how Jim Gee and I soothe our guilty consciences

In the video below of a presentation to the Education Writers Association 2010 Annual Conference, Jim Gee says this about how to introduce innovative ideas into education:

There's a choice of strategies here.... One strategy is: Let's take our innovations to the center of the school system and spread them as fast and quickly as we can. People believe that this current school system as it is will just co-opt those innovations and make them ... just better ways to do the old thing. Another strategy is: Let's make these innovative learning and assessment tools and put them at the margins, in places that will tolerate innovation, and then show it works. Now if you think about it, in technology outside of schools, going to the margins first and then to the center--that's always been the way innovation happens. The only place we've ever tried to keep putting the new thing right in the center at once is in schooling, and it's never worked. What i would love to see is that we hive of some of the (Race to the Top) money for a national center that would trial these new assessments, show they work in places that tolerate innovation, and then spread them there, just the way you would want if we have to keep coal and oil--let's at least have something trying out new forms of energy, so that we're ready for these markets but also we can prove they work. if we don't do that, we're just gonna get a better mousetrap.

I absolutely agree with the sentiments in the quote above, except for the BP oil spill. Let's say there's some innovative energy research going on in the margins, ready to prove it works and to take over where coal and oil left off. That's fantastic, and it doesn't do a single goddamned thing to help the birds, the fish, the sea mammals, the tourist industry, the ecosystem, the fisheries, and the human residents of the Gulf Coast. Those are simply casualties, not a single thing we can do to help them now no matter what awesome innovative fuel source we finally embrace, no matter how much more quickly we may embrace a cleaner fuel source as a result. Even if tomorrow's birds are safe from Big Oil, today's birds are drowning right in front of us.

Working at the margins of education is a fantastic way to innovate and offer useful evidence that innovations work. I fully support this approach--but not at the expense of the kids who exist at the center of our education system today. Yes, the school system can and does and maybe always will co-opt any innovation we try to introduce. But that doesn't excuse us from trying anyway. That doesn't give us license to give up on today's children, even if it keeps tomorrow's children safe.

And of course this isn't what Jim Gee wants to do, anyway. But the Jim Gees of the world who urge us to work at the margin live in symbiosis with the Jenna McWilliamses of the world who believe we must also work from the center, where--ironically--the most marginalized kids in education commonly reside. I can't innovate as much as I'd like from the center, maybe I can't help tomorrow's marginalized kids as much as I'd like either.  And Jim Gee can't help today's marginalized kids as much as he'd probably like from the edges. So we need each other, if for nothing else than to assuage our guilty consciences for being unable to do more of what we know must be done.

I should probably also note that Jim Gee is one of my absolute all-time heroes, so I hope he's not mad at me for this post.

This video also stars Daniel Schwartz, who I believe is one of the smartest guys thinking about assessment and learning these days. I had the great luck to attend an assessment working group with him and a big crew of assessment-focused researchers, and I was amazed and blown away by just about everything he said.

In a recent publication, Choice-Based Assessments in a Digital Age (.pdf), Schwartz and his co-author Dylan Arena make this argument:

Educational assessment is a normative endeavor: The ideal assessment both reflects and reinforces educational goals that society deems valuable. A fundamental goal of education is to prepare students to act independently in the world—which is to say, to make good choices. It follows that an ideal assessment would measure how well we are preparing students to do so.

I can't remember when I've agreed more emphatically with the introductory sentence of a scholarly article about education.

Here's the video, which is well worth a watch.

This I Believe: informed citizenship and informed citizenry

Here's an inalienable right for you: the right to informed citizenship.

Citizenship, the informed kind, has two distinct angles to it. The first is the personal: We, all of us, have an absolutely inalienable right to the information that allows us to act in a civic and socially responsible way, and Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The second is the social: We, all of us, have an absolutely inalienable right to live in a society populated by informed citizens. We have a right to live among an informed citizenry, and any policy, law, or practice that restricts this right exists in opposition to a free and functional democracy.

In America, we embrace the right to informed citizenship; or, more accurately, we shout our support of informed citizenship up to the very rafters. Then we give Big Business a million incendiary devices to burn down that house.

There are explosives, like the recent SCOTUS decision knocking down campaign finance laws and giving corporate lobbyists unfettered access to our legislative and executive branches (and, by extension, the judicial branch as well).

Then there's the kindling, the petrol, the oxygen that keeps the fire blazing. Among the most powerful of these is the news paywall, which sequesters off information to which citizens have an absolute right. In theory, paywalls are no different from their precursors, subscription fees and newsstand prices. But two things have changed--our model of citizenship, and our access to circulated information--since those pre-internet days.

For example: In 1990-1991, during the first Gulf War, news was circulated fairly evenly across multiple platforms. An American who didn't want to pay for a newspaper could still gather information through television and radio. She could walk into a library and read the news for free. Certainly this wasn't a utopian ideal of a free press on every street corner, but the news that enabled a citizen to act was available through multiple outlets.

Today, the speed and reach of internet news sources make them by far the dominant news circulation platform. Indeed, the speed and reach of internet news are part of why a new model of citizenship is emerging. If there was ever a time when it was possible to measure civic engagement by looking at voter turnout on Election Day, that time is long past. Today's civically engaged citizen is the one who is aware of Facebook's abominable approach to privacy and has made decisions about how (or whether) to use Facebook as a result of this knowledge. Today's informed citizen may not know how many electoral votes are needed for a candidate to win the presidency, but she knows how to find that information when necessary. She votes on Election Day, sure, but she also votes with her feet and her eyeballs and her fingertips, constantly making informed decisions about how to parcel out her energy and time, when to dance along with corporate and political influences and when to resist, when to leave the dance floor entirely.

Paywalls make it harder for an informed citizen to stay informed, which in turn restricts my right to live among an informed citizenry. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the news that sticks is the news that spreads--via blogs, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and news aggregating sites like Boingboing. News that's stuck behind a paywall is news that can't spread and is therefore news that dies.

And that's not all: I believe that news paywalls are likely to have long-term effects on citizenship, as well, since I agree with James Seddon's point in his recent Wired article that young people who grow up without unfettered access to local news are likely to grow up without a sense of social and civic connection to their communities.

I recognize that the current business model for print journalism isn't working. I recognize that newspapers need to do something if they want to try to save their jobs. But in America, the eight-year reign of Baby Bush notwithstanding, we don't let business interests trump fundamental human rights.

I'm rooting for newspapers, I really am. I hope they survive this challenge. But news paywalls are in direct opposition to our fundamental right to informed citizenship, and my message to the print media folks is this: Find another way.

a call for businesses to boycott the Bloomington Herald-Times

Tonight will mark the last commencement ceremony for Aurora Alternative High School, whose doors will shut at the end of this school year after 15 years of serving the Bloomington, IN, community.

The Bloomington Herald-Times ran a nice short article about Aurora this morning, which I'm posting in a separate post. I'm posting it here instead of directing you to the article because the Herald-Times has stuck its online content behind a paywall, a decision I oppose deeply. The paywall seems even more wrongheaded and socially irresponsible during times of community crisis, as in, for example, when an economic recession paired with terribly short-sighted and heinously pro-rich tax laws force local school boards to make excruciating decisions about which programs to cut.

The publisher of the Herald-Times, Mayer Maloney, has stood firmly behind the paywall decision from its inception, arguing that it guarantees advertisers' access to local readers who, because they live in the community, are far more likely to purchase the goods and services being advertised.

Let's analyze this stance. First, the paywall is not an effort to recruit local readers; it's an effort to keep non-local readers out. Which means that what happens in Bloomington stays in Bloomington, since the vast majority of readers live or work in the region.

Second, the economic value of a local newspaper is directly related to its community value, and community value is directly related to the newspaper's penetration into the community it serves. As I've mentioned before, the Herald-Times is pretty much the only game in town, which perhaps explains why Maloney feels justified in prioritizing the paper's value to advertisers over its value to community members. But eventually, I believe this approach will fail the Herald-Times. It's inevitable that one of the following will happen: Another news outlet will provide good (or good enough) local reporting that will be made freely available to all community members; or, in the absence of another quality news source, a community whose primary news source is sequestered behind a paywall will be a community to whom local news matters less and less. Maloney has said that subscription rates have been steady since the inception of the paywall, and this may be so; but it won't be so forever.

And even if business remains good at the Herald-Times, this doesn't justify the social irresponsibility of making news available only to those who are willing to pay. Especially during times of crisis--and let's not mistake this time for anything less than crisis--access to local news is essential for an engaged, politically active community.

If the Herald-Times refuses to stand down from its short-sighted position on news paywalls, then I call for local businesses to boycott the paper for the good of the community these businesses serve. If the Herald-Times will not heed the needs of its community members, then perhaps it will listen to the groups whose interests do seem to matter.

my mom gets on CNN

I recently published a post about my mom, Janet McWilliams, who has been fighting an excessively high water bill and has had a great deal of trouble getting local officials to respond to her attempts to communicate about the bill. After months of trying to communicate with township officials about her bill, she got tired of getting stonewalled and turned to local news media.

A letter to the editor of the local newspaper led to an article in the same newspaper, which led to a television interview with local news affiliate WDIV, which led to distribution across multiple national networks, including MSNBC and CNN. The video below ran on local stations, and clips from this video have been running on CNN's Headline News for the last two days.

Despite the media attention, my mom hasn't heard a thing from her local officials, who were also apparently contacted by the various media outlets and were not available for comment. I've also contacted several local and state officials about the issue and haven't heard back. I'll let you know if anyone does manage to get a response from those folks, but don't hold your breath.

For now, enjoy my mom's moment in the sun!

Letter from a Bloomington high school student to the students of Aurora Alternative High School

Today, the Bloomington Herald-Times published a guest column written by Victoria Ison, a student at Bloomington High School North. The column is framed as a letter to students at Aurora Alternative High School, which is slated for closure at the end of this school year as a money-saving measure.

This piece, like almost all of the Herald-Times' content, is not available to the general public, as the paper has made the foolish decision to erect a paywall. Yet another lesson to learn from the ongoing issue of budget cuts across the MCCSC school system is that more access to information is better than less access, and in times like these, the Herald-Times' paywall begins to look increasingly obstructive. Forcing people to pay to access information about issues that directly affect them is a barrier to civic engagement, plain and simple, and the Herald-Times should be ashamed of itself.

On a related note, I've decided to run the entire text of Victoria Ison's letter below.

Please be aware that Ison is a high school student and that this column addresses a difficult and emotionally charged issue. On the Herald-Times site, several readers posted what I consider to be cruel and hurtful comments in response to Ison's post, and I'm not going to let that happen here. Whatever you think of her columnn, Ison should be commended for her honesty and willingness to present her ideas on a complicated debate.


COMMENTARY
Opinion: Aurora students impress a student who doesn’t know them
March 3, 2010


To the students of Aurora Alternative High School:

We’re pretty much the same ages, you and I. I don’t really know any of you, but that’s not uncommon; there are thousands of youth in this community, after all. If you went to North, I might know you. Or I might not. There are a lot of kids.

But now, I need you to forgive me.

You see, before the budget crisis — or at least, before the public was aware of the budget crisis — I didn’t think about you very much. Hardly at all, actually.

Sure, I saw articles in the newspaper at times. You were involved with Martin Luther King Jr. Day volunteer activities. You stuffed a bus and wrapped gifts for Fairview kids. Your Facebook page popped up in my Newsfeed.

But I didn’t become a fan. You were far away — if not in miles, in accessibility. My everyday life was a blur: home and school and back again. You never crossed my mind. Then I saw the name of your school on the proposed list of our district’s budget cuts. And still, I gave it just a passing glance.

It wasn’t until the Tuesday night board meeting that I thought any more about you. I was sitting there with my teacher/mother, listening to the public comments and half-heartedly taking U.S. history notes. Occasionally, I would look up and look around, noticing the appearances of the various impassioned speakers.

I was surprised to see you there. I was surprised by some of your hats, your earrings, your fashion statements. I was most surprised to see your tears.

Some of you got up and spoke. Eloquently. Emotionally. It was so evident that you were fighting for something you believed in, something you needed.

You talked about being “broken,” about being hurt. You talked about needing an escape, wanting to run away. You talked about having to attend any other high school — including my very own North — with measures of overwhelming dread.

I didn’t want to listen to you.

I didn’t want to see your pain and have to admit my ignorance. I didn’t want to have to struggle to try not to judge you.

Because I was. I was sitting confidently in my seat, wearing my track team sweatshirt, doing homework for a class that I have an A grade and a zillion friends in, judging you.

And I am sorry.

I am sorry for being self-absorbed into oblivion, for not noticing your pain or having empathy for your problems. Before you spoke, I didn’t realize that high school could be such a terrible kind of place. I didn’t realize that teenagers — people my own age — could feel hopeless like you said you did. I am sorry for anything I’ve done to make North such a hard place to be.

I am sorry for fitting in and forgetting you.

I need to make it up to you, and I need you to tell me how. Your school is going to be inside my school’s building next year. If you want to be left alone, I’ll understand. But know I’ll still be thinking about you, wondering about you, rooting for you. You’ve impressed me with your passion, humbled me with your tears. There’s no forgetting you now.

And if you’re willing, well, our schools are going to be much closer now. And we’re pretty much the same ages, you and I. We should be friends.

Victoria Ison is a junior at Bloomington High School North and a former biweekly correspondent for The Herald-Times “In School” section. She can be reached at victoria.ison@gmail.com.

the Bloomington Herald-Times doesn't get this 'social networking' thing.

I'm pretty sure the Herald-Times of Bloomington, IN, is a sub-par paper with a short-sighted business model.

I say I'm "pretty sure" because the Herald-Times has developed two strategies that prevent me from knowing for certain: a paywall that keeps me from looking into whether the quality and content merit the paywall; and an apparent "no comment" policy with respect to the paywall, circulation numbers, and long-term subscription strategies.

How do they ignore people? Let me count the ways.
I learned about the "no comment" strategy after several weeks of seeking response from the paper. I went about seeking this response in a deliberate way: First, I challenged the paper through Twitter, by posting links to reports and articles about other papers' efforts to make newspapers available for cheap or free to Bloomington college students; by linking to free versions of the walled-off stories posted via the paper's Twitter account; and by stating my case, 140 characters at a time, for the paywall to be dropped. I ended each tweet with this challenge:

what say you, @theheraldtimes?

Nothing.

Next, I published a blog post about the issue in which I argued that not only was the paywall a short-sighted business model, but also that the paper was misusing Twitter by linking followers to content for which they would be required to pay. I wrote:

[M]y first request to the Herald-Times is this: Be nice or leave. Either stop spamming us, or lock your Twitter account to all but paid subscribers to the paper. Twitter is not the place to hustle subscriptions.

My second request is this: Tear down the goddamned paywall. The Herald-Times is, for all intents and purposes, the only local newsdaily (though I'll offer alternative news sources below). This means it certainly can but absolutely should not erect a paywall for web content. The need to make local news available for free becomes more urgent when you consider the demographics of Bloomington. It's the home of Indiana University, a college town whose median age is 23 (.pdf).

I ended the post with this:

what say you, @theheraldtimes?

Nothing.

I circulated a link to the post on Twitter. "what say you, @theheraldtimes?" I asked each time I linked to it. @theheraldtimes had nothing to say.

So I emailed the managing editor, Andrea Murray, and the publisher, Mayer Maloney, requesting comment. My request was forwarded to another member of the Herald-Times staff, who ultimately informed me that the only person who would serve as the official spokesperson on this issue was Maloney himself. Clearly, then, Maloney's approach to his role as the official spokesperson is silence.

I sent a final request, informing the paper that I wanted to publish a follow-up post exploring approaches to gaining readership in a college town where, presumably, the future readers of newspapers are gaining their sea legs (or not, depending on the approach to gaining readers). You can guess, I bet, what kind of response I received to my request for comment.

Why ignoring angry social media users is a really bad idea

Since my multiple requests for comment have been met with stony silence, I can only guess at the paper's reasoning based on context clues. First, Maloney has made it clear on numerous occasions (presumably in interviews with people he considers "real" journalists) that he sees the paper's paywall as a roaring success (here, here). I don't see it that way--as I wrote in my previous post on this issue, I see paywalls as a short-term solution to a deeper, longer term problem that's actually worsened by paywalls. It's like dealing with burst plumbing by putting down paper towels to clean up the water.

I suspect, too, that Maloney doesn't see me as a big enough fish to waste his time on. After all, I'm just an obnoxious pup with a strangely titled blog that reaches maybe a few hundred people a day.

It's true: I am an obnoxious pup with a strangely titled blog that reaches maybe a few hundred people a day. I am also a member of a key demographic for the future of the Herald-Times: 12-99-year-olds who are comfortable broadcasting their opinions, supporting those opinions with evidence, and circulating those opinions to several hundred to several thousand people. (My blog had just over 2,000 unique visitors in November.) As we know, after all, opinions are made through loose association and vague understanding of issues. All it takes, sometimes, is a handful of angry tweets, maybe a quick skim of a blogpost, for a small group of people to decide how they feel about an issue or product. This is word-of-mouth marketing on steroids; only this time, it's the consumers, not the marketers, who decide what the message will be.

I'll use my experience as an example. Though my tweets and blog post never garnered a response from the Herald-Times, it did generate responses from several other members of my social networks, all of whom offered some version of this:

the H-T is a terrible paper with pretty shoddy business practices. Here's a list of some alternative news sources.

It shouldn't be news to anybody that with print media in its precarious state, the last thing a newspaper needs is for the above message to circulate across social networks. But this is exactly what's happening with respect to the Herald-Times. It doesn't help that the paper uses its Twitter feed not to contribute to the larger knowledge-building work of that platform but to direct people to content they have to pay for to access. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: This is against the very spirit of Twitter. It is unethical, inappropriate and unwanted.

The Herald-Times is building a bad name for itself for many reasons, which would be bad enough if it could counter this reputation by making it clear that the paper offered really solid local news reporting. But here's the thing about erecting a paywall around your content: People have to be given a good reason to pay. I imagine (I can't know for sure, since I'm swimming in this sea of silence) that publisher Maloney takes his subscription numbers and continued ad revenue as proof that people value what his paper has to offer. I counter that his subscription numbers and ad revenues, whatever they are, are only the product of a single key fact: that the Herald-Times is for all intents and purposes the only game in town.

But the game is changing. Yesterday, newspapers could assume they filled an important community function; today, newspapers have to prove (to readers and advertisers) that they fill an important community function. There is still a sizable chunk of the population who will continue to subscribe to print media outlets, but young people--especially those who have grown up surrounded by free information and take for granted that they shouldn't have to pay for what they can get for free--young people have to be given a reason to subscribe. They have to be shown the value of local reporting, of community newspapers. They have to be shown that their local paper fits into their understanding of what "community" means.

In sum:

• The paywall will contribute to the demise of the local newspaper, because it will produce a generation of young adults who have no interest in following local news. 
• Misuse of online social networks such as Twitter only makes the problem worse, because it turns off entire groups of potential readers.
• Ignoring angry social media users is a really bad idea because they have the tools to articulate their opinions, the platform for circulating their opinions and, often, the wherewithal to use the tools and platforms to do exactly this.
• The old model--that one unhappy customer tells ten people--is out the window. The average Twitter user has 126 followers. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, and MySpace users average around 180.

What say you, @theheraldtimes?

to the Bloomington Herald-Times: drop the paywall. now.

My local paper, the Bloomington Herald-Times, has, if you can believe it, instituted a paywall.

This news is not particularly new, as the paywall was erected back in 2003. In a recent interview with the Guardian (which is, by the way, committed to keeping its web content available for free), the Herald-Times' publisher, Mayer Maloney, said this:

"When we changed to a pay website, in what might be called the dark days of the paid content debate, I kind of expected the earth to open up and the fires of hell to consume us.... We had some complaints, we still do, but by and large, I think folks expect to pay for stuff they want to consume and I don't see why papers have been giving away their journalism for free."

I'll get to why papers have been giving away their journalism for free in a second. First, though, I want to point to an enormous gaffe by Herald-Times staff: using the official Herald-Times Twitter account to link to content that only subscribers can access. Here's a recent snippet from the paper's Twitter feed:

If you want to find out more about the alleged sexual assault, if you want to learn about the robbery of the dead man's house, if you want to learn about the bank robbery--in other words, if you're interested in engaging with your local news--you can head over to the Herald Times website, where you'll see a page like this:

Using Twitter--a platform whose existence relies on members' goodwill toward each other, on their willingness to serve as intelligent filters for each other--to link to content people have to pay for is what we like to call "spam." It's not appropriate. It's not appreciated. And it's not okay. The decision not to link directly to news stories is presumably the Herald-Times' strategy for making it look like they're not spamming their followers, but it doesn't work. "Woman reports sexual assault after separating from her family at the Red Lot to attend IU/PU game"? You bet I'm going to try to find out more. The very effort to offer 140-character mini-headlines is an attempt to make Twitter users try to find out more. And when they do, they smack up against the paywall.

So my first request to the Herald-Times is this: Be nice or leave. Either stop spamming us, or lock your Twitter account to all but paid subscribers to the paper. Twitter is not the place to hustle subscriptions.

My second request is this: Tear down the goddamned paywall. The Herald-Times is, for all intents and purposes, the only local newsdaily (though I'll offer alternative news sources below). This means it certainly can but absolutely should not erect a paywall for web content. The need to make local news available for free becomes more urgent when you consider the demographics of Bloomington. It's the home of Indiana University, a college town whose median age is 23 (.pdf). Publisher Maloney considers the paywall a roaring success, adding in the abovementioned Guardian article that

"The simple question is whether you're selling something that people want to buy. I think it's foolish to give away to one group what you're charging another group for."

You know what else is foolish? Substituting long-term survival with short-term cash. Sure, the paywall has worked for the last five years. And in that time, how many young people, potential lifelong subscribers to local newspapers, have been denied the chance to see the value of connecting with community events? How many people have formed a notion of civic engagement that completely excludes the role of local news?

Sure, the cost of subscription is fairly low--just $5.95 a month. But I won't pay it, and thousands of young people won't pay it either. What they may do is pick up one of the free newspapers made available on campus: The New York Times or USA Today, both of which also offer free online content. (In case you missed it, USA Today recently announced a pilot program in which an e-edition of the paper will be made available for free to university populations, and Indiana University is one participant in this pilot.) Though students don't pay each time they grab a 'free' paper, the service is not free. To cover the cost of the NYTimes, all students have a small fee tacked on to their bill--as near as I can tell, it's somewhere around $1.25 per semester, though I'll double-check on that and get back to you. The USA Today program is free for now, with future conversations about pay structures planned after the pilot ends.

Just for the record, I don't consider this fee structure to be analogous to a paywall. The cost is low, largely invisible, and distributed across all members of the university community. In my view this would be, if the Herald-Times wanted to know, a legitimate way to approach circulating their content to university students.

But look: we need to think, and think hard, about strategies for maintaining cultural interest in high-quality reporting, at the local, state, national, and international level. We want--we need--to cultivate in our young people a deep investment in news so that the news, in whatever form it ends up adopting once newspapers die off, carries and is carried by its community. This means dropping down anything that acts as a barrier between the community and its news, and this means making web content--which is, let's face it, the content that young people are more likely to access--available for free. Paywalls solve the problem for now, but they don't solve the problem for later.

What say you, @theheraldtimes?


coda: some Bloomington news alternatives
The Bloomington Alternative: http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/
The Indiana Daily Student (Indiana University's student-run newspaper): http://www.idsnews.com/news/headline.aspx
WFIU, Bloomington's Public Radio station: http://indianapublicmedia.org/radio/
Indiana Public Media news: http://indianapublicmedia.org/news/

on the decline of print media

The career counselors thought physician’s assistant or forester but I was born to this job like sturgeon.

My mechanic says cars are like people:

the oil’s always trying to find a way out—he beats off

twice a day in the utility sink.

The berry pickers heading home at dusk agree but it’s not oil, they say,

picking red clots from their feet,

it’s something else. It’s easy enough for them,

moving slowly in discolored robes, but I could never wait

so long for anything. At this speed shapes are baffled and missiles hover warily.

My composition coach treads in fear of modifiers but that’s

how they do it, I swear, warily. The architects guffaw.

That’s all we do is modify, they grin, turning back to their tables. Each night

they make love to someone who likes them less and less.

The journalists, my friends, have stopped taking notes. They are drawing their lions again; it’s impossible now

to get them to stop. We meet for drinks on Thursday nights

and an aproned man slaps an egg beater into his palm at the door. My friend,

says the editor, the earth doesn’t speak to us. We speak to each other and pretend it was the earth.

Then there isn’t much time, the berry pickers cry, squirting juice across the page.

the 'news wants to be free' schadenfreude: rupert murdoch edition

Pity poor Rupert Murdoch, who recently ate a small bite of crow when he admitted that his plans to toss up a paywall for accessing News Corp's online content by June 2010 may have to be...postponed.

Murdoch apparently didn't offer any explanation for the delay, but this article suggests it's because it's becoming clear that not all news outlets will get on board. The Guardian, one of News Corp's biggest competitors, has committed itself to keeping things free, and the article also offers this:

Media commentator Jeff Jarvis has previously said that the only effect of Murdoch's papers charging online would be to clear the path for competitors. Some specialist papers can charge, he wrote in the Guardian, but "for most, pinning hopes for the survival of news on charging for it is not only futile but possibly suicidal."

I have previously made this argument:

It would be passing strange to assert that "news wants to be free." It's less strange to assert that people want their news to be free. Less strange still to assert that democracy wants news to be free, despite the capitalist tendency to charge. Even less strange to assert that in a free, democratic society dedicated to democratic ideals, more news, made more freely available to a broader public, is better than the alternative.

Additionally, it turns out that I have deep faith for the journalists, editors, and media chiefs who commit themselves to a dying profession out of a deep commitment to democracy, free speech, and interest in arming citizens with information they need to resist, decide, embrace and challenge cultural movements, laws, and norms. I just don't happen to trust folks like Rupert Murdoch, who by all appearances does what he does because it got him filthy rich and kept him there.

state of the blogosphere 2009: the kids are all right

I've been following technorati's 2009 state of the blogosphere report with the level of interest you might expect from someone who spends the vast majority of her free time blogging. Much has been and will be made of the following statistics, culled from technorati's survey:

• Two-thirds are male
• 60% are 18-44
• The majority are more affluent and educated than the general population
◦ 75% have college degrees
◦ 40% have graduate degrees
◦ One in three has an annual household income of $75K+
◦ One in four has an annual household income of $100K+
◦ Professional and self-employed bloggers are more affluent: nearly half have an annual household income of $75,000 and one third topped the $100,000 level
• More than half are married
• More than half are parents
• Half are employed full time, however ¾ of professional bloggers are employed full time.

These statistics are worth mulling, as they point to a disturbing trend toward the mainstreaming of what was previously a counterculture form of communication. Others have begun exploring this in depth.

What interests me most at the moment, however, is the statistic on journalistic credentials. According to the report, 35% of respondents have worked in traditional media formats, including newspapers and magazines, radio, and television. Compare this to the less than 1% of the entire American work force employed in traditional media fields.

And one more statistic before we dive into analysis: Of those who identified as having employment history with traditional media sources, 72% are no longer employed by a media outlet. This means that just over one-fourth of the bloggers surveyed are formerly affiliated with traditional media outlets.




Why does this matter? Because it points to two interesting and important trends among bloggers: They have had more exposure to traditional journalistic ethics than does the average American; and they are disproportionately drawn to blogging as a news circulation format. This is, in my view, a double smackdown to those who fear that the shift away from traditional news sources will lead to a decreased quality in reporting.

journalistic ethics, carried over
As I've explained before, I'm a former newspaper reporter whose paper folded after a long slide toward decreased advertising revenues. Not all of us who worked at that local paper were journalists, exactly--our crew included two sales reps, two assistants, a circulation manager, and various part-time employees--but everybody at that office embraced a deep commitment to honest, responsible information delivery. It kind of came with the territory.

Journalism is guided by an ethical framework--what we might call an appreciative system--that's undergirded by intellectual rigor, critical curiosity, and chronic curmudgeonry. Though this commitment is move visible in its breach (which is in part why Jayson Blair became a household name), it's a big piece of what drives so many people into traditional journalism even as its dying gasps turn into death rattles.

disproportional representation: paid journalists become voluntary journalists
Old journalists never die, they just get de-pressed, har har. In fact, the thriving popularity of blogs and their potential to reach a vast--indeed, potentially almost infinite--audience is by my lights part of what draws us traditional media curmudgeons to new media. Though I can't speak for all traditional media-affiliated bloggers, I can tell you that I was drawn to journalism because I believed in its power, believed in its transformative potential. I believed, even before I could articulate it, in the power of a free press in a democratic society. That's free as in speech, not as in beer.

Now, as a blogger, my understanding of "free press" has changed: When I talk about the power of a free press, I now mean free as in speech and as in beer. This does not, contrary to common belief, mean that I believe we can sustain a thriving communication system without funds; I just don't believe that the people should be required to pay for information. I have elsewhere delineated between 'news' and 'the news' and discussed various approaches to funding that may be more sustainable than the current system, so I won't go into that here; instead, I only want to submit that for many traditional-media types like me, blogs offer what a career in journalism did, only more so. More communication of ideas, more potential readership, more opportunity for direct conversation between the writer and her readers. News can be broken, immediately, to overwhelming impact, via blogs; ideas can be offered, discussed, and modified; a reading public can be mobilized to act.

There are those who will (and do!) argue that unpaid citizens will never be willing to commit to reporting on local, national, or international news without pay; or that even those who are willing to do so will offer substandard, biased, or useless content. These charges may be true, but only of a subset of the online journalistic population. For the rest of us, our commitment to delivery of high-quality, well researched and useful information has never been higher or more valuable--essential, really, to a democratic society built on a presumption of freedom of speech and of the press.

news may not want to be free, but people want (and deserve) free news

There is, apparently, a "news wants to be free" contingent. I learned this because I was accused of being a member of this contingent over at Beat the Press.

There is no definition of the "news wants to be free" contingent on that blog or in the Boston Globe piece by Lou Ureneck that started the whole conversation. As near as I can tell, though, Ureneck attributes this stance to people who believe that there's no putting the genie back in the bottle when it comes to online news content--that it's far too late to institute paywalls or micropayments now.

If this is the stance of the "news wants to be free" contingent, then count me in. I don't buy Ureneck's comparison of online news content to cable television. "Are you doubtful?" he asks. "I remember when television also was free."

Nah, I don't buy the analogy. The slow but steady transition to paid television content was a master stroke that cannot be replicated with online news. Cable's success lay in its ability to offer something far superior to free content; to offer pure, easy entertainment (fluff mixed with filler mixed with news channels; if cable was only news, we'd never be willing to pay); to leverage our willingness to pay to be entertained; and, most importantly, to rig up a corporate monopoly on that entertainment. In most parts of the U.S., if you want cable you get fewer then three providers to choose from, and they all cost about the same and offer about the same features.

News outlets, thank christ, could never manage the same sort of monopoly, even if the Big Five news agencies do end up buying all of the major news outlets. There will still be independent sources, alternative journalism, free public radio streams, underground journalism, forums, blogs...and platforms we can't even imagine yet.

Here's an example of why it won't work. My news outlet of choice is currently the New York Times. If the Times decided to charge--even micropayments, even a dime or a nickel per visit--I would take my readership elsewhere. I might go to CNN, and if CNN charged, then I'd head to the Chicago Tribune or the Boston Globe or, god forbid, USA Today. If all of the major news outlets started to charge, then I'd head to the Huffington Post or BoingBoing. If those outlets started to charge, then...well, you get the point.

And I'm not alone. There are millions of people just like me who will refuse to pay. There will be others who will pay in order to access news that they will then distribute to others free of charge. Media moguls might stop some of these resisters, but they'll never stop them all. It would take nothing short of a carefully orchestrated international conspiracy--every outlet deciding to charge the same amount, at the same time, for the same content--for things to be otherwise.

Besides--and it's strange to have to remind Ureneck, a lifelong newspaper man and the chair of Boston University's journalism department, of this--newspapers have never made the lion's share of their revenue off of reader subscriptions. It's always been sponsorship, ads, and corporate funds that kept the lights on. The fact that advertising no longer pays does not give news organizations license to suddenly turn to readers to pay the delinquent bills. It only means that new corporate marketing models become necessary.

You should not, contrary to Ureneck's strange and irrational assertion, assume that I want reporters to starve or their children to have to drop out of school. In fact, as a former newspaper reporter whose paper closed when ad revenues declined, I am deeply sympathetic to the plight of the print journalist. But Ureneck should know that wishing things were otherwise does not make them so.

It would be passing strange to assert that "news wants to be free." It's less strange to assert that people want their news to be free. Less strange still to assert that democracy wants news to be free, despite the capitalist tendency to charge. Even less strange to assert that in a free, democratic society dedicated to democratic ideals, more news, made more freely available to a broader public, is better than the alternative.

time to smack down the Wall Street Journal

(Don't worry; I snuck around the pay wall.)

As my sister Laura put it when she sent me this article on why the Wall Street Journal is five years behind the times why email is no longer the communication tool of choice, "It's trying so hard to be 'with it' and in the flow of the times... But it seems stuffy and like a 40-year-old's take on new media."

The piece is called "Why Email No Longer Rules… And what that means for the way we communicate," and it reiterates points that were interesting to tech folks a handful of years ago. (Here's a 2007 piece on the decline of email from Gawker; here's a 2007 piece on the same topic from Slate ; here's a 2006 blogpost on the issue ; and so on.)

Among the "insights" of the WSJ article are that email seems painfully slow to us now:

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

There is, reporter Jessica E. Vascellaro explains, a new phenomenon wherein we receive a constant stream of information, both personal and professional. There is a downside, as she points out:

That can make it harder to determine the importance of various messages. When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages—from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening's plans—being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether.

Additionally, the speed of communication presents problems:

While making communication more frequent, they can also make it less personal and intimate. Communicating is becoming so easy that the recipient knows how little time and thought was required of the sender. Yes, your half-dozen closest friends can read your vacation updates. But so can your 500 other "friends." And if you know all these people are reading your updates, you might say a lot less than you would otherwise.

Good lord! she exclaims. We're surrounded by this constant stream of information! How will we manage it?

It makes sense that we would compare new forms of communication--Twitter, Facebook, text messages--to older forms of written communication like email and, going back more than ten years (!), letters, memos, and personal notes. If we compare newer communication technologies to those previous modes of written communication, then Vascellaro's points ring true.

But here's where Laura got it right: Thinking of Twitter as a faster, shorter, and less consequential version of email is an old-school paradigm that ignores that other than the fact that it works primarily with printed text, Twitter (and, more broadly, microblogging in general) is not like email at all. Anyone who approaches these new platforms with an attempt to figure out what's 'important' and what's 'trivial,' what needs to be acted on and what can be ignored, is missing out entirely on the spirit of these spaces.

In fact, Twitter, Facebook, and similar participatory platforms support a convergence of multiple types of communication. Twitter, just as one example, supports a type of identity work that was not previously seen in other communication environments. Through the careful combination of tweets about personal information, 'trivial' details, and and professional interests, people are painstakingly (sometimes, especially at first, accidentally) crafting and presenting a coherent if fluid and flexible identity, which then informs the identities they present in other spaces, online and off.

What makes Twitter new is the particular combination of people and affordances. Facebook and similar social networks require people to send out friend requests that must then be accepted; it means people can control, fairly strictly, the size of their community. Twitter requires no such permission. Because I can follow almost anyone I want to, and because almost anyone who wants to can follow me, we're seeing a fascinating intermixture of near and distant connections between people. I follow my best friend, who follows me; I also follow my idol Clay Shirky, who doesn't follow me (yet); and I follow colleagues who fall all along the friendship continuum. Some of them follow me and some of them don't (yet).

Vascellaro largely focuses on the professional implications of new communication tools, and agrees that one nice feature of these tools is that information is often available instantaneously--if you need to know whether a colleague has left work yet, you might check her Facebook status. The downside, she explains, is that

a dump of personal data can also turn off the people you are trying to communicate with. If I really just want to know what time the meeting is, I may not care that you have updated your status message to point people to photos of your kids.

In fact, if you're using Facebook and Twitter just to find out the kinds of information you used to get through email and phone conversations, then the volume of information may feel overwhelming and prohibitive. But if you're only focusing on how to use these tools to do the work that email used to do, then you're kind of missing the point: Social media communication tools provide new avenues for doing deep identity work in communities that mix professional and personal relationships.

To be clear, Twitter is not email on steroids. Facebook is not like coffee circles for 500 people at a time. And blogs are not diaries with 100 or 1000 readers. Twitter is Twitter. Facebook is Facebook. And trying to parse these spaces by comparing them to previous one-to-many types of communications (like email) limits one's ability to see the full range of the affordances of these platforms.

I don't mean to hammer too hard on Vascellaro, who has written numerous interesting tech-related articles for the WSJ. But a quick look at her homepage reveals her biases (this, by the way, is another interesting aspect of an increasingly participatory culture: a public figure's digital footprint becomes a matter of public interest). Her site points to her Facebook page, the details of which are locked to the public; the ability to lock down a Facebook page, in my experience, is a feature largely leveraged by people who struggle with the notion of mixing the personal and the professional. But increasingly, the ability to engage with this mixture--even by getting it wrong sometimes--is more valued and valuable than the ability to carefully separate the two.

A look at Vascellaro's Twitter feed is even more telling. Her first several hundred tweets mimicked the style of Facebook status updates:




Eventually, she switched to a broadcast approach, mainly tweeting about interesting articles or linking to her own writing at the WSJ. These forms of participation are, just to be clear, perfectly legitimate. But other people do it better, and I imagine they get more out of the Twitter experience.

"Better" in this case, means "with deeper engagement in the collective meaning-making process supported by the affordances of Twitter."

[insert contemplative pause]

Truly, I've been sitting here considering whether an examination of Vascellaro's social networking practices are germain to a critique of her article. She links to her Facebook page (locked to outsiders) and her Twitter feed on her home page, and I believe that there is much to be learned about a technology reporter's biases through an examination of her use of those technologies. But I wonder how I would feel if someone picked apart my use of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. At the very least, I might be engaging in an ad hominem attack. But then I think, if a school reporter critiques public schools, we should try to find out where she sends her kids. If a tech reporter smacks down Apple products, we should find out what kind of products she uses at work and at home.

Am I being a crudwad for examining Vascellaro's digital footprint? Is it relevant to the issues she identifies in her piece? I would love for people to weigh in on this. In fact, I think I'll try to get Vascellaro herself to weigh in.

update on the decline of print media

Over the last few months, I've largely kept my "print-media-isn't-viable" soapbox stowed out of public view. A new post by Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy got me lugging it back out.

Kennedy, a long-time subscriber to the Boston Globe (which he calls--and I agree with him--"the most important news organization in Greater Boston"), has decided to cancel his Monday through Saturday subscription. He writes:

Why did we do this? It’s been inevitable since early this summer, when the Globe made a couple of important changes in its distribution model. First, it unveiled GlobeReader, an electronic paper that’s a faster and easier read than the Web edition. Second, it raised the price of its print edition.

Seven-day home delivery of the Globe now costs $46.56 a month in Media Nation. With advertising in what may be a permanent decline, readers are going to have to pick up more of the cost, so I certainly don’t fault the Globe for charging more. But our family is not immune from economic pressures. For us, it makes sense to go with paper on Sundays and use GlobeReader the rest of the week.

Kennedy, like all of us who consider a thriving, free press to be the backbone of a thriving, free society, explains that he has struggled with his family's changing relationship to his local newspaper. He justifies the change with his subscription to the Globe Reader (it costs $14.95 a month it comes with subscription to the Globe--thanks for the correction, Dan) and explains that he would not have canceled his subscription if the only alternative were reading the news online, because

[l]ike virtually all newspapers, the Globe is struggling with its decision some dozen year ago to offer its content online for free. At one time, newspaper executives assumed that advertising revenues would eventually justify that decision. It didn’t happen — it may never happen — and the way out of that morass is unclear. We were not about to contribute to that pain.

Though Kennedy makes no judgment here about the net value of making news content available for free online, there are those who do, who have, and who will. I am one of those people. I believe that the decision to make news content available for free online is perhaps the single most crucial factor leading to the social revolution.

Imagine an alternate scenario: back in the 1990s, at the very beginning of the internet age, news executives decide to charge--and even a micropayment will do, for this scenario--for access to online content. Communication, creation, and circulation of individual ideas and creative works are still cheap or free, as they are today, but accessing the news will cost you. In this scenario, the power of the hyperlink gets diluted to practically zero, at least for those who choose not to pay for their news. Blogging loses its widespread appeal. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, if they even come into being, get relegated to the realm of the banal: tweets about what I had for breakfast, status updates spreading my results on a series of meaningless quizzes, achievements in Mafia Wars and Scrabulous.

It's tough to imagine this alternate universe because putting a price, even a tiny one, on access to content seems nearly unthinkable to us now. Indeed, perhaps the most significant fallout from media executives' decision not to charge for content is the general public stance exemplified by Jon Stewart's comment to Walter Isaacson, a journalist and policy guy who believes newspapers should start charging for access to online content: "Sir," Stewart said in disbelief, "the internet is free."

Since the advent of mass literacy, has there ever been a time when so many people believed so strongly that information should be free and accessible to all?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Walter Isaacson
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

"Things fall apart"? SRSLY?

Over at the HASTAC blog, Cathy Davidson has posted a fantastic piece about a so-called "Facebook Exodus."

Davidson's post is called "Is Facebook the Technology from Hell?" and it tackles a New York Times article by Virginia Heffernan that suggests that

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters.... [W]hile people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing — some of them ostentatiously.

Davidson, while acknowledging her affinity for other Heffernan-authored pieces, rightly attacks this article for sloppy research and a bald-faced refusal to interpret data rationally. First, Davidson explains,

The "small but noticeable group" she documents are her friends. Their reasons are the ones that any wise FB user needs to be cautious of. Privacy, mostly. Of course FB is datamining. It's "free," right? Well, no. As every Cat in the Stack user knows by now, the "information is free" fantasy has been over for a long, long time. If it is free, they are gathering information that they can sell on the backend. There is no free lunch and no free Internet.

While it's certainly true, Davidson adds, that Facebook's popularity is declining among the younger demographic and it likely won't remain the behemoth it is now for the rest of time, there's no reason to think it will turn into the "online ghost town" Heffernan believes it's doomed to become--a ghost town, by the way, "run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit."

But Davidson's most important point is this:

methodology, people! We have to hold mainstream media responsible in the same way we hold the Internet bloggers and writers responsible. One's five friends are not necessarily the best filter on the world.

It is passing peculiar that the journalistic revolution--everybody, Clay Shirky writes, is a potential media outlet--is being covered by journalism's old guard, the very people whose vocations are threatened by new media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, blogging applications and forums. Humans have consistently proven their ability to see only what they want to see and ignore the rest; print journalists, for all their training in "objectivity" and "fairness," are really no different.

Of course not all print journalists are focused on studiously ignoring the social revolution, despite the overwhelming likelihood that it will come at the cost of their entire field as we know it today. For proof, just follow any journalist who actively uses Twitter as god intended it (I recommend David Carr, David Pogue, and Rachel Maddow).

Still, the question remains: Given the inherent bias of print media outlets toward print media outlets, how do we decide what to trust? Is it true that Facebook, Twitter and the like are suffering from a decline in popularity, that online reportage is less reliable than print outlets, or, indeed, that print journalism is really in the dire straits it purports to be?

stop saying 'ATM machine,' and other exhortations of a participatory culture theorist

I hate grammatical redundancy. Some of the best examples of this are:

• ATM Machine (Automated Teller Machine Machine)
• PIN Number (Personal Identification Number Number)
• ISBN Number (International Standard Book Number Number)

There's actually a term for this: RAS syndrome, or Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome.

"But," said my buddy Dan, with a look of pure glee, "you say ATM Machine like everyone else, right?"

"I do not," I answered. And I don't.

"That's a dilemma," Dan said, still gleeful. "The English major part of you conflicting with the participatory culture theorist, who says that whatever the people decide is right."

He was ribbing me, but in truth it's a fair enough critique. After all, some of the most influential books on participatory culture and the social revolution include the following titles, all of which intentionally fly in the face of common attitudes toward morality, ethics, and human progress:

Here Comes Everybody (Clay Shirky)
The World is Flat (Thomas Friedman)
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Don Tapscott)
Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (Seth Godin)

And, I'll just admit it, my blog is absolutely peppered with sweeping declarations: Print journalism isn't viable. Young people are leading the social revolution. The question isn't 'is it moral?', but 'is it popular?'

Why, after all, isn't the question 'is it moral?' Simply put, most of the time when people ask that question about aspects of the social revolution, what they're actually asking is more along the lines of 'is this better or worse than the experiences and culture I'm used to?' This is a matter of personal preference, and there's no accounting for taste.

Some of my friends think wearing a wristwatch makes it easier for them to make it to their meetings on time; some of my friends think watches just make them more time-conscious and anxious. If suddenly a critical mass of people started wearing watches and pressuring the rest of their culture to wear watches too, some of my friends would be thrilled (everybody will have to be on time now!), some would be upset (we're all going to start caring more about the time than about each other!), and some wouldn't care at all (*shrug* it's just another tool to help me get through my day.).

Some people think online social networks signal the decline of community. Some people think new, valuable community structures have emerged around these networks. And some people just think online Scrabble is a fun way to spice up a boring work day. All of these people are right, but arguing about whether we're better or worse off (or the same) is pointless, because is a wristwatch-bearing culture better than one that uses sundials? Your answer depends on a lot of things, like: whether you make your living off of sundial manufacturing; whether you can personally afford a watch; whether you were someone who cared a lot about keeping track of the time in the first place; and whether you think a watch looks good on your wrist.

Please don't accuse me of absolute moral relativism, though; even participatory culture theorists have their limits. It's wrong to force everyone to wear wristwatches, for example, just as it's wrong to ban sundials. If democracy, freedom of the press, or free speech falter when print journalism hits its death throes, I will be among the throngs calling for social change. Participatory media platforms tend, as all previous platforms have, to silence certain groups (nonwhites, nonstraights, older participants, less educated [formally or informally] participants); this is painful and wrong.

And RAS syndrome will always be wrong, no matter what percentage of the population adopts the phrase "ATM machine."

---

---

---

Footnote upon the construction of the masses:
some people are young and nothing
else and
some people are old and nothing
else
and some people are in between and
just in between.

and if the flies wore clothes on their
backs
and all the buildings burned in
golden fire,
if heaven shook like a belly
dancer
and all the atom bombs began to
cry,
some people would be young and nothing
else and
some people old and nothing
else,
and the rest would be the same
the rest would be the same.

the few who are different
are eliminated quickly enough
by the police, by their mothers, their
brothers, others; by
themselves.


all that's left is what you
see.

it's
hard.

(Charles Bukowski, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills, 1969)

---

---

---

blogging burns more calories than watching tv or sleeping

I recently went nearly completely offline for ten full days as I packed and moved from Boston to Indiana, having the unbelievable good fortune along the way to witness the first minutes in the life of my brand new niece, Morgan Brianna DeGeer. During this time, I only found the time and connectivity to publish two blog entries, post four tweets, and enter five Facebook status updates.

Being offline was hard but not impossible, thank god; I halfway expected to suffer from serious irritability and sudden fits of rage and sadness. What I missed most was my daily morning routine of waking up, reaching over to the passenger side of my bed, and grabbing hold of my laptop. This is a routine I'll be glad to get back to.

And I'm not alone, according to a recent New York Times article that describes an increasingly typical A.M. routine:

This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

Some people--including some interviewed for the NYTimes article--may decry this new trend as unnatural, antisocial, or unhealthy. I can't speak for the experience of others, but for myself, I disagree with this analysis. (And here I risk being part of what another New York Times article calls a potentially problematic anti-print media "drumbeat." "This drumbeat," Michael Sokolove writes in the piece about the faltering of Philadelphia's major newspapers,

a relentless declaration that print is doomed, may be a problem in and of itself, making it easy to cast anyone who wants to save print as a Luddite.)

Perhaps "lunging" for cellphones and laptops before emptying your bladder might be considered unhealthy, but only if you think of the lunging as on par with waking up and reaching for the TV remote. Watching television, after all, is the ultimate passive activity, burning a mere 68 calories an hour (to the 46 calories burned per hour of dead sleep). But for a lot of people, opening a laptop is practically the diametric opposite of turning on the tv: Instead of watching something someone else made, they get to make something for themselves and others, to build something new out of nearly endless buckets of clay that get replenished by the day, the hour, the minute.

In a previous career trajectory, I was a newly minted poet freshly emerged from an M.F.A. program. Most mornings, I woke up early, flipped open a notebook, and wrote. That activity seems to me now to be innately self-contained and self-absorbed, existing as it did in an intentional vacuum. I don't know how many calories blogging burns per hour, but I know it generates both light and heat for me and, I hope, for other people who land here. It's why I haven't yet been swayed by accusations that blogging, tweeting, and working with social networks are a vain, self-centered and self-aggrandizing acts: When leveraged in the most interesting ways, these media platforms become not only the materials molded out of clay but the raw materials from which others may build their own designs.



Oh, and here's a pic of my new niece. I swear she is exactly as gorgeous as this photo suggests.

why Twitter's not trivial, by a print journalist who trivializes Twitter

From the opinion section of the Detroit Free Press comes further evidence that even the most social media-friendly print journalists either: a.) don't really understand the value of social media; or b.) have yet to master the finer points of conveying irony through the written word.

This most recent proof comes the Freep's deputy managing editor Steve Dorsey, in a column about Thursday's Twitter hack. The column, "Tweetless Thursday was a shock," makes the sound and fully reasonable argument that in its approach to reporting the outage, mainstream media "once again...underestimated the value of social media to its users."

Dorsey points to the Associated Press description of the event:

“For Twitter users, the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter was down.”

As Dorsey explains,

The site has played a big role in several recent news stories ranging from the social turbulence following the Iranian elections to the first picture of a plane that landed in New York’s Hudson River. Locally, the earliest headlines and photos after the tanker explosion on I-75 at 9 Mile were on Twitter....

Some use Twitter solely as an input channel, to update their Facebook status. Others value its conversational nature. I take advantage of both. Ultimately the biggest value of Twitter is a weeded out, faster connection to things I didn’t know before.

Dorsey had me until the final paragraph of his piece: "Embrace it or not, but don’t ignore Twitter. Give it a try: it’s free (and it’s addictively fun!)."

Okay, so after an entire piece that argues for taking Twitter more seriously, he ends by encouraging his readers to try it not because of its social value but because it's free and addictive? All we can do now is hope the irony was intentional.

one thing I'll miss when print journalism finally dies

what will we do without really good exposés of cults and such, like a recent shredding of the Church of Scientology?

Aside from skimming the occasional story about Scientology's hold on celebrities or following the campaign of the civic protest group Anonymous, I really don't pay a lot of attention to the day-to-day workings of the Church of Scientology.

A recent three-part expose of the Church of Scientology's leaders, including its head, David Miscavige, caught my attention. The piece, published last month in the St. Petersburg Times, points to a long history of verbal, emotional, and physical abuse codified in the tenets of very religion itself. Members of the church are pressured to confess, in writing, all transgressions, and these documents are held in order to be used against defectors. According to the piece, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard

wrote a policy stating that a person leaves as a kind of noble gesture when he can't help himself from injuring the church. To justify leaving, Hubbard believed, the person thinks up bad things to say about the church.

Anyone who leaves has committed "overts" (harmful acts) against the church and is withholding them. The church is obligated to make such people come clean, Hubbard said, because withholding overts against Scientology can lead to suicide or death by disease. They must write down their transgressions to remain in good standing when they leave.

The story hinges on the word of four former executives in the Church of Scientology, all of whom paint a picture of extreme dysfunction (regular beatings, cruel and avaricious deceits, and the death of one emotionally troubled young woman while in the care of the notoriously anti-psychiatry church) and all of whom have suffered ongoing smear campaigns in an effort to discredit their accusations and their motives. The campaign, like so much of what this particular religion sets its mind to, is incredibly run--so well run, in fact, that though I'm predisposed toward suspicion of organized religion and especially cults like the Church of Scientology, I still wonder about the veracity of the defectors' accounts.

Particulars aside, this series is about as thorough, intricate, and detailed as you can get. It's the product of countless interviews and weeks of poring over legal documents, transcripts, and complicated news reports. The journalists, Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin, have done fine work that represents the best of the journalistic profession.

It's one thing we're likely to lose, at least for a good while, as the profession continues its steady decline. Citizen journalism is good for an awful lot, but it can't offer up a detached, professional, and multi-perspectival story like this. At least, if it can, I haven't yet come across a good example. I hope someone out there can prove me wrong.

what's a 17-letter word for mixed blessing?

You guys, I really love word and number puzzles--crosswords, sudoku, cross sums, word mines, the whole deal. One of my most long-standing hobbies is working through a ratty pile of Dell puzzle magazines. (Never Penny Press; I hate Penny Press.)

It didn't occur to me until I read this post in Good Magazine arguing that the decline of print media may also signal the decline of printed puzzles. Suddenly, I'm terrified: What if Dell Magazines goes out of business? Would I have to turn to Penny Press as the only alternative, however distasteful and what if Penny Press goes out of business too?

My fear of losing my printed puzzles (there is, so far, no evidence to justify this fear) helps me get some perspective on the people who are terrorized by the notion of their local newspaper shuttering its windows and boarding up its doors. In Boston, where I live, the prospect of failure looms large at the Globe--a long-time money sieve--after its parent company, New York Times, Inc., began looking for buyers. The Globe is only the most visible example in a trend toward faltering print media sources as revenues decline amid the emergence of participatory media.

It's a fair bet that the failure of a big chunk of our country's newspapers won't signal the death of journalism; it's not the desire for news but the medium of choice that's unsustainable.

But the readers who are most terrified of losing the Globe are a lot like I am with Dell puzzle magazines: If the Globe stops printing, they'll have to turn to the dreaded Boston Herald (which really is one of the world's lamest newspapers).



If the Herald follows suit, people may resort to the Phoenix, the Metro, or a non-local paper; and the more papers fail, the less likely readers are to find the features that drew them to a particular news source in the first place.

As a kid, I lived in a house that subscribed to both the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press. I was drawn to the Freep for lots of reasons, from its larger comics section to its more interesting columnists (Mitch Albom, Susan Ager, Leonard Pitt) to its more readable print type. If pro-print media types were honest, they might say that the real issue is not (just) the potential decline of journalism but their deep affinity for the features of one newspaper or another.

Losing the small delights of a particular print news source means finding new sources of delight, just like I would have to do if my puzzle magazine of choice were to shut down its presses. I suppose if this were to happen, I might start reading books before bed instead, or crochet, or develop some other evening hobby to take up the slack. I might even be the better for it. The puzzle industry might be better for it, too, if it could find more cost-effective ways to deliver its product to the populace. It might, after all, be agathokakological.