Chris Boese's Weblog

What's happening to journalism and journalists right now

You hear the news of the layoffs across the board, hitting the big papers, the big TV stations, the big chain media conglomerates (Gannett, Time Warner, Tribune Co).

But it doesn't really sink in until you understand an ENTIRE GENERATION of experienced journalistic talent is being lost. Yes, that was also lost in the late 1980s (I remember 800 people laid off in a fell swoop when the two Little Rock, AR newspapers merged, because that town wasn't big enough for the two of them, according to Gannett. That was repeated in Tulsa, repeated in Anchorage, AK, repeated everywhere). 

But the current purge is making the Reagan media deregulation, which ushered in the era of media monoculture monopoly, the anti-thesis of the "penny press" which, like the blogosphere, let a thousand journalistic flowers bloom, look like child's play.

Instead, the consolidation of the Reagan years left the media ecosystem INTENSELY vulnerable to a single attack of a bark beetle that seems to be wiping out dead tree media, among other things. And that was all in the name of protecting 20-30% shareholder profit margins in the 80s (not exactly an easy PR move to make, to tell all those people you were depriving of their livelihood that it was all in the name of profit margins that retailers and manufacturers haven't seen in decades).

The excuse now is that the gaping pie hole of the Internet isn't sucking up enough of the costs of print media, so to old media monopoly barons that means CONTENT CREATORS have to go. Because no one on the Internet craves news content and analysis, or topical or beat coverage at all, nuh-uh.

You don't think this is screwing up our world? Read the story below, and cry, not for this resilient laid-off reporter. Cry for yourselves, because we will all be deprived of ready access to his and other talented writers' work.

Except for that profitless, frictionless, RSS distribution system that is the Blogosphere.

All Hail the Long Tail!

Link: Gannett reporter made "independent" by noon: Former Gannett environmental reporter becomes "independent" by noon.

Former Gannett environmental reporter becomes "independent" by noon

By Bruce Richie

I started out this morning as a reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat. I ended the work day as an "independent journalist."

At 8:45 I headed over to Marpan Recycling to work on a story about the state's goal of achieving 75 percent recycling by 2020. That was the goal spelled out earlier this year in a comprehensive state energy bill. And the goal is about three times as much as the state is recycling now.

At Marpan, they're recycling about 2/3 of the construction waste that comes in. Concrete, metal, cardboard and wood are the main products that are sold to recyclers along with mulch.

Marpan's Kim Williams said the state could boost recycling if people purchased more products from recycled materials to boost markets. Starting in January, all construction waste now going to Leon County's landfill will go through Marpan first for recycling.

Upon heading into the office shortly after 10, I was called into the office of Executive Editor Bob Gabordi. I knew what was coming, especially when I saw managing editor Africa Price there.

I was being laid off, Bob explained, and he asked if I had any questions. I could have responded more politely but frankly I was annoyed. My job had already been changed three times this year, and now I was being put out of work. But we shook hands, they offered to help me and I offered to help them in the future. There was a modest severance package.

   Then I went home. I checked my e-mails. I returned a few phone calls. And I didn't know what to do next.

   So I ate my lunch and went to work.

   I went to the same state hearing that I had been planning on going to. But now I wasn't a Tallahassee Democrat reporter.

[...]

About 100 people attended, many of them from county recycling programs. Speakers chimed in with ideas about how the state could better educate residents to recycle or how it needs to create new markets for recyclable materials.

It seemed like news to me, but I was the only reporter there to cover it. And I wasn't even a newspaper reporter any more. Perhaps the other media were at the Environmental Regulation Commission meeting across town, where an important vote was scheduled on whether to adopt California's auto emissions. Or maybe they were not there either.

Earlier this year I would have covered the ERC instead. But my environmental reporting job got axed on Aug. 1 and I was reassigned to cover Leon County. Since recycling is inherently local, I figured I could at least cover the interesting concept of recycling 75 percent of our waste.

In this age of change, I feel certain there is a place for me to report on the important issues in Florida's Capital. Maybe I'll become a blogger, combined with some freelancing, combined with being on welfare. The reality hasn't really set in yet.

[...]

What gives me the most joy about the presidential election

It was hard to detail all the things we lost as eight years of cronyism and anti-intellectualism, the disempowering of expertise, research, studies, and specialists began. But isn't it fascinating, now in hindsight, to look back and compare the different outcomes from the radically different worldviews?

I know postmodernists like to take potshots at the Enlightenment, but like literacy, the Enlightenment gave an important base for the pomos to branch off FROM. The Bush "post-rationalists" were a nightmare of authoritarian relativism, and I am of great hope that some good academic types will spend  time exploring all the various aspects and contradictions and ironies embodied in authoritarian relativism, not just in its thought processes, but also in its outcomes, in the thorny knots in public affairs it tied us all up in.

Like "proving" absence, as when the U.S. demanded Saddam Hussein "prove" he didn't have WMD. I've revisited this conundrum recently, while listening to Ron Suskind's "The Way of the World" and "One-Percent Solution" on audio book. Suskind of course was the one who first clued us in on how deep the post-rationalist thinking went, with his famous quotation about the Bush Administration's loose association with the so-called "reality-based universe."

But the demand on Saddam to prove absence, which left me gasping at the time for its unabashed fallacious thinking, is made even worse when we see in "The Way of the World" that the British spy agency had turned an internal security officer high up in Saddam's government, an officer who was offering detailed and highly credible information about Saddam's WMD programs before the war started, but it wasn't the information the Bushies wanted to hear, so the source was blown off, not even used as an intelligence asset DURING the war.

And of course, Cheney's twisted logic that gave us the "one-percent solution" remains probably the most logically tortured post-rational policy in the history of the modern world.

But now... BRAINS ARE BACK! Yay!

Link: Goodbye, Anti-intellectualism. Brains are Back! | Newsweek Voices - Michael Hirsh | Newsweek.com.

THE WORLD FROM WASHINGTON Michael Hirsh

Brains Are Back!

After eight years of proud incuriosity and anti-intellectualism, we now have a leader who values nuance and careful thought.

Published Nov 7, 2009

For two days now Americans have celebrated the idea that we may have atoned finally for our nation's original sin, slavery, along with its long legacy of racism. We have rejoiced in the world's accolades over the election of a multicultural African-American to the presidency after nearly eight years of cringing in shame as the Bush administration methodically curdled our Constitutional values and sullied our global reputation as a beacon of hope. Every once in a while, it seems, we Americans do manage to live up to our ideals rather than betray them. Hooray!

I am just as happy as everyone else over all this global good feeling. But there's something else that I'm even happier about--positively giddy, in fact. And the effects of this change are likely to last a lot longer than the brief honeymoon Barack Obama will enjoy as a symbol of realized ideals. What Obama's election means, above all, is that brains are back. Sense and pragmatism and the idea of considering-all-the-options are back. Studying one's enemy and thinking through strategic problems are back. Cultural understanding is back. Yahooism and jingoism and junk science about global warming and shabby legal reasoning about torture are out. The national culture of flag-pin shallowness that guided our foreign policy is gone with the wind. And for this reason as much as any, perhaps I can renew my pride in being an American.

I'm under no illusion that Barack Obama will turn out to be Barack Panacea. In terms of holding major office, he's the least experienced president in memory. He'll probably screw up a lot of things, especially at first. The problems he faces – from the economic crisis to Iran's nuclear program – are just too hard. And I occasionally worry that in his eloquent eagerness to empathize and reach across cultural barriers, Obama may overreach in the opposite direction from Bush, stumbling into the appeasement of adversaries like Iran (whose buffoonish president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, practically invited him to do so this week by sending him the first letter of congratulations from Tehran since 1979). Obama must also guard against the sort of intellectual arrogance that characterized the "best and the brightest" of the Vietnam era.

But, frankly, these are all risks worth taking after nearly eight years of a president who could barely form a coherent sentence, much less a strategic thought. We can finally go back to respecting logic and reason and studiousness under a president who doesn't seem to care much about what is "left," "right" or ideologically pure. Or what he thinks God is saying to him. A guy who keeps religion in its proper place—in the pew. It's no accident that Obama is the first Northern Democrat to be elected president since John F. Kennedy. The "Sun Belt" politics represented by George W. Bush – the politics of ideological rigidity, religious zealotry and anti-intellectualism--"has for the moment played itself out," says presidential historian Robert Dallek.

[...]

One tragedy of the Bush administration is the amount of American brain power and talent that went unused, the options that went unconsidered, because they were seen to lack ideological purity. That era is over as we confront a desperate landscape—a serious recession and two prolonged wars. While he hasn't yet invoked Franklin Roosevelt, Obama seems to be embracing FDR's pragmatic approach in 1933 -- knowing that what the country may need, economically and politically, is not so much an organized program but a hodgepodge of bold experiments like the New Deal. "It is common sense to take a method and try it," FDR said back then. "If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."

[...]

And finally, we won't have to pretend any more, for the sake of civil conversation, that invading Iraq was a rational act. George W. Bush cited not a single study to justify such a dramatic move, nor did he convene a single strategic meeting to discuss it. (Did it ever occur to anyone to ask where the conceptual linkage between the rise of al Qaeda and the lack of democracy in the Arab world came from? The answer is: nowhere. No such study exists.) In order to sell this neck-wrenching and nonsensical shift away from the actual culprits of 9/11—al Qaeda--to the American public, Bush then broadened the grim and necessary war in Afghanistan into the strategic monstrosity we now routinely refer to as the "global war on terror." Because this became the official ideology of his administration, and because so many major media pundits and Democrats also persuaded themselves it was valid, we've all felt compelled to pay deference to it.

[That will be the hangover from the Bush Administration, all the various ingrained media genuflections to anti-logic by repetition and party-line marching, almost like a series of verbal tics that suddenly and radically become absurd posturing, in an instant, in a blinking of an eye, as the exposed spin-fiction no longer holds power, no longer carries force beyond the exigencies of currying favor with an Emperor's New Clothes administration no longer in power.

I wonder if some in the media will even notice that they are waking up from a bad dream. I imagine there will be some, the true sophistic media relativists (as opposed to the authoritarian relativists on the right) who will simply move their tape recorders to the other side of the political spectrum and transcribe as faithfully from that power group as it did from the anti-intellectual power group, without parsing that arguments are now supported by real studies, by policy papers, by entire meta-ethical schools of thought that have been subjected to critical review, replicable data, and comparative historical outcomes. There will be some in the media, I suppose, who won't even notice the difference. But some will.]

But now President-to-be Obama, who first came to national attention back in 2002 arguing that Iraq was a "dumb" war unrelated to the real fight against al Qaeda (a fact now borne out by the resurgence of the Taliban in the only battlefront that ever really counted, Afghanistan and Pakistan), will dictate a new reality in Washington. The "media elites" who've managed to escape whipping for their strategic blindness will have to quietly acknowledge this reality, even if they can't bring themselves to admit their errors. Victors, it is said, write the history. Obama is now about to write America's new history. Unless I mistake my man, its theme will be that reason and sense and that cardinal American virtue--pragmatism--are going to rule once again. And that's really something to celebrate.

About 2,000 people celebrating in my neighborhood

My neighbor Dave was out surfing the crowd that centered around Madiba restaurant in Fort Greene (about a block or two from my house) and flowed through the street and down to Fort Greene Park. I was already in my jammies and couldn't drag myself away from the TV coverage of the big party in Chicago at Grant Park. A VERY emotional night, and now, a whole new world to walk around in! What an amazing time to be alive!

Photos by David Malouf

 

Rachel Maddow: Another silly fan gushing, but what great stuff to gush about!

Great New York magazine profile of Rachel Maddow, officially out tomorrow, I guess, but so many good lines and pithy observations that I just had to pull out my favorite bits here, so you will be certain not to miss them.

(FWIW: I also gushed previously, with pictures, when MSNBC first launched Maddow's new show)

I didn't write any of this, but am excerpting from Jessica Pressler's great story, and maybe adding my own snarky comments.

Link: The Secret to Rachel Maddow's Success -- New York Magazine.

The Dr. Maddow Show

The secret to the success of a wonky lesbian pundit with no TV experience? A Ph.D. from Oxford, a dry sense of humor, and the ability to be nice to Pat Buchanan.

By Jessica Pressler Published Nov  2, 2008

Ever heard of something called Dada?”

Rachel Maddow is trying to make an analogy. It’s mid-October, two weeks before the election, and the MSNBC host is comparing the McCain campaign’s recent fixation on “Joe the Plumber” to the anti-bourgeois cultural movement of the early-twentieth century. But this is prime time, and Maddow first has to define Dadaism in as colloquial a way as possible. This is something of a challenge considering she only has about twelve seconds.

“Deliberately being irrational, rejecting standard assumptions about beauty or organization or logic,” she begins. “It’s an anti-aesthetic statement about the lameness of the status quo … kind of?” She twists her face into a cartoon grimace that morphs into a wide smile. “Why am I trying to explain Dadaism on a cable news show thirteen days from this big, giant, historic, crazy, important election that we’re about to have?” she asks with a self-deprecating laugh, as she recognizes the Dadaishness of her own quest. “Because that’s what I found myself Googling today, in search of a way to make sense of the latest McCain-Palin campaign ad!”

It’s hard to imagine many other cable news hosts going down that particular rabbit hole. (Can you picture Glenn Beck referring to the existentialists to make a point?)

[Yeah, but Glenn Beck is finally and fully OFF CNN's Headline News, and good riddance! That racist creephead was easily my biggest source of embarrassment while I was working there (although the Natalie Holloway non-story comes in a close second). But meanwhile, Beck goeth happily to Fox News, and gets replaced by... wait for it, wait for it! Another out-lesbian celebrity-crime broadcaster! What programming genius!]

But then again, Rachel Maddow is not like other cable news hosts. A self-described butch lesbian with short hair and black-rimmed glasses, off-camera she resembles a young Ira Glass more than the helmet-headed anchoresses and Fox fembots who populate television news. Doing the press rounds when MSNBC first announced her show in August, she’d show up to interviews looking like, she says, “a 14-year-old boy” in puffy Samantha Ronson sneakers with iPod headphones dangling from her ears—but then she’d easily segue into an informed foreign- policy or economic discussion that ended with a Daily Show–worthy punch line. Her résumé is similarly unexpected: A Rhodes scholar and an Oxford Ph.D., she’s done stints as an AIDS activist, barista, landscaper, Air America host, and mascot in an inflatable calculator suit. She’s a civics geek who reads comic books, goes to monster-truck rallies, likes to fish, calls herself an “amateur mixologist” of classic cocktails, and even Twitters.

[And I am now following those Tweets, most written by her producer Will, I suspect. Doesn't make me a stalker. Doesn't. Everybody on Twitter does it. So there!]

There’s something about the mix of personal details that is—to a young, educated, left-leaning, cosmopolitan audience—instantly recognizable. As one New York acolyte told me, “She is more like one of my friends than anyone else on television.” And her ratings have been astounding, especially in the coveted 25-to-54-year-old demographic. Maddow averaged a higher rating with that group than Larry King Live for thirteen of the first 25 nights she was on the air, enabling the network to out-rate CNN in that time slot for the first time. It’s an impressive feat, even given the fact that the show started two months before the election when political interest was at a fever pitch.     

“You come out of the gate as fast as she came out, it gives me incredible excitement,” thunders MSNBC president Phil Griffin. “We are stronger than we’ve been in twelve years. We have more swagger today than we have ever had. It’s because of Rachel. And trust me. The other guys see it. They are watching. And they are scared.”

[Hmm. I don't know how scared they are. More like relieved, cuz this breed of TV exec isn't usually known for his or her programming courage, so when one of them, oddly, sticks a neck out and takes a risk, the others can celebrate, cuz no TV exec ever lost a job for crassly imitating or copying a successful risk taken by someone else.

But the most interesting thing here to me is that Rachel defies imitation, because she is able to communicate actual SMARTS. And TV execs can try to bottle or imitate that until the cows come home, as legions of consultants rush out and prescribe all kinds of new formulas for new "smart" ways to deliver cable current events (can we still call it "news"?) content and water cooler conversation, but the "smart" has been so fully purged from this industry that you can only still find it in beleagered newsroom old timers, stubbornly holding on as young chippies promising 18-35 demo chippi-ness get promoted over them, over and over again.

So hey, Rachel, good on ya for showing that smart can be chic, and can pull ratings. What is bizarre is that you are doing it in a world where that very thought is considered a DEEPLY radical idea.

I mean, only in cable news (and I've personally witnessed this) can a writer be openly dressed down for taking a set of facts and writing a lead for a story, and by pure chance, accidentally use the same details and language in the same order as an NPR All Things Considered lead on the same story-- THE GREATEST SIN! If NPR did it a certain way, it is the sign of the devil, and we must write that same story differently, as a matter of principle, lest ANYONE remotely suspect any NPR-pointy-headed-wannabees were hired by accident.

Cable news likes to cast itself as the anti-NPR, and usually lives up to it, in much the same way teenagers think they are so independent when they rebel against their parents, without realizing that their behavior is still being utterly controlled by what the parents value, in the shallow opposition. It takes a good bit of time for a kid to grow up enough to develop real independence, and even then, some never grow out of holding views that are merely the anti- version of their parents' views.

That that kind of shallow reasoning had infected the management of a cable news channel at the time almost made me snort out loud, but I caught myself just in time, when I realized they were very serious.

That someone with Rachel Maddow's brains was even allowed into that world is remarkable in and of itself.

Yeah, but Maddow is my kind of pointy-head. Meaning the kind that can appreciate a fart joke! See the bold bit below.]

There’s not much of a dividing line between the material that gets slated for the TV show and what winds up on the radio. The second hour of the Air America show now features repackaged material from MSNBC, and even the original content is quite similar, with pet issues like national security and veterans’ rights taking the lead, plumped up with quirkier topics like comic books and News of the World–type oddities. “They’re both built around Rachel,” says Silverton-Peel. “Whatever interests Rachel every day.”

Maddow is reveling in the attention. “The most highly staffed show I worked at in the past had three people,” she says later. “Now there’s like all these people every day who are waiting to hear what I’m interested in, so we can turn that into the show.”

[...]

Insofar as there has been a plan. No one in Rachel Maddow’s life thought she would end up hosting a national cable news show. Her longtime friends and family members stress their pride, but they are clearly surprised at the path she’s taken. “Rachel, as I knew her, has always been about making a contribution,” says Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, who was friends with Maddow at Stanford and Oxford. “She wasn’t just about giving commentary; she was an activist. She wanted to change the world.”

Maddow likes to joke that her admission to Stanford was a “mistake,” but her professors remember the Castro Valley, California, native as a serious scholar from the beginning. “She was a brilliant student,” says Roger Noll, former director of the Public Policy Program at Stanford, “one of those that only come around every few years or so.” When she graduated in 1994, her undergraduate thesis—which explored the shift in the perception of AIDS patients from “the other” to “one of us”—won a medal for excellence. “I still send students to that thesis as a model,” says another professor, Debra Satz.

[...]

But at Oxford, Maddow felt restless and out of place. A few months into the program, she put her doctorate on hold, traded her Oxford apartment for a London squat, and became the general manager of a fledging organization called the AIDS Treatment Project. “Rachel took me to a public-housing project,” says Booker. “That was where she was hanging out, in this London version of a tough neighborhood. It wasn’t like it was a sociology project. Most Oxford kids wouldn’t have even known that neighborhood existed.”       

Eventually she ran out of money and moved back to the United States to finish her dissertation, settling in Massachusetts, since it was far away from home and relatively free of distractions. “I wanted to live somewhere where I would be forced to do what I had to do,” she says. She crashed with friends and took up a number of odd jobs to support herself.

She was scrubbing out coffee barrels at a friend’s coffee shop in Northampton one morning when the local rock station announced it was holding an open audition for a “sidekick” for “Dave in the Morning,” known for its wacky parodies of popular songs. Maddow liked the idea of “a new, odder job,” she says. “And anyway I had to support myself. I wasn’t like a trust-fund kid.”

[...]

The job mostly consisted of reading the headlines of the day and setting up punch lines for Morning Dave. “She was one of the wittiest, smartest people I’ve ever met,” says Brinnel, but not too smart for morning-show humor. “One day, we got into a discussion about farts,” he says. “And I just remember her stopping and going, ‘Wait a minute: There is nothing funnier than a fart.’ ”

But it soon became clear to her co-workers that “Dave in the Morning” was not going to be her last job in broadcast. “Not in an obnoxious way,” says Bruce Stebbins, a former co-owner of the station. He remembers trying to engage Maddow in a political conversation back in the late nineties. “I realized immediately that I was just like way out of my league,” he says. “She just had such a powerful intellect. I remember thinking, ‘What is she doing here?’ ”

[...]

“I do worry if being a pundit is a worthwhile thing to be,” she says. “Yeah, I’m the unlikely cable news host. But before that I was the unlikely Rhodes scholar. And before that I was the unlikely kid who got into Stanford. And then I was the unlikely lifeguard. You can always cast yourself as unlikely when you’re fundamentally alienated in your worldview. It’s a healthy approach for a commentator.”

[...]

Maddow first came on MSNBC’s radar in 2005, when she auditioned as a foil for the conservative Tucker Carlson’s show. Bill Wolff, Carlson’s producer at the time, was immediately smitten. “She was unbelievably prepared,” he said. “And she just killed him.”

[I will happily give Tucker Carlson the most credit for getting Rachel Maddow on the teevee, but despite his good judgment in that area, I have to say, it wouldn't take much logic to shred his political positions, as he usually only has two: repeating GOP talking points, or feigning outrage that someone taking a political position with more logical force and support than his would "stoop to that level" he deems as conveniently beyond the pale.

Now, shredding Tucker Carlson with charisma and grace when the cameras are rolling, that is a true skill to be admired. But most of my past freshman comp students could out-argue Carlson on a bad day, and about any grad student who has ever defended a thesis could run circles around his absurd non-logic. I'm not just slamming Tucker. I was forced to watch CNN's Crossfire daily for at least 2 years as part of my job. I can go into imitations of him on cue.]     

She bobbed around as a guest commentator for three years, appearing as a regular guest on Carlson’s show, but also on Paula Zahn’s and Larry King’s. At one point, she filmed a pilot for a weekend political show with CNN. “She seemed really constrained there,” says a person involved in the program. “It was like they didn’t know what to do with her.” The pilot never went anywhere. CNN president Jon Klein says it was because having an “obviously liberal” host didn’t fit with the mission of the network: “It’s like, you wouldn’t put The Sopranos on Comedy Central.”

[OK, the irony here is killing me. I'm vaguely aware of the time frame when this decision was made, and what we got instead from those rounds of "screen tests" at Headline News (the unspeakably awful Glenn Beck). Just think, back at that time, in an alternative universe, I could have found myself proudly working for the network that launched Rachel Maddow. I could have applied for staff jobs on her show. I'd probably be still working there to this day, if that had been the case. Life could have been completely and inalterably different. Don't pinch me. I might wake up!]

Still, she kept at it. “I think deep down, Rachel knows that this is something she has to do,” says her former radio co-host Chuck D. “She kind of looks at the television and thinks, I know that’s something I have to do well. Sometimes it’s not up to you.”

Her break came when Carlson’s show was canceled last year and Olbermann asked her to appear more frequently on Countdown. He admired the way Maddow had excoriated Carlson on his own turf, punctuating her arguments with a friendly laugh, like an athlete offering her hand to the loser after a winning game. “We were friends from the start,” says Olbermann. “Our worldviews overlap.”

[...]

Most people would obsess over the competition—Olbermann’s fixation with Bill O’Reilly ignited his career. But Maddow says she doesn’t want to absorb any “homogenizing influences.” She recognizes that part of her on-air charm comes from being unschooled enough to take risks: to explain Dada, or spend 22 seconds reading from John Hodgman’s book, or lavish airtime on Zimbabwe’s new $10 trillion bill. She gets her information mostly from the Internet, then picks what she thinks is interesting.

[I'm really being silly here, but I can't help noticing similarities. Besides my own love of fart jokes (and of putting fart jokes in inappropriate places), this is also what I loved doing when I was at CNN, working on the headline ticker at Headline News. While the salary there cost me thousands of dollars in student loan deferment interest, I loved having a job that allowed me to do precisely what Rachel has leveraged above: to cast an idiosyncratic eye across the landscape of the planet, and pull out those nuggets that grab your sensibility with a sense of "what the... ?" My job on the ticker could be described thusly: read everything in the world, and pull headlines out of it. Unlike the CNN "crawl," they even let me put jokes in there. Even, when nobody was looking, fart jokes.]

This is not to say that Maddow doesn’t have opinions about cable news. For starters, she loathes the format that casts the host as a referee between squabbling guests and has vowed to have only one speaking guest at a time, because, she’s says, it’s more respectful. “You’re essentially watching for the kinetic activity of the fight rather than listening to what anybody says about the issue,” she says. “And I think what people end up cheering for is winning, you know, rather than getting something out of it. I think there’s more intelligent ways to entertain people.”

She also does not abide impoliteness: In March, when Pat Buchanan told Democratic strategist Kelli Goff to “shut up” on Dan Abrams’s show, on which Maddow was also a guest, she leaped in to administer such a deft, polite scolding—“Pat! I have never heard you tell anyone to shut up like that before!”—that the former Nixon speechwriter looked genuinely chastened. Buchanan, whose 1992 culture-war speech was a pivotal moment for 19-year-old lesbian Maddow, now frequently appears on The Rachel Maddow Show to provide conservative counterpoint under the rubric “It’s Pat,” which he most likely doesn’t know is a reference to the old Saturday Night Live skit about a gender-neutral character. “Thank you so much for coming on, Pat. Always a pleasure,” she says warmly when he totters off after their sparring matches.

“Even though I can be harsh in my criticism and I can be strong in my beliefs, I try not to be mean,” she says. “And I don’t have a very high tolerance for other people who are cruel or personally insulting in a way that I think is meant to humiliate people.”

[...]

Maddow counts Countdown, the only cable news she really watches, as an influence. “The thing that I think he doesn’t get enough credit for is how much information is in it,” she says. “That show is produced to within a half-second of its life.” As she talks about it, she becomes more animated. “Put a lot of information out there. People can handle it. It’s okay to use big words. You don’t need to dumb stuff down! You don’t need to make stuff simple and repetitive for people. If you assume that your audience is as interested in what you are talking about as you are, you’re going to connect with your audience in a much better way.” She might not be saving the world, but she is intent on making it a little smarter.

[...]

You know, Rachel, I think that last quotation is destined to go into my random quotation hall of fame, up in the banner of this blog.

But what I like best about it, besides that it says such an important thing, is that the statement is being made from inside the cable news channel hothouse where the very idea of NOT dumbing everything down is not just massively radical, it also challenges the basic article of faith in that media genre.

Can I just give that a big ol' WHOOO HOOOO!!!!!!!!!??

Rachel Maddow goes prime time cable on MSNBC

Link: Maddow Gets Her Own MSNBC Show | The Trail | washingtonpost.com.

Maddow, who leavens her barbs with humor, is something of a heroine on the left. New York magazine recently ran an item headlined "Why We're Gay for Rachel Maddow," and a Nation article said:

"Maddow didn't get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season's discovery isn't a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a Ph.D. Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist."

Congratulations Rachel!

It couldn't happen to a smarter woman, and the cable news bloviation airwaves are just a tad more intelligent when your voice cuts through the shit!

I haven't been able to get Air America in a while now, but I stuck with Keith Olbermann even as he piled on Hillary, just to catch Rachel and Pat Buchanon juicing things up with something other than the standard, tired old spin-meisters.

So Rachel, do something original! They'll probably make you salt your show with all the standard paid-for-hire talking heads (like you used to be, in your election drag, which was hot in its own way, but not like your non-drag shots--found this one at right on Facebook--hey, it works for me!).

Don't let network management types push you around too much! Standard cable programming wisdom is utter bullshit!

Here's some of my fav bits from an article in The Nation and around the web:

Link: The Nation: Rachel Maddow's Life and Career.

Mad for Rachel Maddow

By Rebecca Traister

This article appeared in the August 18, 2008 edition of The Nation.

July 30, 2008

VIRGINIA SHERWOOD/NBC NEWSWIRE VIA AP IMAGES Rachel Maddow reports from the MSNBC newsroom in New York City, January 3.

In a year bursting with memorable moments in televised political punditry, the first may have come on January 8, when MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow explained one of the quick-spreading theories behind Hillary Clinton's victory in New Hampshire, a surprise win that had knocked many of Maddow's on-air colleagues on their asses.

"You want to know who they're blaming for women voters breaking for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama?" a delighted Maddow asked co-panelist Pat Buchanan and host Chris Matthews, her eyes flashing. "They're blaming Chris Matthews! People are citing specifically Chris...not only for his own views but also as a symbol of what the mainstream media has done to Hillary Clinton."

Matthews sputtered dismissively, but Maddow wasn't done yet. "People feel the media is piling on Hillary Clinton," she said, "and they're coming to her defense with their votes."

[Happily, I was watching this particular show live, and relived this moment reading it here! But at the time I was clapping and cheering, doing my usual "Go Rachel, Go Rachel!" Guess I wasn't the only one!]

For Matthews, who'd been enjoying near rapturous pleasure over the presumptive early-season thumping of his personal hobgoblin, there could not have been worse news than that his own commentary might have paved the way for Clinton's triumph. Yet here was just this headline, delivered by Maddow, looking like Sylvester the Cat, practically licking yellow feathers from the corners of her mouth.

"I didn't mean it in a mean way at all," says Maddow over breakfast on a summer day many months and many MSNBC promotions away from that indelible January night. "But I knew that it was just going to blow his mind."

Matthews is far from the first talking head to get this treatment. Long before this primary season, clips of Maddow, an Air America host often invited on cable news shows as a ballsy gremlin of the left, zipped around the Internet. Her specialty was making Tucker Carlson's head explode, or getting under Buchanan's skin until all he could do was gibber at her about socialism. But presidential election cycles provide the hot klieg lights under which character actors mature into media leading ladies, and at 35, with fewer than five years of national broadcast experience under her belt, Rachel Maddow is the explosive star of the season.

[YES! I been saying it and saying it.]

She's gone from being a popular guest analyst on MSNBC to an exclusive commentator to a regular guest host for the network's prize pig, Countdown With Keith Olbermann. Now there is increasing clang and clamor over the possibility that she will get her own show on MSNBC.

[As of Sept 9, which Rachel notes is her 93-year-old grandmother's birthday. I'll be visiting my 95-year-old grandmother at the time. Maybe we can watch the first show together.]

What's remarkable about Maddow's ascension is not its velocity--Hurricane Katrina made Anderson Cooper in less than a week...

[For the record, I called that out here on this blog as well, and got tons of hits that week.]

--but the shifts in media it may demarcate. Maddow is one of the few left-liberal women to bust open the world of TV punditry, which has made icons of right-wing commentators like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. Unlike her beautiful, bilious conservative female counterparts or the cocksure boys-on-the-bus analysts, however, Maddow didn't get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season's discovery isn't a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a PhD Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist.

[Yeah, and by being a hell of a lot smarter on her feet than the average bloviating bear. I wonder what her astrological sign is? I'm guessing Sagittarius, with those truth-arrows she likes to shoot with deadly accuracy.]

All of which raises a crucial question: does Maddow's unlikely success, reliant on her ability to defy cliché and categorization at every turn, signal a move in punditry away from the thuggish and the angry and toward the lucid and sophisticated? Or has her powerful charisma and canny career management allowed her to break the rules--without actually breaking a mold?

[That's the $64,000 question! On Air America, she called herself "Amy Goodman with animal sounds"]

When we meet, Maddow is halfway through an eight-night stand filling in for a vacationing Olbermann on Countdown, and she is vibrating with energy from the previous evening. She believes she has three distinct responsibilities when subbing: not messing anything up for the show's permanent stewards, keeping Olbermann's ratings high and just being Rachel Maddow. "Trying to do it as if I'm Keith isn't the best way to go," she explains.

Maddow fulfilled all three responsibilities in her July stint, showcasing her obvious facility with the medium while putting her own stamp on the program.

[Without trying, that week I managed to catch every program. Go figure. Not since Xena: Warrior Princess have I watched any program so faithfully. I try with Battlestar Galactica, but life too often intervenes.]

Nonetheless, she still dwells on her anxieties about the mechanics of hosting--when to look at the camera, when to turn to the script--which she says Olbermann has tutored her on. "It's like rocket science, honestly," she says. "And I feel like I've got a learning curve that's like the Matterhorn! Holy mackerel!"

Of course, Olbermann recently told the Kansas City Star that his protégée mastered the technical stuff in about ten minutes, and that on the first night she stepped in for him, she didn't make a single teleprompter mistake, while he averages four or five a night. But Maddow's signature mixture of self-deprecation and gusto, her holy mackerel-ness, is as good a place as any to start thinking about her singular success. Everything about her radiates competence and a deft, bright careerism. She wants to succeed, makes no bones about campaigning for her own television show and yet evinces a regular-person charm and self-doubt that ensures you'll never mistake her ambition for bloodthirst or bullying.

Unlike her Air America founding classmates Janeane Garofalo and Al Franken, Maddow is not a professional comedian. Still, it's clear that she finds many of the characters lumbering across the tableau of American politics a total hoot. She finds her own story pretty hilarious, too. Asked if her television career is the culmination of a plotted path, Maddow laughs. "You mean when I started working on AIDS in prisons, was this where I thought it would end up? Yeah. This is pretty much it. Phase forty-seven of my master plan."

Maddow grew up in the Bay Area; she came out just before college in 1990 and became an AIDS activist at the epicenter of the epidemic. She earned a degree in public policy from Stanford before beginning work with ACT UP and the AIDS Legal Referral Panel. But Maddow had trouble breaking into treatment activism, which was then the rock-star world of AIDS policy. "It was boys' land," she says. "I knew like two women total who were doing treatment activism. And I didn't totally get it. I'm not like Barbie--'Math is hard!'--but it was a techie world, and I didn't feel like I could be all that helpful."

What she discovered instead was the nexus of the radical prison reform movement of the '70s and modern AIDS activism. It was an area where Maddow felt progress--like allowing secure hospices to take dying prisoners--was possible. "Dying behind bars?" she says fourteen years later. "Wicked expensive. And wicked stupid. And also mean. So let's make the hospices get what they want and also do the right thing!"

In 1995 Maddow traveled as a Rhodes scholar to Oxford, where she began a doctorate in political science, focusing on the intersection of the AIDS and prison movements. She moved back to the United States to finish her dissertation, crashing with friends in Western Massachusetts. "I wanted to live somewhere where I'd be unhappy," she explains. "And I have no interest in New England, hate winter, don't like the country, not fond of animals." More than a decade later, Maddow still divides her time between her home in Northampton, Massachusetts, and an apartment in Greenwich Village, both of which she shares with her girlfriend, artist Susan Mikula. The couple have been together for almost ten years, and Maddow calls their relationship "my proudest accomplishment."

[No way I could complain that much about Northampton, for most of the obvious reasons. I'd take a teaching job at Smith in a heartbeat, but the real lure? Living a stone's throw from Emily Dickinson's grave! I happened to be working on my doctorate during this same times, and making pilgrimages to that area fairly regularly, but mostly before 1996. Sorry if I missed you, Rachel. As in, damn, I am sorry.]

After defending her dissertation, Maddow picked up work on AIDS in prison again, as well as a series of odd jobs, from cleaning buckets at a coffee bean factory to being a handyman who didn't know how to fix anything. As part of her patchwork career, she attended an open audition to replace the "news girl" at the local radio station. She got the job and took a shine to the airwaves. When Air America launched in 2004, Maddow lobbied the network to bring her aboard. It did, hiring her to co-host Unfiltered with Chuck D and Lizz Winstead. When the show was canceled a year later, Maddow got her own two-hour weekday slot. "They had no business hiring me," Maddow says of the flier Air America took on her. "As it turned out, it worked out for them. I mean, I hope it did. I hope they're happy!"

[2005 in Missoula, Montana was, oddly, when I got totally hooked on my daily Air America Rachel Maddow fix. And then, mysteriously, I couldn't find it anywhere I was living again, until she turned up on Olbermann.]

Maddow is one of the only original Air Americans to be left standing after the company's rocky four-and-a-half-year history, and her mainstream success is an unqualified victory for the network. If she got plucked away by grabby television hands, it would be a tough loss. "We view her as a homegrown talent," says Air America chairman Charles Kireker, who has run the network since February. "We hope and expect to have her continue hosting a radio show on Air America for a long time."

In an e-mail, Maddow confirms her desire to host both a TV and a radio program: "If O'Reilly, Hannity and Beck can do that, so can I." Still, Kireker has reason to be nervous. Calling from the Netroots convention in Austin, he'd just come from a panel during which mention of a still-imaginary Maddow TV show prompted an eruption of applause. "We've seen the potential for greatness in Rachel for years," says Kireker. "What's so remarkable is that now it's coming so quickly. This election cycle has propelled it forward in a meteoric fashion."

No kidding. Love is too weak a word to describe how some people feel about Rachel Maddow. They lurve her, loave her, luff her.

[Heh. Hey, I resemble that remark!]

New York magazine's online Intelligencer column recently ran an item headlined Why We're Gay for Rachel Maddow, and the blogosphere is dotted with posts like "I'm totally gay for Rachel Maddow." The "gay for Rachel" meme appears to transcend gender and sexuality. Women, men, straight and not straight: they're all gay for her. In a year in which we have decided to become postracial and postgender, Maddow may embody a media in which adoring fandom is postgay.

That's appropriate, since part of the hypnotic hold Maddow has on her audience is that while she is one of the first fully forged stars of the "liberal media," her commentary is, in a funny way, also postpartisan. During an incendiary primary season, Maddow maintained an almost maddening equilibrium, expressing dismay and appreciation for just about every candidate. She was very hard on Clinton; her face still hardens when she talks about the 3 am red phone ad, which she calls "an abomination," and Clinton's war vote, which she says is "unforgivable." But Maddow also finds herself "frequently underwhelmed" by Obama. "He got it right in opposing the war," she says, "but his war policy stuff now is bullshit. It's total bullshit, and I've never been impressed by it. One or two brigades a month? You want your son to be in the last brigade?"

Contrary to widely held opinion, Maddow did not endorse a candidate in the primary. "I have never and still don't think of myself as an Obama supporter, either professionally or actually," says Maddow, adding that she feels "liberated by having a professional role in which it's probably better for me not to take sides."

"She is a civics geek," says Vanessa Silverton-Peel, executive producer of The Rachel Maddow Show. "She wants to talk about AIDS in prison and the Constitution and the war in Iraq. Policy is her main focus. Not winning elections."

[OK, so I want to marry Bill Moyers, but have Rachel Maddow's love child. Or marry Rachel Maddow and have Bill Moyer's love child. Think their spouses would mind?]

On radio, Maddow starts every day with war news. She focuses hard on policy and on the politics of the absurd. "I'm fascinated by the evil child actor twins that run Poland," she says, as well as inflation in Zimbabwe ("How many bails of hundred-dollar bills does it take to buy bread today in Zimbabwe?"). She's obsessed with the Iraqi national soccer team, librarians and cocktail mixology; she once said that she'd like to "professionally bully people about what they drink." Then there are her specialties: foreign policy, the GI Bill, veterans groups. "That's the most satisfying thing about being able to do my own story selection," she says. "You get to pick that stuff. And whoever is President or in control in Congress is not going to affect that."

It's ironic that Maddow, perhaps Air America's most successful product, has traveled through the looking glass of partisan journalism and come out the other side an electoral agnostic, a liberal in the purest, almost mineral sense of the word. She loves the country, loves the Constitution and loves what is moving about politics. A worldview shaped by these concerns, one that maintains a well-manicured distance from electoral Sturm und Drang, could be a powerful asset for Maddow and the rest of the left-leaning media, an inoculation against future tune-out should they get their wish--an Obama administration that could rob them of their fury-fueled audiences.

Maddow, who has not owned a TV since 1990, tries to limit her exposure to online and print criticism of herself.

[Whew! That means there's no chance she'll stumble on my silly gushing!]

If and when she lands her own berth, and with it a nightly viewership unused to seeing a brainy lesbian with rock-solid expertise on military policy or the IAVA, that will become more difficult. She already bristles slightly when talking about how she gets all the girl questions. "I love the idea that I am the voice of woman," she says, gesturing at her T-shirt, baggy jeans and Red Sox cap. "Look at me. It's like: really? The one woman in the room is really mannish." In real life, as advertised on her website, Maddow dresses "like a first-grader" and hypothesizes that her mild androgyny might have greased her infiltration of boyworld punditry. "I look like a dude," she says.

[No, that isn't what that "D" on your forehead stands for. I'm talking from one to another here.]

Of course, for her television gigs, Maddow gets coiffed and painted and dressed up in what she calls "lady clothes" to fit a more traditional bill, a process she says she used to "resist and get angsty about," but to which she has now surrendered.

[I'll never forget the first day I caught Rachel in her "Primary Coverage" drag. She looked great, but that's when I knew she was in the running to move into the big leagues, or rather, the bigger leagues of fringe rant cable. Heh. Hey, I did my dissertation on Xena, while lived on the cable fringes as well. I'm not putting it down. I worked for 5 years at CNN. Fringe cable and the nutball Internet. That's my life! At least no one will ever go to see Rachel years later at Sci-Fi Cons. The Spinsterhaven Old Age Home that will take the place of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, maybe.]

When I ask whether some of her signature habits--the fascination with the evil twin Polish dictators, the obsession with the nuts and bolts of foreign policy--will go the way of her chunky glasses and naked lips, she balks. "The only reason I get these opportunities is because of my sensibility," she says. "I'm not being invited to do these things because of my looks or my facility with language. What they're after is the thing you're saying I have to trade off."

She continues, "My instinct sometimes is to trade it off. Like, 'Oh, I'm in the big leagues now so I better dial it back. But they don't want it dialed back. They are booking me or asking me to host because they like what they see."

PRIDE! Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama stand poised on the edge of a historic opportunity

Link: Ending Her Bid, Clinton Backs Obama - NYTimes.com.

Link: Op-Ed Columnist - Bob Herbert - Savor the Moment for a Historic Campaign - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.

Link: Op-Ed Columnist - Gail Collins - What Hillary Clinton Won - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.

As the TV blowhards blather on about general mindless crap they scat with after political speeches, I just have to pause for a moment and savor Senator Hillary Clinton's concession speech today, as she suspends her campaign (wording there is very important) and unequivocally throws her support to Senator Barack Obama.

It was a historic speech, and one that had me clapping in my living room more times than those fake manufactured applause moments in the usual State of the Union presidential speeches.

So am I one of those "wounded feminists burning up the Internet," as Gail Collins called us above? The passions of the feminist movement are as much with me as they ever were, and they are the reason I watched every word of Hillary's concession speech today with my heart in my throat, and the memory of every glass ceiling I've ever banged into as fresh in my mind as ever.

I LOVE that the feminists emerged from out of the 30 years of history they'd been relegated to by the media and culture, as if they were as dead as the suffragists. And more important, I LOVE that many of those original women who won their right to vote in the early 20th century returned to the front lines again.

Oh, I've been in love with those wonderful League of Women Voters ladies for years, and I sit and talk with them at the polls whenever I find one of their often elderly poll-watchers.

Those crappy pundits say her "celebratory tone" in this terrific speech was an audition to be Obama's Vice President, which is about all they can see. Not surprising, most of them are men, and that is all they can see because that is all their sexist blinders let them see.

This speech was a celebration for women, and for all the other traditional and populist constituencies that haven't seen the light of day for so long, from people without health care, to the vanishing middle class and the threat of deep poverty that a looming recession brings for all of us, just one twist of fate away.

Yeah, I know as well as anyone that the Clintons always brought a mixed bag, doing whatever they could within the frame of politics as the art of the possible. I remember the awful disappointment, after that empowering and massive March on Washington in 1993, when the Clinton administration turned on the gays and lesbians who supported them so strongly, because GA DEMOCRAT Sen. Sam Nunn decided to single-handedly strong-arm  "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" into place in the military. It was a slap in the face, but unlike others at the time, I knew the politics of the situation well enough to know that if I were on the receiving end of Nunn's threats, I may have had to capitulate to them as well. Ironically, the Clinton Administration did better standing up to Newt Gingrich's Congressional strong-arming than it did to more Machiavellian Democrats in Congress (damn, I miss Paul Wellstone too! I miss him all the time).

I don't care about that mixed bag. Hillary Clinton will have my support whenever she wants it. She became, in the course of this campaign, one of the most courageous and strong human beings I've ever seen. I love that she stayed in the campaign as long as she did in the face of unfair media coverage and unprecedented chauvinistic media activism, and I'd have loved a brokered convention even more.

I love that she was smart like a fox "suspending" her campaign, so her delegates remain hers, for the history books, as a bargaining chip. All those MALE pundits seemed to demand she just capitulate without a word, with a sense of male entitlement that made me gag. I feel that such a demand that would have never been made of a man, and was never demanded of other male presidential candidates who went all the way to the convention with a much smaller and less historic percentages of the popular vote.

But what I really want right now is to find a transcript of this speech, so I can pull my favorite parts out of it.  I titled this post PRIDE because there is NO OTHER WORD for what I feel about this historic campaign by this historic woman.

That I met her 30 years ago in Arkansas gives it more poignancy for me personally, just as Bill Clinton's election in 1992 moved me strongly as well. (Arkansans never expect to win in the end... long conditioning of a small and often-overlooked state, because as much as we love the Razorbacks, they do have a tendency to often fall short in the big game. So when we win one, the celebration is bigger,  because the fight is as underdogs, with no real expectation of winning. Hillary's relentless focus on the White House without considering the possibility of defeat is a part of Arkansas she carries with her, because defeat is such a more likely norm, you always operate with that subtext, and fight like a wild boar--Go Hogs!-- anyway, no matter what anyone says about you.)

So PRIDE! Hillary won! This was not defeat, because Hillary won what needed to be won for us, as Obama wins what also needs to be won for us. This presidential race (and the GOP hasn't gotten the word yet, but they will, because there have been GOP populists before, real ones, not Rovian manipulators of Joe Sixpack demographic categories) for the first time in my memory is about candidates as true symbols for a movement of real people, not candidates as candidates, They are candidates WE, not candidates Me, I. This was brought out on Bill Moyers last night. Other presidential candidates in the past have had to go in search of a movement, but these candidates have found their movement, and for the first time in my memory, the movement is more important than the point person who gets designated to give the movement a voice.

Obama still isn't fully my cup of tea. Too young, too cultivated, too close to the machine (Hillary is cultivated and close to the machine as well, but we have seen examples of how she acts in a position of power in those circumstances, and we have no similar examples with Obama). But that's not enough to offend me. I do love what he's doing, and the symbol he is painting himself to be.

I just wish he'd drop the fake Southern accent word-endings in speeches, the eh- sound of the genteel plantation South (not rough hill country Ozark South), mixed with self-consciously-used preacher cadences. I understand why he is doing it, and what he wants to evoke, and I don't deny it does what he wants it to do. I also know Martin Luther King Jr. was criticized for some for having an "academic" voice and a "preacher" voice, and for being an adept code-switcher. I don't even have anything against that. MLK actually WAS from Atlanta, tho, and his preacher voice didn't sound so much like an affectation, since he actually WAS a preacher, and that's the part that bugs me about Obama's use of it. Blah.

But I will back Obama as fiercely as I back Hillary, not because of either one of them, but because I sense potential in the populist movement they given a reason to arise. That's the magic part, isn't it?

I mean, think about it. The feminists didn't go away by the mid-80s. They were still kicking around, even as attention went elsewhere with the failure of the E.R.A. Many built empires in academia, where they embraced post-modernism and acted as if all the activists had fought so hard for was automatically achieved, so all they had left to do was gaze endlessly into relativistic cultural navels, because everything had "always already" happened (the freaky post-conservatism conservatism of postmodernism), instead of fighting for deeply oppressed women globally, those multi-cultural women the pomos had theories for, yet whom they rarely actually encountered, except on Fulbright exchange programs (Fulbright--see? everything comes back to Arkansas!).

Hillary Clinton was still out there duking it out tho, going to the World Conference on Women in China in 1995 (to be fair, some academic feminists I know were involved with this conference as well).

But what is bringing U.S. feminists back out of the woodwork, out of the closet, out of the lowered expectations the revenge of the glass ceiling has brought them? The Chauvinist Piggies came out in force, and by god, that was OFFENSIVE. We'd already been putting up with a lot, but when the Piggies got up on TeeVee and went all oink oink, that was just too much. Suddenly Hillary wasn't just Hillary any more. She became all of US who had ever been oinked at by a Piggie. Just WHO did they think they WERE?!

That was probably what killed E.R.A., you know? A different time, but there had been enough of a reduction in general piggie-ness that nobody really had a bee in their bonnet about it. Nobody had their panties in a twist. It just lost steam.

Think too about the civil rights struggles of African Americans in the U.S.  It has a history of ups and downs since the time of Lincoln, but most tellingly, the civil rights MOVEMENT needed something to get outraged over, something to make them turn out in numbers. Jim Crow provided that public dose of bigotry in several different forms, from segregated schools, bathrooms, drinking fountains, lunch counters, buses and trains. The courts also "helped," as did George Wallace and Orval Faubus.

It is crass movement politics to seek out, create, or exploit such moments or incidents.  Yet Rosa Parks was chosen for her role to be a symbol, as did others in test cases created to push the courts to overcome or show their bigotry.

In this case, tho, this LONG primary campaign was the exigence, the bully pulpit that brought the Piggies and the Bigots out of the woodwork and trotted out by the unconsciously right-wing media, with all the irony that entails (yes, I was embarrassed by the racists in Southern states Hillary unfortunately had to embrace, because they are working class Democrats and do deserve a voice about real working class issues, but oh, I just had to hold my nose).

Do we want to abandon those folks to the GOP who will vote to chop the tops off their mountains and fill in valleys with slag? Do we want to blow off the real health issues the terrible pollution in these coal-mining areas are bringing to these people's children, just because they happen to have a cultural tradition of racism? Or do we want to keep them in the Dem tent, and plan programs that might lead to greater cross-cultural and class and race-based understanding and solidarity?

And no, I do not think the Clintons "chose" to play any race card whatsoever, or to adopt a Nixon-esque "Southern strategy." That is utter horseshit, and was manufactured by Obama campaign handlers or Rovian dirty-tricksters or god knows what, I but I know the Clintons and how they feel about African Americans, and there is not a racist bone in either of them, as I saw in things they did in Arkansas, with no national spotlight on them. There was a truly odd tone among some Obama supporters, who tried to use a rhetorical frame that anyone who would oppose Obama's historic campaign must be racist, by the very act of opposing it, and Hillary as his primary opponent must therefore be racist because of it. Besides being an absurd false dilemma fallacy, it is also a bizarre attempt to manipulate the dominant stupidity of tape recorder journalism, which has no problem repeating false dilemma fallacies unchecked and ad nauseum.

Difficulties will arise with trying to unify and deal with the cultural differences between African Americans and Hispanics in the U.S., and that may be a bigger challenge for the Dems than racist bigots. Dems will have a challenge healing that divide by bringing all into one tent, united for civil rights for all, especially the poorest of us. But is the alternative leaving the more conservative Catholic Hispanics to join with the GOP and be exploited and blown off, imprisoned and deported, abused and kept as a permanent invisible underclass living in semi-legal slave-like conditions?

That is an exciting opportunity for Senator Clinton and Senator Obama to approach head on, if they can unite their constituencies as a single MOVEMENT and a united ticket. I believe a united ticket is an IMPERATIVE to ride this movement to its natural next populist step.

Yes, Obama MAY be able to be elected to president without Hillary on the ticket, but what price must he pay to do so? He will not have the votes to lay claim to a full-on movement. But Hillary and Obama together can be the less important figureheads to something more important, the actual populist movement behind them, to which they both have made noises to the desire to give it voice.

Noises, but are the noises the real thing, or political opportunism, a motive that simply disappears once the goal has been reached? Hillary's speech today (and her actions of the past 40 years) lead me to believe her noises are the real thing. Obama's community organizing and superior campaign organization do give me hope that for him too the movement is more important than personal glory. He possibly could gain office without it (as most presidential candidates have done in modern history, running for the office as a man, not a voice for a movement. Not since RFK, I don't think, has a candidate run as a voice for a movement. Even his own brother did not. Jesse Jackson may have tried, but his own personality overshadowed the aborted attempt at a movement, the Rainbow Coalition).

But if they chose to lead the movement (and the movement must necessarily direct them, not the other way around, that is the mark of real movement leadership, that the leader is a wise servant of a populist moment), they could do something far more historic than just the amazing list of "firsts" that they've already compiled and will continue to compile. That would be the hope Obama would like to invoke in his "Yes We Can" chant for "change."

I had more hope from Hillary's track record than Obama's speech-making wind that she could deliver, but together, maybe they could keep the focus in the right place.

It is most historic, I think, more so than the first woman or first African American, as an emblem, to run for an office, to see a movement rise up around the exigence of that agon, the campaign struggle, a populist movement that needed the outrages of the Bush years to get their dander and gumption up, to be their "Jim Crow," to be their "Iron My Shirt!" moment, to make their voices heard.

That's the real reason my overwhelming emotion at this moment is Pride.   

Teach your children well...

Link: Our Boob Jobs, Ourselves: My Beautiful Mommy Teaches Kids Why Mommy's Face Is Suddenly "Prettier".

File this one under "How we raise kids today..."

Or under the "Child-bearing as disease" model of pregnancy.

Or just under "Neo-Gilded Age people still can't find enough to do with their excess wealth."

I love the headline the Jezebel site put on it, tho, and so I must quote it. I love how they invoke the feminist women's health classic, Our Bodies, Our Selves (I wish I still had that early edition of it. I wonder if it will ever be reprinted, for posterity? If the Boston Women's Health Collective is listening, please take note!)

Our Boob Jobs, Ourselves

, plastic surgery, top, tummy tucks, boob jobs, mommy makeover, nose jobs

My Beautiful Mommy Teaches Kids Why Mommy's Face Is Suddenly "Prettier"

Here's the perfect Mother's Day gift for your favorite surgically-enhanced breeder: My Beautiful Mommy, a picture book explaining plastic surgery to the under-8 set. Mommy is by Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a Florida plastic surgeon who tells Newsweek he was inspired to write the book when he saw parents coming into his office with their kids, who would become confused and upset when they saw their mothers in bandages. "Parents generally tend to go into this denial thing. They just try to ignore the kids' questions completely...With the tummy tucks, [the mothers] can't lift anything. They're in bed. The kids have questions." The hero of the book is named "Dr. Michael" and he looks like the dad in the Incredibles, all solid muscle and square jaw.

[...]

Newsweek ... gives stats about plastic surgery, including the fact that, last year, 348,000 women had boob jobs and 148,000 had tummy tucks, but what I'm wondering is who are these people?

There are so many articles about plastic surgery — women dying from Botox,  women getting boob jobs for their weddings — but I barely know anyone who's had surgery at all. Sure, a smattering of post-grad nose jobs have occurred, but it doesn't seem to be this all-out country-wide body reconstruction/ self-loathing that the sheer amount of press makes it seem like. Is it because celebrities get so much surgery that it makes it seem like the norm? Or do I live in a fantasy land where women spend their money on new books, not new breasts?

Mommy 2.0 [Newsweek]
My Beautiful Mommy

Is Amazon trying to monopolize the empowering "citizen media" Publish-On-Demand market?

UPDATE 3/30/08: A commenter below (A.F. Stewart) has left a link for an online petition against Amazon's new policy, and I wanted to make it live and promote it also up here at the top of the post:

Buy buttons have now been disabled, (PublishAmerica and Whiskey Press) and Amazon's policy is to do it to all who don't fall into line.

Voice your protest, sign the petition.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/protectPOD

Thanks for the link, A.F.!

Link: Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else....

http://writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html

I am republishing this courageous post from Writer's Weekly in its entirety, in order to help spread the word. That Amazon.com (normally quite supportive of key aspects of the Citizen Media Movement and its most democratizing elements) would attempt such a thing just leaves me speechless.

I hope I'm wrong, and I hope that the negative PR from such a heavy-handed move by a key gatekeeper rebounds badly and forces Amazon to allow the POD books the same rights and privileges as ANY published book with its own ISBN number.

Could you imagine Amazon dictating such a policy to any small university or literary press? What about selected political publishing houses devoted to giving voice to the Thomas Paines of our day?

Amazon made its name by becoming an online equivalent of our Library of Record. Google has now entered that arena, and the competition was necessary, but we can't expect the Barnes & Noble to take up that mantle, and I don't think it could; its interface is too weak and its devoted user base too also-ran. Many of the affected writers are turning to B&N as an alternative, and that could be a good move, if for nothing else, it could help B&N become a better true competitor to Amazon, but B&N has a long way to go.

Could it really be that Amazon is trying to bite the Long Tail that feeds it?

The Internet can be a truly open space only so long as our searches remain honest. Both Amazon and Google have an obligation to citizens of cyberculture not to go all border collie on us and use their power as gate-keepers at their leveraged choke-points of power as oppressive agents of social control against more democratizing forces online.

I hope to follow this issue more in the future, as I learn more about what's happening here, and Amazon's reaction to a public backlash. I should note that key groups particularly affected by this development are FANWRITERS, a massive constituency of fan fiction writers online who develop their skills and corpus of works in specific fandom communities. I have analyzed this social citizen media phenomena in my dissertation, and in the years since, have followed the careers of many successful writers who have "graduated" from fandom audiences to POD, often bringing their own quite sizable audience of fans with them. The effects of this move by Amazon below on the vast worlds of specific fandoms is just chilling.

The good news, which Amazon may not have realized, is that online fandoms are not simply intensely-focused affinity groups. As I also found in my dissertation, they are highly-organized activist organizations. While charities (on the positive side) cable television production houses and networks (on both the positive and negative side) are most often the targets of their organized activism (other sectors of politics and business should take note!), these fandom groups can easily turn on a dime and activate their bases against any target.

If Amazon should step back from this oppressive policy and I somehow miss it, please let me know, so I can also note the change here, when it happens. I have no interest in sharing this outrage in error, nor do I want to lose my faith in Amazon.

Say it ain't so! Please!

Link: Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else....

http://writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html

March 27, 2008

Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else...

BREAKING DEVELOPMENT: We were notified by a PublishAmerica author that her book was available for purchase through Amazon on Tuesday but today the "buy" button for her book on Amazon is gone. We researched some other PublishAmerica books and it appears the "buy" button on Amazon has indeed been removed from the vast majority of their book pages.

PublishAmerica issued a press release today that states, "PublishAmerica will not comply with Amazon's ultimatum, and will not allow that company to dictate who will print PublishAmerica's books, and at what conditions."

~~~~~

Some Print on Demand (POD) publishers are privately screaming "Monopoly!" while others are seething with rage over startling phone conversations they're having with Amazon/BookSurge representatives. Why isn't anybody talking about it openly? Because they're afraid - very, very afraid.

Amazon.com purchased BookSurge, a small POD publisher/printer back in 2005. Amazon also lists and sells titles for the largest POD printer, Lightning Source, which is owned by Ingram (the large book distributor). According to their website, Lightning Source serves more than 4,300 publisher clients and has more than 400,000 titles in their system.

You'd think Amazon's purchase of BookSurge might have made things a bit uncomfortable between the two companies. However, they continued to work together, getting books on demand to Amazon.com's loyal customers. Things appeared to be cruising along just fine, but perhaps not anymore.

Reports have been trickling in from the POD underground that Amazon/BookSurge representatives have been approaching some Lightning Source customers, first by email introduction and then by phone (nobody at BookSurge seems to want to put anything in writing). When Lightning Source customers speak with the BookSurge representative, the reports say, they are basically told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages will be "turned off."

The book information would remain on Amazon, and people could still order the book from resellers (companies that list new and used books in Amazon's Marketplace section), but customers would not be able to buy the book from Amazon directly, nor qualify for the coveted "free shipping" that Amazon offers.

Don't believe it? I didn't believe it either. I am Angela Hoy, the co-owner of POD services company BookLocker.com and publisher of WritersWeekly.com. I am well-known in the industry for my activism performed through WritersWeekly Whispers and Warnings. Over the years, we have helped writers recover tens of thousands of dollars in fees from deadbeat editors and publishers, helped them negotiate better contract terms, assisted writers in obtaining payment after their copyrights have been violated, and even assisted police in collecting evidence to prosecute criminals who have preyed on writers. I am also the author of 11 non-fiction books.

Still doubting the reports could really be true, I emailed an Amazon/BookSurge representative who's been trying to get us to talk to him by phone. John Clifford of Amazon/BookSurge called me at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26, 2008.

My first comment was to tell him we heard a rumor that POD publishers who didn't use BookSurge would have the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages turned off.

He said, "What? Who told you that? That's not true!"

I told him I'd heard some rumors from the "POD underground."

He said he'd previously tried to talk to my husband, Richard Hoy, the President and CEO of BookLocker. I explained that we had a very bad experience with BookSurge in the past and that he was, naturally, hesitant to do business with them again. (Google the words BookSurge complaint without any quotes to see other customers' comments about them as well.)

He claimed the people who worked for BookSurge back then are probably all gone (but that didn't explain the more recent complaints). He made his sales pitch, talking about percentages and such, and said many POD publishers are resisting their attempts to convert to BookSurge. Mr. Clifford also said BookSurge's aim was to help Amazon customers get their books faster.

What he didn't say was that Lightning Source not only packages books for Amazon customers in boxes that feature an Amazon.com return address label, but also drop-ships those orders directly to Amazon customers at Amazon's request. Hmm...

He stated several times that books not converted to BookSurge's system would be "taken down." Since that wasn't exactly what we'd heard, I asked about books that perhaps weren't selling well, that aren't good candidates for converting to BookSurge (books that would remain for sale through Lightning Source, but would never be converted to BookSurge due to the time/expense involved).

Contrary to what he stated at the very beginning of our conversation, Mr. Clifford finally admitted that books not converted to BookSurge would have the "buy" button turned off on Amazon.com, just as we'd heard from several other POD publishers who had similar conversations with Amazon/BookSurge representatives.

Mr. Clifford said authors of those books could participate in the Amazon.com Advantage Program, meaning they would have to pay Amazon $29.95 per year PLUS 55% of the list price of their book, as well as buy and then send those books to Amazon directly for them to warehouse and ship to customers.

I explained to him that we had more than 1500 books in print and that it would take quite awhile to convert all of those over to BookSurge's system. He said as long as the relationship was "moving forward" that the "buy" button would remain active on our authors' books that had not yet been switched.

Another comment Mr. Clifford made was that their eventual desire is to have no books from other POD publishers available on Amazon.com.

WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?!

I have to wonder if Jeff Bezos is even aware of what is going on within his organization. Here is Amazon's Vision Statement, taken directly from their website:

"Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online."

What it doesn't say is, "Our customers can buy any print on demand book they might want online...as long as we also get paid to print it."

Nobody likes being backed into a corner, and saying "do this or else" naturally breeds angry rejection and hostility. If we did agree to sign the contract, pulling and transferring files to Amazon/Booksurge would take an enormous amount of time and money. From the POD publishers we've talked to, and from our own experience at BookLocker, we could all be looking at a dire and immediate threat of revenue cuts if we refuse to sign the Amazon/BookSurge contract. Most importantly, there could be an outcry from and potential financial hardship on the authors, who are completely innocent in all of this.

In BookLocker's opinion, and the opinion of all the fellow Lightning Source customers we talked to, the Amazon/BookSurge proposal does not appear attractive at all (yes, we obtained the contract and the file submission specifications). Amazon/BookSurge would make money two ways on Amazon.com sales - first the fee for printing the books, and then 48% of the list price of each sale through Amazon.com. Lightning Source allows its customers to set their own discount rate for Amazon and other retail sales, and does not force POD publishers or authors to pay "48%."

Furthermore, it could take the larger POD publishers months to submit their book files to Amazon/BookSurge, at a considerable cost and number of man-hours. This makes the deal even less attractive. Finally, while the initial list of books submitted by POD publishers could be submitted to Amazon/BookSurge for free, the contract states future books would cost $50 each to process. The cost for individual authors to publish through BookSurge is considerably more, with an average publishing package cost of more than $1,000.

Since Amazon/BookSurge does not offer Ingram distribution (Ingram distribution is considered imperative in the industry for bookstore sales), any company that accepts the Amazon/BookSurge deal, who desires to keep offering Ingram distribution, may need to maintain two copies of the book files. Since the Amazon/BookSurge current specs don't match the Lightning Source specs, future book files, both interior and cover, may need to be formatted separately. So, they would have to pay double the setup fees and might have to do double the formatting work as well...or pay designers to do double the formatting work.

Likewise, self-published authors who believe they must have Ingram Distribution AND an active "buy" button on Amazon to be successful may need to pay double the setup fees (to a POD publisher AND Amazon/BookSurge), and also may need to create two separate sets of formatted files.

In the event where two versions of a book might be available, Mr. Clifford said the Amazon/BookSurge version of the POD book would trump (override) the version offered by Lightning Source on Amazon.com.

AMAZON WAS BUILT BY BOOKS....That Were Written By AUTHORS

When authors get wind of this, we believe they are going to be livid. Authors are also readers. They love books. We suspect they buy from Amazon in droves. I, myself, have been an Amazon junkie for years, not only heavily promoting Amazon.com in my non-fiction books for writers and on our very popular website, WritersWeekly.com, but also listing my own books for sale there, ordering other authors' books, DVDs and numerous other products as well. I pulled up our Amazon customer account and looked at our receipts. We've spent $1508.81 at Amazon.com in the past six months. Multiply that by the number of authors this will affect...authors who, like me, have a multitude of websites to choose from when doing their shopping online.

In addition, authors participate in the Amazon experience, via blogs on the website, by posting reviews about other books, and more, activities that help to continually make Amazon bigger and better. Authors are a loyal bunch! For years, they've been faithfully sending their readers to Amazon.com, again and again, even when they earned lower royalties for doing so.

It's not inconceivable to think that this group, if shoved against a wall like this, won't simply pledge their allegiance elsewhere. Let's face it, BarnesandNoble.com offers free shipping on orders of $25 or more, too. Authors can change the links to their book pages on their websites, in their ezines and press releases, and even in their email signatures to their book's page at BarnesandNoble.com. Authors can spend their own money elsewhere as well (as I plan to do). I imagine BarnesandNoble.com will be very happy to process the extra book sales that could result from all of this.

Amazon.com might also upset countless companies that have Amazon Affiliate bookstores on their websites (many authors have these, too!). If Amazon/BookSurge were to follow through with turning off the "buy" buttons for thousands of POD titles, customers following those links from other websites could be confused and annoyed. After clicking on a link, they would find no easy way to purchase the book directly from Amazon, and no way to obtain free shipping on that book, even if they're willing to buy more products to meet the $25 free shipping threshold. One would think Amazon must know the free shipping strategy works to upsell customers on additional products. That's why they offer it. Without it, these customers could have no incentive to buy more products because the product they surfed in to buy does not qualify.

One has to wonder if traditional publishers will be next? Will Amazon eventually require all books sold through Amazon.com to be printed by BookSurge?

Let's all hope and pray this situation is one huge, misguided idea from some mid-level management person and not corporate policy being dictated from the office of Jeff Bezos.

What can you do? Let Amazon know what you think about this "offer" by Amazon/BookSurge.

The names of their Officers and Directors are here: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-govManage

Amazon's Investor Relations Team email address appears near the bottom of this page: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-faq

Their address is:

Amazon.com, Inc.
P.O. Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226

Next, tell your author friends, your book buyers, your website visitors, your ezine subscribers and everyone else about this situation. Amazon.com was built on books. Books are written by authors. Unfortunately, it appears authors may ultimately be the innocent pawns in this power struggle.

~~~~~

[...]

Angela Hoy is the publisher of WritersWeekly.com, which offers free job listings and paying markets for freelance writers every Wednesday. Subscribe at WritersWeekly.com. She is also the publisher at BookLocker, which offers full-service, affordable print on demand publishing and free ebook publishing.

~~PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT TO AUTHORS FROM ANGELA~~

There is no reason to panic. We are not aware of any cases yet where the "buy" button has been removed. It is possible, after recognizing everyone's concerns, that Amazon might change its mind.

If they do turn off the "buy" buttons, though, not having an active "buy" button on Amazon.com is not the end of the world.

After selling books for eight years, it has been our experience that "chance purchases" of self-published books on Amazon.com are not the norm. Authors slap books up on Amazon.com all the time, don't market them, and sell zero copies. For most self-published authors, sales are almost always author-driven, meaning the bookstore link you use in your marketing efforts is what's driving your sales, not just simply having your book listed on Amazon.com.

We know from experience that the customer is going to buy your book from where you tell them to buy your book. If you want your customers to qualify for free shipping, you can send them to BarnesandNoble.com, and tell them their order might qualify for free shipping (many people don't know BarnesandNoble.com offers free shipping!).

Jury backs Blackboard Inc. patent claim against Desire2Learn

This is killing me just so badly, I had to post on it. Those who know me well know the reason why the entire saga sticks my my craw, beyond the reasons cited in the article below. I'm hoping for a drawn-out appeal process, perhaps all the way to Supreme Court, with a lot of mainstream media attention.

Here's a bit from the Chronicle of Higher Ed (I can't believe the content is outside their oppressive firewall... that's an odd change)

Link: Blackboard Inc. Is Awarded Payment From Competitor in Patent Case - Chronicle.com.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Blackboard Inc. Is Awarded Payment From Competitor in Patent Case

By KATHERINE MANGAN

Austin, Tex.

A federal jury in Texas awarded Blackboard Inc. $3.1-million on Friday, saying that a smaller Canadian competitor, Desire2Learn Inc., had infringed its patent for a system of delivering course materials online. The jury also found that Desire2Learn had not shown clear and convincing evidence that Blackboard's patent was invalid.

Blackboard's general counsel, Matthew Small, said the verdict validated the company's assertion, which has been challenged by many higher-education technology experts, that its system was unique when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Blackboard the patent in 2006. The office agreed last year to take another look at the patent after Desire2Learn and others challenged its validity. That review is still pending.

"They won this round, but the battle is not over by any stretch of the imagination," John Baker, president and chief executive of Desire2Learn, said in an interview Friday. "We'll continue to fight and hopefully remove from the educational community this very dark cloud."

The company is considering several options, including appealing the verdict, continuing to challenge the patent at the federal level, and modifying its software so it does not infringe Blackboard's patent.

Mr. Baker said he was "shocked" when the jury announced its decision after deliberating for nine hours over two days in the U.S. District Court in Lufkin. The trial lasted two weeks.

[...]

Blackboard, which is based in Washington, sued the smaller, Canadian-based company in 2006, saying Desire2Learn had infringed its patent and taken away customers that should have been Blackboard's (The Chronicle, Aug. 2, 2006). The Canadian company has been one of Blackboard's primary competitors since Blackboard took over another rival, WebCT, in 2006.

'Prior Art' Dispute

Desire2Learn, which has its headquarters in Kitchener, Ontario, argued that Blackboard's patent was invalid and should never have been granted in the first place. Lawyers for the company said that Blackboard officials were aware of similar technology, or what's known as "prior art," that existed before it filed its patent application, and that the company had failed to divulge that information to the patent office.

The judge in the case, Ron Clark, rejected that argument.

Mr. Small said Blackboard never claimed to have invented the course-management system. What the company did invent, he said, is "a course-management system where a single user with a single log-on could have multiple roles across multiple classes." For instance, a person who was a student in one course and a teaching assistant in another could log on once and access all of his course materials.

"It really was transformative for the industry," Mr. Small said. "We knew we were the first doing it at the time, and that's why we applied for the patent. People look at the technology now and say that's obvious, but at the time, we were the first, and we're very proud of it."

[...]

"This is a signal event in educational technology," said Alfred H. Essa, associate vice chancellor and deputy chief information officer for Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. "It means that the big boys are playing for keeps and will use their patent portfolio at any cost to crush and deter new entrants. As a community, it will take us a long time to recover from this mess."

[...]

Eben Moglen is founding director and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, an advocacy group for open-source software that has challenged Blackboard's patent. Mr. Moglen, who is also a professor of law at Columbia University, said there is plenty of evidence, presented both in the trial, and to the federal patent office, of similar technology that existed before Blackboard's patent was issued. He added that his group plans to continue fighting to invalidate Blackboard's patent.

"We see this attempt to strangle or force licensing of Desire2Learn on the basis of an invalid patent as clear evidence that Blackboard cannot be trusted," Mr. Moglen said.

[...]

But Mr. Small, the Blackboard lawyer, said the "highly educated jury" included two people with master's degrees in information systems, two others who were academic-computing administrators, and the city's postmaster."

Their decision left many in the industry wondering just how much power Blackboard now wields.

Peter A. Schilling, director of information technology at Amherst College, said colleges may decide it's too risky to use any course-management system other than Blackboard's. The patent, he said, is so broadly written that professors may be afraid to even use wikis or blogs.

Blackboard's president, Michael L. Chasen, testified during the trial that his company will not sue colleges that use open-source software to create their own online learning systems. Mr. Small repeated that promise during the trial and pointed out that his company signed a legally binding pledge promising that it would not take action against colleges that use free, open-source software.

[...]

It's that bold paragraph above (emphasis mine) that chaps my hide so completely. As I was reading all the court materials and blog postings about this, I found myself thinking the exact same thing as Peter Schilling above.

It is just chilling. I really don't trust what Blackboard says in the paragraph after that, simply because of the way this patent was set up, and now, so oppressively enforced.

Backstory: at one time I was working on an interface design (very different in its foundational model from Blackboard's, partly because I was so dissatisfied with the Blackboard products), an interface for which I also entertained the notion of submitting for a patent.

I still have those materials and that model, which is why I was looking at the Blackboard patent claims so closely, and while I still need to read more of the fine print, I have to say, if what they have is their criteria for a patent, there are quite a lot of us who worked with educational and groupware software interfaces who could have patented our work 15 years ago or more. What a scam!

I'm not quite sure why the prior art claim was dismissed so easily. I expect that to come back up again. I hope there will be more to come, and that this ridiculous decision will not be left to stand.

J.K. Rowling oversteps copyright... because fans are easier to pick on than academics?

Link: J.K. Rowling should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

The unique ways lawyers and authors try to stretch and distort copyright laws are reaching new levels of absurdity.

At first, I thought the article below was going to go toward a new argument about derivative fiction authorship (a case I believe can and should be made, but a more difficult argument than the point I want to make here).

Then, I realized that Rowling was actually suing what is essentially a critical VOCABULARY guide to Rowling's works.

What? What sort of absurd assumptions sit behind this suit? That the Encylopedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary should have obtain copyright permission for every entry they include for a term or an entry that has a clear author with copyright?

It gets even sillier. It appears to me (check out the article below and see for yourself) that Rowling and her lawyers are going after FANS of her works largely because they are a less empowered group, rather than target FAR BIGGER offenders of the type of behavior the lawsuit seeks to punish.

What offenders am I referring to? Why, tenured academics in the humanities, of course! There is not an academic in the humanities in the U.S. who has not received tenure specifically for writing about and critically analyzing (and professionally profiting from) someone else's copyrighted work!

If what these fans are doing is a copyright violation, then nearly every scholarly book in the humanities, perhaps every college student's research paper which cites as sources CREATIVE AND COPYRIGHTED WORKS is, by virtue of the reasoning in this lawsuit, is ILLEGAL.

What a bizarro world this is.

Link: J.K. Rowling should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine.

J.K. Rowling's Dark Mark

Why she should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon.

By Tim Wu

 Posted Thursday, Jan. 10, 2008, at 7:59 AM ET

As I wrote in October, over the last few years, the relationship between fan-written Web sites and the copyright owners of the content they draw on, if legally murky, has at least been peaceful. Once it dawned on media companies that fan sites are the kind of marketing that they usually pay hard cash for, they generally left the fans alone. But things turned sour in the fall, when the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site announced plans to publish a book version of its fan-written guide to the Potter world. Author J.K. Rowling and publisher Warner Brothers have sued the Lexicon for copyright infringement, exposing the big unanswered question: Are fan guides actually illegal?

[...]

At issue are the giant fan-written guides like the H.P. Lexicon or the Lostpedia (for the show Lost) that try to collect all known information on topics like Harry's pet owl or the Dharma Initiative. Rowling takes the position that she, as the original author, has the right to block the publication of any such guide. In her words: "However much an individual claims to love somebody else's work, it does not become theirs to sell."

But Rowling is overstepping her bounds. She has confused the adaptations of a work, which she does own, with discussion of her work, which she doesn't. Rowling owns both the original works themselves and any effort to adapt her book or characters to other media—films, computer games, and so on. Textually, the law gives her sway over any form in which her work may be "recast, transformed, or adapted." But she does not own discussion of her work—book reviews, literary criticism, or the fan guides that she's suing. The law has never allowed authors to exercise that much control over public discussion of their creations.

Unlike a Potter film or computer game, the authors of the Lexicon encyclopedia are not simply moving Potter to another medium. Their purpose, rather, is providing a reference guide with description and discussion, rather like a very long and detailed book review. Such guides have been around forever—centuries if you count the Bible, and more recently for complex works like the writings of Jorge Borges or The Lord of the Rings. As long as a guide does not copy the original work verbatim, it falls outside the category of "adaptation." And that's why it is largely unnecessary to discuss the more complex copyright doctrine of "fair use." Rowling's rights over the guide don't exist to begin with, so we don't need to go there.

[...]

Bizarrely, Rowling says that the fan guide would prevent her from writing her own guide to the Potter world. "I cannot," she said in a statement "approve of 'companion books' or 'encyclopedias' that seek to preempt my definitive Potter reference book. ..." To begin with, Rowling sounds entirely too much like a Death Eater in this quote. More generally, two products in the same market isn't called pre-emption—the word is competition. Why not let consumers decide which guide they like better? Rowling might object that the fan's guide will be strewn with errors or poorly written; but it is hardly the job of copyright to protect us from bad execution. And the fan's guide might actually be better, or at least different.

There are more ethereal reasons that Rowling ought not win. For reasons anthropologists will someday understand, volunteer encyclopedias have become the place to find what passes for our collective wisdom. Wikipedia is the clearest example: It may be wrong sometimes, but it is nonetheless a statement as to what we know. To her credit, Rowling accepts this and tolerates the online version of the H.P. Lexicon. But a general rule of the kind she is asking for isn't so generous: It would, by necessity, give copyright owners power over the content of Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias that discuss their works. Not the end of the world, but certainly a subtle form of thought control.

In the end, this dispute is about the current meaning of authorship. Rowling is the initial author and deserves the bulk of the credit, respect, and financial reward. But she has all of that. What she wants is a level of control over the Potter world that just isn't healthy. The authors of fan guides, like house elves, rarely get famous or rich. They deserve legal credit for their modest contributions, not the Wizengamot.

What bothers me above is that the author, Tim Wu, while making good points, is perhaps missing the most important point.

Wu is drawing some kind of unconscious distinction between critical study through works of of analysis and cataloging and documenting done by SANCTIONED and IMPORTANT author-types (a self-appointed class, as declared by the various academic credentialing or the established publishing industry) and ordinary people, hereto referred to by the diminutive label "fans."

He never mentions this distinction in the article, but he also never reaches or sees past it. What is the difference between a fan seeking to write the "definitive" piece of encyclopedic analysis and cataloging of Rowling's work and a tenured professor seeking to write the "definitive" piece of encyclopedic analysis and cataloging of, say, Emily Dickinson's work?

And no, the fact that Emily Dickinson is dead, or supposedly "canonized" by some massive sanction system called a "literary industry" doesn't count. Current postmodern scholars have easily collapsed distinctions between so-called "high" and "low" cultural products, distinctions that were only ever really enforced by repetition.

Further, before the advent of Modernism and New Criticism in literature, the PRIMARY "product" of literary scholars was a form of criticism known as "traditional-biographical."

That means if you wanted to be a literary scholar back in that time, you had two routes to follow:

1. catalog and link the author's works against a careful biographical analysis of events or aspects of the author's life, OR

2. catalog and carefully establish the exact chronology and literary development of various textual versions of the author's works, those first drafts that establish dates, the variorum editions that attempt to argue that Emily Dickinson used male and female pronouns interchangably in her love poems, or that Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night BEFORE Hamlet.

Oh yeah, and along the way, they'd argue over and create lexicons for specialized terms and metaphors, which, for authors such as Jonathan Swift or Lewis Carroll, mean unusual and otherworldly terms and situations, and the potential political points that were made through allegory.

Granted, literary criticism has evolved considerably since then, to the point of subjecting live and dead authors to psychological high colonics in order to analyze the symbolic systems that go along with the works (ala' Freud or Jung). Or they take apart the imperialist or foundationalist cultural assumptions an author makes (like Tim Wu above), or even just to do a micro-minutia focus on a single literary work alone, as if it doesn't even have an author, or better yet, treat it as if the work itself doesn't exist and only the reader does!

All of which FANS of ANY work can engage in and profit from just as viably as tenured academics, because the Commons is free for anyone to engage in independent and unaffiliated research, even ordinary fans, even (gasp) ordinary journalists, even ANYONE who gets up in the morning and puts her underwear on one leg at a time.

Imagine that. Shhhh. Don't tell J.K. Rowling's ambitious lawyers. Think of the field day they could have, if they were turned loose in academia.