February 5, 2012
Significant and Silly at BuzzFeedBy DAVID CARR
When a Web site called BuzzFeed broke the news on the night of the Iowa caucuses that John McCain was endorsing Mitt Romney, more than a few readers scratched their heads and said, “What is a BuzzFeed?”
They’re about to find out.
BuzzFeed is the creation of Jonah Peretti, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab with an expertise in content that is likely to be “liked.” He took those skills to The Huffington Post, where he was the wizard in back of the curtain, brewing a bubbling cauldron of tatty celebrity news and goofy cat shots behind a front page of serious news and commentary. Using search optimization, he knew what people wanted almost before they did.
Mr. Peretti started BuzzFeed as a laboratory at first, making it less about what people were searching for and more about what they might share. He developed technologies that allowed BuzzFeed to determine very quickly what media content was being posted and shared — items that were contagious, the kind of thing that ends up on one person’s Facebook page and then suddenly, many other people’s. When The Huffington Post was sold to AOL last year, Mr. Peretti left and began working on BuzzFeed full-time.
With its mix of oddities, listicles and Web memes, BuzzFeed was at first something like The Huffington Post without the pretension of producing news and commentary. But in December, Mr. Peretti hired Ben Smith, the highly regarded blogger and columnist for Politico, to be his editor in chief. Right after he started in January, Mr. Smith broke the news of Mr. McCain’s endorsement of Mr. Romney for the New Hampshire primary. The message was clear: BuzzFeed was a player in news. (Mr. Smith still writes his weekly column for Politico.)
Soon afterward, BuzzFeed raised $15.5 million from Kenneth Lerer’s Lerer Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Hearst Interactive Media, Softbank and RRE Ventures. Mr. Smith immediately began hiring reporters, including Matt Buchanan from Gawker Media; John Herrman from Popular Mechanics; Rosie Gray from The Village Voice, and Doree Shafrir from RollingStone.com. BuzzFeed wasn’t just hiring brand names to serve as lustrous hood ornaments connoting credibility, the way Tina Brown and Arianna Huffington have. The hires at BuzzFeed were more like maypoles: young writers native to the Web who become pivot points for contents because they are bathed in both the ethos and practice of social media.
After a week in which Facebook announced an initial public offering that could end up in valuing it at $100 billion, it’s clear that the social Web — Facebook, Twitter and their ilk — will rival search — Google, Bing and their ilk — as a force for helping people find content. The average person’s Facebook feed, just like BuzzFeed, is a mix of the comical and the consequential, functioning as a kind of human-enabled RSS feed that belies the traditional architecture of media outlets.
In a sense, Mr. Peretti is reverse-engineering the HuffPo formula. At The Huffington Post, he used search optimization to create a gaudy funhouse behind a serious front page. At BuzzFeed, the funhouse was the point of it all. The main headers on the home page told the story: “LOL,” “cute,” “win,” “fail,” “omg,” “geeky,” “trashy” and “wtf?”
But with the addition of Mr. Smith and his new hires, BuzzFeed is growing some serious news muscles under a silly, frilly skin, and added the header “2012” for election coverage. (More traditional news verticals will be rolled out in the coming months.) It’s gone well so far, with comScore showing 10.8 million unique visitors in December, more than double that of the same month in 2010.
Its business model, in part, capitalizes on the mix of high and low content; instead of banner ads, BuzzFeed works with companies like Pillsbury to create content ideal for sharing, including “10 Things You Never Knew You Could Do With a Crescent Roll.”
If it is successful, BuzzFeed will generate the kind of traffic that will rival behemoths like, yes, The Huffington Post. Mr. Peretti says that BuzzFeed makes a profit some months, but given the level of investment and growth — there are now 78 people in its Flatiron offices — the burn rate on that new chunk of capital is significant. “It’s fun to watch them make all these hires,” said Choire Sicha, the founder of The Awl site and a veteran of the New York Web scene. “But it’s important that they don’t overspend. Web ad rates are what they are and that isn’t going to change.”
Mr. Peretti says he is not, and won’t be, competing with The Huffington Post, in part because that would be awkward since he and Mr. Lerer were among the founders of that site. Sitting in the coffee area of BuzzFeed’s offices on West 21st Street in Manhattan, he pointed out that there is nothing more viral than news that no one else has, so it makes sense to create some. With Mr. Smith sharing the table, he said that BuzzFeed is a natural response to a changing ecosystem.
“As the world has realigned from being about portals and then search and now social, how do you build a media company for a social world?” he said. “And a big part of that is scoops and exclusives and original content, and it’s also about cute kittens in an entertaining cultural context.”
As the consumer Web has matured, readers have become minipublishers, using social media platforms to share information they think will entertain and enlighten their friends. No longer is it just about so-called sticky content that keeps readers around, or even clicky content that causes them to hit a link; it’s also about serving up content that is spreadable.
Hit the right note, and your readers become like bees, stopping by your site to grab links and heading back out on the Web to pollinate other platforms. That behavior has tapped into something visceral, a kind of game in which the person finding something delicious gains social capital for sharing it.
“I can remember when I first had lunch with Jonah, he talked a lot about the social Web,” Mr. Smith said. “I left thinking he had just filled my head with jargon, and then it gradually dawned on me that it is actually where I am just living.”
Before he went to BuzzFeed, Mr. Smith was a force on Twitter, with about 60,000 followers. He was known as a reporter who not only broke news on Twitter but also served as a signal tower, providing links for the news made by others.
Now he is overseeing an editorial world where there are still articles like “The Cutest Boys With Dogs” (not to be confused with “30 Cats Sitting Like Humans”) and “50 Things You Will Never See in Real Life,” which includes a picture of a Chihuahua wearing double cheeseburgers for shoes. That odd numerology is an update of the ancient dark arts in publishing. For some reason, putting a number on something makes it irresistible. For decades, women’s magazines have been telling you about “101 Sure-Fire Ways to Lose Weight” and “18 Secrets to Winning His Heart.”
But those numbers riffs now sit side by side with serious news about fraudulent mortgage foreclosures. “I am hiring people who don’t just want to waste their time reporting other people’s work,” he said. “No one is going to care if we come up with a story that is almost as good as someone else’s scoop four hours earlier.”
Mr. Peretti already had a team of editors who knew how to take commodity content and refashion it into something new, but he wanted more. News is the killer app, and does not depend on search optimization: The Web immediately points at your site when you have an actual scoop. That’s where Mr. Smith and his team of digitally enabled journalists come in.
So now Mr. Peretti has high and low, news and fun, all ready for sharing. “People are now used to having everything mixed together in a Facebook newsfeed,” Mr. Peretti said. “A story about the Arab Spring will be next to a picture of your sister’s new baby. Why not have a publishing site that embraces those colliding worlds?”
Showing posts with label Journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Journalism. Show all posts
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Saturday, July 31, 2010
The Best Magazine Articles Ever
The Best Magazine Articles Ever
The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Stars denote how many times a correspondent has suggested it. Submitter comments are in italics. For a great way to read long-form magazine articles on a tablet device see my review here.
This is a work in progress. It is a on-going list of suggestions collectively made by readers of this post. At this point the list has not been vetted or selected by me. It is incomplete. You may notice that your favorite author or piece is missing. This is easy to fix. Simply recommend your favorite magazine articles to me via email: articles@kk.org. Or if your favorite article is already listed, use the same form to recommend it in order to elevate it to the "top".
— KK
The Top Five Articles
****** David Foster Wallace, "Federer As Religious Experience." The New York Times, Play Magazine, August 20, 2006.
***** David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster." Gourmet Magazine, Aug 2004.
***** Neal Stephenson, "Mother Earth, Mother Board: Wiring the Planet." Wired, December 1996. On laying trans-oceanic fiber optic cable.
****** Gay Talese, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Esquire, April 1966.
**** Ron Rosenbaum, "Secrets of the Little Blue Box." Esquire, October 1971. The first and best account of telephone hackers, more amazing than you might believe.
**** Jon Krakauer, "Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds." Outside Magazine, January 1993. Article that became Into the Wild.
The Full List
Works are arranged in chronological order of appearance.
* William Hazlitt, "On Common-Place Critics." The Examiner, November 24, 1816. [Ed's note: Republished in Hazlitt's The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men and Manners, Volume 2.]
* Joseph Mitchell, "All You Can Hold for Five Bucks." The New Yorker, April 15, 1939. A brilliant description of the nearly extinct traditional New York "beefsteak" dinner, but almost all of the stories in [Mitchell's] collection Up in the Old Hotel merit inclusion.
* R. A. Radford, "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp." Economica, 1945.
* Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think." Atlantic Magazine, July 1945.
** John Hersey, "Hiroshima." The New Yorker, August 31, 1946.
* Lillian Ross, Profiles, "'How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?'," The New Yorker, May 13, 1950. profile of Ernest Hemingway in decline.
* Gay Talese, "Looking for Hemingway." Esquire, 1960. [Ed.'s note: Republished in Talese's The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits and Encounters.]
** John Updike, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." The New Yorker, October 22, 1960. About Ted Williams career framed by his last game. I read it every opening day without fail.
** Norman Mailer, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." Esquire, November 1960.
* S.L.A. Marshall, "First Wave at Omaha Beach." The Atlantic Monthly, November 1960.
* Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem." The New Yorker. Part I: February 16, 1963; Part II: February 23, 1963; Part III: March 2, 1963; Part IV: March 9, 1963; Part V: March 16, 1963. [Republished as Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.]
* Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp.'" Partisan Review, 1964.
* Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Harper's Magazine, November 1964.
* John McPhee, Profiles, "A Sense of Where You Are." The New Yorker, January 23, 1965. A portrait of Bill Bradley from his Princeton days, and a good analysis of the sport of basketball.
** Tom Wolfe, "The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!" Esquire, March 1965.
* Nat Hentoff, "Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan." February 1966.
****** Gay Talese, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Esquire, April 1966.
** John Sack, "M." Esquire, October 1966.
* Joan Didion, "Farewell to the Enchanted City." Saturday Evening Post, January 14, 1967. [Ed.s' note: Reprinted in Didion's anthologySlouching Towards Bethlehem as "Goodby to All that."]
* Hunter S. Thompson, "The 'Hashbury' is the Capital of the Hippies." The New York Times Magazine, Maybe 14, 1967.
* Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1967. [Ed.'s note: Reprinted in Didion's anthologySlouching Towards Bethlehem.]
*** Hunter Thompson, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." Scanlan's Monthly, June 1970.
* Tom Wolfe, "Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers." New York Magazine, June 8, 1970.
* Norman Mailer, "Ego." Life, March 19, 1971.
**** Ron Rosenbaum, "Secrets of the Little Blue Box." Esquire, October 1971. The first and best account of telephone hackers, more amazing than you might believe.
* Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Rolling Stone. Part I: November 11, 1971; Part II: November 25, 1971.
* David Felton, "The Lyman Family's Holy Siege of America." Rolling Stone. Part I: December 23, 1971; Part II: January 2, 1972. Rolling Stone for several years in the 70s was, along with Co-Evolution, was the best periodical going. I saw you listed the Patty Hearst story. But for my money the absolute best was this creepy but true story on the Mel Lyman cult.
* Nora Ephron, "A Few Words About Breasts." Esquire, May 1972. [Ed.'s note: Republished in Ephron's Crazy Sald.]
** Stewart Brand, "Space War: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Dearth Among Computer Bums." Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972. Written nearly 40 years ago, this account of virtual realities has all the classic props: midnight hours, geek humor, nerd hubris, and other worldliness.
* Brad Darrach, "The Day Bobbly Blew It." Playboy, July 1973. Republished in Halberstam's The Best American Sports Writing of the Century.
* Howard Kohn and David Weir, "Tania's World: The Inside Story." Rolling Stone, October 23, 1975. About Patty Hearst's kidnapping.
* Lester Bangs, "The Greatest Album Ever Made." Creem, March 1976.
* Robert Scheer, "The Playboy Interview: Jimmy Carter." Playboy, November 1976.
* John McPhee, "Coming into the Country." The New Yorker, June 20, 1977. One of the best articles about Alaska, and Alaskans.
* John McPhee, "Basin and Range (Part I)." The New Yorker, October 20, 1980. Clear and interesting explanations about geology and plate tectonics for the layperson.
* George W.S. Trow, "Within the Context of No Context." The New Yorker, November 17, 1980. Brilliant, eccentric, apocalyptic writing about the nature of the cultural devastation television has wrought.
* Paul Nelson, "The Crackup and Resurrection of Warren Zevon." Rolling Stone, March 19, 1981. Tough, fearless and a very memorable look at Zevon's alcoholism and his attempt at recovery.
**** Edward Jay Epstein, "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" Atlantic Magazine, February 1982. Diamonds, De Beers, monopoly & marketing.
* Marcelle Clements, "The Dog is Us." Rolling Stone, September 2, 1982.
* William Broyles, Jr., "Why Men Love War." Esquire, November 1984.
** George Plimpton, "The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch." Sports Illustrated, April 1, 1985. I remember being extremely angry (for a few minutes) that the Mets were going to get this guy instead of my A's. I was an honest kid and man, it just seemed so unfair. When I realized it was a prank, I wasn't as upset. Because I always thought this guy, in some form, would someday show up and blow away the Twins, the Angels, and the Giants wearing an A's uniform. I'm still waiting!
* Frank Deford, "The Boxer and the Blonde." Sports Illustrated, June 17, 1985. Story of a hard Pittsburgh boxer and the woman who captured his heart.
* James Fenton, "The Snap Revolution." Granta, 1986. What happened in Manila, and in Malacanang Palace, when the Marcoses fell.
* Calvin Trillin, "Covering the Cops." The New Yorker, February 17, 1986. Terrific profile of Edna Buchanan
* Calvin Trillin, "Black or White." The New Yorker, April 14, 1986.
*** Richard Ben Cramer, "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?" Esquire, June 1986.
* Carlos M. Cipolia, "Basic Laws of Human Stupidity." Whole Earth Review, Spring 1987. A serious meditation on stupidity that will probably resonate today.
** John McPhee, "The Control of Nature: Atchafalaya." The New Yorker, February 23, 1987.
* Bill Barol, "I Stayed Up With Jerry." Newsweek, September 1987.
* Davis Miller, "My Dinner With Ali." Louisville Courier-Journal, 1989. [Ed.'s note: Republished in Miller's The Zen of Muhammad Ali, Harrington's The Beholder's Eye, and elsewhere.
* Gary Smith, "Shadow of a Nation." Sports Illustrated, February 18, 1991. Feature on the Crow Indians -- the story that won him his first National Magazine Award.
** Richard Preston, "The Mountains of Pi." The New Yorker, March 2, 1992. Two brothers build a supercomputer from mailorder parts in the New York apartment. All it does is compute new digits of Pi.
* Russ Rymer, "A Silent Childhood." The New Yorker. Part 1: April 13, 1992; Part II: April 20, 1992. The two-part article was later reworked into the book, Genie: a Scientific Tragedy, the story of a feral child discovered in LA in 1970, and how she was used as a guinea pig to test linguistic theories.
* Richard Preston, "Crisis in the Hot Zone." The New Yorker, October 26, 1992. "If there were any significant airborne transmissibility to the disease, the situation would be much different." "How so?" "There would be a lot fewer of us.
* Susan Orlean, "The American Man at Age Ten." Esquire, December 1992. [Ed.'s note: Not available in Esquire's online archive, but you'll find it with a little searching. Also republished in Orlean's The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup and Glass's The New Kings of Nonfiction.]
* Louis de Bernieres, "The Brass Bar." Granta, 1993. Callow writer and recently-graduated English major decides to expose himself to the rich language of the working class by taking a job as a mechanic, and discovers a brass bar that's so fucking pukka you'd want to spunk yourself.
**** Jon Krakauer, "Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds." Outside Magazine, January 1993. Article that became Into the Wild.
* Karl Taro Greenfeld, "The Incredibly Strange Mutant Creatures who Rule the Universe of Alienated Japanese Zombie Computer Nerds (Otaku to You)." Wired, March/April 1993.
* Mark Blackwell, "Cream of the Crap." Spin Magazine, May 1993.
* Mark Danner, "The Truth of El Mozote." The New Yorker, Dec 6, 1993.
* Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace." The Village Voice, December 21, 1993.
* David Foster Wallace, "Ticket to the Fair." Harper's Magazine, July 1994.
* Lawrence Weschler, "Inhaling the Spore: David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology." Harper's Magazine, September 1994. The first and best detailed treatment of the most interesting place in North America.
* James R. Kincaid, "Tom the Misunderstood." The New York Times, Books, December 18, 1994.
** Gary Wolf, "The Curse of Xanadu." Wired, June 1995. The story of Ted's Nelson attempt to heal his personality with his invention of hypertext.
* Susan Orlean, "Orchid Fever." The New Yorker, January 23, 1995.
* Hunter S. Thompson, "Song of the Sausage Creature." Cycle World, March 1995. Unfortunately the magazine's web site doesn't include the article, but it's available on various other sites without permission; just Google the title. [Ed.'s note: Also republished in Thompson's Kingdom of Fear and Klancher's The Devil Can Ride.]
* George McKeena, "On Abortion: A Lincolnian Position." The Atlantic Monthly, September 1995. I don't agree with the political position, but I do recall it as one of the most rational, thoughtful articles I've read on the subject.
* Barry Lopez, "On the Wings of Commerce." Harper's, October 1995. An excellent view inside the hidden world of commercial air freight, which powers a big chunk of the global economy. Think Neal Stevenson's glass necklace (see below), but airborne.
** David Foster Wallace, "Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise." Harper's Magazine, January 1996.
* Edwin Dobb, "A Kiss is Still a Kiss (Even if the Sex is Postmodern and the Romance Problematic)." Harper's Magazine, February 1996.
*** David Foster Wallace, "The String Theory." Esquire, July 1996.
*** Jon Krakauer, "Into Thin Air." Outside Magazine, September 1996.
****** Neal Stephenson, "Mother Earth, Mother Board: Wiring the Planet." Wired, December 1996. On laying trans-oceanic fiber optic cable.
* John Gregory Dunne, "The Humbolt Murders." The New Yorker, January 13, 1997.
* Katie Hafner, "The Epic Saga of The Well." Wired, May 1997.
* Ron Rosenbaum, "J.D. Salinger: The Man in the Glass House." Esquire, June 1997. This, in my mind, is the best piece on Salinger's reclusive life.
** Michael Paterniti, "Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain." Harper's Magazine, October 1997.
** Tom Junod, "Can you say- Hero?" Esquire, November 1998. A profile of Mr. Rogers.
* Robert Kurson, "My Favorite Teacher." Esquire, March 1, 2000.
** Bill Joy, "Why the future doesn't need us." Wired, April 2000. The best magazine article I've ever read-- by which I mean the piece that came out of nowhere and just knocked my socks off and changed the way I think about the human species.
* David Foster Wallace, "The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub." Rolling Stone, April 13, 2000. [Ed.'s note: Republished in Evans' The Best American Magazine Writing 2001.]
* Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, "Landing From the Sky." The New Yorker, April 24, 2000.
* Bruce Feiler, "Pocketful of Dough." Gourmet, October 2000.
* Malcolm Gladwell, "The Pitchman." The New Yorker, October 30, 2000. Part story teller and part sleuth, he gets beyond the simple sound bite to the core of what drives Popeil and his process. The fundamental takeaway is the inseparability of product design and product marketing in building products designed to be coveted by the customer they are target for.
* Rebecca Mead, “You’ve Got Blog.” The New Yorker, November 13, 2000. Profile of two bloggers before I knew what a blog was.
* William Langewiesche, "The Million Dollar Nose." The Atlantic Monthly, December 2000. About Wine critic Robert Parker.
* Ian Frazier, "Tilting at Tree Bags: The Tale of One Man's Triumph Over Chaos, One Plastic Bag at a Time." Mother Jones, January/February 2001.
* Mark Singer, "The Book Eater." The New Yorker, February 5, 2001. Profile of Michael Zinman, turbine trader and collector.
* George Gurley, "Pleasures of the Fur." Vanity Fair, March 2001.
** David Foster Wallace, "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage." Harper's Magazine, April 2001. A tome to the politics of language.
** James B. Stewart, "The Matchmaker." The New Yorker, Aug 20, 2001. A revealing look into the secret world of Steinway Hall in New York City and one remarkable seller of pianos with troubled memories.
* Edward W. Said "The Clash of Ignorance." The Nation, October 22, 2001. In response to Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations."
* William Langewiesche, "The Crash of EgyptAir 990." Atlantic Magazine, November 2001.
* James B. Stewart, "The Real Heroes Are Dead." The New Yorker, February 11, 2002.In 1998, Susan Greer, a divorced New Jersey housewife in her fifties, fell in love with Rick Rescorla, an old-fashioned man of action seemingly from a bygone era. He worked as vice president for security for a financial firm, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. Three years later, Rescorla died a hero at the World Trade Center, a tragedy he had long foreseen. Like the best storytellers, Stewart builds his tale so masterfully that, even though you already know the ending, it's still devastating, devastating, devastating.
* William Langewiesche, "American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center." The Atlantic Monthly. Part I: "The Inner World," July/August 2002; Part II: "The Rush to Recover," September 2002; Part III: "The Dance of the Dinosaurs," October 2002. [Ed.'s note: Excerpts are available from The Atlantic. Republished as Langewiesche's American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center.]
* Gary Taubes, "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" The New York Times, July 7, 2002.
* Alex Kotlowitz, " The Trenchcoat Robbers: After Fifteen Years and Twenty-seven Banks, They Finally Tripped Up." The New Yorker, July 8, 2002.
* John Seabrook, "The Fruit Detective." The New Yorker, Aug 19, 2002.
* James Fallows, "The Fifty-First State?" Atlantic Magazine, November 2002.
* Michael Pollan, "An Animal’s Place." The New York Times Magazine, November 10, 2002. It's about meat eating, and farming, and nutrition, but mostly it's about the hypocrisy of veganism or vegetarianism as an animal friendly way of life.
** Steven Kotler, "Vision Quest: A Half Centure of Artificial-sigh Research has Succeeded. And Now This Blind Man Can See." Wired, September 2002.
* Calvin Tomkins, “His Body, Himself.” The New Yorker, January 27, 2003. Profile of Mathew Barney.
* Evan Wright, "The Killer Elite." Rolling Stone, June 26, 2003. [Ed's note: Available in Rolling Stone's online archive by subscription only. Republished in The Best American Magazine Writing 2004.]
* Katherine Boo, "The Marriage Cure: Is Wedlock Really a Way Out of Poverty?" The New Yorker, August 18, 2003.
*** Tom Junod, "The Falling Man." Esquire, September 2003.
* William Langewiesche, "Columbia's Last Flight." The Atlantic Monthly, November 2003.
* Charles Fishman, "The Wal-Mart You Don't Know." Fast Company, December 1, 2003.
* John Jeremiah Sullivan, "Upon This Rock: Rock Music Used to be a Safe Haven for Degenerates and Rebels. Until it Found Jesus." GQ, February 2004. Extremely funny and smart and profound meditation on much more than its title and subhead suggest.
* David Grann, "The Brand." The New Yorker, February 16, 2004. A look inside the most murderous prison gang in America.
* Stephen Dubner, "The Silver Thief." The New Yorker, May 17, 2004.
** Chris Jones, "Home." Esquire, July 1, 2004. A lovely meditation on loneliness and homesickness. Follows the astronauts on board the International Space Station when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry in 2003, grounding the shuttle program and leaving them stranded in orbit.
***** David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster." Gourmet Magazine, Aug 2004.
* Gene Weingarten, "Fear Itself: Learning to Live in the Age of Terrorism." The Washington Post, August 22, 2004. About riding a bus in Jerusalem.
** Chris Anderson, "The Long Tail." Wired, October 2004. See the Wikipedia article on Long Tail.
* Mark Slouka, "Quitting the Paint Factory." Harper's Magazine, November 2004.
* Bob Garfield, "Bob Garfield's 'Chaos Scenario': A Look at the Marketing Industry's Coming Disasterz." Advertising Age, April 13, 2005. A classic for anyone working in media today.
* James Bamford, "The Man Who Sold The War." Rolling Stone, December 1, 2005.
* Andrew Corsello, "The Wronged Man." GQ, November 2004 (republished November 2007).
* Jesse Katz, "The Recruit." Los Angeles, March 2005.
* Gene Weingarten, "The Peekaboo Paradox." The Washington Post, Sunday Magazine, January 22, 2006. Story about the weirdest clown, the Great Zucchini, you'll never want to meet. Keep reading....
** David Foster Wallace, "Host." Atlantic Magazine, April 2005.
* Malcolm Gladwell, "Million-Dollar Murray." The New Yorker, February 13, 2006. In it, he follows a homeless alcoholic and talks with the hospital he is constantly in and out of and determines that the man costs them about a million dollars a year because he is uninsured. Besides the fabulous writing and the incredible way in which Gladwell argues his point about how paying for insurance for the man is infinitely smarter, it is a story of how the argument that the gov't shouldn't take care of people in this way is leading us into economic hell.
* Kevin Kelly, "Scan This Book." The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006.
* C.J. Chivers, "The School." Esquire, June 2006.
****** David Foster Wallace, "Federer As Religious Experience." The New York Times, Play Magazine, August 20, 2006.
* Jonathan Lethem, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism." Harper's Magazine, February 2007.
** Gene Weingarten, "Pearls Before Breakfast." The Washington Post, Magazine, April 8, 2007. Joshua Bell is one of the world's greatest violinists. His instrument of choice is a multimillion-dollar Stradivarius. If he played it for spare change, incognito, outside a bustling Metro stop in Washington, would anyone notice?
* James McConkey, "What Kind of Father Am I? Looking Back at a Lifetime of Parenting Sons and Being Parented by Them." The American Scholar, Spring 2008.
* Nick Paumgarten, "Up and Then Down: The Lives of Elevators." The New Yorker, April 21, 2008.
* Wil S. Hylton, "Leave No Man Behind." GQ, May 2008.
*** Chris Jones, "The Things That Carried Him." Esquire, May 2008. It’s extremely moving without being saccharine or twee. It’s a military story, but utterly without jingoism or indictment. And it’s wonderfully observed.
* Chris Anderson, "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete." Wired, June 23, 2008.
* David Grann, "The Chameleon: The many lives of Frédéric Bourdin." The New Yorker, August 11, 2008.
* Peter Alsop, Livia Corona, "Fin: The Last Days of Fish." Good, September 5, 2008. An excellent look at the sad state of our oceans and the fishing industry.
** Michael Lewis, "The End." Portfolio, November 11, 2008. Breaks down supposedly complex economic cause and effect into very engaging, easily understood analysis. Real life characters as interesting and entertaining as the best fiction. A must.
*** Gene Weingarten, "Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?" The Washington Post, Magazine, March 8, 2009. Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing.
** Michael Lewis, "Wall Street on the Tundra." Vanity Fair, April 2009. It's an in depth analysis of the financial collapse of Iceland. Excellent. There are some great one liners (this isn't actually one of them, but it'll give you the idea): "This in a country the size of Kentucky, but with fewer citizens than greater Peoria, Illinois. Peoria, Illinois, doesn’t have global financial institutions, or a university devoting itself to training many hundreds of financiers, or its own currency. And yet the world was taking Iceland seriously."
* Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, "Stealing Mona Lisa." Vanity Fair, May 2009.
** Skip Hollandsworth, "Still Life." Texas Monthly, May 2009. A Texas teenager is paralyzed from the neck down in a sports accident. His condition requires that he always lay down. Skip Hollandsworth's moving, detailed account captures a family who lived in a time capsule for over 30 years.
* Mike Sager, "Todd Marinovich: The Man Who Never Was." Esquire, May 2009.
* Michael Lewis, "The Man Who Crashed the World." Vanity Fair, August 2009. About the collapse of AIG.
** David Grann, "Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?" The New Yorker, September 7, 2009. Portrait of the unjust conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. The piece perfectly portrays the U.S.'s broken justice system; the way Grann unfolds the story is a slow hammer blow.
* Thomas Lake, "The Debtor." Atlanta Magazine, November 2009.
* Justin Heckert, "Lost in the Waves." Men's Journal, November 9, 2009.
* Evan Ratliff, "Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here’s What Happened." Wired, November 20, 2009.
* Ariel Levy, "Either/Or: Sports, Sex, and the Case of Caster Semenya." The New Yorker, November 30, 2009. Wonderful, heartbreaking piece about the South African runner.
* Janet Malcolm, "Iphigenia in Forest Hills." The New Yorker, May 3, 2010. A compelling look at a murder trial, the rituals of a courtroom and a contemplation on being a journalist all rolled into one.
* Errol Morris, "The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is." The New York Times, Opinion, June 20, 2010. There's been a lot of well-written, breezy books on the brain in the last--well, I don't know; since I've been paying attention?--but this series maps the concepts of perception and the physiology behind perceiving reality and the harsh truth of reality to interesting, practical anecdotes, some of which are recent, and some of which are historical. It's fascinating.
* Michael Hastings, "The Runaway General." Rolling Stone, June 22, 2010. An entertaining read and because of impact it had on Army leadership it has become historically important.
* David Grann, "The Mark of a Masterpiece: The Man Who Keeps Finding Famous Fingerprints on Uncelebrated Works of Art." The New Yorker, July 12, 2010.
* Atul Gawande, "Letting Go: What Should Medicine Do When It Can’t Save Your Life?" The New Yorker, August 2, 2010. I couldn't read it all at once because I started crying at several points.
The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Stars denote how many times a correspondent has suggested it. Submitter comments are in italics. For a great way to read long-form magazine articles on a tablet device see my review here.
This is a work in progress. It is a on-going list of suggestions collectively made by readers of this post. At this point the list has not been vetted or selected by me. It is incomplete. You may notice that your favorite author or piece is missing. This is easy to fix. Simply recommend your favorite magazine articles to me via email: articles@kk.org. Or if your favorite article is already listed, use the same form to recommend it in order to elevate it to the "top".
— KK
The Top Five Articles
****** David Foster Wallace, "Federer As Religious Experience." The New York Times, Play Magazine, August 20, 2006.
***** David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster." Gourmet Magazine, Aug 2004.
***** Neal Stephenson, "Mother Earth, Mother Board: Wiring the Planet." Wired, December 1996. On laying trans-oceanic fiber optic cable.
****** Gay Talese, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Esquire, April 1966.
**** Ron Rosenbaum, "Secrets of the Little Blue Box." Esquire, October 1971. The first and best account of telephone hackers, more amazing than you might believe.
**** Jon Krakauer, "Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds." Outside Magazine, January 1993. Article that became Into the Wild.
The Full List
Works are arranged in chronological order of appearance.
* William Hazlitt, "On Common-Place Critics." The Examiner, November 24, 1816. [Ed's note: Republished in Hazlitt's The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men and Manners, Volume 2.]
* Joseph Mitchell, "All You Can Hold for Five Bucks." The New Yorker, April 15, 1939. A brilliant description of the nearly extinct traditional New York "beefsteak" dinner, but almost all of the stories in [Mitchell's] collection Up in the Old Hotel merit inclusion.
* R. A. Radford, "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp." Economica, 1945.
* Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think." Atlantic Magazine, July 1945.
** John Hersey, "Hiroshima." The New Yorker, August 31, 1946.
* Lillian Ross, Profiles, "'How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?'," The New Yorker, May 13, 1950. profile of Ernest Hemingway in decline.
* Gay Talese, "Looking for Hemingway." Esquire, 1960. [Ed.'s note: Republished in Talese's The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits and Encounters.]
** John Updike, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." The New Yorker, October 22, 1960. About Ted Williams career framed by his last game. I read it every opening day without fail.
** Norman Mailer, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." Esquire, November 1960.
* S.L.A. Marshall, "First Wave at Omaha Beach." The Atlantic Monthly, November 1960.
* Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem." The New Yorker. Part I: February 16, 1963; Part II: February 23, 1963; Part III: March 2, 1963; Part IV: March 9, 1963; Part V: March 16, 1963. [Republished as Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.]
* Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp.'" Partisan Review, 1964.
* Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Harper's Magazine, November 1964.
* John McPhee, Profiles, "A Sense of Where You Are." The New Yorker, January 23, 1965. A portrait of Bill Bradley from his Princeton days, and a good analysis of the sport of basketball.
** Tom Wolfe, "The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!" Esquire, March 1965.
* Nat Hentoff, "Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan." February 1966.
****** Gay Talese, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Esquire, April 1966.
** John Sack, "M." Esquire, October 1966.
* Joan Didion, "Farewell to the Enchanted City." Saturday Evening Post, January 14, 1967. [Ed.s' note: Reprinted in Didion's anthologySlouching Towards Bethlehem as "Goodby to All that."]
* Hunter S. Thompson, "The 'Hashbury' is the Capital of the Hippies." The New York Times Magazine, Maybe 14, 1967.
* Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1967. [Ed.'s note: Reprinted in Didion's anthologySlouching Towards Bethlehem.]
*** Hunter Thompson, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." Scanlan's Monthly, June 1970.
* Tom Wolfe, "Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers." New York Magazine, June 8, 1970.
* Norman Mailer, "Ego." Life, March 19, 1971.
**** Ron Rosenbaum, "Secrets of the Little Blue Box." Esquire, October 1971. The first and best account of telephone hackers, more amazing than you might believe.
* Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Rolling Stone. Part I: November 11, 1971; Part II: November 25, 1971.
* David Felton, "The Lyman Family's Holy Siege of America." Rolling Stone. Part I: December 23, 1971; Part II: January 2, 1972. Rolling Stone for several years in the 70s was, along with Co-Evolution, was the best periodical going. I saw you listed the Patty Hearst story. But for my money the absolute best was this creepy but true story on the Mel Lyman cult.
* Nora Ephron, "A Few Words About Breasts." Esquire, May 1972. [Ed.'s note: Republished in Ephron's Crazy Sald.]
** Stewart Brand, "Space War: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Dearth Among Computer Bums." Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972. Written nearly 40 years ago, this account of virtual realities has all the classic props: midnight hours, geek humor, nerd hubris, and other worldliness.
* Brad Darrach, "The Day Bobbly Blew It." Playboy, July 1973. Republished in Halberstam's The Best American Sports Writing of the Century.
* Howard Kohn and David Weir, "Tania's World: The Inside Story." Rolling Stone, October 23, 1975. About Patty Hearst's kidnapping.
* Lester Bangs, "The Greatest Album Ever Made." Creem, March 1976.
* Robert Scheer, "The Playboy Interview: Jimmy Carter." Playboy, November 1976.
* John McPhee, "Coming into the Country." The New Yorker, June 20, 1977. One of the best articles about Alaska, and Alaskans.
* John McPhee, "Basin and Range (Part I)." The New Yorker, October 20, 1980. Clear and interesting explanations about geology and plate tectonics for the layperson.
* George W.S. Trow, "Within the Context of No Context." The New Yorker, November 17, 1980. Brilliant, eccentric, apocalyptic writing about the nature of the cultural devastation television has wrought.
* Paul Nelson, "The Crackup and Resurrection of Warren Zevon." Rolling Stone, March 19, 1981. Tough, fearless and a very memorable look at Zevon's alcoholism and his attempt at recovery.
**** Edward Jay Epstein, "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" Atlantic Magazine, February 1982. Diamonds, De Beers, monopoly & marketing.
* Marcelle Clements, "The Dog is Us." Rolling Stone, September 2, 1982.
* William Broyles, Jr., "Why Men Love War." Esquire, November 1984.
** George Plimpton, "The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch." Sports Illustrated, April 1, 1985. I remember being extremely angry (for a few minutes) that the Mets were going to get this guy instead of my A's. I was an honest kid and man, it just seemed so unfair. When I realized it was a prank, I wasn't as upset. Because I always thought this guy, in some form, would someday show up and blow away the Twins, the Angels, and the Giants wearing an A's uniform. I'm still waiting!
* Frank Deford, "The Boxer and the Blonde." Sports Illustrated, June 17, 1985. Story of a hard Pittsburgh boxer and the woman who captured his heart.
* James Fenton, "The Snap Revolution." Granta, 1986. What happened in Manila, and in Malacanang Palace, when the Marcoses fell.
* Calvin Trillin, "Covering the Cops." The New Yorker, February 17, 1986. Terrific profile of Edna Buchanan
* Calvin Trillin, "Black or White." The New Yorker, April 14, 1986.
*** Richard Ben Cramer, "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?" Esquire, June 1986.
* Carlos M. Cipolia, "Basic Laws of Human Stupidity." Whole Earth Review, Spring 1987. A serious meditation on stupidity that will probably resonate today.
** John McPhee, "The Control of Nature: Atchafalaya." The New Yorker, February 23, 1987.
* Bill Barol, "I Stayed Up With Jerry." Newsweek, September 1987.
* Davis Miller, "My Dinner With Ali." Louisville Courier-Journal, 1989. [Ed.'s note: Republished in Miller's The Zen of Muhammad Ali, Harrington's The Beholder's Eye, and elsewhere.
* Gary Smith, "Shadow of a Nation." Sports Illustrated, February 18, 1991. Feature on the Crow Indians -- the story that won him his first National Magazine Award.
** Richard Preston, "The Mountains of Pi." The New Yorker, March 2, 1992. Two brothers build a supercomputer from mailorder parts in the New York apartment. All it does is compute new digits of Pi.
* Russ Rymer, "A Silent Childhood." The New Yorker. Part 1: April 13, 1992; Part II: April 20, 1992. The two-part article was later reworked into the book, Genie: a Scientific Tragedy, the story of a feral child discovered in LA in 1970, and how she was used as a guinea pig to test linguistic theories.
* Richard Preston, "Crisis in the Hot Zone." The New Yorker, October 26, 1992. "If there were any significant airborne transmissibility to the disease, the situation would be much different." "How so?" "There would be a lot fewer of us.
* Susan Orlean, "The American Man at Age Ten." Esquire, December 1992. [Ed.'s note: Not available in Esquire's online archive, but you'll find it with a little searching. Also republished in Orlean's The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup and Glass's The New Kings of Nonfiction.]
* Louis de Bernieres, "The Brass Bar." Granta, 1993. Callow writer and recently-graduated English major decides to expose himself to the rich language of the working class by taking a job as a mechanic, and discovers a brass bar that's so fucking pukka you'd want to spunk yourself.
**** Jon Krakauer, "Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds." Outside Magazine, January 1993. Article that became Into the Wild.
* Karl Taro Greenfeld, "The Incredibly Strange Mutant Creatures who Rule the Universe of Alienated Japanese Zombie Computer Nerds (Otaku to You)." Wired, March/April 1993.
* Mark Blackwell, "Cream of the Crap." Spin Magazine, May 1993.
* Mark Danner, "The Truth of El Mozote." The New Yorker, Dec 6, 1993.
* Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace." The Village Voice, December 21, 1993.
* David Foster Wallace, "Ticket to the Fair." Harper's Magazine, July 1994.
* Lawrence Weschler, "Inhaling the Spore: David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology." Harper's Magazine, September 1994. The first and best detailed treatment of the most interesting place in North America.
* James R. Kincaid, "Tom the Misunderstood." The New York Times, Books, December 18, 1994.
** Gary Wolf, "The Curse of Xanadu." Wired, June 1995. The story of Ted's Nelson attempt to heal his personality with his invention of hypertext.
* Susan Orlean, "Orchid Fever." The New Yorker, January 23, 1995.
* Hunter S. Thompson, "Song of the Sausage Creature." Cycle World, March 1995. Unfortunately the magazine's web site doesn't include the article, but it's available on various other sites without permission; just Google the title. [Ed.'s note: Also republished in Thompson's Kingdom of Fear and Klancher's The Devil Can Ride.]
* George McKeena, "On Abortion: A Lincolnian Position." The Atlantic Monthly, September 1995. I don't agree with the political position, but I do recall it as one of the most rational, thoughtful articles I've read on the subject.
* Barry Lopez, "On the Wings of Commerce." Harper's, October 1995. An excellent view inside the hidden world of commercial air freight, which powers a big chunk of the global economy. Think Neal Stevenson's glass necklace (see below), but airborne.
** David Foster Wallace, "Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise." Harper's Magazine, January 1996.
* Edwin Dobb, "A Kiss is Still a Kiss (Even if the Sex is Postmodern and the Romance Problematic)." Harper's Magazine, February 1996.
*** David Foster Wallace, "The String Theory." Esquire, July 1996.
*** Jon Krakauer, "Into Thin Air." Outside Magazine, September 1996.
****** Neal Stephenson, "Mother Earth, Mother Board: Wiring the Planet." Wired, December 1996. On laying trans-oceanic fiber optic cable.
* John Gregory Dunne, "The Humbolt Murders." The New Yorker, January 13, 1997.
* Katie Hafner, "The Epic Saga of The Well." Wired, May 1997.
* Ron Rosenbaum, "J.D. Salinger: The Man in the Glass House." Esquire, June 1997. This, in my mind, is the best piece on Salinger's reclusive life.
** Michael Paterniti, "Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain." Harper's Magazine, October 1997.
** Tom Junod, "Can you say- Hero?" Esquire, November 1998. A profile of Mr. Rogers.
* Robert Kurson, "My Favorite Teacher." Esquire, March 1, 2000.
** Bill Joy, "Why the future doesn't need us." Wired, April 2000. The best magazine article I've ever read-- by which I mean the piece that came out of nowhere and just knocked my socks off and changed the way I think about the human species.
* David Foster Wallace, "The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub." Rolling Stone, April 13, 2000. [Ed.'s note: Republished in Evans' The Best American Magazine Writing 2001.]
* Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, "Landing From the Sky." The New Yorker, April 24, 2000.
* Bruce Feiler, "Pocketful of Dough." Gourmet, October 2000.
* Malcolm Gladwell, "The Pitchman." The New Yorker, October 30, 2000. Part story teller and part sleuth, he gets beyond the simple sound bite to the core of what drives Popeil and his process. The fundamental takeaway is the inseparability of product design and product marketing in building products designed to be coveted by the customer they are target for.
* Rebecca Mead, “You’ve Got Blog.” The New Yorker, November 13, 2000. Profile of two bloggers before I knew what a blog was.
* William Langewiesche, "The Million Dollar Nose." The Atlantic Monthly, December 2000. About Wine critic Robert Parker.
* Ian Frazier, "Tilting at Tree Bags: The Tale of One Man's Triumph Over Chaos, One Plastic Bag at a Time." Mother Jones, January/February 2001.
* Mark Singer, "The Book Eater." The New Yorker, February 5, 2001. Profile of Michael Zinman, turbine trader and collector.
* George Gurley, "Pleasures of the Fur." Vanity Fair, March 2001.
** David Foster Wallace, "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage." Harper's Magazine, April 2001. A tome to the politics of language.
** James B. Stewart, "The Matchmaker." The New Yorker, Aug 20, 2001. A revealing look into the secret world of Steinway Hall in New York City and one remarkable seller of pianos with troubled memories.
* Edward W. Said "The Clash of Ignorance." The Nation, October 22, 2001. In response to Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations."
* William Langewiesche, "The Crash of EgyptAir 990." Atlantic Magazine, November 2001.
* James B. Stewart, "The Real Heroes Are Dead." The New Yorker, February 11, 2002.In 1998, Susan Greer, a divorced New Jersey housewife in her fifties, fell in love with Rick Rescorla, an old-fashioned man of action seemingly from a bygone era. He worked as vice president for security for a financial firm, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. Three years later, Rescorla died a hero at the World Trade Center, a tragedy he had long foreseen. Like the best storytellers, Stewart builds his tale so masterfully that, even though you already know the ending, it's still devastating, devastating, devastating.
* William Langewiesche, "American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center." The Atlantic Monthly. Part I: "The Inner World," July/August 2002; Part II: "The Rush to Recover," September 2002; Part III: "The Dance of the Dinosaurs," October 2002. [Ed.'s note: Excerpts are available from The Atlantic. Republished as Langewiesche's American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center.]
* Gary Taubes, "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" The New York Times, July 7, 2002.
* Alex Kotlowitz, " The Trenchcoat Robbers: After Fifteen Years and Twenty-seven Banks, They Finally Tripped Up." The New Yorker, July 8, 2002.
* John Seabrook, "The Fruit Detective." The New Yorker, Aug 19, 2002.
* James Fallows, "The Fifty-First State?" Atlantic Magazine, November 2002.
* Michael Pollan, "An Animal’s Place." The New York Times Magazine, November 10, 2002. It's about meat eating, and farming, and nutrition, but mostly it's about the hypocrisy of veganism or vegetarianism as an animal friendly way of life.
** Steven Kotler, "Vision Quest: A Half Centure of Artificial-sigh Research has Succeeded. And Now This Blind Man Can See." Wired, September 2002.
* Calvin Tomkins, “His Body, Himself.” The New Yorker, January 27, 2003. Profile of Mathew Barney.
* Evan Wright, "The Killer Elite." Rolling Stone, June 26, 2003. [Ed's note: Available in Rolling Stone's online archive by subscription only. Republished in The Best American Magazine Writing 2004.]
* Katherine Boo, "The Marriage Cure: Is Wedlock Really a Way Out of Poverty?" The New Yorker, August 18, 2003.
*** Tom Junod, "The Falling Man." Esquire, September 2003.
* William Langewiesche, "Columbia's Last Flight." The Atlantic Monthly, November 2003.
* Charles Fishman, "The Wal-Mart You Don't Know." Fast Company, December 1, 2003.
* John Jeremiah Sullivan, "Upon This Rock: Rock Music Used to be a Safe Haven for Degenerates and Rebels. Until it Found Jesus." GQ, February 2004. Extremely funny and smart and profound meditation on much more than its title and subhead suggest.
* David Grann, "The Brand." The New Yorker, February 16, 2004. A look inside the most murderous prison gang in America.
* Stephen Dubner, "The Silver Thief." The New Yorker, May 17, 2004.
** Chris Jones, "Home." Esquire, July 1, 2004. A lovely meditation on loneliness and homesickness. Follows the astronauts on board the International Space Station when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry in 2003, grounding the shuttle program and leaving them stranded in orbit.
***** David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster." Gourmet Magazine, Aug 2004.
* Gene Weingarten, "Fear Itself: Learning to Live in the Age of Terrorism." The Washington Post, August 22, 2004. About riding a bus in Jerusalem.
** Chris Anderson, "The Long Tail." Wired, October 2004. See the Wikipedia article on Long Tail.
* Mark Slouka, "Quitting the Paint Factory." Harper's Magazine, November 2004.
* Bob Garfield, "Bob Garfield's 'Chaos Scenario': A Look at the Marketing Industry's Coming Disasterz." Advertising Age, April 13, 2005. A classic for anyone working in media today.
* James Bamford, "The Man Who Sold The War." Rolling Stone, December 1, 2005.
* Andrew Corsello, "The Wronged Man." GQ, November 2004 (republished November 2007).
* Jesse Katz, "The Recruit." Los Angeles, March 2005.
* Gene Weingarten, "The Peekaboo Paradox." The Washington Post, Sunday Magazine, January 22, 2006. Story about the weirdest clown, the Great Zucchini, you'll never want to meet. Keep reading....
** David Foster Wallace, "Host." Atlantic Magazine, April 2005.
* Malcolm Gladwell, "Million-Dollar Murray." The New Yorker, February 13, 2006. In it, he follows a homeless alcoholic and talks with the hospital he is constantly in and out of and determines that the man costs them about a million dollars a year because he is uninsured. Besides the fabulous writing and the incredible way in which Gladwell argues his point about how paying for insurance for the man is infinitely smarter, it is a story of how the argument that the gov't shouldn't take care of people in this way is leading us into economic hell.
* Kevin Kelly, "Scan This Book." The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006.
* C.J. Chivers, "The School." Esquire, June 2006.
****** David Foster Wallace, "Federer As Religious Experience." The New York Times, Play Magazine, August 20, 2006.
* Jonathan Lethem, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism." Harper's Magazine, February 2007.
** Gene Weingarten, "Pearls Before Breakfast." The Washington Post, Magazine, April 8, 2007. Joshua Bell is one of the world's greatest violinists. His instrument of choice is a multimillion-dollar Stradivarius. If he played it for spare change, incognito, outside a bustling Metro stop in Washington, would anyone notice?
* James McConkey, "What Kind of Father Am I? Looking Back at a Lifetime of Parenting Sons and Being Parented by Them." The American Scholar, Spring 2008.
* Nick Paumgarten, "Up and Then Down: The Lives of Elevators." The New Yorker, April 21, 2008.
* Wil S. Hylton, "Leave No Man Behind." GQ, May 2008.
*** Chris Jones, "The Things That Carried Him." Esquire, May 2008. It’s extremely moving without being saccharine or twee. It’s a military story, but utterly without jingoism or indictment. And it’s wonderfully observed.
* Chris Anderson, "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete." Wired, June 23, 2008.
* David Grann, "The Chameleon: The many lives of Frédéric Bourdin." The New Yorker, August 11, 2008.
* Peter Alsop, Livia Corona, "Fin: The Last Days of Fish." Good, September 5, 2008. An excellent look at the sad state of our oceans and the fishing industry.
** Michael Lewis, "The End." Portfolio, November 11, 2008. Breaks down supposedly complex economic cause and effect into very engaging, easily understood analysis. Real life characters as interesting and entertaining as the best fiction. A must.
*** Gene Weingarten, "Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?" The Washington Post, Magazine, March 8, 2009. Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing.
** Michael Lewis, "Wall Street on the Tundra." Vanity Fair, April 2009. It's an in depth analysis of the financial collapse of Iceland. Excellent. There are some great one liners (this isn't actually one of them, but it'll give you the idea): "This in a country the size of Kentucky, but with fewer citizens than greater Peoria, Illinois. Peoria, Illinois, doesn’t have global financial institutions, or a university devoting itself to training many hundreds of financiers, or its own currency. And yet the world was taking Iceland seriously."
* Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, "Stealing Mona Lisa." Vanity Fair, May 2009.
** Skip Hollandsworth, "Still Life." Texas Monthly, May 2009. A Texas teenager is paralyzed from the neck down in a sports accident. His condition requires that he always lay down. Skip Hollandsworth's moving, detailed account captures a family who lived in a time capsule for over 30 years.
* Mike Sager, "Todd Marinovich: The Man Who Never Was." Esquire, May 2009.
* Michael Lewis, "The Man Who Crashed the World." Vanity Fair, August 2009. About the collapse of AIG.
** David Grann, "Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?" The New Yorker, September 7, 2009. Portrait of the unjust conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. The piece perfectly portrays the U.S.'s broken justice system; the way Grann unfolds the story is a slow hammer blow.
* Thomas Lake, "The Debtor." Atlanta Magazine, November 2009.
* Justin Heckert, "Lost in the Waves." Men's Journal, November 9, 2009.
* Evan Ratliff, "Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here’s What Happened." Wired, November 20, 2009.
* Ariel Levy, "Either/Or: Sports, Sex, and the Case of Caster Semenya." The New Yorker, November 30, 2009. Wonderful, heartbreaking piece about the South African runner.
* Janet Malcolm, "Iphigenia in Forest Hills." The New Yorker, May 3, 2010. A compelling look at a murder trial, the rituals of a courtroom and a contemplation on being a journalist all rolled into one.
* Errol Morris, "The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is." The New York Times, Opinion, June 20, 2010. There's been a lot of well-written, breezy books on the brain in the last--well, I don't know; since I've been paying attention?--but this series maps the concepts of perception and the physiology behind perceiving reality and the harsh truth of reality to interesting, practical anecdotes, some of which are recent, and some of which are historical. It's fascinating.
* Michael Hastings, "The Runaway General." Rolling Stone, June 22, 2010. An entertaining read and because of impact it had on Army leadership it has become historically important.
* David Grann, "The Mark of a Masterpiece: The Man Who Keeps Finding Famous Fingerprints on Uncelebrated Works of Art." The New Yorker, July 12, 2010.
* Atul Gawande, "Letting Go: What Should Medicine Do When It Can’t Save Your Life?" The New Yorker, August 2, 2010. I couldn't read it all at once because I started crying at several points.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Should Old Articles Be Forgot By WILLIAM FALK
December 29, 2009
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Should Old Articles Be Forgot By WILLIAM FALK
OVER the past year, Americans have spent an average of 11.8 hours a day consuming information, sucking up, in aggregate, 3.6 zettabytes of data and 10,845 trillion words. That, said the University of California, San Diego, researcher who computed these figures, is triple the amount of “content” that we consumed in 1980.
Thanks to this gargantuan download from all forms of media, we now know vastly more than we did a year ago about bankers’ bonuses, Sarah Palin, “death panels,” Glenn Beck, where Barack Obama was born, Jon and Kate, and cocktail waitresses who have spent quality time with Tiger Woods.
Hidden among that avalanche of diverting gigabytes were some developments of more enduring significance. Here are just a few:
ROBOTIC WARFARE The use of drones became a central part of the American antiterrorism strategy this year, with President Obama sanctioning about 50 Predator strikes — more than George W. Bush approved in his entire second term. As Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reported earlier this year, most of the targets of these assassinations were in the tribal regions of Pakistan, with as many as 500 people killed. Those killed in the missile attacks include many high-ranking Qaeda and Taliban figures and dozens of women and children who lived with them or happened to be nearby.
The military is so enthusiastic about these remotely piloted planes that it is building new ones as fast as it can (including a more heavily armed version called the Reaper). It also announced that it will deploy drones to scour the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean for drug smugglers. What’s more, the government is now working on “nano” drones the size of a hummingbird, which would be able to pursue targets into homes and buildings.
CAR CRAZY IN CHINA This year, China surpassed the United States as the largest consumer of that iconic American machine — the automobile. China’s emerging middle class has fallen in love with cars, with sales up more than 40 percent over 2008; there are now long waiting lists for the coolest and hottest models, ranging from the Buick LaCrosse to BMWs. Automakers are expected to sell 12.8 million cars and light trucks in China this year — 2.5 million more than in America.
China’s auto boom, of course, has major implications for global efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The nation of 1.3 billion is on pace to double its consumption of gasoline and diesel over the next decade.
REAL WORKING WIVES In more than a third of American households, women are now the chief breadwinners. This reversal of traditional roles was accelerated by a brutal two-year recession, in which 75 percent of all jobs lost were held by men.
Even in homes where both spouses work, one in four wives now earns more than her husband. That’s partly because of rising education levels among women, falling salaries in manufacturing and blue-collar jobs and the growing need for both spouses to bring home a paycheck. Wives’ earnings, said Kristin Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, have become “critical to keeping families afloat.”
A NEW SOURCE OF STEM CELLS Scientists re-engineered regular skin cells from mice into stem cells that are just as versatile as embryonic stem cells. To demonstrate that these re-engineered adult cells could be used to create any kind of cell in the body, the Chinese research team inserted just a few of them into placental tissue and developed them into healthy mice. “We have gone from science fiction to reality,” said Robert Lanza, a cell biologist.
If further research on the new technique proves successful, it may create a viable means for scientists to use a patient’s own tissue to produce a replacement liver, kidney or other organ — without the ethical concerns attached to the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos. But reprogramming adult cells opens the door to a new ethical problem: a rogue scientist could use the method to create human beings from a few cells scraped from a person’s arm. “All the pieces are there for serious abuse,” Mr. Lanza said.
TEEMING WITH PLANETS Astronomers are closing in on identifying distant worlds that may have the right conditions to support life. Techniques for detecting “exoplanets” are becoming more sophisticated, and over 400 have been discovered so far — 30 in October alone. This year brought two particularly intriguing finds. One is Gliese 581d, orbiting a star at a distance that could indicate surface temperatures not so different from Earth’s. Astronomers also discovered a “waterworld” composed mostly of H2O, which would be a prime candidate for extraterrestrial life if it were just a little farther from its sun.
The discovery of Earth-like planets, with water and moderate temperatures, is now so likely that the Vatican held a conference of astrobiologists this year to discuss the theological repercussions of extraterrestrial life. “If biology is not unique to the Earth, or life elsewhere differs biochemically from our version, or we ever make contact with an intelligent species in the vastness of space, the implications for our self-image will be profound,” said Chris Impey, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.
Discovering that we have company in the universe, in fact, might open our eyes to what’s important on Earth.
William Falk is the editor in chief of The Week magazine.
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Should Old Articles Be Forgot By WILLIAM FALK
OVER the past year, Americans have spent an average of 11.8 hours a day consuming information, sucking up, in aggregate, 3.6 zettabytes of data and 10,845 trillion words. That, said the University of California, San Diego, researcher who computed these figures, is triple the amount of “content” that we consumed in 1980.
Thanks to this gargantuan download from all forms of media, we now know vastly more than we did a year ago about bankers’ bonuses, Sarah Palin, “death panels,” Glenn Beck, where Barack Obama was born, Jon and Kate, and cocktail waitresses who have spent quality time with Tiger Woods.
Hidden among that avalanche of diverting gigabytes were some developments of more enduring significance. Here are just a few:
ROBOTIC WARFARE The use of drones became a central part of the American antiterrorism strategy this year, with President Obama sanctioning about 50 Predator strikes — more than George W. Bush approved in his entire second term. As Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reported earlier this year, most of the targets of these assassinations were in the tribal regions of Pakistan, with as many as 500 people killed. Those killed in the missile attacks include many high-ranking Qaeda and Taliban figures and dozens of women and children who lived with them or happened to be nearby.
The military is so enthusiastic about these remotely piloted planes that it is building new ones as fast as it can (including a more heavily armed version called the Reaper). It also announced that it will deploy drones to scour the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean for drug smugglers. What’s more, the government is now working on “nano” drones the size of a hummingbird, which would be able to pursue targets into homes and buildings.
CAR CRAZY IN CHINA This year, China surpassed the United States as the largest consumer of that iconic American machine — the automobile. China’s emerging middle class has fallen in love with cars, with sales up more than 40 percent over 2008; there are now long waiting lists for the coolest and hottest models, ranging from the Buick LaCrosse to BMWs. Automakers are expected to sell 12.8 million cars and light trucks in China this year — 2.5 million more than in America.
China’s auto boom, of course, has major implications for global efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The nation of 1.3 billion is on pace to double its consumption of gasoline and diesel over the next decade.
REAL WORKING WIVES In more than a third of American households, women are now the chief breadwinners. This reversal of traditional roles was accelerated by a brutal two-year recession, in which 75 percent of all jobs lost were held by men.
Even in homes where both spouses work, one in four wives now earns more than her husband. That’s partly because of rising education levels among women, falling salaries in manufacturing and blue-collar jobs and the growing need for both spouses to bring home a paycheck. Wives’ earnings, said Kristin Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, have become “critical to keeping families afloat.”
A NEW SOURCE OF STEM CELLS Scientists re-engineered regular skin cells from mice into stem cells that are just as versatile as embryonic stem cells. To demonstrate that these re-engineered adult cells could be used to create any kind of cell in the body, the Chinese research team inserted just a few of them into placental tissue and developed them into healthy mice. “We have gone from science fiction to reality,” said Robert Lanza, a cell biologist.
If further research on the new technique proves successful, it may create a viable means for scientists to use a patient’s own tissue to produce a replacement liver, kidney or other organ — without the ethical concerns attached to the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos. But reprogramming adult cells opens the door to a new ethical problem: a rogue scientist could use the method to create human beings from a few cells scraped from a person’s arm. “All the pieces are there for serious abuse,” Mr. Lanza said.
TEEMING WITH PLANETS Astronomers are closing in on identifying distant worlds that may have the right conditions to support life. Techniques for detecting “exoplanets” are becoming more sophisticated, and over 400 have been discovered so far — 30 in October alone. This year brought two particularly intriguing finds. One is Gliese 581d, orbiting a star at a distance that could indicate surface temperatures not so different from Earth’s. Astronomers also discovered a “waterworld” composed mostly of H2O, which would be a prime candidate for extraterrestrial life if it were just a little farther from its sun.
The discovery of Earth-like planets, with water and moderate temperatures, is now so likely that the Vatican held a conference of astrobiologists this year to discuss the theological repercussions of extraterrestrial life. “If biology is not unique to the Earth, or life elsewhere differs biochemically from our version, or we ever make contact with an intelligent species in the vastness of space, the implications for our self-image will be profound,” said Chris Impey, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.
Discovering that we have company in the universe, in fact, might open our eyes to what’s important on Earth.
William Falk is the editor in chief of The Week magazine.
Saturday, August 08, 2009
It’s Time to Stay the Courier By JOE NOCERA
August 8, 2009
Talking Business
It’s Time to Stay the Courier By JOE NOCERA
So you think your business has problems.
Consider the plight of John E. Potter, the chief executive of the second-largest employer in America. On the one hand, he has a guaranteed monopoly for much of his business. On the other hand, monopoly or not, the combination of the Internet and the recession is absolutely crushing his company, just as it is for so many other companies across the country. His last quarter’s results, which were announced on Wednesday, revealed a loss of $2.4 billion. The business is on track to lose a staggering $7 billion in 2009, on around $68 billion in revenue. That’s practically General Motors territory.
What can he do to fix the situation? Surprisingly little. His employees have clauses in their union contracts that forbid layoffs. Nor can he renegotiate their gold-plated benefits, the way, say, the auto companies did when their backs were against the wall. Political pressure makes it nearly impossible to shut down any of his company’s 34,000 facilities, no matter how outmoded or little used. He can borrow money, but under the law, he can add only $3 billion in debt a year — an amount that isn’t going to come close to covering his losses.
Oh, and get this. Every year between now and 2016, he has to put aside over $5 billion to finance health benefits for future employees. You read that right: future employees. There isn’t another business in the country that finances benefits for employees it hasn’t even hired yet.
Welcome to John Potter’s world. He’s the nation’s postmaster general. Yes, that’s right: for the last nine years, he has run the United States Postal Service, which, since 1970, when it stopped being a government department and started becoming self-sufficient, has been the oddest of ducks. It is expected to operate as a business, turning a profit and so on, and yet it is still subject to Congressional oversight and all sorts of legal constraints, like that ridiculous health benefit prefinancing for future employees, which was part of a big 2006 postal reorganization bill. (Its main purpose, it would seem, is government accounting: those funds get counted against the federal deficit.)
Even so, until recently, Mr. Potter had had a pretty successful run. A smart, likable, lifelong Postal Service executive, he got it through the anthrax crisis early in his tenure. He saw it through 9/11 (in no small part by engaging Federal Express to fly long-distance mail during the day, when its planes were empty, something it still does). He has overseen productivity gains and, according to a poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports, a rise in customer satisfaction. Between 2001 and 2006, he even eliminated the Postal Service’s $11.3 billion debt. That year, 2006, was also when demand for mail service peaked, with 210 billion pieces delivered.
But the last few years have been brutal. The Postal Service lost more than $5 billion in 2007, and another $2.4 billion in 2008. And, of course, it is on track to lose that whopping $7 billion in the current fiscal year. (Its fiscal year ends in September.) The amount of mail being sent is dropping like a stone — it will be down to 175 billion pieces in 2009. Mr. Potter has reduced the Postal Service’s head count to 650,000, from 800,000, almost entirely through attrition. He has cut costs every way he can think of. And still the losses mount.
A few weeks ago, the Government Accountability Office added the Postal Service to its list of “high risk” federal agencies, meaning that it is in such dire straits that it needs “to restructure to address its current and long-term financial viability.” Indeed, if something doesn’t change by the fall, the Postal Service will have to renege on those health benefit prepayments — despite its legal obligation to pay them — or start missing payroll. “U.S.P.S. must align its costs with revenues, generate sufficient earnings to finance capital investments, and manage its debt,” the G.A.O. said. Just like any real business would.
“If you are asking me to run it like a business, give me the same tools that someone would have in the private sector,” Mr. Potter said when I spoke to him recently.
But as I discovered on Thursday, when I watched a Senate hearing on the current Postal Service crisis, that’s not likely to happen. For one thing, Mr. Potter isn’t really asking for the tools he needs to turn the Postal Service into a real business. He is asking Congress to relieve it from the health prepayments, which he is likely to get, at least temporarily. He is also asking that the Postal Service be allowed to reduce mail service to five days a week, and to eliminate some postal branches. These aren’t exactly revolutionary ideas — yet they are viewed as highly controversial in Congress, which frets that constituents might get angry if the local postal branch closes.
But even if Mr. Potter were to get his way on these two items, they would still be only stop-gap measures that fail to tackle the bigger question. As the Internet continues to erode the use of snail mail, does the Postal Service’s business model still make sense? Do we even still need the government to deliver the mail anymore?
•
To me, the answer is obvious: no.
Think for a minute about the mail that comes into your home. In the modern age, very little of it is personal mail. The vast majority is commercial mail of some sort — advertisements, bills, movies from Netflix or catalogs. Once upon a time, said Rick Geddes, an associate professor in the department of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, the postal service was viewed as “a way to bind together the nation. In subsidizing mail service to rural communities you were keeping them connected to the rest of the country.” But today, he added, “it is kind of silly to say we are binding together the nation through advertisements and catalogs.”
These days, the main justification for keeping the postal service as a quasi-government entity is the belief that no private company would be willing to deliver the mail to sparsely populated rural areas of the country. People fear that it would be a little like airline deregulation: communities that weren’t large enough to justify flights in the newly deregulated environment lost their carriers.
But that mission of universal service has all but blinded just about everyone connected with the Postal Service. Congressmen — many of whom, after all, come from rural areas — are loath to give the Postal Service too much free rein for fear that Mr. Potter’s minions will start shutting down post offices. (Never mind that 2,000 of them serve fewer than 100 people each.) The postal unions, with their no-layoff clauses, have used universal service to justify benefits so generous the Postal Service would save $600 million just by bringing them in line with other federal employees.
As for Mr. Potter himself, while he may want more freedom to run the Postal Service like a real business, he, too, seemed surprisingly wedded to outmoded ideas about mail service in America. “This country needs to have and to protect universal service,” he said. “Our business is all about making sure every American can stay connected with every other American.”
I failed to ask him the obvious follow-up question: Don’t e-mail messages now do that?
For most of us, of course, it does — and that will increasingly to be the case, as broadband makes it way into, yes, even those rural areas that everyone is so worried about. Michael A. Crew, a professor of regulatory economics at Rutgers told me that that while the Postal Service’s “short-term situation is bleak, its long-term situation is really bleak.” He is one of a number of experts who say they believe that even when the recession ends, the Postal Service’s woes won’t be over. As businesses look to save money in the recession, for instance, they are starting to do end-arounds the Postal Service. Online bill-paying is become ever more popular. Evite is starting to replace mailed invitations to parties. None of that business is ever coming back.
Which is why, instead of trying to find short-term, piecemeal solutions to the current crisis, those involved in managing and overseeing the Postal Service ought to be thinking harder thoughts about blowing up its business model. Maybe the Postal Service should turn itself into a giant outsourcer, handling some tasks but handing out others, for a fee, to more efficient companies. Maybe the government should allow companies to bid on lucrative urban delivery — with the proviso that they also deliver to rural areas. Maybe some areas should get mail deliveries less frequently than others. Maybe there should be radically different pricing structures. Maybe it should even lose its monopoly on first-class mail. I mean, why not?
Mr. Geddes, the Cornell professor, says he believes that the only solution is for the Postal Service to become “just another company” — lose its monopoly, shed its bureaucratic mind-set, become able to negotiate freely with its unions, and answer to shareholders instead of Congress, which is always going to resist significant change that might upset a constituent. Only when that happens will it be able to bring its costs in line with its revenue.
“The post office is not broken,” Mr. Potter insisted. But surely it is. And its current crisis brings to mind Rahm Emanuel’s line that you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.
Alas, here in the middle of its worst financial crisis ever, the Postal Service and Congress seem utterly intent on wasting it.
Talking Business
It’s Time to Stay the Courier By JOE NOCERA
So you think your business has problems.
Consider the plight of John E. Potter, the chief executive of the second-largest employer in America. On the one hand, he has a guaranteed monopoly for much of his business. On the other hand, monopoly or not, the combination of the Internet and the recession is absolutely crushing his company, just as it is for so many other companies across the country. His last quarter’s results, which were announced on Wednesday, revealed a loss of $2.4 billion. The business is on track to lose a staggering $7 billion in 2009, on around $68 billion in revenue. That’s practically General Motors territory.
What can he do to fix the situation? Surprisingly little. His employees have clauses in their union contracts that forbid layoffs. Nor can he renegotiate their gold-plated benefits, the way, say, the auto companies did when their backs were against the wall. Political pressure makes it nearly impossible to shut down any of his company’s 34,000 facilities, no matter how outmoded or little used. He can borrow money, but under the law, he can add only $3 billion in debt a year — an amount that isn’t going to come close to covering his losses.
Oh, and get this. Every year between now and 2016, he has to put aside over $5 billion to finance health benefits for future employees. You read that right: future employees. There isn’t another business in the country that finances benefits for employees it hasn’t even hired yet.
Welcome to John Potter’s world. He’s the nation’s postmaster general. Yes, that’s right: for the last nine years, he has run the United States Postal Service, which, since 1970, when it stopped being a government department and started becoming self-sufficient, has been the oddest of ducks. It is expected to operate as a business, turning a profit and so on, and yet it is still subject to Congressional oversight and all sorts of legal constraints, like that ridiculous health benefit prefinancing for future employees, which was part of a big 2006 postal reorganization bill. (Its main purpose, it would seem, is government accounting: those funds get counted against the federal deficit.)
Even so, until recently, Mr. Potter had had a pretty successful run. A smart, likable, lifelong Postal Service executive, he got it through the anthrax crisis early in his tenure. He saw it through 9/11 (in no small part by engaging Federal Express to fly long-distance mail during the day, when its planes were empty, something it still does). He has overseen productivity gains and, according to a poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports, a rise in customer satisfaction. Between 2001 and 2006, he even eliminated the Postal Service’s $11.3 billion debt. That year, 2006, was also when demand for mail service peaked, with 210 billion pieces delivered.
But the last few years have been brutal. The Postal Service lost more than $5 billion in 2007, and another $2.4 billion in 2008. And, of course, it is on track to lose that whopping $7 billion in the current fiscal year. (Its fiscal year ends in September.) The amount of mail being sent is dropping like a stone — it will be down to 175 billion pieces in 2009. Mr. Potter has reduced the Postal Service’s head count to 650,000, from 800,000, almost entirely through attrition. He has cut costs every way he can think of. And still the losses mount.
A few weeks ago, the Government Accountability Office added the Postal Service to its list of “high risk” federal agencies, meaning that it is in such dire straits that it needs “to restructure to address its current and long-term financial viability.” Indeed, if something doesn’t change by the fall, the Postal Service will have to renege on those health benefit prepayments — despite its legal obligation to pay them — or start missing payroll. “U.S.P.S. must align its costs with revenues, generate sufficient earnings to finance capital investments, and manage its debt,” the G.A.O. said. Just like any real business would.
“If you are asking me to run it like a business, give me the same tools that someone would have in the private sector,” Mr. Potter said when I spoke to him recently.
But as I discovered on Thursday, when I watched a Senate hearing on the current Postal Service crisis, that’s not likely to happen. For one thing, Mr. Potter isn’t really asking for the tools he needs to turn the Postal Service into a real business. He is asking Congress to relieve it from the health prepayments, which he is likely to get, at least temporarily. He is also asking that the Postal Service be allowed to reduce mail service to five days a week, and to eliminate some postal branches. These aren’t exactly revolutionary ideas — yet they are viewed as highly controversial in Congress, which frets that constituents might get angry if the local postal branch closes.
But even if Mr. Potter were to get his way on these two items, they would still be only stop-gap measures that fail to tackle the bigger question. As the Internet continues to erode the use of snail mail, does the Postal Service’s business model still make sense? Do we even still need the government to deliver the mail anymore?
•
To me, the answer is obvious: no.
Think for a minute about the mail that comes into your home. In the modern age, very little of it is personal mail. The vast majority is commercial mail of some sort — advertisements, bills, movies from Netflix or catalogs. Once upon a time, said Rick Geddes, an associate professor in the department of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, the postal service was viewed as “a way to bind together the nation. In subsidizing mail service to rural communities you were keeping them connected to the rest of the country.” But today, he added, “it is kind of silly to say we are binding together the nation through advertisements and catalogs.”
These days, the main justification for keeping the postal service as a quasi-government entity is the belief that no private company would be willing to deliver the mail to sparsely populated rural areas of the country. People fear that it would be a little like airline deregulation: communities that weren’t large enough to justify flights in the newly deregulated environment lost their carriers.
But that mission of universal service has all but blinded just about everyone connected with the Postal Service. Congressmen — many of whom, after all, come from rural areas — are loath to give the Postal Service too much free rein for fear that Mr. Potter’s minions will start shutting down post offices. (Never mind that 2,000 of them serve fewer than 100 people each.) The postal unions, with their no-layoff clauses, have used universal service to justify benefits so generous the Postal Service would save $600 million just by bringing them in line with other federal employees.
As for Mr. Potter himself, while he may want more freedom to run the Postal Service like a real business, he, too, seemed surprisingly wedded to outmoded ideas about mail service in America. “This country needs to have and to protect universal service,” he said. “Our business is all about making sure every American can stay connected with every other American.”
I failed to ask him the obvious follow-up question: Don’t e-mail messages now do that?
For most of us, of course, it does — and that will increasingly to be the case, as broadband makes it way into, yes, even those rural areas that everyone is so worried about. Michael A. Crew, a professor of regulatory economics at Rutgers told me that that while the Postal Service’s “short-term situation is bleak, its long-term situation is really bleak.” He is one of a number of experts who say they believe that even when the recession ends, the Postal Service’s woes won’t be over. As businesses look to save money in the recession, for instance, they are starting to do end-arounds the Postal Service. Online bill-paying is become ever more popular. Evite is starting to replace mailed invitations to parties. None of that business is ever coming back.
Which is why, instead of trying to find short-term, piecemeal solutions to the current crisis, those involved in managing and overseeing the Postal Service ought to be thinking harder thoughts about blowing up its business model. Maybe the Postal Service should turn itself into a giant outsourcer, handling some tasks but handing out others, for a fee, to more efficient companies. Maybe the government should allow companies to bid on lucrative urban delivery — with the proviso that they also deliver to rural areas. Maybe some areas should get mail deliveries less frequently than others. Maybe there should be radically different pricing structures. Maybe it should even lose its monopoly on first-class mail. I mean, why not?
Mr. Geddes, the Cornell professor, says he believes that the only solution is for the Postal Service to become “just another company” — lose its monopoly, shed its bureaucratic mind-set, become able to negotiate freely with its unions, and answer to shareholders instead of Congress, which is always going to resist significant change that might upset a constituent. Only when that happens will it be able to bring its costs in line with its revenue.
“The post office is not broken,” Mr. Potter insisted. But surely it is. And its current crisis brings to mind Rahm Emanuel’s line that you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.
Alas, here in the middle of its worst financial crisis ever, the Postal Service and Congress seem utterly intent on wasting it.
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Hot Story to Has-Been: Tracking News via Cyberspace By PATRICIA COHEN
August 5, 2009
Hot Story to Has-Been: Tracking News via Cyberspace By PATRICIA COHEN
Like a lot of new ideas, Media Cloud started with a long-running argument among friends. Ethan Zuckerman and a handful of his colleagues at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School found themselves in endless disputes about the mainstream media and newer digital variations. Who sets the agenda? How is public debate shaped? What topics are covered or ignored?
Anecdotes favoring one side or another were as plentiful as pop-ups, but a comprehensive and reliable database that could track the daily rhythm of the news cycle over time and was available for public use didn’t exist. So Mr. Zuckerman and others at Berkman decided to create one.
The result is Media Cloud, a system that tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousands of Web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database, at mediacloud.org, will eventually enable researchers to search for key people, places and events — from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections — and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered, said Mr. Zuckerman, whose official title is senior researcher, though he acknowledges that a more accurate label would be computer geek and international development specialist. (At the moment only a small sample of Media Cloud’s tools are on the public Web site.)
The findings, which can be graphed or mapped, can demonstrate the evolution of a report and variations in coverage. Users get to “do the fun part, which is analyzing the data,” Mr. Zuckerman said, “while we do the hard part of this, which is collecting it.” Eventually users will be able to compare the top 10 news events covered by Fox News, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the BBC, for example, or chart the terms that appear most frequently in The New York Times, compared with leading blogs, or create a world map showing which countries receive the most media attention, or follow the path of a particular report to see if it dominates the news or dies out.
For the past decade or so, many researchers have used link analysis to figure out how information spreads, said Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor at Berkman who has been involved in creating Media Cloud. You could identify which Web sites were linked to most frequently and infer whose sites were most influential. But researchers have pretty much squeezed all that they can from that approach, Mr. Benkler said. Although Media Cloud is still in its early stages, it is among “the next generation of tools that actually look at what people are saying,” he said, adding, it is “a better microscope.”
There are other kinds of media trackers. Cornell University researchers, for example, have developed MemeTracker, which maps the daily news cycle by grabbing repeated quotations from one million online sources. (A meme is anything — an idea, a phrase — that spreads by imitation from one person to another.)
Its graphs, which can be viewed at memetracker.org, display the reports that are competing against one another for attention on a given day, as well as those that have staying power or quickly disappear. A recent paper on MemeTracker’s experience during the presidential campaign was hailed by experts as a landmark piece of work.
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism offers a news-coverage index, which is laboriously compiled by having 14 people sample leading reports produced by 55 outlets. Media Cloud is much less exact, Mr. Zuckerman said, but it can automatically scan hundreds, and eventually thousands, of sources.
Amy S. Mitchell, deputy director of Pew’s journalism project, said Media Cloud “offers the public a great opportunity to play around with looking at a wide swath of media at more of a surface level.” But, she added, it cannot really capture the nuances of the news agenda of the news media. “There are certain things that computer algorithms cannot do that individuals can,” she said.
Since every method has virtues and drawbacks, she added, “I think there is tremendous value in having both approaches.”
What Media Cloud offers that no one else does is a tool anyone can use to answer all sorts of questions about the media landscape. One topic that Mr. Benkler and Mr. Zuckerman have long been debating is whether the Internet has helped open up the public sphere to more voices, or whether it just serves as an echo chamber, simply repeating information and views that the mainstream media already circulate.
Mr. Benkler is using Media Cloud to test his theory that digital media is widening the circle of voices somewhat. Sites that he characterizes as “one link out” from the most visible (like The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo and Instapundit) are entering into the conversation, he argues.
Who has the power to place an idea on the national agenda is another question that Mr. Benkler said Media Cloud could help answer. For instance, how is the conversation about the recession and the financial crash shaped? Using some of the database’s more specialized tools, Mr. Benkler investigated who first floated the idea for a temporary takeover of the financial system by the government, as was done in Sweden in the 1990s.
Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, first raised the idea in September 2008, but it was a cluster of influential economic and political bloggers like Brad DeLong and Matthew Yglesias who kept the idea alive. After the subject disappeared for a couple of months, the bloggers then resurrected it early this year as Washington began discussing the details of a bank rescue plan. To Mr. Benkler, this preliminary evidence suggests that the network of public media has given a voice to some people who in the past may have had useful ideas but were, as a practical matter, unable to inject them into the national conversation.
“If you’re actually trying to map where an idea starts and how it moves through the public sphere, you need a database like we’re developing, with time-stamped data,” Mr. Benkler said, explaining that services like Google and Lexis/Nexis are not as comprehensive or do not provide that level of detailed information. Media Cloud also enables more fine-grained analyses by examining language and context. “How does rhetoric change over time, and what’s the role of the Internet and the mainstream media in that?” Mr. Zuckerman asked.
Some of his colleagues, for example, have been tracking the frequency of the words bailout and stimulus to pinpoint when one term overtook the other. Media Cloud mapped the results to show how the term bailout, used constantly in the news in the fall, eventually gave way to the word stimulus after President Obama took office. The results were graphed, illustrating precisely when the two lines crossed — where, as Mr. Zuckerman would say, “one meme took over from the other.”
Media Cloud’s founders have put out an open call on their Web site for research ideas. The system provides a platform, Mr. Zuckerman said, on which others can build using their own kinds of tracking software. The point is to start with facts rather than impressions.
As Mr. Zuckerman noted, a lot of anecdotes don’t necessarily add up to the truth.
Hot Story to Has-Been: Tracking News via Cyberspace By PATRICIA COHEN
Like a lot of new ideas, Media Cloud started with a long-running argument among friends. Ethan Zuckerman and a handful of his colleagues at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School found themselves in endless disputes about the mainstream media and newer digital variations. Who sets the agenda? How is public debate shaped? What topics are covered or ignored?
Anecdotes favoring one side or another were as plentiful as pop-ups, but a comprehensive and reliable database that could track the daily rhythm of the news cycle over time and was available for public use didn’t exist. So Mr. Zuckerman and others at Berkman decided to create one.
The result is Media Cloud, a system that tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousands of Web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database, at mediacloud.org, will eventually enable researchers to search for key people, places and events — from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections — and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered, said Mr. Zuckerman, whose official title is senior researcher, though he acknowledges that a more accurate label would be computer geek and international development specialist. (At the moment only a small sample of Media Cloud’s tools are on the public Web site.)
The findings, which can be graphed or mapped, can demonstrate the evolution of a report and variations in coverage. Users get to “do the fun part, which is analyzing the data,” Mr. Zuckerman said, “while we do the hard part of this, which is collecting it.” Eventually users will be able to compare the top 10 news events covered by Fox News, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the BBC, for example, or chart the terms that appear most frequently in The New York Times, compared with leading blogs, or create a world map showing which countries receive the most media attention, or follow the path of a particular report to see if it dominates the news or dies out.
For the past decade or so, many researchers have used link analysis to figure out how information spreads, said Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor at Berkman who has been involved in creating Media Cloud. You could identify which Web sites were linked to most frequently and infer whose sites were most influential. But researchers have pretty much squeezed all that they can from that approach, Mr. Benkler said. Although Media Cloud is still in its early stages, it is among “the next generation of tools that actually look at what people are saying,” he said, adding, it is “a better microscope.”
There are other kinds of media trackers. Cornell University researchers, for example, have developed MemeTracker, which maps the daily news cycle by grabbing repeated quotations from one million online sources. (A meme is anything — an idea, a phrase — that spreads by imitation from one person to another.)
Its graphs, which can be viewed at memetracker.org, display the reports that are competing against one another for attention on a given day, as well as those that have staying power or quickly disappear. A recent paper on MemeTracker’s experience during the presidential campaign was hailed by experts as a landmark piece of work.
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism offers a news-coverage index, which is laboriously compiled by having 14 people sample leading reports produced by 55 outlets. Media Cloud is much less exact, Mr. Zuckerman said, but it can automatically scan hundreds, and eventually thousands, of sources.
Amy S. Mitchell, deputy director of Pew’s journalism project, said Media Cloud “offers the public a great opportunity to play around with looking at a wide swath of media at more of a surface level.” But, she added, it cannot really capture the nuances of the news agenda of the news media. “There are certain things that computer algorithms cannot do that individuals can,” she said.
Since every method has virtues and drawbacks, she added, “I think there is tremendous value in having both approaches.”
What Media Cloud offers that no one else does is a tool anyone can use to answer all sorts of questions about the media landscape. One topic that Mr. Benkler and Mr. Zuckerman have long been debating is whether the Internet has helped open up the public sphere to more voices, or whether it just serves as an echo chamber, simply repeating information and views that the mainstream media already circulate.
Mr. Benkler is using Media Cloud to test his theory that digital media is widening the circle of voices somewhat. Sites that he characterizes as “one link out” from the most visible (like The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo and Instapundit) are entering into the conversation, he argues.
Who has the power to place an idea on the national agenda is another question that Mr. Benkler said Media Cloud could help answer. For instance, how is the conversation about the recession and the financial crash shaped? Using some of the database’s more specialized tools, Mr. Benkler investigated who first floated the idea for a temporary takeover of the financial system by the government, as was done in Sweden in the 1990s.
Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, first raised the idea in September 2008, but it was a cluster of influential economic and political bloggers like Brad DeLong and Matthew Yglesias who kept the idea alive. After the subject disappeared for a couple of months, the bloggers then resurrected it early this year as Washington began discussing the details of a bank rescue plan. To Mr. Benkler, this preliminary evidence suggests that the network of public media has given a voice to some people who in the past may have had useful ideas but were, as a practical matter, unable to inject them into the national conversation.
“If you’re actually trying to map where an idea starts and how it moves through the public sphere, you need a database like we’re developing, with time-stamped data,” Mr. Benkler said, explaining that services like Google and Lexis/Nexis are not as comprehensive or do not provide that level of detailed information. Media Cloud also enables more fine-grained analyses by examining language and context. “How does rhetoric change over time, and what’s the role of the Internet and the mainstream media in that?” Mr. Zuckerman asked.
Some of his colleagues, for example, have been tracking the frequency of the words bailout and stimulus to pinpoint when one term overtook the other. Media Cloud mapped the results to show how the term bailout, used constantly in the news in the fall, eventually gave way to the word stimulus after President Obama took office. The results were graphed, illustrating precisely when the two lines crossed — where, as Mr. Zuckerman would say, “one meme took over from the other.”
Media Cloud’s founders have put out an open call on their Web site for research ideas. The system provides a platform, Mr. Zuckerman said, on which others can build using their own kinds of tracking software. The point is to start with facts rather than impressions.
As Mr. Zuckerman noted, a lot of anecdotes don’t necessarily add up to the truth.
Sunday, August 02, 2009
The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)By Ian Shapira
The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)By Ian Shapira
Sunday, August 2, 2009
A few weeks ago, I scored what passes these days for one of journalism's biggest coups, satisfying a holy writ for newspaper impact in the Internet age. Gawker, the snarky New York culture and media Web site, had just blogged about my story in that day's Washington Post.
I confess to feeling a bit triumphant. My article was ripe fodder for the blogosphere's thrash-and-bash attitude: a profile of a Washington-based "business coach," Anne Loehr, who charges her early-Gen-X/Boomer clients anywhere from $500 to $2,500 to explain how the millennial generation (mostly people in their 20s and late teens) behaves in the workplace. Gawker's story featured several quotations from the coach and a client, and neatly distilled Loehr's biography -- information entirely plucked from my piece. I was flattered.
But when I told my editor, he wrote back: They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man?
* * *
The more I toggled between my editor's e-mail and the eight-paragraph Gawker item, the angrier I got, and the more disenchanted I became with the journalism business. I enjoy reading Gawker and the growing number of news sites like it -- the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and others -- but lately they're making me even more nervous about my precarious career as a newspaper reporter who enjoys, at least for the time being, a salary, a 401(k) and health insurance.
I started thinking about all the labor that went into producing my 1,500-word article. The story wasn't Pulitzer material; it was just a reported look at one person capitalizing on angst in the workplace. With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post. Journalism at a major newspaper is different from what's usually required in the wild and riffy world of the Internet. And that wild world is killing real reporting -- the kind of work practiced not just by newspapers but by nonprofits, some blogs and other news outlets.
Gawker's version of my story, headlined " 'Generational Consultant' Holds America's Fakest Job," begins by telling its readers to "Meet Anne Loehr" -- with a link to my story but no direct mention of The Post. It then condenses her biography: "Loehr is 44. She spent the entire decade of the 90s running hotel and safari operations in Kenya." That's information I got after an hour-plus phone call with Loehr and typing out 3,000 words of notes.
The bulk of the posting consists of Loehr's own words, her thoughts on this generation's affinity for reality television and its supposed aversion to Nike products. (Still no mention of The Post.) For those little nuggets, I drove a half-hour to Fairfax County's Tower Club, and attended her two-hour "Get Wise with Gen Ys" session and recorded it.
Then the work got painstaking: It took about four hours to transcribe the session. (Are you playing mournful melodies on your violin yet?)
After the quotations from Loehr, the Gawker posting is a cut-and-paste of my own stuff, a description of why a financial adviser attended (so she can work better with clients who are "trust fund babies," she said). Still no attribution to The Post.
The eighth and last paragraph discusses and links to Loehr's "generational cheat sheet" on our Web site. Finally, beneath the last paragraph, the hyperlinked words "Washington Post" appear in red. Would the average visitor have clicked on the link to read the whole story? I probably wouldn't have.
After all the reporting, it took me about a day to write the 1,500-word piece. How long did it take Gawker to rewrite and republish it, cherry-pick the funniest quotes, sell ads against it and ultimately reap 9,500 (and counting) page views?
I called up Hamilton Nolan, the Gawker writer to whom I had been so grateful. "Probably took me," he said, "you know . . . a half-hour to an hour."
* * *
After I first saw Nolan's post, I shifted into modern self-promotional reporter mode, trying my best to keep spreading the story into the digital ether. I posted the story on my Facebook page and tweeted it on Twitter with all the appropriate symbols: "Gawker has a great posting on my #WashPost story on the #millennial guru." I hadn't had my outrage stoked by my editor yet and was still happy for the attention.
Gawker was the second-biggest referrer of visitors to my story online. (No. 1 was the "Today's Papers" feature on Slate, which is owned by The Post.) Though some readers got their fill of Loehr and never clicked the link to my story, others found their way to my piece only by way of Gawker.
Even if I owe Nolan for a significant uptick in traffic, are those extra eyeballs helping The Post's bottom line?
More readers are better than fewer, of course. But those referring links -- while essential to our current business model -- aren't doing much, ultimately, to stop our potential slide into layoffs and further contraction. Worse, some media experts believe that Gawker and its ilk, with their relatively low overhead, might be depressing online ad revenue across the board. That makes it harder for news-gathering operations to recoup their expenses.
The Post just completed its fourth round of buyouts since 2003; and although the company reported on Friday that it had returned to profitability in the second quarter, the newspaper division, which is pretty much us, continues losing money. Standard & Poor's expects that the company's gross earnings will drop by 30 percent this year. Gawker Media, on the other hand, reported last week that its revenues in the first two quarters of 2009 were up 45 percent from the first two quarters of last year.
David Marburger is a First Amendment lawyer who, along with his economist brother Daniel, is stirring a minor controversy in the blogosphere with a proposal that might empower newspapers, or any news organization that spends the bulk of its budget on original reporting. They want to amend the copyright law so that it restores "unfair competition rights" -- which once gave us the power to sue rivals if our stories were being pirated. That change would give news organizations rights that they could enforce in court if "parasitic" free-rider Web sites (the heavy excerpters) refused to bargain with them for a fee or a contract. Marburger said media outlets could seek an order requiring the free-rider to postpone its commercial use or even hand over some advertising revenue linked to the free-riding.
News organizations once had such protections against the replication and resale of their work because of a wire service showdown in the early 20th century. In 1918, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Associated Press in a complaint against a rival wire service that had been ripping off its stories, Marburger said.
When Congress was revising copyright laws in 1976, it decided to abolish all other laws that functioned like copyright, while maintaining an exception for that Supreme Court ruling. The Justice Department objected to keeping the ruling alive, arguing that it gave media organizations a "boundless monopoly" over the news of the day. Congress then dropped the exception.
Current law basically allows the Gawkers of the world to appropriate others' work, repurpose it and sell ads against it with no payment to or legal recourse for the company that paid me while I sat through two hours of a generational seminar.
Marburger compared my article and the Gawker posting and concluded: "This is what in our opinion is a huge contributor to the demise of those who are originating news reports. If you don't change the law to stop this, originators of news reports cannot survive."
That may be far-fetched. And after all, newspapers aren't entirely unwitting victims; they knew about the Internet very early, knew about the power of the Drudge Report in the 1990s and failed to innovate.
The Washington Post Web site has successfully sued several media companies, including Total News, Free Republic, GoSMS and Gator Corp., for exploiting Post content (and in several cases, selling ads against Post material). In a statement, Post general counsel Eric N. Lieberman said: "In general, we believe that there is a very important line between appropriate quoting and linking, which contributes to free expression, and inappropriate free-riding, which diminishes free expression."
Recently, the Associated Press announced that it will track illegitimate uses of its articles online; and a California startup, Attributor, has devised a new way for newspapers to share in the ad revenue from any site that copies their articles, although the idea needs cooperation from big ad networks to succeed.
Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, which owns not only Gawker but sports and technology blogs such as Deadspin and Gizmodo, told me that he'd "love to shut down or charge" the Twitter aggregators and spam blogs that reprint his company's stories and headlines. But newspapers, he said, are not sin-free, either. "I'd like newspapers to pay us too, while we're at it," he told me over Gmail chat. "For instance, the New York Post lifted our Deadspin story on [ESPN reporter] Erin Andrews and splashed it on their front page. A brief credit -- but they didn't even link from the web version."
So Denton balks at the appropriation of his reporter's work about the illicit videotaping of a popular sports reporter. But what about Gawker's riff on my Post story?
"That was certainly more of an excerpt than we'd normally indulge in," he said.
* * *
The popular saying in the industry now is that it's important to "save journalism" -- not necessarily newspapers. I agree, but newspapers are still the most common organizations that pay a large staff of reporters, providing them with a living wage, health care and a retirement plan.
Nolan, 29, the Gawker writer, told me he feels he has hit a ceiling in the business. "It used to be that people would get a job at Gawker, do it for a year, then go off and get a great job at New York magazine," Nolan said. "Now those jobs are gone, and I feel like there is nowhere to aspire to. But I'm pretty happy."
Nolan, who is considered an independent contractor, gets paid $4,000 a month, and thanks to Denton's acknowledgement that people should have incentives to make an impact, he gets bonuses for exceeding his Web traffic expectations. Does he see the Catch-22 he's inflicting on himself -- and everyone else? "I don't generally feel bad about doing this. I am trying to put in a highlight reel of the stories. It's like doing movie previews," he said.
After talking with Denton, Nolan and others for this article, I still want a fluid blogosphere, but one where aggregators -- newspapers included -- are more transparent about whom they're heavily excerpting. They should mention the original source immediately. And if bloggers want to excerpt at length, a fee would be the nice, ethical gesture.
So, Gawker, do me a favor. At least blog this piece. I'll even write a headline for you (free of charge). How about: "Whiny WashPost Reporter Makes His Point: Respect the Genuine Article"? Oh -- one other thing. If you sell ads against your posting, can you cut The Post a check?
shapirai@washpost.com
Ian Shapira is a local reporter for The Washington Post who writes about the millennial generation. He will be online to chat with readers at 11 a.m. Tuesday. Submit your questions before or during the discussion.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
A few weeks ago, I scored what passes these days for one of journalism's biggest coups, satisfying a holy writ for newspaper impact in the Internet age. Gawker, the snarky New York culture and media Web site, had just blogged about my story in that day's Washington Post.
I confess to feeling a bit triumphant. My article was ripe fodder for the blogosphere's thrash-and-bash attitude: a profile of a Washington-based "business coach," Anne Loehr, who charges her early-Gen-X/Boomer clients anywhere from $500 to $2,500 to explain how the millennial generation (mostly people in their 20s and late teens) behaves in the workplace. Gawker's story featured several quotations from the coach and a client, and neatly distilled Loehr's biography -- information entirely plucked from my piece. I was flattered.
But when I told my editor, he wrote back: They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man?
* * *
The more I toggled between my editor's e-mail and the eight-paragraph Gawker item, the angrier I got, and the more disenchanted I became with the journalism business. I enjoy reading Gawker and the growing number of news sites like it -- the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and others -- but lately they're making me even more nervous about my precarious career as a newspaper reporter who enjoys, at least for the time being, a salary, a 401(k) and health insurance.
I started thinking about all the labor that went into producing my 1,500-word article. The story wasn't Pulitzer material; it was just a reported look at one person capitalizing on angst in the workplace. With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post. Journalism at a major newspaper is different from what's usually required in the wild and riffy world of the Internet. And that wild world is killing real reporting -- the kind of work practiced not just by newspapers but by nonprofits, some blogs and other news outlets.
Gawker's version of my story, headlined " 'Generational Consultant' Holds America's Fakest Job," begins by telling its readers to "Meet Anne Loehr" -- with a link to my story but no direct mention of The Post. It then condenses her biography: "Loehr is 44. She spent the entire decade of the 90s running hotel and safari operations in Kenya." That's information I got after an hour-plus phone call with Loehr and typing out 3,000 words of notes.
The bulk of the posting consists of Loehr's own words, her thoughts on this generation's affinity for reality television and its supposed aversion to Nike products. (Still no mention of The Post.) For those little nuggets, I drove a half-hour to Fairfax County's Tower Club, and attended her two-hour "Get Wise with Gen Ys" session and recorded it.
Then the work got painstaking: It took about four hours to transcribe the session. (Are you playing mournful melodies on your violin yet?)
After the quotations from Loehr, the Gawker posting is a cut-and-paste of my own stuff, a description of why a financial adviser attended (so she can work better with clients who are "trust fund babies," she said). Still no attribution to The Post.
The eighth and last paragraph discusses and links to Loehr's "generational cheat sheet" on our Web site. Finally, beneath the last paragraph, the hyperlinked words "Washington Post" appear in red. Would the average visitor have clicked on the link to read the whole story? I probably wouldn't have.
After all the reporting, it took me about a day to write the 1,500-word piece. How long did it take Gawker to rewrite and republish it, cherry-pick the funniest quotes, sell ads against it and ultimately reap 9,500 (and counting) page views?
I called up Hamilton Nolan, the Gawker writer to whom I had been so grateful. "Probably took me," he said, "you know . . . a half-hour to an hour."
* * *
After I first saw Nolan's post, I shifted into modern self-promotional reporter mode, trying my best to keep spreading the story into the digital ether. I posted the story on my Facebook page and tweeted it on Twitter with all the appropriate symbols: "Gawker has a great posting on my #WashPost story on the #millennial guru." I hadn't had my outrage stoked by my editor yet and was still happy for the attention.
Gawker was the second-biggest referrer of visitors to my story online. (No. 1 was the "Today's Papers" feature on Slate, which is owned by The Post.) Though some readers got their fill of Loehr and never clicked the link to my story, others found their way to my piece only by way of Gawker.
Even if I owe Nolan for a significant uptick in traffic, are those extra eyeballs helping The Post's bottom line?
More readers are better than fewer, of course. But those referring links -- while essential to our current business model -- aren't doing much, ultimately, to stop our potential slide into layoffs and further contraction. Worse, some media experts believe that Gawker and its ilk, with their relatively low overhead, might be depressing online ad revenue across the board. That makes it harder for news-gathering operations to recoup their expenses.
The Post just completed its fourth round of buyouts since 2003; and although the company reported on Friday that it had returned to profitability in the second quarter, the newspaper division, which is pretty much us, continues losing money. Standard & Poor's expects that the company's gross earnings will drop by 30 percent this year. Gawker Media, on the other hand, reported last week that its revenues in the first two quarters of 2009 were up 45 percent from the first two quarters of last year.
David Marburger is a First Amendment lawyer who, along with his economist brother Daniel, is stirring a minor controversy in the blogosphere with a proposal that might empower newspapers, or any news organization that spends the bulk of its budget on original reporting. They want to amend the copyright law so that it restores "unfair competition rights" -- which once gave us the power to sue rivals if our stories were being pirated. That change would give news organizations rights that they could enforce in court if "parasitic" free-rider Web sites (the heavy excerpters) refused to bargain with them for a fee or a contract. Marburger said media outlets could seek an order requiring the free-rider to postpone its commercial use or even hand over some advertising revenue linked to the free-riding.
News organizations once had such protections against the replication and resale of their work because of a wire service showdown in the early 20th century. In 1918, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Associated Press in a complaint against a rival wire service that had been ripping off its stories, Marburger said.
When Congress was revising copyright laws in 1976, it decided to abolish all other laws that functioned like copyright, while maintaining an exception for that Supreme Court ruling. The Justice Department objected to keeping the ruling alive, arguing that it gave media organizations a "boundless monopoly" over the news of the day. Congress then dropped the exception.
Current law basically allows the Gawkers of the world to appropriate others' work, repurpose it and sell ads against it with no payment to or legal recourse for the company that paid me while I sat through two hours of a generational seminar.
Marburger compared my article and the Gawker posting and concluded: "This is what in our opinion is a huge contributor to the demise of those who are originating news reports. If you don't change the law to stop this, originators of news reports cannot survive."
That may be far-fetched. And after all, newspapers aren't entirely unwitting victims; they knew about the Internet very early, knew about the power of the Drudge Report in the 1990s and failed to innovate.
The Washington Post Web site has successfully sued several media companies, including Total News, Free Republic, GoSMS and Gator Corp., for exploiting Post content (and in several cases, selling ads against Post material). In a statement, Post general counsel Eric N. Lieberman said: "In general, we believe that there is a very important line between appropriate quoting and linking, which contributes to free expression, and inappropriate free-riding, which diminishes free expression."
Recently, the Associated Press announced that it will track illegitimate uses of its articles online; and a California startup, Attributor, has devised a new way for newspapers to share in the ad revenue from any site that copies their articles, although the idea needs cooperation from big ad networks to succeed.
Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, which owns not only Gawker but sports and technology blogs such as Deadspin and Gizmodo, told me that he'd "love to shut down or charge" the Twitter aggregators and spam blogs that reprint his company's stories and headlines. But newspapers, he said, are not sin-free, either. "I'd like newspapers to pay us too, while we're at it," he told me over Gmail chat. "For instance, the New York Post lifted our Deadspin story on [ESPN reporter] Erin Andrews and splashed it on their front page. A brief credit -- but they didn't even link from the web version."
So Denton balks at the appropriation of his reporter's work about the illicit videotaping of a popular sports reporter. But what about Gawker's riff on my Post story?
"That was certainly more of an excerpt than we'd normally indulge in," he said.
* * *
The popular saying in the industry now is that it's important to "save journalism" -- not necessarily newspapers. I agree, but newspapers are still the most common organizations that pay a large staff of reporters, providing them with a living wage, health care and a retirement plan.
Nolan, 29, the Gawker writer, told me he feels he has hit a ceiling in the business. "It used to be that people would get a job at Gawker, do it for a year, then go off and get a great job at New York magazine," Nolan said. "Now those jobs are gone, and I feel like there is nowhere to aspire to. But I'm pretty happy."
Nolan, who is considered an independent contractor, gets paid $4,000 a month, and thanks to Denton's acknowledgement that people should have incentives to make an impact, he gets bonuses for exceeding his Web traffic expectations. Does he see the Catch-22 he's inflicting on himself -- and everyone else? "I don't generally feel bad about doing this. I am trying to put in a highlight reel of the stories. It's like doing movie previews," he said.
After talking with Denton, Nolan and others for this article, I still want a fluid blogosphere, but one where aggregators -- newspapers included -- are more transparent about whom they're heavily excerpting. They should mention the original source immediately. And if bloggers want to excerpt at length, a fee would be the nice, ethical gesture.
So, Gawker, do me a favor. At least blog this piece. I'll even write a headline for you (free of charge). How about: "Whiny WashPost Reporter Makes His Point: Respect the Genuine Article"? Oh -- one other thing. If you sell ads against your posting, can you cut The Post a check?
shapirai@washpost.com
Ian Shapira is a local reporter for The Washington Post who writes about the millennial generation. He will be online to chat with readers at 11 a.m. Tuesday. Submit your questions before or during the discussion.
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