A moment of clarity

A number of things have just occurred to me, the first of which being the Sisyphean task of putting off this blog until now. No excuses exist, and the neglect at times seemed willful on my part, leaving me feeling guilty about pissing on my favorite professor (full disclosure: this is not an attempt to lick the shit I continue to lay off anyone's boots but merely a statement of fact). I won't try and make any excuses, even though this already feels like one. Instead, I will simply make an apology. Scott, I'm sorry. I just wish you hadn't left the country because I would have liked to have done this in person. (Rereading this, it seems horribly awkward, but such is the nature of life, non?)

Now that that's over with, I will file my replacement blog for being "on assignment" in Columbus when the Ruhl and Payne shindigs went down. I titled this entry after the epiphanies attributed to alcoholics when they realize just what they are. While this is nothing so severe, I just realized exactly how democratic the Internet has made the media. Obviously, we've all known this for some time, from reading and thinking about it, but this is the first time it really hit home.

Given that I came across the blog post via Romanesko says something about media gathering in and of itself, but it was the content of the GM blog I came upon that really made me realize that newspapers may be doomed after all. It is an uncharacteristic post on a psuedo-PR site known more for its "Photos of the Day." The content is rather banal and self-serving, including the elucidating post, "The Ban on 'Rubbish' in the New York Times," but this does not detract from troubles it suggests.

Last week, Thomas Friedman wrote a column defaming GM and the automaker thought (rightly, I'd say) that it could publish a response in the letters section, especially given 4 letters in favor of the column were published. The paper, in one way or another, according to the GM blog, routed the attempts of the automaker's PR department, from fighting over word lengths to the final straw, the use of the word rubbish, which the paper deems inappropriate for its letters page. Friedman's article is compelling and it could be that the facts published in the letter are inaccurate, which is the beauty of a newspaper, but the fact is, the complaints still made it out into the (new) media landscape and got picked up by one of its most respected voices--er, does Romanesko really have a voice?

So the problem the major media now must contend with is the unlimited access everyone now has to capitol-m Media. We're all news makers, and while we may not be able to report on Iraq, we can certainly all address what's in front of our face. In the case of Brian Akre, that's GM. In my case, it will hopefully soon be Portland music. Does this mean we'll all bring our uninhibited and in many cases untrained biases to the table? Quite possibly. It's a sad and scary thought that news as she is known may some day explode into cacophony.

Postscript: I found the Friedman column sans Times Select, which serves as further proof of the liberating power of the Web and also the further threat it poses to fiduciary efforts on the part of traditional outlets. Don't get me wrong, I love the Times and would hate to see it go. I just have no idea how they could ever hope to keep this up.

Why I love David Pogue (and hate Byron Calame)

Forget it's vaunted international coverage, its history, its place as the "paper of record"--all things it's happily pissed down the toilet over the last few years--the real reason I love The New York Times is David Pogue. I've yet to pin down a definitive title for the man, but I like to think of him as mastermind tech guru over yonder. I stumbled across Mr. Pogue one day while checking out the paper's video section (read: procrastinating).

I can't remember how he came up, but David has proven to be the funniest thing to happen to the Times since David Carr. (Why are there no Matts or Matthews at the Times. I know people keep telling me I'll be the one to change that, but it still never sits very well. I've made the same observation about The New Yorker, and the only prominent journalist to come to mind is the defamed Matthew Cooper of Time. OY!)

What's so great about Pogue is his humor and receptivity. His articles are funny if a little technical and long winded, which makes his videoblogs the best. As the Times has stepped out into the world of blogging, Pogues was naturally one of the first in, and his Pogue's Posts are the height of the form: short, pithy, funny little blirbs that illuminate the rest of his work. They are never overwrought or drawn out but they present a further illumination on his work and particularly his columns and videos since he is so perceptive to his reader's comments.

The biggest problem with the blog front at the paper is the dirth of topics. Ombudsman Byron Calame wrote a preface of sorts to attend the blogging page that debuted along with the Time's Web site redesign. There he wrote that the paper was slower than others, including the Post to embrace blogging because he feared the veracity of the work. This sounds like his usual explanation for the paper falling behind--say on the wire tapping story--when this reporter simply expects they missed the boat.

Just look at the blogs the paper offers. Two come from the Dining section. One is on real estate, another IPOS, information readily available online in the way newspapers still will not relinquish, like running stock tables. The other is Pogue's and the final one is Calame's. Yes, their are a few more from Op-Ed columnists and contributors, but those cost money, so I'm still snearing. Do these blogs really need that much oversight that the paper should be so concerned? It's not like James Risen and Eric Lichtblau are scooping themselves in blogs. And I'm not saying these are bad blogs. They often enhance the work of the reporter. I'm just airing further frustration for Calame and the rest for not fessing up to the truth as has become their habit.

This bears out in Calame's blog, a useful addition to his bi-montly "Public Editor" column, but even here he practices his vile back pedalling. His most recent post explains the absence of coverage in the Times regarding Stephen Colbert's much publicized speech at the White House Correspondants Dinner. He claims that few media outlets covered it immediately--more of the above--and continued that it wasn't politically apropriate. Come one. What had a bigger fallout than that story. And we all know politics is all about fallout.

The better solution, it seems, is the one the Post has taken, where it treats blogs more like columns, even combining them into the same section on its Web site. If the Times were more in tune, it would throw caution to the wind and embrace the Internet. Then it would have seen the YouTube results and reported the Colbert story. It would monitor its blogs but not stifle them. It's not like it hasn't tossed the baby out with the bath water a couple of times now.

Google does it again

Not really paying attention during the Google lecture last week, I was clicking around Google Labs when I found their cool new feature, Google Trends. Moments after I had made my discovery, with the intention of sharing it with the class, Professor Maier directed the class to it, a la the direction he had received from Aaron. Dang, scooped again.

Still, I would have been happy to know about the site had I not found it, and the application for others is rather beneficial. I can see this as surpassing the quotation of the number of from Google in news stories. What Trends does is tracks the frequency of searches on what seems to be the world's favorite search engine--I'm not about to verify that beyond our combined anecdotal evidence.

One of the most illustrative and telling examples of how Trends works in the input of "Janet Jackson" in the search box. It returns this graph:

All results for Trends start with January 2004, presumably the start date for the program, though why Google couldn't dig further back over time, like the Time's ever-expanding on-line archive, waits to be seen. The above graph is pretty self-explanatory, with a meteoric number of search results surrounding Ms. Jackson shortly after her "wardrobe malfunction."

The class thought we were on to something when one classmate searched for "boobies." We all chuckled at the correlation, but when I was showing Trends to a friend and we gave both a shot, I realized the "boobies" query actually took place some months later. This is more clearly illustrated by using the comparative search results, which include commas between the queries, in this case, "janet jackson, boobies."

Clearly that didn't work, but it instead proves the volume of Janet searches, which function as an outlier that drowns out the boobie search, that looks like this:
Now inserting that image deleted my above one, which showed the first graph and then just a red line. If you want to see a comparison, I'd advise you check "janet jackson, boobies" out on your own via the above Trends link. It would seem I can get no more than three images, or something from Blogger--a the adventure that is this business.

Anyway, this is a powerful tool that allows you to know about when people were looking for words and to compare them to other searches. If only we could get specific dates and counts, that would be something powerful, but far too telling to marketers to be profitable for Google. They may profess not to be evil, but it still comes down to the dollar in the business of organizing the world's information, non?

The genesis of a meth head

Meth is everywhere these days. Beyond the bus stops crowded with strung out users and the labs that churn out their poison (note: I by no means condemn drug use, but the damage they cause at this stage of the game is inarguable) meth has appeared with increasing frequency on newspaper front pages. This is in part because of the growing prevalence of the aforementioned groups but also because of the work Steve Suo and the Oregonian have done in exposing and explaining their prevalence. Suo spoke today to the journalism class for which this blog exists about his landmark investigative report "Unnecessary Epidemic." The project started as a lark, when Suo was combing through Census data, on which his work at the paper had focused since the 2000 numbers were released--he's a bit of a math and computer whiz over at the paper, a skill he developed while earning a masters in public policy at the Kennedy School at Harvard. The numbers revealed a high incidence of foster care in Oregon. When Suo began to look into the facts, he kept hearing that drugs, particularly meth, tended to be involved.

As Suo began to look into meth further, he found Oregon "far and above first" when it came to meth treatment, a commonly used indicator of drug usage. When Suo asked around, he was told this was the result of Oregon's implementation of the Oregon Health Plan in 1996, which meant more people had access to treatment. Like any good journalist, Suo questioned the official answer. "Be skeptical of everything you see," he told the class.

Officials cited a rise in meth treatment from 1994 to 1997 as proof of the Health Plan's effects on treatment. But Suo found treatment had already been on the rise and actually dipped in 1996. This dip, and another two years later, became the focus of Suo's reporting. He began to aggregate various databases from Western states--the breeding ground for the spread of an addiction that now claims every state west of the Mississippi, "and the Eastern states are getting darker," Suo added. These databases showed a number of indicators, from purity to property crime, that followed the same pattern as his treatment numbers. (The collection and analysis of this data was the focus of Suo's presentation to the class of journalists aspiring to his job.)

I realize I've droned on far too long about the minutiae of Suo's work--this was an unreported side, I figured, but who really cares besides me?--and get to the power of his presentation. (Also, the bars are calling. If you want more background, just read the stories above.) The underlying theme behind Suo's work, and no doubt that of all invesigative and computer-driven reporting is persistence and intelligence. Suo was presented with myriad explanations from "experts," but he always double-checked them against his data, which often proved them wrong. This led to new data which led to more questions which led to new data which led to, well, you get the idea.

I've always felt the journalism classroom (except for Scott's, and I'm not just saying this for Brownie points) to be a little trying and overly pedantic. Journalism, like writing, is a skill and only so much can be taught. Hearing first hand accounts from practicing journalists tends to reveal more than text books, at least for me. What bore out from Steve's presentation was less how to do this kind of number crunching than how to approach it, interrogate it and report in general. Play the cankered dog: grab on and don't let go.

To all the haters

If you've been to any kind of respectable club in the last year, you no doubt have heard The Knife. The exultant post-disco burner "Heartbeats" (check it at their MySpace) always got the cool kids bumping everywhere I went, what with its perfectly timed handclaps offset by perfect synth fills and calypso fades. It was the closest thing to dance-pop perfection since the heyday of Kylie or Madonna ("Can't Get You Out of My Head" and "Hung Up" notwithstanding). For this very reason, many of my friends have lambasted the latest effort by the Swedish brother sister duo that is Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson. That album, Silent Shout is a conceptual one to say the least. Relating the harrowing story of a prostitute fallen from love to loss, the pair have created a heartbreaking album that could make the Christian Coalition weep--and with sympathy, not pity. And the dark, jumpiness of the music perfectly drives the story...

From the partying highs of a band of womanizers...
"We Share Our Mother's Milk"
(This is as dancy as it gets kids. The ghostly shrieks do spin out into an amazing beat, but if this one won't soothe you, nothing will. You have no taste.)

to the fraught reactions of a dismayed family....
"Forest Families"

ending with the repercussions of an abortion.
"Still Light"

"Was it worth is? Could it be worse than this?" Oli sings through a mountain of vocoding on the final track there. The answer, respectively, is "yes," and "hell no!" After all, Karin admits on the band's (far superior) British Web site that this is the sound The Knife has been working towards for seven years now. I wonder what the haters have to say about that?

Also: in case the introduction to my essay was not enough about the new glory that is blogging, here's some more. Now that I'm off topic and assignment, I'm having more fun, but the confessional, dashed-off informality of blogging has certainly proven exhilarating. I'm also finding it dangerous, however. Without proper editing or proof-reading, I almost add extra T's to words like editting (sic) or leave cliches in place like the one above referring to the CC--yes, I left it to be illustrative. I would never let such an egregious phrase into my real copy. I swear.

(Funny that the Blogger spellchecker doesn't recognize "blogging" as a word, non?)

Welcome Mat(t)

Before we begin, please forgive any dour remarks and prognostications of doom. It's just my dinner settling.

Here I am, another birth into the blogsphere, offering my take on the content of my subhead, on the world, on whathaveyou and fuckall. And in this case, blogs. (How Postmodern--an opening blog about the act of blogging. I feel like Escher. Then again, since these things link up all the time, it's only natural, non?)

The reason this concerns me is because I have been asked to write about the relationship between traditional journalism, particulaly newsprint (at least that's what I'm concerned with), and blogs. The reason this concerns me so is that I will graduate this winter and must go find a job in some farflung newsroom. I cannot help but feel like the Internet has ravaged newsprint in ways not seen since the heyday of Kahn. That's the one from Star Trek--I'm talking about television here. While blogs are probably the smallest part of newsprint's current woes, they no doubt contribute.

To suggest, then, that journalists have anything to learn from bloggers is insulting. Poynter columnist Steve Outing instead makes a good argument for me to take my journalism education, find a decent-paying desk job and just blog all day. The biggest problems facing print journos these days is there credibility. Bloggers, argues Outing with the support of the cyberfamous Wonkette, ne Ana Marie Cox, can publish whatever they want and leave it up to their readers to fact check. "It's fine in a democratic society for people to receive most any information," Outing writes of Cox's approach to blogging, adding that so long as the source is clarified, and its questionable nature made clear, the public will support their decision and wait for more. Where I am at a loss is how the most reputable and well-read blogs manage to read all their comments and reply in kind while a paper can't. Or maybe I'm just wondering why newspapers can't be more forgiving.

Maybe because Outing is right when he writes, "newspaper corrections typically are relegated to an inside page in a special corrections area, unseen by many readers." The way I've written thus far has at times placed newspapers on a pedestal. From Blair to Plamegate, no wonder "citizen journalists" don't believe they can do it if not better than at least just as good. Outing suggests bloggers could stand to learn a few things from journalists, such as doing real reporting and having someone edit their work. But isn't this counter to the whole spirit of blogging. The more I think about it, maybe Wonkette is right. The checks and balances of the newsroom work no better than those of our federal government. As former technology reporter Dan Gilmour told Quill magazine, "Readers collectively know more than we journalist can possibly know, and they are a great sources for us." So why should bloggers go mudding up the works by becoming proper journalists. Where would they be without the Times? Probably out on the street, figuratively, or literally, doing my job. Let them stick to their cubicles. Then, maybe I'll be left with some bread on my table once the year's through.