The Raymond Davis saga in Pakistan is far from over, and I’ll have a piece sooner or later on the implications, broadly, for US-Pak relations. But there’s a meta-story that’s worth taking note of now: the coverage of the story in the Pakistani and international press. Essentially, Davis’ CIA status was being floated in the Pakistani press for several weeks before it ‘broke’ in the Guardian. It turned out that the New York Times and other American news organizations had deliberately held back the information at the request of U.S. authorities. Though a similar request was made of the Guardian, the paper’s editors and reporters refused.
As a reader of the Pakistani press, I’d seen the CIA claim, but in part because of the easy way in which the CIA is used as a bogeyman in Pakistani political discourse, I must admit I was skeptical of the claim until the Guardian verified it. As a critic of the Times’ inconsistent policy about withholding information for ‘the safety of the subject,’ I’m disappointed, but unsurprised, by their call on this one. Points to the Guardian for getting it right. For more on the details, this video from Al Jazeera’s media-watch show, Listening Post, is good:
The story is amusing coming on the heels of Hillary Clinton’s takedown of the American media at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week. Clinton asserted that the U.S. is losing the global information war because of the frivolity in American journalism: you don’t feel when watching American news stations, she says, that you are getting real news.
Problematically, one reason American news outlets don’t deliver enough ‘real news’ is because they comply too readily with the intelligence agencies trying to win that information war. Yet another example of misaligned agendas coming from the State Department and the CIA.
What do econo-wonks do for fun on the weekends? We play interactive deficit-fixing games online. Really. Felix Salmon has a good post explaining why some of the options the game provides–especially the Medicare cap–are unrealistic and why many of them are regressive. But the solution Salmon proposes (gutting the Pentagon budget completely) seems just as unlikely. My version is harsher, in that I take a scalpel to entitlements. But it gives a 60-40 tax increases-spending cuts balance that I’m more comfortable with the 70-30 Salmon has going. You can see my version, and make your own, here.
Updated 11/15 5:20PM: Also worth playing is the CEPR budget deficit calculator. A very different–ie more left-wing–set of choices are in place there. It’s pretty hard to get far on that calculator, for example, without a complete re-do of health care reform and two energy taxes–both at the producer and the consumer levels. That seems ridiculously implausible to me, but still fun to play with.
Two very different publications with very similar names–the Times of London and the New York Times–have been leading the charge within establishment media to try and take more revenue out of subscribers than out of advertisers.
The Times of London’s paywall, which blocks non-subscribers from reading anything except headlines–came down in July, and this month, News Corp announced that it 105,000 people have paid to access the site since then. Here’s the problem: we have no idea what kind of access they paid for. How many paid for desktop access vs. applications on the Kindle or the iPad? How many paid for a promotional subscription at a lower rate during the first few weeks? How many paid for single articles vs. for the whole site? Without answers to those questions, it’s impossible to know if the paywall is worth the dramatic crash in traffic that the Times has suffered. PaidContent did their best to sound cheerful in the rough calculations they published, but even they admit, the numbers look “a little meagre.” The FT, MediaGuardian and Clay Shirky were much less charitable.
It’s a pity because the Times’ redesigned site is a pretty sleek affair. But it’s a shame for another reason too: the Times paywall was not just an experiment for the Times but an experiment for the industry. And even those of us who agree with the Murdochs about next-to-nothing were curious about how it would work. Because we can’t get ahold of the details, the paywall can’t serve as a teaching moment. We know it probably didn’t work, but we don’t know exactly why, or where the failings were. Shame on James Murdoch for that.
Meanwhile, here in New York, the New York Times metered system is about to launch. I’m already a full print-and-web subscriber, so it won’t affect me, but one thing that is nice is to know that the meter–unlike Murdoch’s paywall–doesn’t shut out search, or traffic from blogs and other websites, which means I can keep linking to the Grey Lady from here. In that, it’s going to be a bit like the FT’s model (which I like). There’s more info on the meter and other things the NYT is thinking about in the most recent earnings call. [Worth noting: yes, profits are down for this quarter, but year to date, 2010 is looking to be a more profitable year than 2009.]
But here’s the interesting thing: despite all the hype surrounding it, the Times management seems to have already conceded that the meter is too soft an approach to radically change its digital revenue stream. CEO Janet Robinson told Robb Montgomery that she think the real paid content winner is apps. Assistant Managing Editor Gerry Marzorati told a conference in New York that the Times can stay afloat for awhile by hiking up rates on its print subscribers, and scandalized many-a-blogger by noting that many subscribers don’t know what they pay. I’m not sure, exactly, how the meter helps either of those strategies along, or why so much time an effort went into it if the head honchos don’t expect it to make a splash. Thoughts?
Occasionally, the Apocalypse Series has attempted to read the tea leaves and make predictions about the new model. I don’t believe–as other media prophets seem to–that there will be no more Big Media. Human history suggests that power tends to consolidate, break down and then consolidate again. I believe that the new consolidators of power will be organizations who can mix and match. It will be the people who can take the nichification that the web brings and use it to deepen rather than to flatten what we know. Read the rest of this entry »
When the massive data dump that was the Wikileaks Afghan War Logs showed up on my screen three weeks ago, I did what–apparently–no one else had yet done: read the whole thing. At the time, this seemed like Journalism 101. But by the time I finished [at the end of the week], I was more bored and overwhelmed than stimulated or enlightened. Because, as others had concluded by then, there really isn’t that much that’s earth-shattering in the logs. And I’ve been pondering what to say ever since . Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been exploring the Google-NYTimes–WaPo venture Living Stories, a site that aggregates coverage of particular events in real-time. As one reader put it, this seems like something news organizations should have done long ago.
As a consumer of news, I consider this a potential tool, but it needs to have a much wider array of news sources to be truly useful: my challenge as a reader today isn’t keeping up with the New York Times’ coverage of Pakistan; it’s keeping up simultaneously with the Times and the Post and the Journal and the BBC and the Guardian and about as many local outfits.
Because even though ad revenue from Living Stories is to go to the news organizations, Google is still powering the site and organizing the ads—they still have access to all the user data involved and that benefits them elsewhere. The more that all news organizations’ content merges on sites like these, the more centralized and more powerful Google’s data cache can become.
Moreover, Living Stories, or indeed any subject-based aggregation strategy, doesn’t solve the critical problem facing journalism today: if given a choice to consume content by subject, it’s likely that readers will choose to keep up with regular developments in national politics, hyperlocal affairs, sports and culture. Foreign affairs, state-level politics, and economics are less likely to receive sustained attention—everyone is interested when there’s a major intelligence breakthrough, a corrupt governor or a case of corporate fraud, but no one wants to the read the months of daily stories that lead to big scoops in these areas. And there’s no way to know, in advance, which companies or which states or which countries will produce that scoop—you have to pay, blindly, for daily reporting on all of it. Who is going to do that now?
I don’t think Living Stories does much to help us there. Like many Google products—Gmail, Reader—I like this one, but it’s unclear to me if its good or bad for the news organizations involved.
Virginia Heffernan’s column in the New York Times Magazine is one of the highlights of my weekend. It might be because she writes so wittily; it might be because I read the magazine on the treadmill and her column, which appears within the first ten pages, is often the last thing I read before I become too sweaty and tired to think straight.
But I digress.
Her column this week is about the Facebook Exodus, the impending backlash of users fleeing the site because they are frustrated with its increased busy-ness and diminished privacy. On the one hand, I think she nailed the trend. On the other hand, I’m a wee bit bitter since I’ve been saying as much on this blog and elsewhere for awhile, and I’m not alone.
The bloggers were quick to jump on the Times with cries of hypocrisy—namely, the paper is supposed to report “all the news that’s fit to print,†meaning all verifiable information of material significance to public debate. Having authoritative, first-hand knowledge that a journalist from a major international title has been kidnapped in a war zone certainly qualifies. Moreover, the Times reports extensively on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or on our government’s homeland security policies–doesn’t that give information to the enemy in the same way the editors claim publishing the Rohde story would have?
It would be possible—and indeed reasonable—to construct a code of professional conduct that drew a line between the ethics of reporting on oneself and the ethics of reporting on the government, but the Times would have to come out and disclose such a code and it would have to be water-tight and consistent with industry norms and standards.
One option would be to define “oneself†as the media writ large: journalists are obligated to report on diplomats and soldiers in danger, but are allowed to protect those who go out to do that reporting. Under this code, all media outlets would be expected to participate in the information blackout, as they did in the Rohde case. But this wouldn’t get the Times off the hook for hypocrisy since they routinely report on lost journalists who work for their rivals. The Times could also get away with a code that allowed them keep secret ONLY their own staffers lost, but that would mean letting other papers do the same. Since the Times asked other papers to help protect ITS staffers, it would be guilty of hypocrisy by this measure of ethics too.
The Times’ hypocrisy, it seems to me, lies not in the way they cover national security but in the way they view their media confreres. David Shuster, are you reading this?
Exhibit B: After cautioning against the takeover of politics, media, etc by individualists over institutionalists, I am overjoyed to see the Fast Talker–a citizen-media enthusiast and individualist liberal-tarian at times–taking my side. What woke him up? A glimpse at the individualist Rightin David Cameron, and the damage the Tory bashing of MP’s expenses has done to his party–Labour–in the lead-up to this week’s local elections. Here is the thing: To turn the tide for Labour, British lefties have to develop a defense of institutions, and that includes many institutionsthat the individualist Left likes to rail against. Liberal-tarians whining about corporate bonuses sets up a conservative critique of big government. Both kinds of whining need to be given up, but the cultural tide towards individualism in both left- and right- leaning circles makes that unlikely.
On Monday, we saw more evidence that the content model of the future will involve vertically integrated news organizations that will allow their audiences to engage at multiple levels for multiple prices. Today, we got a taste of what the ad model to support that might look like–the NYT’s Bill Keller told the NY Observer that the Times would seek some sort of ad share deal with Google rather than going after them aggressively as a monopoly the way others seem bent on:
The solution? He said that the Times is looking at a “carrot approach,†in which, along with the collaboration with Google, The Times would embed ads in its copy, and those ads would stay with the copy wherever it is reproduced.
Despite my own antitrust misgivings re: Google, this is exactly what I recommended for the news industry a while ago. And, I’ve also pointed out, the NYT is already a vertically integrated news org that has grown multiple layers of expertise in-house. It is nice to be right two days running. It’s even nicer to think that the future model of journalism is coming to focus.
