Korr Values

As someone who has more than a passing interest in the maturation of video games, I’ve found some reviews of the would-be blockbuster Metal Gear Solid 4 to be very interesting — and telling.

The reviews of the Playstation 3 game at Slate, Wired’s Game|Life blog, and The Onion A.V. Club (all sites I like and regularly read) are curiously and similarly schizophrenic, alternately criticizing a major part of the game (its story) while praising — well, it’s not exactly clear what’s so great about it. That such praise outweighs the ambivalence in each review shows just how far video games still have to go.

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The Internet is such a ubiquitous and necessary (for us addicts, at least) part of life in the late 2000-aughts that it’s strange and time-warpy to think of how recent that ubiquity really is. Vanity Fair has compiled a fun oral history of the Net that serves as one of those occasional reminders of the absurd pace of change over the past 15 years. (The oral history covers the Internet’s 50-year history, but the best parts are about the World Wide Web era.)

I first became aware of the post-CompuServe Internet when my brother was in college, circa 1992. I was so excited that he somehow had access to all the important information I couldn’t find anywhere else: namely, the special moves for Street Fighter II. I think Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam secrets were also big on my list of Net-procured info, but Street Fighter was the main treasure.

I remember my brother mentioning Archie and Veronica — two early search engines — and I had no idea what he was talking about, though I must have used one or both to find the video game tricks. Oddly enough, I don’t remember the first time I used a Web browser. In my memory, browsers just exist after a point.

Anyway, here are some interesting bits from the Vanity Fair piece…

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So it turns out that moving to a new city tends to take time away from blogging. Who knew?

Over the past few weeks I’ve traded sunny Florida for tornado-filled (maybe) Washington D.C. and the familiarity of daily newspaper journalism for the unpredictable excitement of journalism startups. And while there seems to be a distinct lack of manatees here, living in the city is already awesome. (Anyone else have a pastry chef for a neighbor?)

But the blogging hiatus can’t last forever, so I’m going to ease back into things with some good old linkblogging. Here are some good stories I’ve been reading lately:

• Whilst responding to two worth-reading posts by Megan McArdle about why journalism is healthy even if newspapers aren’t, Doug Fisher makes an interesting point that I’ve never heard before: that one of modern newspapers’ main functions has been to “aggregate social costs.” Fisher writes:

The Colonial and even the Civil War-era press had been an unruly thing, prone to vicious attack. The practical matter, however, was that it was largely impractical to sue individual small publishers for sullying your reputation. The resources were not there

As the newspaper and its news organization evolved, they also developed the necessary deep pockets to right social wrongs their journalists might cause.

The rise of the large media company also provided a central place for legal action, promoting efficiency. In return, it made an implicit social contract (too often violated, but still) that it would strive to meet a certain level of professionalism, both to society (by providing a legal and managerial collar around unruly journalists, for instance) and to the journalists (by providing a living wage and decent benefits, ease of production and distribution, and a certain modicum of legal protection in most cases).

• In previous posts I’ve wondered why newspapers don’t try to take on Craigslist’s free classifieds. Bob Wyman (also via Doug Fisher) argues that doing so at this point would be the equivalent of trying to start a small internet service provider to take on Comcast and Verizon. In other words, that ship has sailed and taken newspapers’ ad revenue with it.

• At Hitsville, Bill Wyman (not to be confused with Bob Wyman or that Bill Wyman) makes the case that there’s still such a thing as selling out — and that rock musicians shouldn’t do it. Discuss.

• I hope to one day win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. And with these tips from recent winner Patrick House, I hope to soon enter for the first time and be just not-funny enough to achieve my dream.

• The New Yorker and the New Republic have simultaneous stories about the revolt against terrorism by former al-Qaida members and other former jihadis, include influential figures whose past writings provided ideological and religious justifications for Islamic terrorism. The New Yorker story is one of Lawrence Wright’s deeply reported tours de force (see here for another); the New Republic piece, by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, is more of a reported essay (as is TNR’s wont). Both are must reads for anyone interested in the future of the Middle East — and the future in general.

• Steven Pinker has a terrific New Republic essay on the danger and idiocy of conservative fearmongering about bioethics.

Matthew Ingram and Mark Hamilton have written posts defending Twitter from a backlash stirred up by some outlandish claims made after the China earthquake. Both make good not-outlandish arguments for why Twitter is important for journalism and news consumers, but after reading their posts I’m still stuck on the arbitrariness of Twitter’s 140-character limit.

Ingram points out that Twitter isn’t going to kill old media — it’s just one of many new tools that are potentially very good at one of old media’s main functions (in this case, getting the news to people in a timely fashion). He writes:

No one is suggesting that Twitter replace the emergency broadcast system, or that Twitterers should be thought of in the same breath as “first responders” such as search & rescue personnel. … But why shouldn’t we talk about how Twitter can be used to get information out about disasters?

It’s a good question, but I would follow up with one of my own: If Twitter is going to become a primary tool for getting information out about disasters, why place an artificial limit on the length of each disaster-information post?

Hamilton answers part of this question in his post. He writes:

The common argument against Twitter, IM and all the rest is that while they can provide information, they can’t provide context and depth. But when news breaks, it’s information that I want, not the narrative-nutgraf stories and not the context. The steady flow of information as the story develops is what I’m looking for (and that steady flow carries with it a lot of the context that some newspaper reporters insist only they can provide). (emphasis in original)

But what about information that’s shorter than a narrative nut graf but longer than 140 characters? In other words, why should the steady flow of information that Hamilton wants be restricted to 140-character blasts? As I wrote in this post, if it’s okay to continue a thought (or a news blast) across multiple Twitter posts, why have an arbitrary limit at all?

There’s another aspect of the 140 limit that troubles me. In that same post I wrote, “Ultimately I’m not sure why multiple 140-character Twitter posts are better than a simple live-blog.” After reading Ryan Sholin’s Twitter coverage of this week’s E&P Interactive Media Conference (where his ReportingOn project won a Knight News Challenge grant!), I’m still not sure.

Here’s a page of Sholin live-Twittering Arianna Huffington’s keynote speech. Sholin’s Twitter followers saw a page and a half of Huffington posts instead of having one post they could click on if they wanted to see the minute-by-minute updates. Plus, because of the 140-character limit there wasn’t room for any (or many) of Huffington’s actual quotes. As I said in my original post, quotes are often unnecessary in stories like these. But Twitter’s character limit means people who don’t speak in perfect pithy phrases just won’t be quoted.

Fast-forward a year or two, when many more people and news organizations will be covering news this way. If you’re following a bunch of Twitterers and three or four of them cover live events at the same time, you’d have to scroll through dozens of news posts before getting to the other people you’re following.

Just to be clear, I’m not criticizing Sholin. He did an awesome job covering the conference given Twitter’s constraints. But I think those constraints may limit the effectiveness of this kind of coverage — just as they may limit the effectiveness of disaster-news delivery and general breaking news.

I don’t always agree with Dana Milbank’s take on politics, but I always love reading his Washington Sketch pieces for the Washington Post. To me, he represents where newspaper journalism should be heading: reporters as honestly subjective sources unto themselves, rather than faux-objective conduits for he-said, she-said quote-getting.

My favorite Milbank pieces are sketches of congressional hearings. He’s not afraid of actually pointing out the absurdity and dulling obfuscation of government bureaucracy in action. I often wonder why the Post bothers running “straight” news stories about hearings — the kind of stories that dutifully recount “newsworthy” quotes (i.e. scripted boilerplate) — when Milbank’s sketch invariably tells you what really happened.

Milbank’s new piece on Hillary Clinton’s win in West Virginia isn’t about a hearing, but it’s one of his best columns yet. Not just because he uses Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” sketch to frame Clinton’s dwindling candidacy, but because he finally reveals the hollowness of my all-time favorite stumping-politician move: the smarmily grinning point-and-wave (and its close cousins the grinning point, wave, and-thumbs-up; and the grinning point-and-nod, which Hillary Clinton does at the 8- and 52-second marks of this video and which Bill Clinton does three times in the first 21 seconds of this video).

Milbank’s description of Clinton running through the point-and-wave motions is almost poignant, despite the mockery of the story’s Monty Python framing:

A steep descent brings Clinton’s plane to Charleston’s hilltop airport. After an appropriate wait, she steps from the plane and pretends to wave to a crowd of supporters; in fact, she is waving to 10 photographers underneath the airplane’s wing. She pretends to spot an old friend in the crowd, points and gives another wave; in fact, she was waving at an aide she had been talking with on the plane minutes earlier.

If there’s been a more succinct, perfect illustration of Clinton’s end-game — or a better skewering of the point-and-wave — I haven’t seen it.

UPDATE: Credit Bill Walsh for the terrific headline (”This Is an Ex-Candidate”) on Milbank’s story. Walsh posted some other headlines he considered; I especially like “White Americans and the Norwegian Blue,” but I think his final headline was poifect.

Everyone who has trumpeted hyperlocal news as the future of newspapers should read this hilariously merciless Bill Wyman post at Hitsville.

Wyman, who notes that he gets three newspapers a day, gives a brutal assessment of one edition of the Arizona Republic’s “Arizona Living” section — which includes such interesting stories as “Free burrito for teachers, ” “Post office food drive,” and “Fight Crohn’s and colitis” as well as

a short filler AP item (”Jump-start day sweetly, swiftly”) about how the Tootsie Roll company has a new product: “Maxxed Energy Pops, a cleverly packed energy drink in the form of a lollipop.” It’s almost hard to believe that life forms above the level of a somewhat dense tree sloth took part in the selection, editing, hed-writing and publishing of that piece of prose.

Yowza. I’m always wary of hyperlocal pushes because of the danger that papers will end up with lots of lame community-newsletter fluff like this. Of course there are ways to do hyperlocal that don’t result in stories-as-boring-calendar-items; Wyman himself suggests a much better approach to one of the Arizona Living stories. So let his post be a warning to journalists everywhere, hyperlocal or otherwise. Please, please, don’t end up like this:

It’s clear that everyone involved long ago had any bit of originality or innovation beaten out of them. They know that they can’t go wrong producing and designing the page to appeal to some imaginary doddering grandmother, so they scour the day’s press releases and then sit around and brainstorm to zero in on the bloodless, the trivial, and the utterly mundane.

From Matthew Yglesias:

Why not get political news from a political news outlet, movie reviews from a place that specializes in movies, and local news from an organization that’s really passionate about covering its community rather than viewing it as a JV form of journalism to be endured before moving on to something bigger?

Amy Gahran has a good column at Poynter Online (via Craig Stoltz) about how closed-mindedness is keeping newsrooms from plunging headlong into the future — and leaching all the fun out of journalism, to boot.

Gahran identifies a number of attitudes that “directly cut off options [for change] from consideration” and can lead to a “toxic” newsroom culture. She also articulates what, to my mind, is turning out to be the central problem with objectivity-era mainstream journalism:

Journalists (more so than most other professions) are supposed to be fundamentally curious and profoundly interested in what’s happening around them.

An apparent lack of curiosity shows up in today’s newspapers in the form of ignorant political journalism, stories written straight from press releases and PR pitches, stories that treat technology and consumer electronics as alien subjects. It shows up inside newsrooms in the form of old-timers who still aren’t comfortable with computers, new-timers who’ve heard of RSS but haven’t tried it out, higher-ups who rarely read journalism/new media blogs.

Institutional strictures are probably the main culprit here. Why bother being well-versed in policy if objectivity conventions forbid you from betraying your expertise in print? Why bother learning how to use new technology if the paper is (until recently) making boatloads of cash doing things the way they’ve always been done? Why explore things like RSS if nobody in the newsroom has articulated why you should do so?

Still, just as newspapers as institutions will have to change, individual journalists will have to ask themselves if they’re curious and interested enough to pro-actively face the coming shakeout. Because in three to five years, it’s likely that the only people to still have journalism jobs will be those who view journalism as more than just that job they’ve always had.

My friend Eric has written an awesome post about the massive holes in the Back to the Future trilogy’s time-travel logic. It’s too long to summarize, but here’s one choice riff:

But here’s the weird thing– when he returns to 1985, he goes back to the parking lot to find the scene from the beginning of the movie play out exactly as it did the first time (except of course that (MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT) the Doc is now wearing a bullet proof vest). Except the Marty who he watches go back in time had a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SET OF LIFE EXPERIENCES. I’ll accept that to protect the space time continuum, Doc Brown made sure that he still became friends with Marty and he still sent him back to the past at the exact same moment as before (he had seen the video footage of same). But here’s what I’m wondering– and this would have been an interesting additional sequel. What exactly did the alternate, better-1985 version of Marty do when he went back in time.

While I haven’t read what are probably numerous hardcore, follow-the-premise-to-its-logical-conclusion sci-fi stories, my sense is there are two possible conclusions to a logically sound time travel story: infinite recursion on the one hand; the instant un-existing of the time traveling character (and anything else introduced in that character’s original moment in time) on the other.

I think Back to the Future is playing with the infinite recursion scenario when Marty returns to 1985 and sees himself drive off into the past. That is, Marty isn’t watching “the alternate, better-1985 version of Marty” (or “Marty 2,” as Eric calls him). It’s meant to be Marty literally watching himself re-enact the movie we just saw. Of course this makes no sense, since the revamped McFly clan was all changed thanks to Marty’s actions on his first trip back to 1955; Marty should be changed too, transformed into Eric’s Marty 2. But here the movie breaks from its already strained logic in order to toss out the cool, mind-bending idea of a single Marty McFly doomed to infinitely re-enact his time-traveling life.

This bad logic shows up again in Part II, when

Marty goes back to the past from the future (in order to get the sports almanac back from Biff). And he sees the exact version of himself that I was just talking about and, as he sees, that Marty does the EXACT SAME THING HE DOES IN THE FIRST MOVIE!! That’s weird!

Eric’s right that this should be Marty 1 watching Marty 2, but the movie instead walks away from its premise; it’s simply Marty 1 again watching himself. Which, again, makes no sense.

Anyway, if the first two BTTF movies blew your mind back in the 80s, go read Eric’s post and prepare to experience your own mental-infinite recursion. (Like contemplating infinity, ever-expanding space, and death, thinking about Back to the Future for too long makes my head hurt.)

In light of this post, it seems appropriate to mention that Wednesday’s Democratic debate turned out to be the apotheosis of mindless, ignorant political journalism. I only caught the last 45 minutes, so I didn’t see the really egregious stuff at the beginning. But even some of the policy questions were bad — i.e. Charlie Gibson channeling Grover Norquist and trying to get the candidates to agree to a no-tax pledge — and from all accounts the rest was a joke as well. (Update: Crooks and Liars has video of the more inane questions.)

There’s been a ton of response to the debate around the blogosphere. Andrew Sullivan has roundups here and here, and a good post of his own. James Fallows weighs in from China with an important post that includes an excerpt from his 1996 article, “Why Americans Hate the Media”:

When ordinary citizens have a chance to pose questions to political leaders, they rarely ask about the game of politics. They want to know how the reality of politics will affect them—through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars. Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public’s representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about.

In the same vein, anyone interested in this topic should read Matthew Yglesias’ December Washington Monthly piece on how NBC’s Tim Russert is the driving force behind this kind of political coverage.

The one good thing about the debate is that it was such a monumental debacle — even Tom Shales, the Washington Post’s TV critic, called it “shoddy” and “despicable,” — that the backlash might finally be strong enough to keep this conversation going and (one can dream) eventually spark some changes.

I’m a pretty compulsive comparison-shopper (that is, a compulsive comparer — I don’t actually buy very much, as seen by my 4-year-old Creative Zen). I’m also a wannabe tech geek. So I read a fair number of reviews of TVs, digital cameras, MP3 players, printers, etc. And I’d say a good three-quarters of them are infuriating — because they barely discuss the one or two key aspects of a product that normal consumers care about.

Take two recent reviews from PC Magazine and PC World. PC Mag gave four stars (out of five) and an Editor’s Choice award to the Westinghouse TX-52F480S 52-inch LCD. I still have an old 32-inch CRT set, so I’m always on the lookout for good flat-panel tellies to file away for when we’re ready to upgrade. But despite the rating, this review was absolutely no help in my mental TV search.

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Via Hitsville, I see that the New York Times continues to assure readers it is dowdy, out-of-touch, and scared of printing language spoken by actual 2008 adults. The latest is an article about vulgarity in NBC’s Thursday-night shows, helpfully annotated by Bill Wyman at Hitsville:

“In the case of ‘30 Rock,’ the reference came in the form of an acronym — part of the title of a make-believe ‘Survivor’-like show — referring to a teenager’s crude designation of someone’s sexy mother.* In ‘The Office,’ besides the bleeping, the character’s lips were even pixilated to prevent lip reading. But it was not difficult for many viewers instantly to realize what was said**.”

* The show-within-the-show in “30 Rock” is called “MILF Island”; MILF stands for “mother I’d like to fuck.”
** In “The Office,” Jan and Michael, hosting the dinner party from hell, engage in a “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”-style face-off, culminating in an argument about having children in which it’s revealed that Michael has had a vasectomy, had it reversed, and then had another one because of Jan’s indecision. “Fine, let’s have a fucking kid,” she says sarcastically. “Do you mean it? Do you want to have a kid?” Michael asks, ready to have his second vasectomy reversal.

See, the real problem with the Times’ (and, by extension, 97 percent of daily newspapers’) prudishness is not only that it drains all the humor and realism out of the topics at hand. It’s just plain confusing, people!

Readers might think 30 Rock’s show-in-a-show was called “YMAH: Your Mom’s a Ho” or “YMSMASPFROMS: Your Mom Sent Me a Spam-Porn Friend Request on MySpace.” The Times may think it’s sheltering readers from put-cotton-in-your-ears language — but it’s really just giving them license to mentally run through all the dirty words referring to a teenager’s sexy mother. Shame on you, gutter-dwelling Times readers!!!

I’ve been meaning for a while to write a post about the pointlessness of the “Is the media finally getting tough on Barack Obama” meme. The gist would have been that the media’s “getting tough” on Obama — just like the media’s alleged “Obama bias” — had zero to do with policy and everything to do with personality, image, and media meta-narratives. Likewise the media’s alleged bias against Hillary Clinton has nothing to do with her policy proposals.

Furthermore, the near-total focus on these sorts of things to the exclusion of policy shows the general shallowness of newspaper political journalism, especially campaign journalism. There are many reasons for this, starting with objectivity conventions, which give reporters little reason to read white papers, policy proposals, scholarly books, etc. Whereas writers for New Republic, Atlantic, Slate et. al. are a) not bound by “objectivity” strictures and b) well-versed in policy.

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Over at American Scene, Peter Suderman offers a good response to Patrick Goldstein’s LA Times lament about the loss of entertainment critics in print media. Suderman writes:

For the vast majority of people, a Friday night at the movies is just that — and nothing more. Most people really don’t care about and have no use for lengthy dissertations about the ways in which Steven Soderbergh borrows from Godard. They just want to know whether to see Ocean’s 12! Playing blame the audience doesn’t work for music studios trying to combat piracy, and it doesn’t work for cranky critics who remain convinced they deserve $2 a word for 1) their insights into obscure movies few people want to see or 2) their complaints about Big Dumb Movies that everyone’s going to see anyway.

I would add that a majority of criticism doesn’t even rise to this level of sophistication/pretension. When I led a session on criticism at the Poynter Institute’s High School Writers Workshop, I presented the difference between good and bad criticism as the difference between a term paper (an original thesis supported by examples from the text) and a book report (basic plot summary with maybe a cursory judgment). Many print reviews still tend toward the book report end of the criticism spectrum. (Plus more papers are experimenting with things like American Idol live-blogs and other “insta-criticism” that runs more toward summary/quick response but is totally appropriate for the subjects and form.)

Suderman makes an even more important point about the lack of perspective from those in the newspaper industry who mourn the loss of print critics. He writes:

Trenchant criticism hasn’t died; it’s just shifted venues. …

Meanwhile, I simply refuse to buy the argument that the loss of book pages and film-review jobs is a bad thing. Yes, it’s a bad thing for professional critics. Yes, it’s tougher for those lucky few thousand folks to make a living reading books and watching movies! On the other hand, the internet has actually created vastly more opportunity for aspiring critics to get their work read. The barriers to entry in top-end publications are still high, but those outlets are no longer the only options for critics on the make. So we’ll see fewer professional critics, sure, but we’ll also see far, far more criticism.

And yes, some of it will be bad. But on the whole, I’d guess that it will create a net gain in serious, thought-provoking criticism of just about every medium. Meanwhile, most of those truly elite outlets — the New Yorkers and the Washington Posts — are not going away.

Terrific points all. Jody Rosen is the best music critic in the country; he writes for Slate, not a newspaper. Newspapers that have a Jody Rosen should build an online brand and community around that critic and hope the critic doesn’t leave. If they don’t have a Jody Rosen, if their critics file one book-report review after another — and if newspapers increasingly need to think about what they can offer readers that no one else can — then they should treat every kind of critic as a luxury except for (maybe) local-music and (definitely) restaurant critics.

But there’s one crucial piece missing from Suderman’s analysis. Yes, there’s plenty of great criticism online. Yes, there’s going to be a net increase in great criticism thanks to that online crit-boom. But like so much of the online news-commentary-criticism boom, it is invisible to newspaper readers.

Suderman assumes that getting rid of critics won’t matter because newspaper readers will find the good stuff online. That would be true if you assume everyone has an RSS feed and reads Slate, Pitchfork, and House Next Door. Needless to say, not everyone does. If they did, that would further erode newspapers’ declining readership.

So if newspapers do get rid of in-house critics, they need to simultaneously start giving readers some of the material Suderman talks about. That goes for more than just criticism. Newspapers can no longer treat the online universe as invisible. They have to find a way to bring that great content to their readers, both via the Web and in print.

Layoffs are never nice; financial pressure is hard for any company in any field. But I think Pat Thornton’s sense of scale is just a little skewed when he writes:

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: Journalism is under fire right now, much more so than just about any other industry in America. More than a thousand jobs have already been cut this year from mainstream media organizations and thousands more will be in the coming months. It’s a very dark hour for journalism.

Tell that to the auto, mortgage/housing/banking, and manufacturing industries. As I pointed out in this post,

Ford lost $2.7 billion in 2007 and $12.6 billion the year before — and those aren’t just losses in market capitalization (that was probably a heck of a lot more), but $15 billion in actual money down the drain. Think they wouldn’t kill for that 21 percent margin [Gannett's 2007 margin]? (Their 2007 margin: minus-6.8 percent.)

The mortgage industry lost 14,000 jobs in the first three months of the year. Subprime mortgage losses have cost insurers $38 billion so far. Banks, brokers, and insurers could end up writing down $285 billion in subprime losses (writedowns have already reached $150 billion).

Dell just closed a Texas plant, costing 900 people their jobs (of the at least 8,800 people the company plans to fire, some will surely be in the United States). Motorola has laid off 10,000 people in the past year (though again, not sure how much of the total is American workers). In the U.S. manufacturing sector overall, 67,000 people were laid off in February.

Yes, these industries are all much bigger than the news media. But let’s keep a sense of perspective here. As Chris Anderson notes, the newspaper industry is “a $45 billion business, which is twice as big as Google and Yahoo combined.” Times are tough, but the apocalypse is still a ways off. Operating with a clear-eyed view of the situation, rather than panicking and overstating newspapers’ very real problems, is the best chance we have at keeping the end times at bay.

(All that being said, I actually agree with much of Thornton’s advice for would-be journalists.)