Xark!

Priceless comment of the week

...And then comes the main point, people. When are you going to start listening to me and others like me (Glen Beck, for example).

This is a left wing reporter working for a left wing publication. This means that everything said and the motive for same is suspect. In this case, it's the common left wing error of not doing one's homework and just jumping on (or trying to create) an emotional bandwagon that ignores FACTS. This is the same mental error EXACTLY that we are seeing in the debate about Gitmo, where the retarded left wingers are finding out that their kindergarten fantasy about magically closing Gitmo has MAJOR LEAGUE problems, to say the least.<

Most of us graduated from Kindergarten a long time ago. Isn't it time to DISMISS all the left wingers who haven't in disgrace from public life and the news media? Isn't it time to IGNORE them and make it such that they simply can not compel our attention and concern?

  --Commenter "postman01" at Postandcourier.com on a column by Ken Burger about what could be done with the ships at Patriot's Point.

I'm not sure which thought is funnier: The notion that The P&C is a "left wing publication" or the idea that someone would voluntarily compare himself to Glenn Beck ... in public!

Keep it up, postman01.

Sincerely,

Liberals Everywhere 

Today's game: Predict Vick

I had a bit of luck last year, projecting the Jets as the Packers' most likely trading partner for Brett Favre long before the team was even considered to be in the running. But what about Michael Vick? That's trickier.

Let's be clear about something, though: Vick will not only play in the NFL, he's likely to start some games in 2009.

There are two categories of teams to consider in the Vickstakes: Teams that don't have a QB of his abilities and teams that don't need him right away but could fit him into their plans.

I think there will be several teams in the running, but only one team that offers the right situation both for the player and the organization.

Lessons from the affaire de Jarre

Last week, as many if not most of you know, a number of news outlets reported that Irish student Shane Fitzgerald had made up quotations, attributing them to French composer Maurice Jarre upon his death and publishing them on Wikipedia.  While the Wikipedia community removed the false quotations rather quickly, given the lack of grounded citation, several prominent newspapers included at least one of these creative quotations in obituaries of Jarre. 

While I found the story interesting, in the large scheme of things, and given the innocuousness of the attributed quotation, the story should have been but a small blip on my radar.  In my larger scholarly and pedagogical community, however, this was rather monumental news for many people to the degree that Wikipedia has become something of a boogeyman in the rather predictable conversations about the laziness of “today’s generation of students.”  In effect, Wikipedia has become the whipping post that teachers turn to each time they begin another round of cursing the laziness of students. 

Indeed, this is true to such a degree that one often finds syllabi with pseudolegalize, warning students away from utilizing Wikipedia as a source.  Instead, the syllabi reminds the student, research must carefully be tied to properly vetted sources (e.g., peer reviewed journals, or, in the case of contemporary events, national newspapers).  University libraries run seminar after seminar, explaining to first year students that they must learn to differentiate between legitimate and nonlegitimate sources for their research.  In short, the most positive thing one will ever found said of Wikipedia is that it might, on occasion, given other sources, be used for deep background information. 

Hence, the affaire de Jarre was the cause of some level of minihysteria in informal conversation and online discussions amongst teachers who yet again pointed to Wikipedia as the example par excellence of the downfall of standards in student research and writing.  In conversation after conversation, numerous teachers noted that this was surely the sign—if we needed another—that students should never turn to Wikipedia as a legitimate source in their research.  If only “we” could get students to do real research, skipping Wikipedia, we would be on solid grounds.

A new form of writing

We all learned to write in more or less the same way: Beginning, middle, end; Subject, predicate, object; Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Beyond consisting of three items, each of these approaches shares another common theme: Inclusion. Everything necessary to understand the point is expressed explicitly on the page.

But when you write for the Web as you'd write for print, you write too long. You waste the reader's time explaining what she already knows.

When we write for the Web, we should use the Web's strengths to our advantage. This begins with thinking a little bit deeper about how information is constructed, because the Web can offer writers the benefit of  both clarity and brevity.

This post is an example: If you already recognized the concepts I used to build my argument, you're almost done reading. If you didn't, you can follow the links and read my explanations. And if you follow each back to its beginning, you'll find some definitive statements. Referencing one definitive statement for any concept or fact is an idea software engineers call "The DRY Principle," and I believe it's important to the future of both journalism and civilization.

Learning to write this way is a bit like playing three-dimensional chess, but it also reminds me of The Glass Bead Game. Sadly, writers today lack the technological tools and display conventions that would fully support and reward the required effort. But I suspect the ideas demonstrated here could lead us toward new ways of thinking and communicating that are far better adapted to the world we now inhabit.

Notes.

Image: This post as a rough semantic outline.Click to see full-size.

Playing the Same Place

Because the ad said that Dex Romweber would begin at 9 PM, and because we thought we would arrive in time to have a drink and survey the surroundings before the show actually began, my friend Steve and I arrived at The Basement at exactly 9 PM.  Big mistake.  Save the drummer for one of the two opening duos—who was fiddling with one of her cymbals—we were literally the only people in the bar.  No other patrons, no other musicians, and no bartender.  Steve literally had to walk outside to find someone to sell us a beer.

I hadn’t seen Dex (formerly of the Flat Duo Jets) play in years, and, if no one was going to show up at this show (two opening bands before Dex played and no one was here?), I wasn’t quite sure I could stand to stick around either.  The whole thing had the feeling of a depressing nightmare from which I wanted to slink away.  And had I been alone, I may well have done so.

“What must it be like,” Steve asked, “to play in places like this for all these years?”

The "Lack of Vision" thing? Well, here's a hopeful vision for you

So you're on an ocean liner and it sinks. Step No. 1 is: Tread water. Step No. 2: Grab the first floating thing that happens by.

That's where the newspaper industry is located today -- desperately grabbing at whatever debris is available, looking for one thing (or several smaller things) with sufficient buoyancy to support its ponderous, monopoly-bloated weight. And there's nothing wrong with that. When you're drowning, stop drowning first and THEN think about how to get to dry land.

Clinging to wreckage isn't a plan. It isn't even survival. And sadly, most of the people writing about this tremendous change simply can't imagine any alternative to grabbing some still-floating piece of the original ocean liner and hanging on like grim death. We're basically squabbling over which wreckage is the best wreckage (pay-to-read news, with or without a rational argument in its favor, is the current flavor of the month).

I've been writing about the inevitability of this change for some time, and I'm now officially fed-up with the daily round of nostalgic, whiny defeatism.

Nothing lasts forever. I grew up in the era of tinny AM radios and 45 rpm records. I've worked for an afternoon paper that went under, the scrappy Washington Star. Maybe serious journalism will reinvent itself in new and unexpected forms. But if everything goes electronic, I'll always miss the feel of newsprint.

Oh, please. Is that all that's left? Really? Some intramural competition to see which print pundit can write the most moving elegy to a self-mythologized press corps'? Makes me want to shake them and shout "SNAP OUT OF IT, MAN!"

The path to an abundant and meaningful future isn't backwards or sideways -- but ahead, into the new. Howard Kurtz was right that "Lack of Vision Is To Blame for Newspaper Woes," but that deficit isn't just historical -- it's ongoing. So in case you've missed it, here's the my best candidate for a hopeful future for professional journalism:

Why comments suck (& ideas on un-sucking them)

In group discussions with American and German newspaper editors last week, I noticed a trend among the Americans: None of them were happy with the comments on their stories and editorials, but practically all of them reported having tried my suggested responses without success.

Which left me wondering: If none of the practices I suggested worked for these newspapers, then why do they seem to work so well at other sites? And rather than just accepting that comments on news stories are America's No. 1 troll breeding ground, what can be done about this nationwide disappointment?

An informatics-based news org

Sketched in Chicago on May 1, 2009. The circles with "recycling" arrows represent informatic filters.Click image to see higher resolution.

Editing Pontin's manifesto

This morning's Trad Media shout from the battlements comes from Technology Review Editor Jason Pontin, who uses posts by Clay Shirky and Dave Winer to argue that the electronic barbarians at the gate "know nothing about the business of media." On the strength of this statement alone, Pontin is sure to drink for free at meetings of his peers for at least a month.

Pontin's point? Those who say that publishers lack good answers to the profitable future of their industry are simply wrong. "While the details are still debated," Pontin writes, "the broad outlines of tomorrow's media are becoming clearer. Consumers must pay for more of what they read; publishers and the media buyers who purchase advertising must be given technologies that will make online display ads more competitive with the keyword ads that search firms sell."

Pontin makes his case in support of these assertions in an expanded version of his column that I'll refer to as the "How to Save Media" version. Since it covers much of the ground I wrote about in March, I was quite interested to read it -- and rather bemused to note how blithely Pontin whistles past some deeply gloomy graveyards.

Let's critique it, shall we?