Tweet Update

Murd and Huff at the FTC hearing become the Ping and Pong, Mutt and Jeff, Clik and Clak of my Tweet

Anything that makes search less direct only fucks itself. To wit.

You can gaze, but you can't see

[cleaned up a bit to make, hopefully, clearer]

Part of the reason the current frantic scribbling about US journalism's prospects of economic dissolution seems arid, tepid and inconsequential is that it takes place within the same tidy, unreal frame in which news is conventionally represented as taking place. Now that the framers of the journalistic gaze are turning it upon itself their own predicament, they're missing the boat. (Sonderman good on this here and here. I attempt to describe the invisible vessel here and here).

Our hypothesis: Content providers have been working on the plantations without making a nickle from the plantation owners - the ILECS - who rake in profits driven by the labor of the content creators.

What is noteworthy, and indisputable, is that very little of what is contained in the frames of the gazers listed below can be found anywhere in USian media (other than Democracy Now) - even now, after all the economic lies that have been exposed. What do USian journalists read, anyway? There's a form of transparency I'd love to see. Do they ever read actual critique?

A brief supplemental reading list, from here:

Michael Parenti: The Hypocrisies of Capitalism
Nena Baker: The Body Toxic
Raj Patel: Stuffed & Starved
Maude Barlow: Peak Water
Vandana Shiva: On Gandhi
David Suzuki: Betraying Nature
Bill McKibben: Climate Change: Tipping Point
Ralph Nader: The Politics of Health Care
Paul Roberts: Food System in Danger
Satya Sivaraman: Human Rights in India: Binayak Sen
Robert McChesney: Journalism and the Crisis of Democracy
Arun Gupta: Banksta Capitalism

To David Simon

Dear David Simon,

You have gone from the penetrating world of The Wire to the impermeably inelastic world of Build the Wall.

Instead of talking supplicatingly to two publishers as you do in your piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, consider what you, we, and they are dealing with.

The money is in the pipes. The pipes are sucking it all into their nether regions. The money for content is there, but it's been abducted.

The quandary of viable content on the Net is not unlike the quandary of viable healthcare in a world of corporate greed. Consider the parallels; they are legion.

There's much more to be said on this. For now, what I'm saying to you - whose work I have deeply admired - is this: where's your imagination? Where are your investigative instincts? Where is your ability to follow the almighty $ from the streets to the vultures to their insect lords?

Dude. No fucking walls.

More to come.

==

Some of the More: {still in progress}

The hegemonic control over the finite, "hard assets" of the Internet has displaced the power of an infinity of content providers from making anything like real money from end users, who have already paid their fair share to access the Internet - where "Internet" takes the pipes and all the content as one unified entity. Even though it's not literally (as in, legally incorporated as a single entity) unified, it obeys the logic of a single system for the end user. We pay for the Internet and we get the dialtone and we get the content. Only, the dialtone providers keep all the money - not for any logical or legitimate reason, solely because they occupy a certain gatekeeping position on the "superhighway."

Just as corporate control of news organizations has eviscerated the very idea of what news is, as Greenwald so eloquently notes here, so the health insurance industry has so polluted our notion of sociality that it does not seem self-evident to many US citizens, including Max Baucis and roughly 40 Republican Senators, that healthcare is a right that must be available to all.

So too Adam Arvidsson in The Ethical Economy is making the case that branding has changed the nature of the economy, from one of production to one of finance. The moment you move from the product to the financing of the product, you have the desire for HUGE BRAND. Only, hugebrandness, like Lehman Brothers' credibility, is mere rumor of value, distinct from all use. If you have Huge Brand as a journalist, say Greenwald and Lewis Lapham, you are probably as corrupt as the day is long.

The point is, it is our health, and our Internet, that should be at the center - not the financing of healthcare, or the financing of content. The corporate infrastructure makes miching mallecho of the argument's inherent logic before it can begin, because the corporate structure of media and the corporate structure of healthcare are entirely alike (indistinguishable plasmids?). Both are wealth creation centers that, like Ron Suskind's famously anonymous worldbeater, create their own reality -- which the reality-based rest of us are permitted to report on, consume, and bewail.

Study for Raft of the Medusa*

*h/t for image to Juke aka Informant38 aka dirty beloved.

Times' mirror

I can't recall seeing a newspaper do what I'm about to describe, but why not?

Here's a Times story from Oct. 23, 1999:

A NEW FINANCIAL ERA: THE OVERVIEW; ACCORD REACHED ON LIFTING OF DEPRESSION-ERA BARRIERS AMONG FINANCIAL INDUSTRIES

The Clinton Administration and top Republican lawmakers reached an agreement early today to overhaul the financial system, repealing Depression-era laws that have restricted the banking, securities and insurance industries from expanding into one another's businesses.

The Times should run that story again. Verbatim, page 1. Make itself, its own understanding of that event, the news. Publish the analyses offered by people with a decade's hindsight. And keep this up until someone sorts out what exactly happened - not just the event, but the Times's coverage of it, and the understanding of that coverage then, and now.

Outta everything

In keeping with the falling value of newspapers nationwide, McClatchy's estimated value of its share of The [Seattle] Times has been eroding steadily. McClatchy acquired the Times share when it bought Knight Ridder in June 2006. In 2006, McClatchy valued its Times investment at $102.2 million. At the end of 2007, the value had fallen to $19.3 million.



The McClatchy Co., which owns 49.5 percent of The Times, has again cut the value of its share of the Seattle newspaper company -- this time to nothing. link

Thumbs down on small payments, says Shirkey

Clay Shirky: Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers:

The invocation of micropayments involves a displaced fantasy that the publishers of digital content can re-assert control over we unruly users in a media environment with low barriers to entry for competition.

What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather than resuscitating old models for employing publishers;

All of which seems sensible to me with regard to commodified news. But what about other sorts of publishing and archival marketeering? He's at FASTforward09, and seems not yet to have moderated his comments. Here's one I left earlier today:

Clay, do you see no role for microeconomics for vended content? One area where one has imagined it proving useful is academic treasure houses like JSTOR, ProjectMUSE, which simply close themselves off to potential readers by operating within an institutional subscription format.

What sort of model would you prefer?

Information, News, Libraries

One day I found a squeal sheet that was so good —it combined rape and murder—that I went straight to the homicide squad instead of reporting first to the poker game. When I showed it to the lieutenant on duty, he looked at me in disgust: "Don't you see this, kid?" he said, pointing to a B in parentheses after the names of the victim and the suspect. Only then did I notice that every name was followed by a B or a W. I did not know that crimes involving black people did not qualify as news.

...

So the defeat at Brandywine turned into a case of miswritten and misread news—a media non-event whose meaning was determined by the process of its transmission, like the blogging about the convertible dome and the filtering of crime reports in Newark's police headquarters.

Robert Darnton, The Library in the New Age, musing on the stability of information, the lies we call news, and, very oddly and seemingly without an equal degree of provocative percipience, Google Book Search.

What new age? It seems to me the library as we know it (there is but one) arrived via the death of Alexander's cosmopolitic vision -- Alexandria as the site of the body and of the muses' hymn to its former inhabitant. Nothing about the digital network changes that in the slightest, despite the worries of bibliophiles and the economic wagers of JSTORians and other profiteers of scarcity.

coraggio, ragazzi

Informant helpfully places Kucinich's Impeachment resolution next to other parrhesic moments.

Consider the sluice

Found this headline:

New Fears on Long-Term Global Oil Supplies

I thought was at the top of a heap of stories aggregated by Google News. It occasioned a mild spasm of anxiety. Until I realized I was not reading a news aggregator, but only the New York Times front page:



I'm still of the wizdumb-of-crowds opinion that the aggregate could carry some weight.

These telenovelas?

In theSessum's memorable phrase, journaljism.

Newshole: Insert for August 11, 2007

MINNEAPOLIS

Divers took another body from the wreckage of a freeway bridge, shrinking to five the number of people known missing and presumed dead in the collapse. Meanwhile, U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters on Friday pledged $50 million to help Minnesota with its recovery and rebuilding.

HUNTINGTON, Utah/PRINCETON, Ind:

Three men fell from a construction bucket Friday and plunged no word from the miners since the Crandall Canyon mine collapsed early Monday. A microphone lowered into a smaller hole yielded no sounds of life and an air sample taken through the 2-inch hole detected little oxygen.

There

The nation's biggest lenders may face a cash shortage because investors who buy their loans aren't bidding and bankers have cut off credit lines. The fallout has toppled at least 70 mortgage companies and half a dozen hedge funds that bought their loans, and stalled buyouts including MGIC's takeover of Radian Group Inc. Regulators in the U.S., Europe and Japan have responded by pumping money into the banking system.

"Any company that has products related to home sales is in trouble," said Ja...

foto

Evidence of news

More than sensory information can be visually represented:

via indexed

More from Reuters on mapping the news. They are also building a crisis map sensitive to issues of hunger, health, war and natural disaster around the world.

Some other maps, modes of visual representation, that could be mashed to offer layered visual representations of news:

• concept mapping
• networks (visual complexity)
• indexical (and hilarious - from which the above)
• live datalogical
• taggable
• information design
• yahoo piratical
  

More suggestions? This doesn't even scratch the surface.

Mapped News: Africa by Reuters

Africa by the country. Breaking news by the nation. Ok, "nation." Still, damn fine.


Someday some major USian news organ (or more likely someone else) will do something like this for

• parts of the city (which could be pared down to city blocks or neighborhoods)
• parts of the state
• states of USia
• segments of the local government, etc.,
  

Each part of which could be linked to blogs that concern themselves with that particular slice of the world, and, hooha,

each "breaking news" page could sit atop a wiki built by the community that concerns itself with that particular part of the larger whole.

(Wait! - the thought will be uttered in newsrooms across the nation - Wikis aren't news, they're all that contextual stuff readers need to make sense of the news! So they won't sell ads! Fuck that!)

Some day, when news organizations forget that they are real estate and marketing agencies, and stumble into thinking about what might serve the interests of conveying, of all things, interrelated news.

- via David Weinberger, who notes that each country's news page features related blogs via Global Voices.