Xark!

The betrayal of the Fourth Estate

I have attempted to be discreet on the decline and fall of the media empire, mostly because I am still in it. With layoffs and furloughs announced every quarter, the consequences of being brutally honest could be dire. But I am disgusted by the complete hypocrisy of the newspaper industry, whose leaders are staking a claim to the sacred art of journalism, as if it has sole rights to it. The assertion by newspaper executives that newspapers are the torch-bearers for a community (or global) moral and ethical center would be laughable, if it were not being used to cloak the greed of corporations that have enjoyed healthy profit margins for decades, all the while failing to invest in anything other than expanding their arrogance. 

These corporations profess it is their duty to hold the world to a higher standard but conveniently overlook their failure to substantively investigate major issues and their own increasing immersion in the very organizations they profess to watchdog. Three words. Yellow cake uranium. Need more? WMDs. Economic meltdown. Climate change. Want a book? Death by Journalism.   Into the Buzzsaw.

(Note to press: You are supposed to COVER politicos not hang out with them.)

Twitter: 'It's the Internet'

Dave Winer and Jay Rosen on Rebooting The News No. 13 at 12:55:

WINER: So we've reached this conclusion that almost everything needs to hook into Twitter. It just does.

ROSEN: Because?

WINER: Why? Why? You're asking a leading question, why don't you just answer it?

ROSEN: (Laughs) Well, I wanna know what you think!

WINER: OK, so it's not a leading question. Well... why? Because it just does, Jay. That's just the way the world is right now. Twitter is the backbone. It's the messaging system. It's the... it's the ... the... It's the Internet. It is.

I mean, I was saying this in an interview I did earlier today on this podcast. It's that we've stuffed the entire Internet into 140 characters, and it does not fit, OK?

(laughter)

But we're making it fit, by hook or by crook.

ROSEN: Here's the way I would say it: We need everyone in the new system, and Twitter is the way we can get everyone into the new system.

Live from Tehran

Photos of the post-election protests in Tehran via .faramarz's Flickrstream, which of course I found via Twitter.

 

The 21st Century in Retrospect

(...joined at 21:37...)

ALLENDE: From a conceptual basis, then, what year marks the beginning of the 21st century?

WANG: I don't know that I could pick one year that encompasses the entire shift. But I think we can definitely state the exact moment that the 20th century ended.

ALLENDE: Yes?

WANG: Nov. 4, 2008, and it ended sometime between the moment Barrack Obama stepped onto the stage at Grant Park and his first words to the nation as president-elect.

ALLENDE: So it was a political shift?

WANG: Not at all. It was a shift in possibility. The 20th century was predicated on material possibility, which included a mechanistic sense of weight and inevitability. A president like Obama wasn't supposed to be possible, because people believed the message that "the system" would never allow it. Electorates, agencies, corporations -- people understood them to be flawed, but people accepted the inhumane and inefficient authority of these institutions out of an ambient belief that high levels of friction, waste and corruption were inevitable in human society.

Criticism: Why it sucks

I write reviews of plays for the local alt-weekly, and I do so more out of compulsion to go places and do things and write about them than anything else. Tonight I'll watch a play. Tomorrow morning I'll write a review of it. And that might just be the last time I do it, given the direction my life is heading and my thoughts on criticism in general.

There are basically two functions of criticism, and they've always been united within the form:

1. The critic is responsible to the audience and should honestly and intelligently answer the question: "Should I devote time and money to seeing this?"
2. The critic has a responsibility to the artist -- and to art itself -- to engage in this vaguely defined, ongoing public dialog about art, quality and standards.

Great critics -- and there have been critical essays and even reviews that I would consider to be "great" -- are artists themselves. But I'm not a great critic. I'm functionally an amateur critic who has been learning on the job. I started in the 1990s with book reviews, but for the past few years I've been required to write critical things (positive and negative -- remember that "criticism" as a literary form also includes praise) about live, local performances, and I'm here to tell you that writing about people you can see is fundamentally a different beast than covering artists who work elsewhere.

The newspaper suicide pact

Primarily written Friday night at O'Hare International. Lightly edited, with links added today. --dc

I think I'll remember last week as the moment when I finally knew, with a certainty approaching fatigue, that the newspaper industry – the business and passion that both shaped and warped me over the past 20 years – had chosen ritual suicide. The choice appears grimly reached and irrevocable.

The issue is “paid content.” That's the generic term. I consider it a euphemism for an entire suite of frustrations and furies that have been boiling out of my former profession since its once-invincible business model began its final slide to the deep in 2008. On the surface, paid content is the reasonable idea that people should have to pay for the professionally produced content they consume. Its core, however, is a post-rational demand that consumers abandon their habits of the past decade in favor of new behaviors intended to restore media companies to the profitability ordained to them by God Almighty.

Does it matter that this is an idea with a known, recent history of failure? Or that human beings have no intention of paying for news they've always received for free? Does it matter that we already  know a return to the paywall-era of the early 2000s will cost these legacy media companies money they will never recoup? No, no and no.

A university for The Singularity

Warning: This TED player can be buggy.