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What was lost is found. But lost was fun, too.

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
404

So you can't find your content? Maybe you'd like to read about something else that is lost. Like Amelia Earhart. Or your luggage.

Early this morning I was scanning my incoming Google alerts and found one I wanted to investigate at NPR.org. It was one of those funky links that breaks over about three lines and includes accidental carriage returns, however, so where I wound up was my favorite 404 page of all time: both funny and smart.

Sure, my content was lost.  Naturally I would want to read about lost content.

Naturally I tweeted it:

npr

To my extreme interest, it got retweeted quickly and often, and then re-retweeted, and re-re-retweeted, spreading virally just the way one would hope if it were actual journalism.

In fact, my bit.ly link to the bad URL got clicked on so much that somebody at NPR must have wondered why a specific nonexistent address got 450 clicks in a couple of hours … figured out where I had wanted to go … and fixed it. Wow, they know what to do about 404′s both on the front end and the back!

So everybody wins.  Other people actually looking to read about Marc-André Hamelin will get to.  Lots and lots of extra ads were served, even on those 404 pages.  Hundreds of people got an extra smile today.

And I learned that my own 404 page is an unexploited opportunity.

For now.

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Posted in By ORY, Random | Comments Off

Read on the Fourth of July

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

Ah, Independence Day: life, liberty, and the pursuit of the written word.  I know I didn’t actually read 233 articles today (one for each year since the Declaration), but I gave it my best shot….

  • “He blanked Joseph Jackson from his life and excised him from his face, but could not forget his father’s exhortation to be ‘a winner, not a loser.‘ ” Where else but The Economist would you expect to find such an pithy, opinionated, and worthwhile obituary of Michael Jackson? No punches pulled here, nor any failure to acknowledge his “real, hard-won achievements.” By putting this together with Bob Herbert in Saturday’s NYT, methinks I am done with Michael for a few months. Or years.
  • “It’s not just the statisticians who wonder whether our heroes achieve records more often than coins. Psychologists, and, increasingly, economists, also puzzle over the seemingly discrete worlds of chance and perception.” In The Triumph of the Random in Friday’s WSJ, Leonard Mlodinow of Caltech reminds us that “Extraordinary events, both good and bad, can happen without extraordinary causes, and so it is best to always remember the other factor that is always present—the factor of chance.” (By, er, chance, a couple of hours later I began reading the typescript of a friend’s next book – which at one point moves the analysis of cause-and-effect from the realms of mathematics and probability into that of neuroscience. Yes, I had time to read more than newspapers and magazines!)
  • “Swedes believe that consensus is the best way to take long-term decisions that all can live with.” Well, that explains a lot about me, I guess, if you go for nature over nurture.  The Economist again, this time in Charlemagne’s column, Those exceptional Swedes. Oh, and elsewhere, the sensible Swedes who run Ikea get props for suspending investment in Russia due to, ahem, the “unpredictable character of administrative procedures” – read graft and corruption. As Charlemagne pseudonymously puts it, “Sweden, in short, is an exceptional place.”

    • (more…)

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Posted in By ORY, Journalism, Random | 3 Comments »

Please discard all canards before entering

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

Eric Zorn: I regularly get letters from high school and college students asking for career advice. Should I be more encouraging? … [T]heoretically, there will be many jobs in the future for good writers, whatever medium they end up in.

Mary Schmich: When students ask me about the future of journalism, my first answer is, “You tell me.” … There’s still a demand for news, stories and a well-turned opinion, and where there’s a demand there’s a market. If you’re curious, skilled, willing to work hard and make less than your lawyer friends, you’ll find your place. And when you do, will you hire me?

via So, you really want to be a journalist? — chicagotribune.com.

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Over the last couple of weeks – at MIT for the Future of News and Civic Media conference; at the 124th Covenant Annual Meeting;  seeing relatives of mine and Linda’s in Oregon; at Illinois Beach Resort to parachute into the Matson-Mårtensson-Mathiasson family reunion – a lot of people whom I have not seen recently have been asking me about my career change.  There are a number of themes in these questions, but inevitably they come around to a version of the Schmich-Zorn discussion in the Tribune the other day:  Will there be journalism in the future, and are there really university students enrolling to pursue it?

Well, yes and yes.  As many faithful readers know, Forbes reported in April that journalism school enrollments appear to be at an all-time high, and as it turns out Medill’s graduate and undergraduate enrollments for the coming academic year are up significantly. This is probably less surprising when one hears the statistics from Columbia, Medill, and elsewhere on the fact that their 2008 graduates are indeed getting hired … and in a job market like today’s, competitive advantage is not to be sneezed at.

The larger point is made by Mary: “There’s still a demand for news, stories and a well-turned opinion, and where there’s a demand there’s a market.” As I was telling an interviewer today, and as so many others have written, the very real economic crisis gripping the industry is not about news, or journalism, or demand for same.  It’s also not about “paid vs. free” or “print vs. digital.” If both the industry and those studying to join it can stay away from those false dichotomies, canards, and briar patches, many of the hirers and the hirees will have purpose and gainful employment….and many others will have gainful self-employment.

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…and the duckbilled platitude lays & lays
and Lays aytash unee

–e.e. cummings, “remarked Robinson Jefferson”

Posted in By ORY, Crystal-ball gazing, Journalism, Medill | Comments Off

Expiation, top 10 style

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

So I could fill up perfectly good space with all the reasons why I allowed the dog to eat my homework, leading to my not posting anything of value over the last week or so.  (I did waste some perfectly good blogging time writing one of those insidious, invidious Facebook quizzes, but decided it wasn’t such a waste after all when 341 people had taken it within 48 hours…and I had only directly promoted it to 4. Add end to monograph on viral marketing.  And then there was the WordPress upgrade that didn’t go well.)

Anyway, all of the following items wanted me to write about them – but I didn’t.  I’m thinking that if I ‘fess up, I can start fresh tomorrow.

10. I still think I want to turn this into a different sort of online quiz because there are lots of perfectly good words in here, as well as some that are, well, fecklessly louche.  N.Y. Times mines its data to identify words that readers find abstruse » Nieman Journalism Lab.

9. L. Gordon Crovitz, on the Op-Ed page, quotes Jeffrey Matsuura: “Intellectual property rights were not goals in and of themselves, but were instead a mechanism through which society attempted to facilitate creative collaboration.” Why Technologists Want Fewer Patents – WSJ.com.

8. “A modified version of the Internet’s communications protocol, devised for interplanetary use, is being tested by spacecraft.” via Monitor: Dot Mars | The Economist.

7.  “[S]ome postal officials are pushing for a fundamental change: five-day delivery.” via Post Office Looks to Scale Back – WSJ.com.

6.  Some dandy back-and-forth between two of my favorite Steves, Outing and Yelvington.  And then more great stuff from Brother Y after a trip to Minneapolis.

silentswitch5. Too many stories on iPhone 3.0 were written for anyone in the universe (whether the currently known universe, and or any portion thereof that is not yet discovered or explored) to write anything new or interesting or of the remotest value.  So I wanted to write about how silly I found it when the “ring/silent switch” fell off my iPhone 3G, what has to be a $0.01 piece of material, and the friendly folks at the Genius Bar handed me a new phone instead of reattaching the switch.  But I didn’t.  And I now I did.  (As I did manage to tweet, I am still ROTFL.)

(more…)

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The death of ‘place,’ the death of papers

Saturday, June 6th, 2009
Richard Rodriguez: "The civic fabric has been ruptured." Richard Rodriguez: “The civic fabric has been ruptured.”

I don’t think the Chronicle is dying so much as I think that San Francisco is dying. When a metropolitan newspaper of that magnitude  stops publication it indicates that there has been a death of the metropolitan ideal.

via Richard Rodriguez: The Death of the SF Chronicle – NAM.

In 1995, Witold Rybczynski published his classic assessment of the devolopment of the American city, City Life. One reason I remember it so clearly is his long lool at Chicago, where “in many ways twentieth-century urbanism got its start.”  More famously, of course, he argued that it was perfectly OK that American cities were not at all like Paris. He refers only glancing to the role of newspapers, though many writers have documented the ways in which the fates and fortunes of cities and their newspapers have always been intertwined.

I was reminded of all this today when I encountered an interview with Richard Rodriguez, the American writer whose prominence stems partly from  his memoir Hunger of Memory and partly from his ideas about ethnicity and identity, at the website of New America Media.

The edited transcript (and the whole interview, provided as an MP3 on the site) constitute a powerful alternative take on 2009′s inescapable “death of journalism” discussions, articles, posts, and memorial services.  Not because the idea is entirely sui generis, obviously; if newspapers and cities grew together, it might well follow that they might die together. But because of Rodriguez’s argument that “Americans are going to news outlets, not for what news used to provide — the sense of the local, the sense of the parochial, the sense of this place–but rather almost as an escape from place.”  In fact, he says that even the metaphors we use about the Internet – “the ether,” “cyberspace,” “the superhighway” – are “almost against the spatial.”

imagesThe jumping-off point is a question about the San Francisco Chronicle, as are several of the examples and explanations Rodriguez cites.  But Rodriguez’s thesis is as much about the idea of a city as it is about the fate of The City, and it summoned up for me a definition of a city that I think I learned in philosophy class: a community founded on common acceptance of social norms.

When I Googled this last idea today, I was reminded that this is close to the Stoic idea of a city, as a community of virtuous people, “something morally good” (Clement of Alexandria).  Does it follow that if a city dies, the moral good that newspapers can do must die with it?  I’m not ready to go there yet.  But let me give the last words to Rodriguez, and then you can go read or listen yourself at one of the links above:

“The civic fabric has been ruptured. It may be 30 years in the making, but it’s happened now, and we blame the Internet or we blame computers; we blame children because they have an addiction to buttons instead of to paper. But these are really afterthoughts.  These are not the reasons the newspapers are dying…By the 1980′s, there already is the sense that San Francisco is losing interest in itself….People tend not to know what they need until they lose it.”

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Posted in Audiences, By ORY, Essays, Journalism | 1 Comment »

The (fast) company we keep

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
Its just one revolutionary interface after another......

It's just one revolutionary interface after another......

When last we looked in on the Internet-era magazine Fast Company, it was 2005 and the Gruner + Jahr division of Bertelsmann was unloading it.  And we do mean “unload”:  According to the New York Times archives, Chicago’s own Joe Mansueto (Morningstar Inc.) picked up both Fast Company and Inc. for $35 million, leaving G+J with a return of -93% on the $571 million it spent to buy them (from separate owners).

There’s quite a bit more to say about the old Fast Company, but today I’m focusing on the new one because my fellow North Park University trustee Chuck Eklund (@ChazEk on Twitter, if you’re scoring at home) pointed me to this piece:

With newspapers’ traditional business model in free fall, the top media minds at global design firm IDEO (designer of the Apple mouse, consultant to Fortune 500 companies) were asked to imagine: How will we get our news after the traditional model falls apart? Here’s their answer.

via News Flash From the Future: What Will Journalism Look Like? | Fast Company.

Some of what you’ll find at the link are paragraphs that exist largely to live next to the eye-catching art from IDEO (“The next four pages showcase two environments that put the future of news in the context of our daily lives,” says the text cheerfully).  Others of its assertions seem just flat wrong already.  But more than a few of the ideas are more than pie in the sky; they’re actually news flashes from … the present.

(more…)

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The future, not the pasture

Friday, May 29th, 2009
Jack Fuller, Ann Marie Lipinski, Scott Smith, Howard Tyner, Alison Scholly Jack Fuller, Ann Marie Lipinski, Scott Smith, Howard Tyner, Alison Scholly

“Tell brave deeds of war.”

Then they recounted tales, –
“There were stern stands
And bitter runs for glory.”

Ah, I think there were braver deeds.

– Stephen Crane

 

And in fact, when three former editors and two former publishers of the Chicago Tribune gathered with two former general managers of the Tribune’s interactive business for lunch Friday at the Arts Club of Chicago, it was the braver deeds that dominated the conversation.

And, of course, the Connecticut warbler that spent most of the lunch in a tree just outside the club’s second-story dining room.

Unlike the newspaper industry meeting on Thursday in Rosemont, there were no outside lawyers present, though had we needed one former editor and publisher Jack Fuller certainly qualifies. But maybe there should have been, since when we discussed health care we could call upon our board and professional connections to Northwestern Memorial Hospital (Scott Smith), the University of Chicago Hospitals (Jack Fuller and Ann Marie Lipinski), and Swedish Covenant Hospital (Owen).

When we got to philanthropy, we had trustees of the Macarthur Foundation (Jack) and the McCormick Foundation (Scott). (We had been hoping for incoming McCormick CEO David Hiller, but my lunch with him isn’t till next week.)

On higher education, we had North Park University trustee Owen, University of Chicago VP for Civic Engagement Ann Marie, and U of C trustee Jack, not to mention plenty of informed opinion from Scott, who is of course deeply involved at Northwestern as well as a trustee at National-Louis. Less problematically from an antitrust perspective when the talked turned to journalism education, Medill was of course heavily represented, by alumni Howard Tyner, Alison Scholly, and Jack, plus professor Owen.

Also unlike that Thursday meeting, which former colleague Jim Warren broke online in The Atlantic, there was no top-secret agenda either to publish or to suppress. The occasion was to mark my retirement from the Tribune. Yes, that came last November, but just think of all the board meetings we’ve been going to.

In the intervening months, of course, I also wound up with this great job at Medill, and the gathered alumni were very interested and very encouraging. I ran a few of my incipient pedagogical ideas and philosophical constructs past the table, and you know what, I think I’ll keep working on them!

img_01782Really, the only virtual trip down St. Clair Street came when my friends showered me with gifts and remembrances. Here, for example, you see my very own Chicago Tribune Chicagoland Music Festival first-place medal, struck by C.D. Peacock. (The Festival, held every year from 1930 to 1966, was just one of the many events – the Golden Gloves, the Silver Skates, the College All-Star Football Game – that the Tribune gave to Chicago over the years. Jack fondly recalled the glow that suffused Soldier Field when, at the end of each Festival, the lights were turned down and everyone in attendance struck a match and held it aloft.)

Did we worry aloud about the current state of the world? Sure. Did we talk about how the Internet had changed everything? No, because we’d all been directly involved.

Did we wonder if things would get better in media land? No, we just discussed what would happen when it did.

Then they sent me back to Medill to get back to work on the next miracle. And so here I am.

Posted in By ORY, Medill, Personal, Retrospectives | 1 Comment »

Hmmm. Should Peter Pan have signed up for unlimited texting?

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

It was 1995 or so when I first came across Sherry Turkle. Her book, “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,” was intriguing academics, scaring parents, and launching incomprehensible book reviews from coast to coast.

Now, a quick word of caution: You can’t apply today’s context to the title. The MIT professor’s book was focused not on the just-emerging World Wide Web, but on the role-playing games that had been proliferating online and the people who inhabited the MUDs – multiple-user domains – that helped define them. Guess what: some of them viewed “RL” (real life) as just another role-playing game … another “screen” to be navigated through … and as such a world no more or less valid than that inhabited by any of their avatars.

But no, that’s not the scary part. (more…)

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Posted in By ORY, Digital media, Essays | 1 Comment »

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