Addendum: No Quick-Fix Models Out There

This little annoucement that employees of The Day, in New London, CT., will take a week furlough with no pay to deal with a revenue problem is a reminder that newspapers owned through various nonprofit arrangements or trusts ultimately face many of the same problems as for-profit newspapers. There just aren't any quick-fix business models for what is ailing the industry, though the attempts to at least throw around ideas can't be dismissed.

When Giving Up Failing Business Models Isn't Easy

A New York Times article on the vulnerability of the billable hour, which is how lawyers price their services, got me thinking about the search for new business models in the news industry(though one could probably fill in the blank with any number of industries). As the NYT article notes, the billable hour, which clients have often felt worked against their interests, is how lawyers assign value to the time they, and sometimes dozens of others in their firm, work on a case. The Times quotes a consultant who observes, “When not paid by the hour, lawyers’ approach to their work changes.”

Most discussions on the need for a new business model to support newsrooms proceed as if the news business will be able to continue with its own basic assumptions about itself once the new business model is in place. Leaders are currently in search of models that allow them to continue what they’ve been doing. There’s little acknowledgment that many aspects of journalism, from its tone to its coziness with the status quo to its blind spots when it comes to recognizing on-the-ground change, need changing, too. One of the more apt quips on this point came across Twitter this week. In response to a NYT op-ed in which two endowment experts suggested that such nonprofit financing could provide a new model for journalism, Jay Rosen, known for his persistent efforts to demythologize journalism for journalists and the public, wrote:

Striking how this Times op-ed on endowments for newspapers (a new social
contract) expects nothing new of the journalism. http://is.gd/hxg4 8:24 AM Jan 28th

Nonprofit ownership of newspapers, an idea with buzz in certain sectors of journalism right now, would require a different relationship with the public, one that would cause journalists and those they serve to examine expectations and more explicitly address what it is journalism is or should do. Any change in a business model would have to do that, making more conscious what was previously taken for granted, or seen as a right. People don’t give up on old business models and the privileges it gives them that easily, even when those models are failing. But it’s difficult to decouple the business model and the practice (law or journalism) it sustains without having to ask difficult questions about the role of the profession and what it owes society. Everybody’s talking about “business models” these days, but their problems are bigger than that.

Reflections on Soaring with Fidel

I never thought that I could get engrossed in a book on bird migration. After reading an article about David Gessner in The Writer’s Chronicle on a long train ride from Hartford, CT to Washington, D.C. last year, my interest was piqued enough to buy his book, Soaring with Fidel. An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond (Beacon Press, 2007).

As Gessner states in his introduction, the book is not just about birds. It’s about the nature of human happiness. And “humans are never happier than when they are chasing something,” Gessner concludes after spending a year following birds and people who follow birds.

The book is about “people and flight and obsession and freedom and empathy,” Gessner says. And, yes, the birds.

Ospreys are large, nearly eagle-sized birds with a six-foot wingspan, I learn from Gessner. (He also wrote a book about the birds prior to this one called The Return of the Osprey). They are known for their daring dives for fish and physical features – “dark brown masks and vivid brown-and-white wing patterns.”

Gessner, a professor of creative writing at a university in North Carolina, set out on his trek during September 2004. He had lived on Cape Cod for several years and got acquainted with Osprey while they nested during the summers on the Cape. Now he wanted to see what they did after the fall.

That migration path took him from Cape Cod to Westport, MA; Long Island, NY; Hawk Mountain, PA; Cape May, NJ; coastal areas of NC; Florida; and culminates on top of La Gran Piedra – a huge rock in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Cuba. And, then, on to Venezuela where many of the birds spend their winter.

Where does Fidel come into this? The BBC, apparently, was making a documentary on the migration track of the Cape Cod Ospreys with scientist Robert Bierregaard around the same time as Gessner started on his trek. Five birds on Martha’s Vineyard were outfitted with satellite transmitters so they could be tracked from Cape Cod to Cuba and beyond.

Gessner thought that he could collaborate with the BBC crew during his journey since they all had the same goal. However, the BBC producers decided they wanted to keep the story of the tagged birds under wraps until the documentary aired. This fired up Gessner's competitive spirit and he thought of himself as a rebel racing against the Brits.

Bierregaard, though, kept a web site on which he posted the movements of the birds along with interesting travelogues, so whenever Gessner had access to the Internet or contacted friends who had computers, he was able to keep up with the activities of the five birds. One, an adult male the BBC crew named Bluebeard, was one of the last birds to leave the Cape.

An attentive father, Bluebeard stayed in the area until late September caring for one of his young ones that couldn’t seem to get the knack of fishing. He would go out and come back wet but with no fish and then would sit on his nest screaming for food. Bluebeard would wind up bringing him fish. Gessner renames Bluebeard, calling him Fidel and has grand visions of meeting him as he flies over La Gran Piedra.

Do the bird and bird watcher/trekker unite? Well, you’ll have to read the book to find that out.

But, I must say that Gessner opened up a world I didn’t realize existed – a community of osprey watchers –experts and lay people , young and old, from New England to Florida, Cuba to Venezuela – that are all connected by their passion for the birds. Aguilas Pescadoras or eagle fishermen as they are known in Cuba.

I have become fascinated with these Cape Cod birds that migrate 8,000 miles on journeys fraught with peril to their winter homes in South America and back to their nesting places on the Cape in the spring. I’ll be looking for them in the coastal areas of Virginia and Chesapeake Bay area as they make their trek back north this spring.

This past fall as night fell, I listened…listened to the sound of life preparing for migration, more in tune with the rhythm of movement than I had been in past years. I, too, wanted to be on the move. And I’m somewhat envious of the Ospreys' freedom, their ability to travel over national borders and the restrictiveness of political systems that are hostile to one another.

More so than ever, I find the truth in a quote by the Scottish-born American naturalist John Muir that opens Soaring with Fidel.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Lesson of CNN's 3D Experiment: Multiperspectives are The Moment

Although I embraced the web much earlier than many others with a print background, I am still suspicious of the rush to use new technologies to do journalism. Such efforts often don't result in better and deeper information; you need ever-developing thinking, research, and writing skills for that. Expensive innovations like CNN's hologram reporter, which debuted on Election night, seemed awfully indulgent. But I see interesting possibilities for Microsoft's Photosynth technology, which CNN put to illuminating use on Inaugural Day. The on-line anchors urged people attending the swearing-in ceremony to send in photos they took during the moment Obama was sworn in( the masses of bodies armed with cellphone and/or cameras ensured there would be plenty). When the photos were uploaded into the software, the hundreds of different photos found one another to create a 3D panorama that allows a view of The Moment no one camera or perspective could capture.

CNN found a very smart way to incorporate user-generated content, transforming it into something with relevance for a broad population. Most news organizations haven't figured out how to utilize user-generated content creatively, so much of what they're getting is self-promotional at best. CNN has taken a page from the best practices of crowdsourcing: it found something that interested people and enlisted the troops to create a news feature out of that interest. Together, the crowd and the rest of us looking in benefit because we end up with a fuller picture of the event. While the vivid shots of the swearing-in carried by major news sites will be what is imprinted on most minds, the layers of the moment are visible for those who want to look. The technology helps to further problematicize photography and the notion that what one is seeing is "real." The frame of any one photo can only capture a fraction of what is "real," making what photojournalist and visual scholar Julianne Newton’s calls "visual truth" a point of contention.

What an interesting moment for Photosynth to get used on such a large scale. If there's anything people should get by now it's that we're in a time where multiple perspectives are critical for our survival and progress as a country and world. I'm hesitant to describe the technology as a metaphor or paradigm, but there's some instruction there.

What Would You Have Done?

For me, a film is successful when it leaves its viewers still thinking and talking about it the next day. Of course, this is a general statement; I am sure there are many really bad films that spark conversation for days on end. The Reader grabs the mind as it works its way through the story and leaves viewers asking one another questions about moral conscience and what any of us might have done when ordered to send people to their death during Nazi pogroms. Many of us have had these thoughts before, but the plot in The Reader, which is based on a German novel(Der Vorleser), by Bernhard Schlink, employs an unpredictable storyline of a middle-aged woman (Hanna, played by Golden Globe winner Kate Winslet) who, in 1958, takes up with a boy of 15(Michael) whom she forces to read classic works to her ( Homer, Chekov, Dickens); his payoff is great sex. The clandestine affair lasts only a summer, but the boy encounters his backstreet romance several years later when he and other law students attend a trial of former SS guards who locked 300 Jews in a church that caught afire from bombs. The prime defendant is the former sex-reading partner, and the young law student watches in anguish and struggles with his conscience as he considers but decides not to reveala secret about the former guard that might have some bearing on the case. The young man, whose older self is played by Ralph Fiennes, struggles with what he did or did not do through his life, though some emotional healing is suggested.

As Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioneers: Ordinary Germany and the Holocaust argues, the Holocaust was enabled by cultural collaboration with roots extending back centuries. In the Reader, we see the faces of female guards whose faces were recognized by survivors and who then become the face of evil for a guilty country, but many unnamed, faceless people were complicit in what happened. As one of the law students says, "everyone knew about it." This reality complicates the guilt of Winslet's character, but it doesn't make her innocent. She asks the judge, "What would you have done?", albeit in a manner of a someone asking about issuing a parking ticket rather than someone wrestling with leading 300 people to their deaths. The movie is satisfying, but not because it supplies any answers; it satisfies because it respects how difficult it is to truly understand how humans conceived, implemented, and enabled the Holocaust.

Welcome to Bizarro World:Fan Mail from Jail

I got a letter from a convicted murder serving life in Oklahoma. The envelope was stamped on the back with official notice that the letter was from an inmate--a warning before I crossed the path of no return and opened it. Apparently, the inmate read an article on the science of media bias that I wrote for Scientific American. Not sure if he read it in print or online. (Could he have a subscription?)He wanted to alert me to his writings on media and justice system bias against victims--something he knows firsthand because, he says, he was wrongly convicted. Although I saw a photo of my 'pen pal' online, I won't link to it, not knowing what sort of chain reaction it could set off. I got a couple of letters from inmates at Somers, a prison here in Connecticut, back when I was an op-ed columnist. I appreciate it when someone takes the trouble to write; it's just always a little surprising to know you've come to the attention of someone sitting in the big house. He seems to have an interest in DNA , which may explain his interest in science magazines.

A Deafening Silence

On Saturday, January 10, I attended the “Let Gaza Live” protest rally in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House and a few blocks south of the Hay-Adams Hotel where President-elect Barack Obama and his family are staying until they move into the Blair House and then onto the White House next week.

The rally and march, sponsored by ANSWER Coalition, Muslim American Society Freedom, Free Palestine Alliance, National Council of Arab Americans, and Al-Awda - International Palestine Right to Return Coalition, was an opportunity for me and others to raise our voices against Israel’s massacre of the residents of Gaza, many of them women and children.

Similar rallies took place across the nation in cities such as New York and San Francisco. In Washington DC, over 20,000 people took to the streets in the freezing rain to demand justice for the people of Gaza. Busloads of people came from as far south as Florida and from mid-western states.

The crowd was a diverse mixture of people, many of whom brought their children. Speakers included former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, Mahdi Bray, Executive Director, Muslim American Society Freedom; Rev. Graylan Hagler, National President of Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic Justice; Mounzer Sleiman, Vice Chairman, National Council of Arab Americans; Ralph Nader; Paul Zulkowitz, Jews Against the Occupation; Brian Becker, National Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition; Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, attorney and co-founder, Partnership for Civil Justice; and others.

Participants then marched to the Washington Post, where demonstrators protested the paper’s coverage of the massacre and its blackout of protest activities in the U.S. Unfortunately, the hometown paper chose to ignore the event.

I thought for sure there might be some coverage of the rising tide of dissident voices demanding justice for the people of Gaza where the death toll is reported to have topped 900, many of them women and children. I didn’t expect front page coverage but at least something in the metro section. Nada. Instead, the Post devoted space above the fold in Sunday's paper to a picture of President-elect Obama ordering a meal at a famous local eatery with the story in the metro section. The president-elect lunched with D.C Mayor Adrian Fenty at Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street. I like half-smokes too, if they're beef.

Fortunately, alternative and some foreign press have been documenting the growing momentum of protests against Israeli assaults on the civilian population of Gaza. Can mainstream media continue to ignore them?

Black Matriarchs (Sassy, of course) and the New York Times

Matriarch, of course, is an innocent enough word, generally meaning the elder female head of an extended family. That word has a lot of baggage in American culture, however. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's infamous report, which spoke of black matriarchs emasculating black men, is one of the more vivid examples of the problem with the word. It kind of makes one wonder where someone with sense and sensibility was before the New York Times ran its page one piece on Obama's mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, moving into the White House, at least temporarily. This was no surprise. As the NYT reports:

After all, Mrs. Robinson, known as a loving, tough-minded matriarch who rarely shies from speaking her mind, has been the bedrock of the Obama family. During the presidential campaign, she retired from her job as a bank secretary to care for the Obama girls, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, while their parents were on the road.


Bedrock? Okay. Matriarch? Media have come to preference this usage when discussing African-American families for which there isn't a father in the picture. Although the NYT is trying to convey the sense of Robinson as an anchor amid change, it's not the best word choice here--especially not with the "rarely shies from speaking her mind." In other words, a sassy black woman. One suspects that, as a secretary to a bank executive, Robinson's former job, the woman had a sense of when not to speak her mind; we can also assume she won't be doing it in the White House.

Reporters should always think about word choice, but they need to spend more time thinking about how certain words perpetuate stereotypes. (Read short item on bell hooks, see Moynihan report and search document for matriarch references.)

I have a running joke/bet with a couple of family members. We know that having Obamas in the White House will invariably result in a lot of articles in which journalists will seek to explain black people to America. I've told a couple of my siblings that the first time we catch a glimpse of little Sasha playing with a black doll, there'll be all sorts of national discussion about the choice of color for her doll, and surely questions about whether she has a proper mix of white and black ones, and so on and so on. Think I'm wrong? News coverage gets dumb like that.

Do ABC and BBC Share a Similar Lens on Iraq?

This plan by ABC to get its Iraq coverage from BBC makes me wonder whether the two will have disagreements over what should be on the air. Granted, the news out of Iraq right now isn't of the shock and awe sort, and ABC has a relationship with BBC that goes back to 1994, according to the The Hollywood Reporter article. Yet, although academic studies have found US and UK media coverage of the war in Iraq to be more similar than dissimilar, BBC certainly has an edge that attracts American viewers looking for an alternative to US TV coverage. It'd be interesting to track what ABC uses from the BBC versus what BBC puts on the air in the UK. Too many projects; not enough time.

At Some Point, Readers Got Smarter Than Their Newspapers

Others will have more useful economic insight to add after reading this Atlantic piece on imagining a world without the New York Times. Sadly, it isn't hard to imagine, or get used to. I say this as someone who has the NYT delivered each day and assigns it in the classroom. Yet I've long tired of Sunday Styles and other features that spin the world in the image of New York elites. Of course, it's not fair to overemphasize the consumption-oriented features running throughout the paper. The NYT is distinct among American newspapers for its ability to bring long solid explorations of Darfur and other crises around the world. And yet, for people who are really interested in the world, the NYT , or any one newspaper, isn't enough. Mainstream journalism, even the elite publications, never really caught up with the rising need for complexity and discernment of segments of the news audience. Most of the current problems in the news business have been pinned on the Internet--and technology and an outlived business model are huge challenges--but there has also been a mismatch between the general mental structure of journalism and the mental maps many people are developing about the world. There's always been this lowest-common-denominator group that salivates for news of Britney and Paris, and it would be an error to claim huge numbers seek intricate analyses of international affairs. However, there have always been intillegent people in the huge middle who would have stepped up and become more engaged if journalism had been smarter about it all. The acclimation to new news forms has always been a process, and in the same way that people got used to personal finance and health news, or fluff, they could have become accustomed to substantive, citizen-oriented newsforms if that had been the primary mission of news organizations. I don't want to make it sound so simple. The problems with journalism are not unrelated to problems with education and governmental institutions, but one has to start somewhere along the loop.