Scott Rosenberg

Interesting exchange this weekend which we might title, “Why can’t conservative bloggers report?”
It starts with Matthew Yglesias responding to a Michael Goldfarb item about Greg Sargent leaving Talking Points Memo for a new Washington Post website. Goldfarb says the GOP has no equivalent to TPM — no website with a cadre of muckrakers. Yglesias responds:

What the right lacks are people with the skill to do the job. The one time I can recall the conservosphere leading the charge on a legitimate story, the thing with Dan Rather and the national guard memos, they got tons of traffic and attention. And lord knows the conservative media has lots of money and plenty of staff. But almost none of that stuff is going to people who report competently. Instead, you get a lot of wild conspiracy theories and a lot of commentary. The progressive blogosphere involves plenty of commentary, of course, and relies a decent amount on reporting done by the non-ideological media. But the right, for all its loathing of the allegedly liberal MSM, is actually entirely dependent on it and the cable-Drudge nexus to advance stories.

I think there’s more reporting happening in the conservative blogosphere than Yglesias allows. (Michelle Malkin goes nuts here with a long list that includes some legitimate links mixed in with lots of ringers — but she has a point.)

But I’d argue that the real reason you find deeper and more effective muckraking on the left is that it’s in the ideological genes. There’s more of a tradition of independent investigative journalism — it goes back to I.F. Stone and beyond, to the original muckrakers of the Progressive era. This is because the progressive ideal is rooted in a belief that government has a key role to play in the modern state and its economy. You dig for stories about corruption and bad behavior in government because you believe it has a job to do and needs to do it right. If you believe, as most on the right do, that the best government is the weakest and smallest government — if you dream of “drowning it in the bathtub,” as the ideologues who ran the country for the last eight years did — then why waste your time trying to expose its malfunctions? Why develop a tradition of trying to shame government into living up to its ideals when you don’t share them?

Goldfarb, and doubtless many others on the right, think that TPM and other Democratic-friendly investigative journalism outlets will wither away during an Obama administration because they won’t want to criticize their pals. That assumes the only motivation for investigative reporting is partisanship. My experience at Salon, which has always done its share of exposes on right and left and which thrived under the Clinton administration, tells me he’s wrong.

UPDATE: Simon Owens picks apart Malkin’s roster of conservative scoopery.

This morning I read the New York Times’ front-page piece about Obama’s stimulus plan, and nearly spat out my coffee as I read this passage near the top of the piece:

Other policy changes would subsidize employers’ expenses for temporarily continuing health insurance coverage to laid-off and retired workers and their dependents, as mandated under a 22-year-old federal law known as Cobra.

I first learned about COBRA as an editor/manager over the last decade, and learned all about it from the other side more recently, as one of the large number of Americans who have resorted to it over the past year. I guess the article’s authors, Jackie Calmes and Carl Hulse, have never had to deal with COBRA up close themselves. If they did, they’d know that employers don’t have many expenses associated with COBRA. COBRA simply allows employees who have lost their health insurance coverage (because they were laid off or they no longer qualify because, say, their hours were cut back) to keep their existing insurance for up to 18 months. All they have to do is pay the entire cost of the health insurance themselves — whatever portion they used to pay themselves, and the (typically) larger portion that their employers used to pay.

So what kind of assistance do employers need to cover COBRA costs? Maybe they have some minor administrative overhead. But surely they’re not the parties who need help in this situation.

There are two possible explanations here: Either the Obama team has suddenly lost all of its marbles, or the Times reporters mangled their description of the Obama plan — which, perhaps, might involve covering the employees’ costs for the COBRA insurance (possibly by paying into the employers’ plan, which might explain the confusion).

I checked the Times site at the end of the day, expecting to find a correction on the article, but there’s none there as I write this.

I continue to read the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and columnists in a “know thy enemy” mode. As the recent economic crises have pretty much razed the paper’s entire stable of totems, it has been fun to watch the rhetorical writhings. Mostly, they speak for themselves. But I think I cannot let this Christmas-eve gem from Holman Jenkins pass without comment. I think it will prove representative of the sort of hilarity we can expect to read from unrepentant free-marketeers over the coming year.

Here’s a shorter Jenkins:

(1) Since we only had one Great Depression, we can’t really draw any lessons from it, because we never got to run the experiment twice. We have no evidence that government spending helped end the Depression, or that more spending would have ended it faster.

(2) Despite said inability to draw lessons from the Great Depression, we do know — thanks to “plenty of evidence from history” — that “actions hostile to business tend to be related to an absence of prosperity.” Therefore people who argue that in the 1930s the “government did not do enough to restore business confidence, or did too much to damage it, piling on taxes, regulation and labor unions” are on “firmer ground” than advocates of government spending.

(3) But never mind these lessons from the Great Depression, because we live in a democracy, and democracies in general can’t be trusted with something as important as an economy. Give the people power and they will inevitably make bad policy.

(4) Sometimes democracies somehow stumble into periods of prosperity anyway, and when they do, this prosperity is “self-reinforcing” because “powerful interests” become powerful enough to resist all that bad policy that a democracy might wish to promulgate.

(5) These periods of prosperity do not last forever, and “once prosperity blows up” the same “self-reinforcing cycle” becomes “an unvirtuous one,” and instead of “powerful [business] interests” promoting prosperity, we get democratic governments promoting “costly or vindictive wish lists.”

(6) Government bailouts and the Federal Reserve’s extreme measures “may in retrospect be seen as just the right medicine. At the moment, no rational investor or business manager looks upon such doings with confidence in our economic future.”

(7) “Bottom line: Politics is in charge — in a way that makes a lost decade of subpar prosperity more likely than not.”

Jenkins’ account of recent events displays the sort of hermetic reality avoidance once only observable in unreconstructed Stalinists. Government must keep its hands off business! We can only trust the unfettered corporation to maintain a virtuous cycle of prosperity! When prosperity “blows up,” we can only trust the same “powerful” business interests to restore it! Don’t ever sully your analysis by asking how it was that your business-driven prosperity “blew up” in the first place. And once the blow-up happens, and people start asking why government didn’t restrain business from wrecking the economy in the first place, turn around and hold government responsible for the coming “lost decade.”

It is entirely possible that we are headed for a “lost decade of subpar prosperity.” But if that is the case, it is hardly excessive government meddling that is at fault, but rather the very philosophy that Jenkins espouses — of leaving our prosperity in the hands of powerful business interests unchecked by effective public oversight.

The good news is that people like Jenkins have next to no influence in the new administration. The bad news is they still have a platform in one of the nation’s two most influential newspapers.

This is the time of year when I realize anew why I am here. I’m not having a spiritual experience. “Here” is the Bay Area, and as we approach the shortest day of the year and face some of the coldest days as well, I renew my delight in my home for the past two decades and more.

Over on Twitter Anil Dash wrote the following yesterday:

As we landed at JFK, the woman in front of me offered, “Northern California is nice, but there’s no sense of urgency. It’s nice to be home.

I can’t tell from the Twitter-speed typing, which annihilates niceties of punctuation, whether the “it’s nice to be home” was overheard, or Anil’s own sentiment. Either way, I share the feeling, but in the opposite direction, each time I return home from an East Coast trip.

When I left my native New York in the 1980s for San Francisco, people told me similar things. “You’ll never really work hard again.” “Enjoy your long vacation.” I never saw or experienced this ostensible Northern Californian slack. I feel plenty of “urgency” here, but it is a pressure I have chosen myself. I worked harder than ever before in my life once I moved here, and continue to, partly because I’m inspired to do so, partly because I do not spend five months of the year in a state of physical misery and mental dejection brought on by extreme cold, light deprivation and aggressively desiccating indoor heating.

Having grown up in Queens and spent the first two decades of my life in the five boroughs, I have certain aspects of New York imprinted in my genes or upon my neurons, including a contempt for wimpy bagels, a disdain for outlandish pizza toppings and a fairly complete knowledge of the subway system rendered only slightly archaic by service changes (c’mon, what’s with this “Z” and “V” lines?). I *heart* NY as much as anyone. But, perhaps because it’s where I spent my youth, I’ve never felt a personal need to prove myself by taking it on as a challenge. I will be perfectly content without ever making it to Page Six (or even Gawker), and the city, of course, will do just fine without me.

One of my chief reasons for not regretting a move away from New York was my sense, in the mid-1980s, that it was a city where money loomed too large as a motivator, a totem and a measure of human value. I was hoping to plant myself in an environment that left at least the possibility of seeing my own life through other lenses. In the ’80s I thought that the ambient greed of New York might be merely a Reagan-era aberration. But subsequent years and decades only accentuated this aspect of the city’s place in the world. New York had long ago stopped making much of anything except money, but it thrived as the epicenter for America’s financial-engineering prowess.

2008 put a definitive end to that. With the collapse of Wall Street’s investment banks, the implosion of the markets and now the revelation of outright fraud on almost inconceivable levels ($50 billion? isn’t that more like a state budget than an investment portfolio?), it seems that New York’s run as the world’s financial capital is at an end. For the foreseeable future, it appears that Washington will be calling the shots in the U.S. economy.

However inconsistent with capitalist doctrine this change may be, it’s hard to complain, given how poorly the New York financiers managed things. But it makes me wonder: what will New York focus on next? There’s too much brains, energy and determination in the city for it to sit on its hands. I think that, now that the dollar is no longer so almighty, a lot of people are going to need to find something else to drive their lives.

Front page NY Times piece today laments the general downsizing of Washington bureaus by papers and chains. On the one hand, any time some writer loses a job, it’s a shame. But we can acknowledge that human price and still question the assumptions behind the more general professional garment-rending.

Before we worried about the rising tide of unemployed journalists, we had a word for the sort of journalism too many of the folks inside the old DC bureaus did: pack journalism. This was not a term of endearment. The pack members mostly asked the same questions, arrived at a general consensus, and shook their heads in sync when somebody broke ranks. It was this same pack that went nuts over the Lewinsky story and failed to understand that the American people did not want to see their president impeached for a peccadillo, and never did. It was this same pack that served (with a handful of honorable exceptions) as stenographers for the Bush administration’s faulty intelligence and accomplices in the rush into a misbegotten war in Iraq.

In the Times piece, Andy Alexander, the retiring chief of Cox’s DC bureau, which is being eliminated, says, “I think the cop is leaving the beat here.” Too often, alas, the cop was either asleep or on the take.

I do not think it is coincidental that the old DC bureaus are being downsized at the same time that we are welcoming a new presidential administration that, as this Times magazine piece reports, does not feel obligated to give interviews to reporters simply because those reporters show up at cocktail parties. A cocktail-party invitation should not be the entree to asking questions of the government. Maybe paying to keep reporters in the capital so they can go to cocktail parties is not a good use of dwindling journalistic resources. If the DC cocktail party circuit is dead — and I doubt that’s actually the case — it can only mean good things for our democracy.

Of course we need reporters in the capital to dig into complex stories and ask hard questions. But do we need hundreds of them all doing the same job, covering the same stories? How many times do we need reporters to repeat the same question, like “Why haven’t you released your internal report on contacts with Blagojevich?” when the question has already been reasonably answered? If many of these bureaus are being replaced by coverage from niche publications that have more specialized focuses, maybe that is something to cheer — a more sensible division of labor.

Henry Blodget isn’t shedding tears, either. But he does acknowledge that the elimination of local papers’ DC bureaus might reduce coverage of the local communities’ concerns and representatives in the capital.

I think we probably will have a gap there for a while, and that’s not good. But it’s not a national disaster. Eventually, the local Web sites will pick up the slack. They may not be able to send reporters fulltime to DC. They’ll miss the cocktail parties. But they’ll still be able to cover the stories that matter to them.

UPDATE: John McQuaid suggests Blodget’s being cavalier, wonders who will dig through all the new data Obama’s “transparency” promise will provide.

Item one: Jurgen Appelo was kind enough to include Dreaming in Code earlier this year in his Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books Ever. (Top 100 and best ever! Yow!) When he came back to me and asked me to do one of his “Five Easy Questions For…” interviews, how could I refuse?

Here is the result, in which I talk about, among other things, my early days as a freelancer, what inspires me to keep writing, and what is more interesting than software development.

Item two: Earlier this year, while I was deeply immersed in work on the new book, Derek Powazek asked if I’d contribute to Fray, his labor-of-love magazine — yes, a paper magazine, it’s a thing of beauty. The sensible thing to do would have been to beg off, and I was going to. But the topic of the issue was going to be “Geek: True Stories of People Taking Things Too Seriously,” and as I plowed through my book work I found my mind drifting back to my youth, and a time when I was a true geek, not for software or Tolkien or theater or politics or any of the other things I have geeked out on over the years, but for tropical fish — which was, for me, the ur-geekly pursuit.

So I wrote a little piece, titled Memories of a Fickle God, about those times. It’s online here, along with a bunch of far more captivating pieces.

But really, if you’re interested in this stuff, the thing to do is to buy the magazine (or subscribe), because it’s full of great stories and beautiful art. This is the future of the print magazine: once the profits have all migrated elsewhere, people will still publish on paper. But they’ll do it for their own damn reasons.

I want to note new books released by two friends and former colleagues, both of which are just out, neither of which I have yet read, both of which I am fully expecting to delight in.

Readers of Salon and the New York Times Book Review know Laura Miller’s critical writing by its wisdom, range, power and clarity. Her new book, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, is her first (she also edited Salon’s Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors). It’s an unusual combination of personal memoir and literary criticism that is about, among other things, Narnia, childhood imagination, memory and the power of stories. I was always more of a Tolkien guy than a Narnian; I think by the time I got to Lewis’s books their Christian subtexts did not look “sub” at all to me, and I found the whole thing an exercise in crude allegory. But if anyone can make me understand their power, I imagine it will be Laura. If you read this excerpt from the book recently posted at Salon, you’ll see why. (Here’s Laura’s website for the book.)

My professional path has crossed multiple times with Mike Sragow’s: He’s now the movie critic for the Baltimore Sun. When I met him he was the movie critic and editor for the Boston Phoenix, where he encouraged me to write about movies (I’d limited myself to theater and books). Then we worked together at the SF Examiner, and again at Salon. For me, he has always been the best kind of mentor; for his readers, he has always been an incisive, insightful and deeply knowledgeable critic.

Mike’s new book, his first (he also edited a couple of anthologies for the National Society of Film Critics), is Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master — a biography of the director of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, whose reputation and swashbuckling life story have long been neglected. Here’s a Wall Street Journal review by Peter Bogdanovich, who calls the book “evocative, layered, engaged, graceful and compelling”; here’s another review of it from today’s N.Y. Times.

I can’t wait to read both of these books — soon as I’m done poring over edits on my own…

For the past few years I have been making a pilgrimage to Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, through what are inevitably cold December rains, for solo acoustic shows by Richard Thompson. (I wrote about the trip back in 2005.) This year I picked up tickets way in advance for a Sunday evening show, figuring the traffic would be lighter than on a week night. Only later was this night declared on the calendar to be a special “theme” night, billed as a “first time ever” event: Thompson would perform “Work Songs, Ballads and Rallying Cries.” A little like his show of “1000 Years of Popular Music,” the set ranged from Renaissance ballads to punk. It was a bit rough around the edges, a rarity for this supremely skilled guitarist, but utterly engaging, and repeatedly surprising.

The show opened with Thompson’s own stirring “Time to Ring Some Changes,” and included several songs from his album “Industry,” one from his “Hard Cash” collection, and “Genesis Hall,” his Fairport Convention classic. The rest were covers — and what an eclectic collection.

I’m probably forgetting a few, but here’s what I remember: “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime”; “Minority” (Green Day); “Joshua Gone Barbados” (Rick von Schmidt); “Strange Fruit”; a hilarious 18th century song about lying, cheating merchants; a solemn, stirring anthem of the Diggers, that brief-lived collective during the English Revolution; “Get Up, Stand Up” (Bob Marley — minus the lines about Haile Selassie); “War” (Edwin Starr/Temptations); “I Ain’t Marching Any More” (Phil Ochs); “Little Boxes” (Malvina Reynolds); “Beds Are Burning” (Midnight Oil). Harmonica player George Galt accompanied on several numbers.

Thompson added a couple of updated verses to the Ochs march, placed his own spooky spin on “War,” and busted loose like a one-man rock band for the Midnight Oil number. Beyond an opening crack about the late conversion of George W. Bush to socialism, he barely alluded to the current state of the world and the woes of the economy. He really didn’t have to.

One of the reasons I’ve proposed MediaBugs as my project in the Knight News Challenge is that professional news organizations don’t have a very good record of transparency and responsiveness when it comes to fixing errors. Today’s tempest over the Wall Street Journal’s front page story on Net neutrality offers a nice illustration of what I mean.

The hook of the Journal piece was a report of documents that showed Google, long considered a staunch supporter of Net neutrality, was “quietly” changing its tune by “approaching major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content.” In addition, the article said, “prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject.” The only scholar discussed in any detail was Lawrence Lessig.

Admittedly, the Net neutrality issue is complex, both technically and as a legal/policy matter. But it’s precisely the sort of topic that the Wall Street Journal is supposed to get right. And both key subjects of the story, Google and Lessig, have now stepped forward to say that the story is simply wrong.

Google posted a response saying that what it’s proposing is a species of caching of Web content to speed its delivery; the service provider wouldn’t be deciding which content gets treated better. (David Weinberger explains this in more and better detail.) The Journal story did not provide readers with any hint of an understanding of that aspect of the issue.

The Journal Web site offered a roundup of critical response to the story this morning. But it’s interesting to note the tone and substance of this roundup: Its lead says that the article “certainly got a rise out of the blogosphere.” It goes on to list a variety of responses to the piece, without ever dealing with the heart of the issue, which is that the key players in the story say that the story is wrong.

The Journal roundup describes Lessig as “critical of the story” but fails to say why. What Lessig says is that the original WSJ piece claimed that he had shifted his position on the issue, and he has not done so: unlike some others in the Net neutrality camp, he has consistently supported the idea of “fast lanes” on the Web as long as everyone has equal access to them.

Net neutrality isn’t easy to explain. But the Journal story had more room than most to try to do so. Even if the writers believe that Google’s explanation of its position is somehow deceptive or insincere, they owe it to their readers to include that argument. The initial story’s failures are only compounded by the follow-up roundup, which purports to cover the bases of Web reactions but leaves out the most importance responses.

This happens all the time: A newspaper does a shoddy job of covering a complex issue; then, when people raise questions about the story’s accuracy, the paper views their criticism as sour grapes, and never bothers to deal with the substance of the complaints.

Here, Google and Lessig aren’t saying merely, “this was a bad story.” They’re both saying, “We are principals to this story, and the story got our position wrong, and then used that error as a news peg.” I’ll be curious to see whether the Journal follows up further with these complaints. Its readers deserve better.

Many serious bloggers rely on Google Blog Search to provide regular reports on who’s linking back to them. The blogging tool I use, Wordpress, even uses Google’s blog search to feed a little window on the blog dashboard. (This is the listing it shows for this blog.)

The Google Blog Search results have generally been the fastest and most useful tool of this kind (Google displaced Technorati, which had long served in this role, some time ago). But a couple of months ago Google Blog Search started becoming pretty much useless. Instead of only reporting links from the “main” blog content, it reported all links on a blog page, including the so-called “sidebar” or blogroll, where many bloggers place a lengthy static list of blogs they read. So this means that, for instance, every time JD Lasica adds a new post to his blog at Social Media, which includes Wordyard in its blogroll, I get a new listing in the Google Blog Search for Wordyard, even though the post has nothing to do with Wordyard. This completely messes up the utility of Google’s search for me — and, from what I see posted by other serious bloggers, many other users.

Google’s whole expertise and reputation lies in the sorting of search results, so I’d hope and think that the company would pay close attention to this issue. But so far the only public comment I can find from Google itself about this problem is this post by Jeremy Hylton last month. Apparently Google Blog Search used to index only the content in the blog’s RSS feed, but now indexes the whole web page. Hylton says Google ” may have underestimated the impact on searches using the link: operator or where the query matches a blog or blogger’s name.” Since (for instance) every installation of Wordpress uses such a search this is not a minor issue; it is, for many of us, the central use of the service.

Hylton says Google’s working on a fix. In the meantime, the company might do a little more outreach so that it doesn’t face the general perception that its service is simply broken, which is how it feels now.

UPDATE: Danny Sullivan in comments below suggests that Google has focused on serving users doing general subject searches rather than bloggers searching for “who’s linking to me.” I’m sure that’s right. But the bloggers are the ones creating the content — they ought to be served well too. See Danny’s Searchengineland post for more info on the changes that Google made that resulted in this situation.

• Chicago Reader| Chicago Needs a New News Model: And here are a couple ideas—just add cash.: The story of the Tyee, David Beers's experiment in nonprofit Web journalism in Vancouver.

• DigiDave | Communication is Key: Drupal Nation: Software to Power the Left: David Cohn's opus on how Drupal powered the Dean campaign. A rare piece of writing that ignores the boundaries between technology coverage and political reporting — warms my heart.

• Dehnadi and Bornat's study of programming aptitude: Effort to devise test to find who will be a successful programmer. Via Clay Shirky on Boingboing:

  the single biggest predictor of likely aptitude for programming is a deep comfort with meaninglessness: “To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion.”

• Want Real Stimulus? Try Universal Health Care - BusinessWeek: A comprehensive plan for national health care isn't a distraction from solving the economy's woes, it is one of the central things the government can do to improve the economy in both short and long terms.

• Unlikely Words » Comprehensive Election Reactions Round Up - A Reference: A sort of digital time capsule for the 2008 election moment.

• Doom-mongering: A 2009 Internet Media Plan: Last month Nick Denton predicted a 40 percent decline in the online ad market. Nick is gloomy even in the best of times, so I’m hardly surprised, but this time around? The pessimists keep winning their bets. 40 percent drop in ad revenue for ad-supported businesses is not a decline, it’s a cataclysm. If it’s right, we’re just at the start of a cycle that will be even worse for this industry than the 2000-2001 downturn.

• Peter Schwartz: Facebook's Face Plant: The Poverty of Social Networks and the Death of Web 2.0: Web 2.0 will die. Facebook is all trivia, and it will go the way of AOL. I agree with about 1/2 of this. Let’s forget about whatever “Web 2.0″ is and talk about Facebook. FB’s effort to cut the difference between walled garden and open platform will work in the short run, probably help it keep growing and even figure out how to make some money through the downturn; but long term I don’t see how it keeps the most engaged users from jumping ship to truly open versions of its services, which will take maybe 5-10 years to go truly mainstream, but Will Happen, most definitely. See previous examination of these issues in previous examination of these issues in Technology Review from last summer.

• The 463: Inside Tech Policy: Learnings from THE Cyberporn Story: Interesting exhumation/recap of the big 1995 Time Cyberporn story fracas, which I followed on the Well and covered in the SF Examiner as an example of “collective online media criticism.”

On Tuesday I turned in the first draft of my book, the culmination of over a year’s work, with about seven months of nearly straight writing. So I’m relieved and happy.

I’m still doing some research and filling in some blanks, and we’ve got a ton of editing ahead of us over the next couple of months. But the hardest part is done.

Dave Winer compares bootstrapping a software project to the way suspension bridges get built, beginning with one thin cable stretched from dry land at one end to dry land at the other. When you’re writing a book, the equivalent of that first cable is probably creating the first outline — that’s the first time you can see the whole text from its opening to its conclusion, and get an overview of how the pieces fit together.

The first draft is something different: I don’t know if there’s an equivalent in the world of bridges. This is now my second time through it, and all I can say is that its completion brings a feeling of enormous relief, tinged by a little regret. The relief comes from the knowledge that this vague notion you once had in your mind has now become something real that other people can share. There were no disasters along the way. The thing worked! The regret comes from realizing that, of that vague original notion, only some fraction has survived the transfer from brain to page.

The title is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. It is in Crown’s Summer 2009 catalog, with an expected publication date of early July. You will be hearing much more about it here from now on, along with much more of everything, as I return to a more regular posting schedule. To those of you who have stuck with me here through the lean months, I’m grateful for your continued attention.

I see that the Washington Post’s new publisher, Katharine Weymouth, says the following in a memo: “We must focus better on what the consumer indicates they want, and be less quick to emphasize only what we think is important.”

These are words that most journalists have conditioned themselves to grimace at. To the old-school reporter, “listen to the customer” is assumed to be code for one of the following: (a) cave to the politician; (b) coddle the advertiser; (c) pander to the ignorant; or (d) give credence to the crazies. Customer research is for the marketing guys on the other side of the wall; here in the newsroom, we chart our own course, and we must stuff our ears and tie ourselves to the mast any time our ship passes close enough to readers for us to hear what they’re saying. Otherwise, we might betray our values.

To those of you in businesses outside of professional journalism, where listening to the customer is simple common sense, I realize that this sounds nuts. But it’s true. Here is a very amusing statement of it from one of the most successful journalists of our time:

At the Post I learned how to cruise the newsroom from the master, Michael Specter, who is now the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times… Michael also taught me how to deal with angry and rude readers, which is a major occupational hazard in the newspaper world. I used to get all flustered and apologetic and depressed when people called up to yell at me. But Michael would just listen for about 10 seconds, roll his eyes, and say: “You seem to have forgotten one thing. I DON’T WORK FOR YOU!” Michael is my idol.

This is Malcolm Gladwell, writing in 1996 in Slate. He is recording what a surprising number of journalists believe: They do not work for their readers. This is a fine thing to say, until the person they do work for turns out to be a profit-hungry capitalist less interested in the values of journalism than in boosting shareholder value (or, today, avoiding bankruptcy). At that moment, suddenly, the journalist becomes a convert to the notion of Serving the Reader. Only the commitment is an abstract one; it is made to The Reader, not to specific readers, and so defining its specific meaning remains in the journalist’s hands.

I am writing harshly here because a profession that I love is falling apart. Once upon a time I, too, would have heard a line like “we must focus better on the consumer” and rolled my eyes. Today? I wish the Post luck in figuring out who those consumers are, what they want, and how to get it to them.

The Tribune Company bankruptcy is a sad thing, but it cannot be said to be a surprising thing. Sam Zell’s purchase of the company was a heavily leveraged deal — that means he borrowed a ton of money to pay the previous owners/shareholders and figured he’d pay off the debt with the profits of the newspapers. Only now those profits are tanking (although in fact we’re told that every single Tribune paper is still in the black for the moment) and the credit markets, as you may have heard, are suddenly much less, er, forgiving.

Of course, as some are speculating, Zell may have figured all along he’d end up needing to take this route, and he may not view it with horror. One of the things he can presumably do in Chapter 11 is renegotiate all the painful labor deals that newspaper owners have always chafed at. Bankruptcy can deal you a “get out of contracts free” card.

Still, it’s a mess, and one that can’t really be laid at the feet of the new-media iceberg that the entire newspaper industry is cruising towards, except in the broadest of ways. If you trace the lines of responsibility for this train-wreck you find they all point back to that sacred cow of the newspaper industry — the Caretaker Family.

In the newspaper biz there is a lot of mythology around family ownership. The idea is that the proprietors’ descendants understand the sacred trust that is journalism and will serve as a strong protection for both newspaper employees and the public that depends on quality news sources.

The problem is that these families are just normal human beings who like to earn money. Over the past decades many or most of them decided — accurately, at least in the short term — that they could make a lot more money by selling shares to the public than by running their firms as private companies. Many newspapers created a dual ownership structure, so that even though the public was buying shares, the families retained effective control of the companies through preferred stock with special voting privileges. That’s how, for instance, the families that owned both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal set up their stock structures. But control turns out to be effective only when the money’s rolling in. When it slows or stops, the family members get restive.

The Bancrofts, who owned the Journal, sold out to Rupert Murdoch with barely a whimper the moment it looked like the Journal was no longer going to line their pockets. They proved faithless protectors of tradition. Of course, sometimes a family will make a smart (or lucky) move. Consider that, as I understand it, the Washington Post owes its relative financial stability to its purchase, in 1984, of the Stanley Kaplan SAT testing outfit, which — unlike the reporting of world and national news — turns out to be a pretty lucrative line of business.

In the case of Tribune, I don’t know how much of the company the family still owned by the time Zell acquired it. But if they weren’t directly responsible for selling to him, then they had bailed some time before. Either way, they hardly protected anything.

I took a look at the company’s proud corporate history here and found an account of an upward march of progress and profits under the wise stewardship of various McCormicks and Medills. Then in 1983 the company goes public and begins aggressive expansion, acquiring a bunch more broadcast outlets and boosting revenue to new heights. In 2000 Tribune acquires Times Mirror (another newspaper empire abandoned by another clan, the Chandlers). By 2002 Tribune has become a true Goliath, with more than $5 billion in revenue. Only here, strangely, the history goes nearly blank. A bland “Tribune returned to private ownership in December of 2007″ is the only mention of the firm’s recent troubles; its new private owner is not even named. Where were those McCormicks and Medills now?

Newspapers, as a business, are simply a huge mess today. For a long time they blamed TV, and now of course they blame the Web. Let us also not forget to blame the families.

I worked for an exemplar of those families myself once, and saw the good and the bad. Our publisher at the old Examiner was Will Hearst, scion of the Hearst clan. He was responsible for a wavering but heartfelt effort to shake some life into the old paper in the 1980s, when I joined it. But after a decade he’d had enough, and moved on (to Silicon Valley). Once he left, I knew it was time to jump ship too. The iceberg was visible enough then. So was the evidence that families were never going to save the newspaper industry.

A couple weeks ago, Peggy Noonan had a hilarious column in which she noted the strange (to her) disconnect between the depressing economic information in the news and the apparently unchanged commercial bustle of her Upper East Side neighborhood, where “nothing looks different.” My friend Andrew Leonard eviscerated her for her “let ‘em eat cake” obliviousness.

There’s a slightly different species of cluelessness at work in the premise behind David Carr’s New York Times column this morning, in which Carr muddily hypothesizes that the speed of new-media information transmission has accelerated the current economic downturn.

The piece is the sort of chin-scratcher that never sums up its thesis because it doesn’t quite have one. But the heart of it seems to be something like this: Things are bad, but even people who haven’t been directly hurt by the recession are cutting back on spending because they’re being bombarded by bad news in new, faster, more enveloping ways. “This recession got deeper faster,” Carr says, “because we knew more bad stuff quickly.” He describes the result as a sort of “emotional contagion” or “neurosis” that is fueling further economic slowdown.

I had my eyes glued to the screen during the last recession at the start of this decade, which was centered on my industry, the Internet. So the idea that there’s something new going on seems hard for me to buy. But the more significant mistake Carr makes is to suggest that the choices people are making to scrimp and scrub their budgets are “emotional,” “neurotic” — irrational. And that’s dead wrong.

What does it take to feel that a recession is real? Carr, like Noonan, seems to be waiting for the appearance of Hoovervilles. There are millions of lost jobs, and many more whom the labor statisticians miss whose hours have been cut back involuntarily. One in ten U.S. mortgage holders is a month or more behind in their payments. Any rational person ought to look at this situation and feel that things have indeed changed.

Yet the question keeps arising: For people who haven’t actually been laid off, “nothing has changed,” so why are they going all Scrooge-like on the economy?

What has changed, for everyone, is our picture of the future. For years we made our economic choices based on one set of assumptions. Even those of us who didn’t take on loads of credit card debt or leverage our homes or otherwise turn ourselves into family-sized debtor nations made assumptions when we looked at our financial plan for the next year or decade or retirement: our homes would grow in value, our 401(k)s would appreciate at a certain rate, we could send our kids to college if things kept going the way they were.

And of course now they are not. So any rational person is having those hard family conversations and scrubbing the personal budget. This is not acting on fear. It is neither “emotional” nor “neurotic.” It is acting rationally, the way economists expect us to act. Much as I am a lifelong skeptic of the classical economists’ hyperrational model of human behavior, in this case, the real world behavior fits the model pretty perfectly.

That it is deepening the recession is to be expected, not the fault of some new-media dynamic of hyperactive blogging but a sign that the signals we are receiving about the economy are strong enough today to shock us back into the “rational actor” mode. Carr implies that the Web jumped the gun on the recession: “The recession was actually not officially declared until last week, but the psychology that drives it had already been e-mailed, blogged and broadcast for months.” But the official declaration noted that the recession actually began a year ago. Of course we have all been talking about it for a year: We weren’t premature, we were reflecting the real-time event. It was the officials who lagged.

Watching your spending? Cutting out what you can? You aren’t being neurotic or irrational. The irrational behavior, it turns out, was what so many Americans were doing previously in this decade — cruising along obliviously and piling up debt while Wall Street concocted escalatingly baroque financial engineering schemes that exponentially inflated the risk at the root of our economy until the whole thing went bust. If a scary market has shocked such irrationality out of our system, let’s hope the effect is long-lasting.

Some of my favorite albums are the quartet of “pop” records Brian Eno made in the 1970s after he left Roxy Music: Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green World, and Before and After Science. These albums live in my brain and will reside there until I’m dead.

Eno has had a long and storied career since as the creator of ambient music, a producer of wonderful albums by Talking Heads and U2 and many others, and a multimedia artist. But one of the things that he no longer seems to do, much, is sing. He did, some, on a collaboration with John Cale from 1990 titled “Wrong Way Up.” But mostly, these days, he doesn’t. Now, his voice is not a conventionally “good” voice, but I always enjoyed it, and I’ve missed hearing it in new music. [UPDATE -- yeah, I forgot about the 2005 Another Day on Earth, probably because I never got that into it. Should try it again...]

All of which is by way of introduction to this delightful piece Eno recently contributed to the NPR series “This I Believe,” in which Eno declares that what he believes in is…singing. It’s a strange admission for him to make after all these years — like, I don’t know, Harpo Marx espousing the virtues of speech, or Greta Garbo expressing her love of crowds. But he makes a good case.

A recent long-term study conducted in Scandinavia sought to discover which activities related to a healthy and happy later life. Three stood out: camping, dancing and singing…. When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

[thanks to Kottke for the link]

For those still following the small-picture “death of the newspaper industry” tragedy while the much larger “collapse of the global economy” unfolds around it, there is a worthwhile exchange unfolding between Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer (starts with Jeff here, Dave answers here, Jeff responds, Dave replies).

It’s all food for thought but I want to highlight an analogy Dave raises today, which has, I think, a great clarity:

Imagine a group of doctors knew that all hospitals and pharmacies were about to shut down. What would they do? Might they do something to make sure their client’s health needs were at least partially attended to?

The same would presumably apply to many other professions, whose services are in some way necessary for life: police, fire, bus drivers, garbage collectors.

We’re often asked to believe how noble the profession of news is — now that is about to be tested in a whole new way. Are we just supposed to cry for this industry and throw our hands up and wait for the collapse before starting to put it back together, or would they like to help while they’re still here?

What’s valuable about this analogy is that it reminds journalists that they are actors in this drama, not victims. Victimhood is written deeply in the culture of the newsroom. It’s always the fault of the guys with the green eyeshades, or the publishers, or the advertisers, or even the readers.

Well, at this point, it hardly matters whose fault it is. Many of these ships are going down fast. If you’re a journalist who cares about the field as a vocation in the old sense (something to which you are called, and to which you feel a responsibility), if you believe that an informed public is a prerequesite for a functioning democracy, then think about Dave’s question. I am.

One of my formative professional experiences was working on the San Francisco Free Press in 1994. When the Newspaper Guild called a strike against the Examiner, where I worked, and the Chronicle (a strike over the jobs of truck drivers!), the Guild decided to publish a strike paper. We published a few editions on paper, but we posted daily on the Web. (The Well still has it up.) We did it partly because it was fun, but partly because we felt a responsibility to our community to keep providing it with news and information. That responsibility remains, whatever happens to the business model of the newspaper industry.

I read the recent New York Times magazine profile of Lewis Hyde with some interest. As it happened, I wrote a review of Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift just about 25 years ago as one of my early assignments at the Boston Phoenix. My editor at the time, Kit Rachlis, thought I might find Hyde’s uncategorizable mixture of literary criticism, sociology and anthropology intriguing, and he was right. (As the profession of editing moves into eclipse, let’s not forget that this matching of writer and subject is one of the subtle arts that we do not yet know how to automate.)

At the time, Hyde’s effort to establish a language of value separate from the financial marketplace spoke hauntingly to me — as a disaffected young liberal stunned by the Reaganite rise of free-market, anti-government ideology. The book’s themes feel somehow timely again today, at the end of the arc of history that began a quarter-century ago, as we scrabble through the ruins that said ideology has left of our economy and try to imagine rebuilding along different lines.

I was fascinated to learn from the Times piece that in the years since, The Gift has become a volume of almost totemic stature to writers like David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem and others whom I admire. I’d written that Hyde’s book would “probably be most read and appreciated by those who already grasp its lessons, the visionary writers and artists from whom Hyde draws so many examples.” It appears I was right. But I’m glad to know that the book has had such perennial success — and that Hyde, now a fellow at the Berkman center, has moved on to studying the concept of the “commons,” newly relevant in the Web era. I’ll look forward to his work on that topic.

In the meantime, if you want to read more, I’ve reposted that 1983 review of The Gift, which holds up pretty well, I think (though today I’d write a less involuted lead!).

A lot of people are upset that the Democrats didn’t go all vindictive on Joe Lieberman and boot him from his committee chairmanship. I have no love for Lieberman and detest his choice to stump for the Republicans this year. But I think I understand what Barack Obama was up to in pushing the Senate Democrats to bury the hatchet.

Obama spent most of the marathon campaign that just ended telling people that he wanted to move beyond the old partisan politics. Having won the election, he now faces a set of problems of a magnitude we haven’t faced since the 1930s. Just as Obama was Mr. Consistency on the campaign trail, sticking to the same themes and policies across the states and months, so, I think, he wants to demonstrate consistency from the campaign through the transition into government. “Remember what I said on the trail?” he’s in effect saying. “I meant it. And I’m going to act on it.”

A president with that sort of carry-through would be something extraordinary — and unfamiliar. I understand why Obama partisans might discount the promise of transcending partisanship as being so much blather. Our last president made campaign noises about “being a uniter, not a divider” and proceeded to pursue an intensely divisive agenda with the thinnest of mandates.

After such an experience, we can be forgiven for collectively discounting all talk of moving beyond the old battles. But I think Obama meant it, and means it, and means to see what happens when a president actually tries to deliver on that promise. While removing Joe Lieberman from his post might satisfy many an activist’s sense of justice, it won’t move us any closer to fixing the economy, reforming healthcare, or reversing the Bush Administration’s destruction of our functioning government. Whereas holding on to Lieberman’s vote in the Senate might.

In other words, settling scores is, and ought to be, a lower priority than delivering on a big policy agenda. If Obama can achieve that — and anyone who defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries and won the White House as a black candidate knows something about achieving tough goals — then the scores will have a way of settling themselves.