Chris Boese's Weblog

Washington Post Obituary for Mike Gauldin

It took a while, but the national press (AP and Washington Post, at least) have noted Mike Gauldin's passing. Since the link may go missing some time in the future due to the uncertain nature of newspapers online and off, I want to save the WashPo obituary here:

Link: Doris E. Gola, Michael G. Gauldin, William L. Siskos, Ora Belle Tamm.

    

Michael G. Gauldin,

Clinton Press Secretary

Michael G. Gauldin, 55, a press secretary for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton who came to Washington to work in public affairs after Clinton was inaugurated as president in 1993, died July 22 of brain cancer at his home in Burke.

Mr. Gauldin was the director of public and consumer affairs for the Department of Energy from 1993 to 1995, followed by six years as communications director at the Department of the Interior.

He then joined the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement as the director of public affairs. In 2007, he became a public affairs officer for the U.S. Geological Survey, a position he held until his death.

Michael Glen Gauldin was born in Mena, Ark., and raised in nearby Foreman, Ark. He served in the Army as a public affairs specialist in Colorado and Europe before graduating in 1981 with a degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Before going to work for Clinton in 1987, Mr. Gauldin worked as a journalism instructor and assistant director of information at the University of Arkansas and as a reporter and cartoonist for several Arkansas newspapers. In early 1992, Mr. Gauldin briefly served as press secretary for Clinton's presidential campaign.

Mr. Gauldin was a freelance commercial artist and cartoonist. His clients included newspapers, corporations and the last three secretaries of the Department of Interior. He also made American history action figures, including Native Americans and African American Buffalo Soldiers, and sold them online.

He was separated from his wife, Jane Catherine Harrison Gauldin of Springfield.

Survivors include his companion of 15 years, Jana Prewitt of Burke; four children from his marriage, Amanda Willett of Oak Hill, Va., and Patrick, John and Elizabeth Gauldin of Springfield; his parents, Harold and Fairy Gauldin of Foreman; three brothers; and two grandchildren.

-- Emma Brown

OJR's Robert Niles: Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists

Link: Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists.

Boy, there's some intriguing stuff packed into this short Online Journalism Review piece by Robert Niles, stuff that gets said on the way to saying something else, and those are the bits that give me pause!

They seem to have more ramifications for the world of writing and literacy than they do for the world of vocational training for journalists, although they are also in some sense tossed off, and could use more support than a hasty generalization.

So I figure, why not look in at them here? Let's look beyond the practical vo-tech employment concerns and wax a bit philosophical.

First, to Robert Niles:

Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists

By Robert Niles

What's the value of journalism?

The short answer is, of course, "whatever someone will pay for it." But a more thoughtful response gets at why people are willing to exchange something of value for news information.

Economics 101 teaches that if more people want something, and the scarcer it is, the higher the price. With millions of new websites competing for people's attention, advertising rates across all media have plunged, threatening news businesses that depend upon advertising income.

[Hmmm. Tell the Econ 101 argument to poets, and they may beg to differ.

While journalists have long had to contend with the idea that their best work has the value of the Daily Fishwrap, the thing that people pile up unread, throw away daily, or use to line birdcages, poets have lived with this deep knowledge, that their very best work, their best of the best, work that strives for standing the test of time, or ephemeral, contingent, and quickly forgotten work like performance art, has an economic value of precisely ZERO, since before the time of Gutenberg. 

Wikileaks Shuttered and on Hiatus

Link: Wikileaks: whistleblowing, investigative journalism isn't cheap | Blog | Econsultancy. [Photo by aturkus via Flickr]

Just another voice in the wind about the very real difficulties facing journalism right now. So many people have talked about a non-profit journalism sector, operating largely along the lines of public radio and public television, with telethon-like beg-fests that apparently turn up a fair amount of cash (much to the annoyance of anyone forced to listen to those interruptions).

So, folks reason, this model could be applied elsewhere. It goes back to the first warbloggers, like Christopher Allbritton, working for donations to get to Iraq and be an independent journalist on the ground in-country. I'm not certain that model even worked that well then.

Other "entrepreneurial journalism" ventures have also attempted to crowd-source editorial assignments, and support for those assignments, like the once-hopeful http://newassignment.net.

The inheritors of this mantle now fall to foundation-supported sites, or sites like Pro Publica (http://www.propublica.org/) or Global Post (http://www.globalpost.com/), sites that seem to want to create a new syndication model for longer form journalists along the lines of what the agencies like Black Star or Magnum did for photojournalists once upon a time, only without the high demand of a glossy magazine industry beast that needed feeding.

Then there's the sponsorship of the Knight Foundation, with the News Challenge for entrepreneurial journalism (http://www.newschallenge.org/).

A cautionary tale as social media sites and platforms inevitably rise and fall

Link:  FT.com / Reportage - The rise and fall of MySpace.

I've been around the social media block long enough (Geocities, Friendster, Tribe.net, anyone?), and this seems to apply to the seemingly "invincible" search engines as well (WebCrawler, AltaVista?): the one thing that seems as constant as death and taxes online is that the social sphere (the wisdom of crowds or mob rule) is fickle.

You may be up one day, but most surely, a day will come when you will be down (think about it, Blackboard!).

So while I never really got into MySpace, the larger story of the MySpace failure is a cautionary tale for any 800 pound gorilla entertaining dreams of invincible bigness.

This Financial Times article dissects the failures of the early leader dancing on the tensions between interactive communication models and mass media communication models, as News Corp tycoons demanded MySpace scale up to mass media audiences and oblivious mass media behaviors, effectively killing their own golden goose.

But is that what killed the MySpace social ecosystem?

(Note, it is not really dead, but it is acknowledged in this article that its 100M users are no longer contesting Facebook for leadership at 300M users.)

One could argue that as surely as MySpace rose, it would also fall, as surely as a small town church will split into two churches, as surely as Friendster begat Tribe begat MySpace begat Facebook (which will begat ???).

But back when this question of ascendancy between MySpace and Facebook was still in more open contention, I never once doubted Facebook would come out on top (and this wasn't just because MySpace often resembled the old Geocities pages either!).

But people argued with me. And I knew they were wrong, despite their very earnest and rational arguments, proofs, numbers.

It bugs me: How did I know they were wrong? I am wont to reflect on these things. I wouldn't just  cite my online research background in social ecosystems, user experience design work, or some other thing from my resume' (an argument based on authority or expertise, which seems to be a cheat in this instance, since I have never designed a site as successful as MySpace or Facebook).

So truisms and arguments from authority or expertise don't count, at least for this exercise.

So how did I just KNOW? How did all those other 300M users just know? What did we know?

Jonathan Zittrain warns: Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms

Link: Zittrain: Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms - GigaOM.

I love it when Jonathan Zittrain weighs in on things. Loved his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, and mostly what he says here expands on ideas in there, focused on the platform side of things, and the growing lack of "generativity" and openness in the newer platforms coming out, like the iPhone and Kindle.

So if you haven't read the book, here's some pithy bits as summarized by Liz Gannes:

Imagine, if you will, that you bought a cloud-enabled toaster. And that one day, you got a sudden in-home upgrade to three toast slots from two. Then, just as suddenly, the new feature addition was rolled back. So you were left with two slots and some smushed toast. And then your toaster decided it wanted to start serving orange juice.

You don’t truly own the toaster — rather, according to Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, “You entered into a service relationship with a breakfast-oriented provider.” That’s the tragic and giggle-worthy analogy Zittrain uses to illustrate his worry that the cloud computing model gives too much control to platforms, which must be trusted to do good.

[...]

His audience included co-panelist Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, a company Zittrain pinpointed as being at the center of the problem.

For instance, Zittrain called Amazon’s Kindle a device with “an operating system crying to get out.” To an even greater degree than with Apple’s iPhone, programmers can’t get direct access to develop on the Kindle platform, he noted. And Amazon retreating on the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature and zapping of U.S. customers’ copies of “1984″ — despite a convincing apology by Jeff Bezos — show the company can beam itself down to make the device less useful when it chooses.

[...]

Zittrain also pointed to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where people can be put to near-automated work that makes them effectively zombies for largely non-useful purposes such as giving five-star reviews for devices they’ve never used. In this case he thinks government regulation, like the FTC’s new blogging disclosure policy, could be a good thing — at least in the sense that it pressures Amazon to police tasks on its platform.

[...]

Clay Shirky and Laura Flanders on the sacred and profane in social media

Link: Clay Shirky on Twitter and the social media revolution | Online Journalism Blog.

For some reason, GritTV on my computer doesn't match audio to video very well, so besides looking like an out-of-sync old Japanese monster film, this is a terrific interview!

The bit I really listened to and took the most away from is about three-quarters of the way through the interview, when Clay starts talking about the way the Pirate Bay lawsuit morphed into the Pirate Political Party in Sweden, with ramifications for the European Parliament. I am definitely going to run out (figuratively, letting my fingers do the running) and find out more about that!

Also (and this relates to a recent post/discussion we were having on our Scatter/Gather work blog), the rest of the discussion from that point forward explores some of my favorite themes about how periods of great growth and intellectual energy are released in times when the sacred and the profane exist in very close proximity to each other. Except that isn't really the way Shirky put it (although others explore this connection, what in the field of Rhetoric you find in Bakhtin and his talk of the discourse of the "carnival")

The simplicity of Twitter, of course, is its genius. It has the power to do so much by doing so little. But that’s not the only thing that’s simple about Twitter. The service itself was only intended to share 140-character messages with the world. Its significance is its evolution. Everything from @replying and retweeting to using hashes and symbols can be attributed to the users. It has brilliantly allowed users to define it – almost entirely. As Shirky points out, “Most of the uses of Twitter were not imagined by the designers of the service – they were managed by the users of the service.”

A telling smackdown for those who blame the "Great Wall" of Journalism for the field's decline

LINK: Andrew Alexander - The Stumbles That Led to an Ethics Blunder - washingtonpost.com.

The upshot of the Washington Post's ongoing influence-peddling (influence for sale) debacle is that some tone-deaf business managers and execs with some kind of distant understanding of journalism walked into this nightmare with their unthinking eyes open, somehow ignoring warnings (or hiding documents that would lead to the warnings) from the editors and beat reporters whose influence was being peddled, at pay-to-play dinners at the publisher's house, no less!

But what if that isn't the story at all?

With the rampant decline of journalism, there has been no lack of voices calling out blame for why newspapers are dying (duh, ad revenue is down in a Great Recession, people!), some of them claiming that the "Great Wall" that was erected in the interest of journalism ethics between a private company's business interests and the editorial integrity of its product was the REASON for the decline, and they've claimed journalists are not doing "enough" to contribute to the bottom line of the company that kept them fed.

That that journalistic integrity actually produced the product being offered for sale (and/or ad-subsidized giveaway) was little remarked upon, except as an object of derision.

They've claimed that journalists are not DOING ENOUGH to be INNOVATIVE in thinking about ways that they can PAIR their work with SALES AND MARKETING opportunities (as if those total sell-out Back to School "editorial" vehicles and their seasonal and non-seasonal ilk are not enough!).

So media critic pundits, many of them online media promoters, sprang up overnight, touting entrepreneurial journalism and more INNOVATION in the "creative" partnerships between the editorial side and the business side as the next big thing, the thing journalists have to be a part of, have to embrace, have to stop saying "No" to, because their always citing the Great Wall, the ethical divide between the reporter's eye and the business interest (always already being undermined, going back 25 years) had become a tired anachronism, something that was an overworn tradition, HOLDING THE BUSINESS INTERESTS BACK.

Oh boo hoo! Those poor business interests. They want to compromise the thing they presume to sell so they can sell it better. Are they just oblivious to the fact that turning their product into pure influence-peddled SHITE also makes it harder to sell? How frakking "innovative" is that?!

[Creative Commons image by Steve Webel]

Well, I could make that point until I'm blue in the face, but I don't have to, because the enlightened publisher and executive (and some editorial) staff at the Washington Post appear to have done it for me.

The greatest scolds as this scandal has unfolded have been some bloggers and many of those these media pundits who are also blaming journalists for not being "entrepreneurial" enough in their thinking about innovation in journalism.

And the scolds are all bandwagon-ish in their disapproval, as if this idea of an "innovation imperative" that would tear down the Great Wall had nothing to do with it. Why isn't anyone pointing out that the WashPo was trying to be "innovative" with their business model?

Probably because the Great Wall still means something, you suppose? Perhaps they would argue that the issue is one of degree. Erode the Great Wall by bits in the name of innovation, but, oh my, this goes too far!

But tell me, how far is too far?

LINK: Andrew Alexander - The Stumbles That Led to an Ethics Blunder - washingtonpost.com.

A Sponsorship Scandal at The Post

By Andrew Alexander
Sunday, July 12, 2009

The Washington Post's ill-fated plan to sell sponsorships of off-the-record "salons" was an ethical lapse of monumental proportions.

Publisher Katharine Weymouth and Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli have now taken full responsibility for what was envisioned as a series of 11 intimate dinners to discuss public policy issues. For a fee of up to $25,000, underwriters were guaranteed a seat at the table with lawmakers, administration officials, think tank experts, business leaders and the heads of associations. Promotional materials said Weymouth, Brauchli and at least one Post reporter would serve as "Hosts and Discussion Leaders" for an evening of spirited but civil dialogue.

I love what Dan Froomkin is laying out here...

Link: Dan Froomkin: Why “playing it safe” is killing American newspapers | Nieman Journalism Lab.

It is outrageous that this man was just let go from the Washington Post, and I am expecting further outrage to continue to roll around the Nets on this topic.

But in the meantime, this series he did for the Nieman Journalism Lab is just pure gold, and I want to think hard about it.

For now, here's just a few quotes that grabbed me from part one (emphasis below is mine).

I hope to add more on this and his other topics in the next few days, including perhaps some reflections on my own journey to these same conclusions in a year that for some reason kept popping up in my mind today: 1989. Geez, was that really 20 years ago? It was when I had my own personal moment of truth about how I would continue to practice journalism in my life, as a quest, a mission, an avocation, nearly a religion, as Froomkin describes in the paragraph I have bolded below.

Series:Dan Froomkin on news’ future

Dan Froomkin: Why “playing it safe” is killing American newspapers

By Dan Froomkin /  May 26  /  8 a.m. 

We’re all in a state of despair these days over our inability to monetize our journalism online the way we’ve been used to doing in print.

[...]

Our reporters and editors are curious, passionate, and voracious discoverers and devourers of information; talented storytellers; and smart people with excellent bullshit detectors. As long as human beings are curious about each other and clamor for trusted information, there’s a place for us out there. The Internet hasn’t changed that. In fact it’s increased the market for what we’ve got: The Internet highly values people who know things, who can find things out, who can distinguish between what’s important and what’s not, who can distinguish between what’s true and what’s not, and who can communicate succinctly and effectively.

But we’re hiding much of our newsrooms’ value behind a terribly anachronistic format: voiceless, incremental news stories that neither get much traffic nor make our sites compelling destinations. While the dispassionate, what-happened-yesterday, inverted-pyramid daily news story still has some marginal utility, it’s mostly a throwback at this point — a relic of a daily product delivered on paper to a geographically limited community. (For instance, it’s the daily delivery cycle of our print product that led us to focus on yesterday’s news. And it’s the focus on maximizing newspaper circulation that drove us to create the notion of “objectivity” — thereby removing opinion and voice from news stories — for fear of alienating any segment of potential subscribers.)

The Internet doesn’t work on a daily schedule. But even more importantly, it abhors the absence of voice. There’s a reason why opinion writing tends to dominate the most-read lists on our “news” sites. Indeed, what we’ve seen is that Internet communities tend to form around voices — informed, passionate, authoritative voices in particular. (No one wants to read a bored blogger, I always say.)

[...]

The right way to reinvent ourselves online would be to do precisely what journalists were put on this green earth to do: Seek the truth, hold the powerful accountable, expose the B.S., explain how things really work, introduce people to each other, and tell compelling stories. And we should do all those things passionately and courageously — not hiding who we are, but rather engaging in a very public expression of our journalistic values.

[...]

Photo by J.D. Lasica used under a Creative Commons license.

Steve Yelvington frames a tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages)

Link: A tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages) | yelvington.com.

Great post here, and an interesting frame for thinking about these issues. Not many mention the CNN.com topic pages (which came out with the redesign launched in 2007)... maybe folks aren't thinking about them because they are less well executed (I don't know if they are or are not, this is a newer genre that owes more to blog "carnivals" than anything else), or because they appeared BEFORE all this talk about topic pages caught fire...)

Anyway, it means approaching the informational side of journalism from OUTSIDE the frame of the inverted pyramid and more actually as technical writers. Isn't that interesting?! Summaries that give context. Unbound, decontextualized content that assumes the hypertextual link is the norm, rather than linear thinking and reading and linking. Fascinating!

What I think we may really, finally be seeing is the true modification of journalism and journalistic discourse for the Web medium, rather than doing the horseless carriage jive, the way early TV looked so much like an old time radio program, only with pictures.

Marshall McLuhan would be proud.

A tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages)

May 18, 2009 - 12:59pm — yelvington

Everybody is different from everybody else, and there are lots of ways to group people. But when looking at the audience of a newspaper website, there's one way that I continue to find compelling -- and troubling.

When we group users by frequency, we get something like this:

Our news websites tend to have a huge reach. This is the cumulative monthly unique-user count that we all like to brag about. It's the number newspapers tout when they claim they've grown total audience when print and web users are combined.

But this big reach is made up mostly of occasional users -- once, twice a month. Many come from search engines. Many aren't in the target market at all. And since advertising requires repetition to be effective, these folks don't constitute a very attractive audience from an economic perspective.

There's a much, much smaller component that's radically different from the big group. These are the loyal users, the people who come not once or twice, but 20, 30, 50 or even hundreds of times a month.

[...]

Many people still read home-delivered print (more than you might think). Print readership isn't directly measurable, but there are plenty of research tools that all report a decline in frequency -- and along with it, engagement with civic life.

On the Web, there's no home delivery -- you have to take an action to visit a website. The results are directly measurable, and painful to look at.

This isn't 1956, but we still typically write like Dwight Eisenhower is president.

That isn't a bad thing for everybody, but it fails for many.

[Heh. Great line!]

For the people in the small "loyal user" circle, it actually works pretty well. News stories tend to report incremental advances in an underlying tale that unfolds slowly, over time. If you're following along, the incremental story makes perfect sense. You might want more depth, more detail, but you won't want to be told what you already know. You won't want the background.

The problem is with the occasional user, for whom the incremental story may seem to be just so much monkey screech.

[...]

The topics page is the piece that offers the greatest opportunity to connect with the big circle.

[...]

Done well, the topics page provides the casual, occasional user with a gentle, almost encyclopedic introduction to the topic (public issue, person, place, thing). But the regular, loyal user benefits too.

Done poorly -- and I've looked recently at some topics pages that would curl my hair, if I had enough left to curl -- a topics page leaves both loyal and occasional users with one of those "WTF" moments.

The biggest dangers come from these sources:

1. 1.  Lack of a synopis that makes sense. Some sites don't even both writing a synopsis. Others seem to have assigned the work to interns from the marketing department.
2. 2.  Misplaced trust in automation. I found a USA Today topics page about the BBC. A bot had assembled it. Every oblique mention of the BBC was churned up. The page made no sense at all. If I want to run a search, I'll go to Google, thank you.
3. 3.  Inflexible formatting. A format or template should be a starting point, not an ending point. If your community has an awesome hip-hop culture, your hip-hop page should be awesome and hip-hop.

Arizona's 'Tucson Citizen' Reporters: Seeking answers to the paper's closure

Link: Our Opinion: Seeking answers? | Editorial.

You know it's bad when things get this grim. The losses of more than five dozen well-paying journalism jobs sort of pale in comparison to what a community loses in the form of its collective memory of itself and its history.

And as The Wire's David Simon has been pointing out to the Senate and to anyone else who will listen (Bill Moyers, Bill Maher), we are about to enter an inglorious boom-time for corruption, from the small town petty kind (how big the automatic kickback for the building permit or zoning change?) to the massive scale Enron- and Maddoff-style fleecing of civil society on a level folks right now probably can't begin to imagine.

Simon is also refreshing for pointing out (as I would also) that this gutting, this hollowing out of the journalistic endeavor began in the late 1980s and reached a kind of height in the flush, 30% corporate journalism profit days of the 1990s, when the corporate coffers were overflowing with carpet-bagger cash, and journalists still faced low salaries and almost constant rounds of layoffs. As they have since. You can set your watch by them.

Apparently the corporate media monopolies have deliberately set out to kill their journalistic audience/community-voice host.

 I've stopped posting on the topic as much because there is really little left to say, beyond rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic or "Thinking the Unthinkable" with Clay Shirky. Once you get there, you can rage, rage against the dying of the light all you want, but journalism as we know it is going going going into that good night.

Maybe I still have a little rage left in me, for the Kabuki Play of public relations material winkingly packaged as "journalism" that the hollowed out remnants of newspapers and other supposedly fourth estate enterprises will become, or perhaps have already become.

Chris Stomps Her Foot and Shakes Fist!

There. I feel better. For about 10 minutes.

Link: Our Opinion: Seeking answers? | Editorial.

Editorial

Our Opinion: Seeking answers?

Published: 05.16.2009

For those of you looking to this space for perspective on the Citizen's demise, for those looking for What It All Means - you are looking in the wrong place.

Excuse us, but we're a little too close to the situation right now.

Do you ask someone how it feels when a relative dies after a long bout with cancer? After all, we knew the end was coming for months.

But here's a revelation: When death comes, even if it's not supposed to be a shock . . . it's still a shock.

[...]

Those of us who have explored Tucson's, uh, challenging employment environment know we won't be making anywhere near the money we make now. Bottom line for Tucson: More than five dozen well-paying jobs lost.

But a newspaper isn't just any company. It's a repository of the city's collective memory and of our aspirations and hopes.

Healthy journalism equates with a vibrant city. A dead paper is analogous to the city's libraries closing - a chilling prospect.

• To all those bloggers and "citizen journalists" who, if you believe the Internet, are this close to reinventing the industry, here's your opportunity.

Now is your chance to cover never-ending board meetings, make Freedom of Information Act requests to dislodge facts from public officials, call sources - you have cultivated sources, right? - and otherwise do what we in our dying industry like to call "reporting."

To do it right, you'll have to work eight to 10 hours a day, five to six days a week.

If it sounds like a job, not a hobby, it is. But don't expect to get paid; apparently, that business model has been discredited.

We're rooting for you. Public officials need vigilant scrutiny if our dollars are to be wisely spent and public policies are to be sane and progressive. So good luck with that.

[...]