000, Republicans were defending more seats, and lost four of them, knotting the Senate at 50-50. Then in 2006, the Democrats went on a mid-term tear and gained six seats and 51-49 control of the Senate.

Which brings us to today. Heading into 2012, Class I consists of 23 Democrats and 10 Republicans. From a political science perspective, that means Democrats are on the defensive, because a 23-10 majority means there just aren't that many seats to be gained, and lots of seats to protect .

Kindle Fire & "direct-to-consumer" marketing

Martin Langeveld (Neiman/Harvard) came out this morning with a big prediction for the new Amazon Fire tablet:

The advent of the Kindle Fire will impact every business engaged in advertising, from your local weekly newspaper to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Groupon, because it will vastly accelerate the transformation to direct-to-consumer marketing by merchants, manufacturers, and service providers, without the traditional interpolation of advertisements to drive buyers to sellers.

It's a good piece, worth reading.

But there's a logic to commercial information in this Media Interregnum that I need to keep emphasizing, because it's as true now as it was when I began beating this drum six years ago.

1. Advertising (renting the attention of consumers to sellers) puts publishers in the business of representing the interest of the seller;
2. As consumer attention fragments and advertising becomes ubiquitous, basic market principles will continue to drive down the ad rates that publishers receive;
3. Commercial media saturation creates a new problem for buyers.They need help cutting through the low-value sales-pitch clutter to find products (CNET) and services (Angie's List) that actually suit their individual needs;
4. Businesses that recognize this opportunity move from representing the interests of the seller (help me sell the thing I want to sell) to representing the interests of the buyer (help me select the right thing for me).
5. By adding the option of moving directly from research to purchasing ("My Shopping Cart"), businesses generate revenue by adding value for the user (comparing products in useful ways), the seller (providing quality commercial information about the seller's product)  and both buyer and seller (by handling the transaction). The result is a virtual marketplace in which a share of every transaction belongs to the business that brings buyer and seller together;.
6. Internet-era businesses following this logic have created successful digital marketplaces for products that are the same no matter where you buy them (Amazon), products that can be hard to find in your town (HuckNroll), discounted products (O.co), and products that can be shipped cheaply and returned easily (Zappos); 
7. The challenge for publishers who serve specific physical communities (news of interest only to this town or that one) is to organize efficient, tailored virtual marketplaces for brick-and-mortar businesses in those communities. These transactions are often more complex than buying books online, but they are also more valuable because they are more complex;
8. To capture that value, local publishers must shift from publishing and structuring information solely on behalf of sellers and put the user at the center of their business model. Only then can they create marketplaces in which they receive a cut of every transaction;
9. Doing this will not only create a more profitable business model, it will improve the trust that individual users give to the non-commercial information a publisher provides;
10. And, finally, by doing this, they will begin to reap higher advertising rates. Because if you're a car dealer, whose attention do you really want to rent? The person who just wants to watch a ball game, or the person who is -- today, right now -- actively looking to buy a car?

What is truly conservative?

This is Henry Wallace, a Republican businessman, agricultural scientist and newspaper editor who -- despite his party affiliation -- became Franklin D. Roosevelt's first Secretary of Agriculture in 1933. For more than seven years, Wallace did that job so well that Roosevelt named him as his as his vice-presidential running mate in 1940. Had it not been for a revolt among Democratic delegates at their 1944 convention, Vice President Wallace would have become the 33rd President of the United States instead of Harry S. Truman.

There are all sorts of interesting facts about Wallace, an Iowan whose research into crop yields changed the way we grow corn today and later led to the first genetic corn hybrids, which have done wonders to increase food production around the world.

But here's what's truly remarkable about the man from my perspective. As Wallace arrived in Washington in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, America's heartland had become a radical place. Midwestern farmers had been suffering through their own recession for years before the stock crash in 1929, and the Depression only made their already desperate crisis worse. By the time Wallace took office, American farmers -- generally considered then as now a practical and conservative bunch -- were on the brink of open, violent rebellion. Not right-wing rebellion, mind you. Left-wing, socialist, communist rebellion.

On writing, and other forms of bullshit

Once upon a time, maybe as recently as 2006, I loved writing. I'd always hoped to earn my living by putting words together, and to be a professional writer and editor, in a community of professional writers and editors, thrilled me. Sometimes it thrilled me several times a week.

For instance, in 2000 I helped launch an anonymous newspaper column called Good Morning Lowcountry, which ran half a page, seven days a week, in The (Charleston) Post and Courier. GMLc was the work of no single writer in its early years, so several of us shared the duties, churning through local topics and mild obsessions and odd bits of Lowcountry trivia like a pack of raccoons rooting through trailer park garbage cans. Every now and then we'd even pause between deadlines to talk about the experience and its process, prompting me once to write a GMLc with the self-absorbed subhead "This Writing Life," in which I attempted to share the good-humored, arty, third-person-objective camaraderie of it all.

Now, of course, I just wish everyone would shut up and get on with it.

There is no more thoroughly boring topic than writing, and if you doubt this, listen to a public radio interviewer ask a Famous Author to talk about his or her process, or even worse, his or her deeper thoughts on language or storytelling..

The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger (script)

 

If you haven't seen this one before, where have you been? And even if you have seen it, you might not have noticed how it's taken over the world, selling more T-shirts than Old Navy and prompting half the people in America under the age of 30 to say at least once, "honey badger don't care." Based solely on his access to the brains of our young, this guy Randall, who does new voiceovers for old nature videos, is one of the most influential men in the United States.

But what else does he say? Since I couldn't find a script online, I decided to transcribe it. So I do all the work, like the honey badger, and you come around and pick up the scraps."Thanks for the script, stupid!"

This is the honey badger. Watch it run in slow motion.

It's pretty badass. Look. It runs all over the place. "Whoa! Watch out!" says that bird.

Eew, it's got a snake! Oh! It's chasing a jackal! Oh my gosh!

Intent, art and the 21st century

So it was that in April of 1970 an artist named Lawrence Weiner typed up a work of art that appeared in Arts Magazine -- as a work of art -- with no visual experience before or after whatsoever, and to wit:

1. The artist may construct the piece
2. The piece may be fabricated
3. The piece need not be built

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership

And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a "receiver" that may or may not be a person or may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just "the artist" in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, for nothing is demanded fo him, nothing at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode -- and in that moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture... and came out the other side as Art Theory!... Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision inivisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.

-- Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, 1975

The tragedy of re-reading Wolfe's short masterpiece today, 29 years after I first encountered it, is its sad failure in predicting the future of artistic taste. Back in the mid-seventies, The Man in the White Suit felt confident that the world would come to its senses by the year 2000, that artists and collectors and writers would look back on the artistic period 1945-1975 with head-shaking wonder. "What happy hours await them all!" he wrote. "With what sniggers, laughter and good-humored amazement will they look back upon the era of the Painted Word!"

Sadly, Old Tom failed to appreciate the gravity of our 20th century intellectual failures, for we remain incapable of escaping their black-hole pull. The Grand Duchy of Art Theory that Wolfe skewered wasn't some post-war aberration: it was an Event Horizon, a point-of-no-return from which a once-cohesive culture doesn't simply recover. From art to literature to political science, the intellectuals of the mid-to-late 20th century pursued abstraction for the sake of theoretical purity, rendered their fields impotent and irrelevant, and then hid the keys to understanding within an arcane codex of self-referential gibberish that only members of their self-selecting academy could hope to understand.

It is this reason more than any other -- more than mass media, more than politics, more than economics, science or religion -- that accounts for the fraying of our current culture. As I wrote in 2005:

Transparency journalism: an FAQ

If the news industry is going to explore transparency as an alternative to the “journalistic objectivity” claim to credibility (and yes, as a matter of fact, we are), then this big idea is going to have to confront a series of small questions. Thank goodness we can begin answering them.

What's wrong with objectivity?

First, we all need to agree on something important. Scientific objectivity is an experimental condition that limits observation so that the collected data will be identical for all observers (and, if managed properly, repeatable in multiple trials). Journalistic objectivity is an assumed perspective that includes a set of variable practices, but is essentially a subjective claim to credibility.

The problem with that credibility claim is that Americans don't believe it. A Gallop poll in September found that 57 percent of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. That's a record low for this Gallop question, and it reflects a decades-long declining trend that others have noticed as well.

Reading William Irwin Thompson

Paradoxically, for my generation, one that came of age in the revolutionary spirit of the affluent 1960s, liberation from institutions and their systems of meanings was not a relationship with a specific oppressive condition but a general, eternal, and absolute value in and of itself. In challenging the rhetoric of Western Civilization, the generation that mocked the bourgeois liberal pieties of its fathers and mother rather smugly took for granted a niave and simpleminded faith in revolt against all forms of authority and enduring value. And, as always seems to be the case in the world of fashion, the French led the way. Roland Barthes announced "The Death of the Author" and tore down this idol of literate civilization; Michel Foucault exposed the "episteme" that bound institutions and forms of knowing into the "discourse" that was itself the system of domination; and Derrida made certain, with an ultimate Deconstruction, that no text would ever rise up again with a pretense to ultimate meaning, or high-minded and high-handed final authority. For an affluent and expanding bureaucracy of academic literary critics and behavioral scientists, this demolishing of the mystique of the solitary romantic artist who could pretend to cosmic knowledge without the necessary university credentials was indeed welcome news, and without much regret the culture of Author-hood and Authority was shouldered aside. "Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes futile... We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." 

Reading Louis Menand: Commercializing anti-commercialism

"Nearly all American culture is commercial. It is either market-driven, as in the case of popular music, paperback fiction, and movies; or it is advertising-driven, as in the case of radio television, newspapers and magazines. And this culture is, of course, only an aspect of the American way of life generally, in which virtually every good – food, housing, furniture, clothing, cars, shaving creams – is understood to be designed to extract the greatest possible profit from the market conditions available, and to be susceptible to alteration the instant those conditions change. Because it is the chief tool for making conditions change, thereby creating new areas of demand and new sources of profit, advertising has become for most people the symbol of the thoroughgoing commercialism of American life.

We are the Founding Fathers (& Mothers, too!)

There are several ways to measure the length of continuous Chinese civilization, but for the sake of discussion, lets set the beginning point for China at the establishment of the first unified Chinese state. That would be the Qin Dynasty, which began in 221 BC, giving us 2,232 years of China as an evolving cultural identity and political reality.

And with that in mind, ask yourself this question:

Would anyone in China today argue that only the ideas expressed during the 15-year run of the founding Qin Dynasty should be counted as valid statements of the Chinese ideal? Would anyone in their right mind conclude that only the Qins should count as the founding fathers of China?

The worst thing about the paywall question

Like a lot of people in the news business, I'm interested in the results of 2011's big bets on paywalls -- the New York Times version and Rupert Murdoch's Times of London version. We're several months in, and I still haven't seen much of substance.

Which was why I jumped on this piece when API's SmartBrief service led with it on June 27. But does the reporting it contains really justify the headline "Murdoch's Leap Finds Converts in Cannes as Paywall Use Grows?" Read it. I'll be here when you get back.

(Tap tap tap tap...)

Kerosene Journalism & the quest for the atom

Since the new-media conventional wisdom machine is having another loose conversation about the “atomic unit” of journalism (thank you, Jeff Jarvis, for kicking this one off), let's use this fleeting moment of attention to advance the subject toward its ultimate destination.

Future journalists are going to be in the information business, not specifically the storytelling business, or the analysis business, or the Tweeting business, or the liveblogging business. What separates the information contained in all these existing journalistic forms from the journalism that will be valuable in the future, is that the future will require us to store the new information we report in ways that are efficiently usable by computers.

So thank you, Mr. Jarvis, for pointing out that quality reporting need not result in an article. Thank you, Jonathan Glick, for noting that mobile interfaces are changing the way we consume news. Thank you, Amy Gahran, for saying that we need better word-processing and browser tools. These aren't exactly new ideas (Jarvis, Gahran and many others have been making similar points off and on for years now), but the recent cascade of discussion makes this a noteworthy moment.

The flaw in this line of conversation is that it ends at the water's edge, by the banks of a river of change that separates the confused state of modern journalism from a future that may offer astounding rewards.

2011 GOP strategies, in summary

Let's review:

Gin-up Birtherism controversies via right-wing media? Obama releases birth certificate, makes them all look like whack-jobs. 

Crap! Quick, get on Fox and raise some doubts about the legitimacy of the document! The latest polls show that only 3 percent of Americans still doubt that President Obama was born in the U.S., despite skeptical coverage of the event on Fox and other conservative media. Obama campaign sells birth certificate T-shirts and coffee mugs as a fund-raiser.

Fetishize the deficit and blame it on Obama? Resulting media attention points out that $7 trillion of current debt came from Dubya, and only $1.7 came from Obama -- who spent stimulous money to end the Bush recession's slide to disaster. Also reminds people that before Bush took over in 2001, the federal budget was on track to eliminate the entire national debt by 2008. Ouch.