You have to watch the interview with David Simon, co-creator of The Wire, on Bill Moyers Journal.
I’m so full of admiration for Simon’s missions and his skill at storytelling that I feel a little sheepish for blurting earlier on Twitter that he’s a print guy ‘til the death. During the Moyers interview he refined my understanding of where he stands on what brought newspapers to their present condition.
A former Baltimore Sun reporter, he tells about taking the paper’s third buyout some years ago, and puts some context around the current debate about charging for internet content. He explains how constant budget cuts in the service of bigger profits devalued the newspaper product to the point where, when the internet threat finally did come along, the online product wasn’t worth enough to charge for it.
The larger share of the interview concerns systemic failures in all kinds of institutions—what The Wire was all about. He’s right, you know, that just electing the right guy isn’t going to yank this empire out of its self-imolation. Barack Obama knows that, too. At least that’s what he kept telling us in the campaign, when he talked about change being everybody’s business.
Still, now that Obama’s in office, he’s more centrist than some of us pretended he might be, and he spins a narrative, because that’s the way things work. When Moyers and Simon talked about “juking the stats” as a common thread that runs through the trouble with various institutions like education and law enforcement, I was thinking the real problem is something related to spinning the stats, but broader than that.
Ayn Rand talked a lot about pretending in her novels, especially in Atlas Shrugged. That’s the theme that makes me return to her, despite some of her uglier and now old-fashioned ideas. (I guess you take what you like and leave the rest from any thinker—from Rand with her female characters who thrive on contemptuous treatment, or from Simon and his apparent dismissal of the idea that decent reporting can be published in most any mode. The internet isn’t inherently fluffy and derivative.)
But about pretending. Don’t you think it’s the root of many evils? We delude ourselves personally, all the time. Our leaders and institutions seem to spend a whole lot more effort on framing what they’ve done or will do than they spend in the actual doing. Then we help them. It starts dawning on Dagney Taggart, the railroad exec in Atlas Shrugged, that she’s been enabling the behavior she despises, and she finally comes right out and says “I’m not going to help you pretend.”
Time to be blunt. That was the beauty of The Wire. Raw truth. Can we take it?
I can’t wait for Simon’s new series about post-Katrina New Orleans.
The jingle is funny, and outrageous in the sense that it’s silly it even exists, and I like it. I like the weekly show, too, and generally listen to it.
Sometimes, though, the show is overall just a little cute and bouncy, so I’m glad we also have Bob McChesney‘s Media Matters. It’s produced from AM station WILL, an NPR affiliate owned by the University of Illinois, and there’s a podcast. McChesney has a frankly liberal agenda, and so do his guests, who take calls when the Sunday show is done live. The newest podcast usually doesn’t show up until Tuesday.
Check out Dave Winer’s and Jay Rosen’s fairly regular Sunday media talks, too. Both bloggers, Dave is an internet pioneer, while Jay is an NYU prof, so their take on the future of journalism is pretty unique.
The way Arrington describes the uses for his science project—a low-cost PADD—it sounds like a toy.
The key uses: Internet consumption. The virtual keyboard will make data entry a pain other than for entering credentials, quick searches and maybe light emails. This machine isn’t for data entry. But it is for reading emails and the news, watching videos on Hulu, YouTube, etc., listening to streaming music on MySpace Music and imeem, and doing video chat via tokbox.
Music on MySpace? Not very enterprising. OK, he’s managing expectations. That’s cool.
Actually, a device like the CrunchPad could accomplish data entry in a really rudimentary way. Think checklists.
Vendors of business software for mobile devices try to protect their turf and warn prospects that the only workable solution for data input is a complicated Blackberry app that syncs with the corporate datastore; wifi isn’t available, they say—and you sure as hell can’t trust it. I don’t know. I’m not sure syncing will be the default in a few years and in a lot of cases it’s not required now.
I love the idea of the pad and have been following its development, even dreaming up scenarios in which my employer could marry its safety inspection checklists with the pad hardware as a bundled product. Enable the chucking of clipboards in an economical way, all online.
I don’t know if commercial producers, ad agencies and their clients are gauging reaction to TV commercials on Twitter, but they should be.
Thinking the Kia hamster commercial was very cute—especially the cool passenger’s crisp little inverse nod of recognition to another hamster at a stop light—I took to Twitter to see if others reacted as I did. The Twitterati likes it mostly.
Strikes me it’s an incredibly objective view. If you’re a marketer, you reach out to consumers with a phone survey or recruit them for a focus group and you’ve attached a lot of importance to wanting to know. You look at blogs for a sense of the pulse and you have to figure the bloggers have attached a certain measure of importance to the act of writing about your product, or may even have some agenda. It takes some effort to publish a blog post. But a twitterer doesn’t make a big investment of time in blurting out a tweet. A collection of opinions tossed out in this way seems very real, honest.
mooshki: If I had any $, I would buy a Kia Soul because of the hamster commercial.
<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=6e09afd2-a7f1-4be6-93a7-6ca89e29e695" target="_new" title="Trying the beta">Video: Trying the beta</a>
Not a lot of controls, but it is very easy to make and publish. Not that the publishing part is anywhere near as populist as YouTube. Click on “Soapbox” in the embed. You go to an MSN video page that’s dominated by MSNBC videos. Soapbox user videos, the thing you thought you were clicking to see, are relatively hidden away behind a little link on the top nav. That seems to be changing with the new MSN video site. (See preview.) But the change doesn’t favor the creations of everyday folks; it seems to tilt from an emphasis on news to an emphasis on TV shows.
I guess they’re feeling their way. Microsoft is getting quite live and webby—in some quarters of that big place. Pretty soon now you won’t even see dialog boxes when you install stuff, like “You may now disconnect from the Internet.”
Couple days ago Sharepoint Designer was freed. First thing some IT folks thought about? Lock it down in enterprises. Can’t have that now. Everybody publishing? Shudder.
I’m sure it must be hard for Microsoft to balance all the interests. They can’t diss the protectionist IT cops who are their customers for servers and Office, but at the same time they have to listen to the reality out there.
Control vs. contribute. I haven’t looked at it lately but there used to be a similarly interesting balancing act performed by Adobe in marketing Contribute on their site. As I recall it, there was practically no summary of the product on the microsite home. You forked immediately to pages for IT or publisher and each audience got a different story. Editors were told they could do anything! IT guys were assured they didn’t have to let anybody do anything.
