Garrett M. Vonk

In an interview that is reminiscent of Amber and Rusty’s encounter with the Traditional Media last June, NPR’s Daniel Schorr expounds on his disdain for new media in the Sacramento Bee:

[...B]logs and citizen journalism. Is this a form of news gathering that you embrace?

A: I can’t embrace it. Not after what I’ve been through at the hands of the copy editors’ desks. I have suffered many, many arguments about what I’ve wanted to say – whether it was grammatically correct, factually correct and all of that – and I want everybody to have to experience what I experienced. But today, your blogger is totally free. He is his own reporter, his own editor, his own publisher, and he can do whatever he wants.

A person like me who believes in the tradition of a discipline in journalism can only rue the day we’ve arrived at where we don’t need discipline or anything. All you need is a keyboard.

Ah, yes, the tradition of discipline in journalism. I understand completely the criticism that the democratization of the media has resulted in an overall decline in truly newsworthy news in the mainstream journalism. But the brave new world of blogs, podcasts, social networks, video sharing, and mobile communication has created unprecedented opportunities to broaden the horizons of the media one consumes and the awareness one achieves of the world around us.

Schorr’s main argument seems to rest on the idea that citizen journalism suffers from the inaccuracy and lack of polish inherent in its low barriers to entry. But many have argued quite the opposite. To paraphrase Jimmy Wales, if someone makes a mistake on a heavily-trafficked Wikipedia article, it’s often corrected in a matter of minutes, whereas an error in a popular Encyclopedia Brittanica article will remain in that book forever. The same is true for popular blogs and other sources of citizen journalism… The more popular–and thus influential–a given source becomes, the more readers are exposed to it and have the opportunity to correct it. Which do you see more: blogs fact-checking traditional media or vice versa?

There are two other huge advantages to citizen journalism/new media that desperately need to be considered.

A. Immediacy/access-
When everyone has the ability to report the news, even in what Mr. Schorr would decry as a pathetically amateurish effort, everyone has access to information that is both up to date and more thorough than the establishment has ever been capable of. Two examples immediately come to mind: interdictor and Jamal Al Barghouti. The Wikipedia (heh) article on interdictor’s coverage of Katrina sums up its impact nicely:

The Interdictor blog quickly became a widely recognized and cited source from inside New Orleans. Sources such as CNN even read directly from the blog on the air, putting its contents on-screen. Even after the media arrived, the Interdictor blog was still commonly cited as a reference to the events ongoing in New Orleans. When a police-enforced evacuation of New Orleans was ordered by Mayor Ray Nagin, the Interdictor bloggers were exempted from the mandatory evacuation. The blog’s debut and rise to prominence during the hurricane and its aftermath was listed in an MSN/PC World article as number 14 on a list of “The 16 Greatest Moments in Web History.”

What ever could CNN have been thinking, reading a blog on live television??? Why, some nutjob could have been making the whole thing up, what with the internet and all its inherent lack of credibility. Why couldn’t they have just waited until New Orleans was fixed up and the infrastructure was rebuilt so that they could have fully vetted Mssr. Interdictor themselves?

B. Specialization
In J-school, they called it fragmentation, and the concept got a good bit of buzz a few years ago as The Long Tail:

An average movie theater will not show a film unless it can attract at least 1,500 people over a two-week run; that’s essentially the rent for a screen. An average record store needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth carrying; that’s the rent for a half inch of shelf space. And so on for DVD rental shops, videogame stores, booksellers, and newsstands.

…And the average newspaper needs X number of people to read a given story in order for advertisers to buy the space next to it. And on and on it goes. But a funny thing happens when space and leverage become free. Niche sources become must-see, everyday reading for some people. Understand that more than half of Amazon’s book sales are books that aren’t even available in a Barnes and Noble store, and you’ll understand the mind-blowing effect that this democratization of ideas has had on the diversity of content available.

Media Savvy: NPR’s Schorr vital link to ‘responsible journalism’[warning - tries to auto-print] (via Kottke)

I’m reading the Foreword to the second collection of Penny Arcade comics, penned by none other than the esteemed J. Allard, and I found this pretty funny:

All love aside, Gabe and Tycho (and their alter egos in the real world) aren’t infallible. It dissapoints me that after all this exposure, success, and profit they’ve amassed from the blatantly capitalistic repackaging of freely available Internet content . . . the fact that they still have a hyphen in their domain name is steeped in a sweaty mass of lameness.

The book showed up in the same box as I Am America (And So Can You!), so the two works will compete for hilarity in my carry-on next weekend when we’re in California.

Bill O’Reilly is awesome. Yes, the story is from earlier last year, but I still really enjoy reading his crazy rant against video games and iPods.

The have-nots are growing. Why are they growing? Because the skill set that is necessary to earn a decent living is being deemphasized in a fantasy world of football games and shooting zombies and all that…. Now you have the “knows” and the “know-nots”, because if you spend all your youth being prisoners of machines….. you’re not going to know anything…. You’re gonna fail.

It helps if you imagine an old man shaking his cane while you read his words. I hesitate to respond to his points at length as I have a gut feeling that he’s just trolling.

I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America…

All this ranting about “the machines” and complaining that the youth are “prisoners” isn’t just paranoid rambling. It’s not that he’s a luddite; Bill O’Reilly can and will sensationalize anything. Still, with rants like this, he’s never going to attract any of the coveted stoned slacker demo. I just hope I can escape the machines in time to make a living for myself.

So, I’ve stumbled upon yet another hilarious celebrity blog… Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, writes:

Me: (answering phone) Y-y-yellow.

Telemarketer: Would you like to buy some crap from a stranger?

Me: I’ll give you $500,000 to beat yourself up right now.

Telemarketer: What?

Me: You heard me. But now it’s only $400,000. You should have started punching yourself in the nose immediately.

It kinda makes me snort into my coffee, much like Ken Jennings’s blog has been making me do lately.

Special bonus! He then writes an entire blog post about, er, public self-adjustment…

Luckily for me, I have the power of invisibility. As an unattractive middle-aged male of average size, no one notices me in a crowd unless I’m either on fire or wearing a suit made from the skin of an attractive 20-year old woman. For once, neither of those situations applied.

Now as you might imagine, pecker adjustment needs to be done quickly. If you linger, it looks like something else entirely. You want to maintain some degree of deniability when airport security starts questioning you.

I have no coffee left to snort.

Here’s me, 4 months ago today, predicting that New Orleans will use eminent domain to their benefit in the aftermath of Katrina:

I wonder if any of the governments in New Orleans will take it upon themselves to sieze the flooded homes, since the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Kelo v. New London gives them every legal justification to do so. They could bulldoze everyone’s homes and sell them to condo developers! Thanks, Supreme Court!

Here’s the Washington Post, today, in an article discussing the rebuilding plan in New Orleans:

Angry homeowners screamed and City Council members seethed Wednesday as this city’s recovery commission recommended imposing a four-month building moratorium on most of New Orleans and creating a powerful new authority that could use eminent domain to seize homes in neighborhoods that will not be rebuilt.

I also really like the tone of this column for Reuters Business. We can all use a little extra motivation to be self-reliant.

Oh sure, you owe your employer an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, and it’s good to take pride in what you do. But it is foolish to expect long-term care from a corporation. Money in the bank is worth more than a company promise.

This is not bad news, it’s simply the killing of a myth that has long existed and been dangerous to workers for generations. At their height, traditional pensions never did cover more than half of the workforce, according to Labor Department figures. Massive layoffs of earlier generations before they ever cashed in, coupled with pension raids, lead to pension protection laws in the first place. Now, at least, smart workers know the score and can set about to protect themselves.

It’s true. There are two ways to deal with the facts. You can either bitch that your employer isn’t going to be your daddy, or you can be absolutely sure you can rely on yourself. I desperately want always to do the latter.

I came across a fantastic article (it’s almost just a blurb) entitled There Is No God by Penn Jillette. I think it’s a really good read, no matter what your religious orientation is.

So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy.

I’m probably overreacting, but I was encouraged, if only briefly, by a quote I read in a Washington Post article this afternoon. The article, The Army’s Musical Pitch: Download, Join Up is a simple, brief piece about a promotion the National Guard is doing– agree to be contacted by a recruiter, and you’ll get 3 free iTunes Music Store downloads.

It’s an inconsequential program, and I could care less about the promotion itself, but check out what the recruiter said: (emphasis mine)

In contrast, ads for the Guard’s iTunes promotion are less expensive and have run on hundreds of Web sites frequented by young people. (Music.com, Billboard.com and the Web site for Fry’s Electronics are examples.) Each download costs the government between 90 cents and a dollar, Jones said. That’s much cheaper than more traditional giveaways of hats and T-shirts, which can cost $3 per item plus delivery charges.

“My responsibility is to get the best bang for the buck out of what we are entrusted with,” Jones said.

What an important distinction…

How rare it is to see an official in any public agency stand up and recognize the nature of “their” money. We, the people, entrust an agent of force with the ability to sieze some of our cash, with the expectation that they will uphold their concomitant responsibility to use our collective earnings wisely.

It makes me think of the congressmen who approved $500k to paint a jet to look like a salmon, a $50 million indoor rainforest in Iowa, a $200 million bridge to nowhere, and other excessive, worthless projects. I’d like them to get on TV, announce what they’re spending our money on, and with a straight face, look right into the camera and say “This project is in keeping with my duty to responsibly spend your money, which you have entrusted to us, the congress.”

With some retailers advertising gasoline prices as high as $6 per gallon, Gov. Sonny Perdue signed an executive order authorizing state sanctions against gas stations that gouge consumers.

“I do not believe there is an energy emergency in this state but we will not tolerate our citizens perceiving the fact there is by exorbitant price-gouging prices,” he said.

Perdue’s order allows the Gov.’s Office of Consumer Affairs to seek civil sanctions against retailers who can’t justify their prices based on the price they paid at the terminal for the product, adjusted for their normal markup.

I can see it now… Retailer! Justify your price immediately! The State only allows a certain amount of markup! Have you no concern for your Motherland?

I mean, honestly, anyone who pays six bucks a gallon when the average price in Atlanta is still about three bucks deserves to be ripped off.

I paid $3.159 for Premium (it was all they had) yesterday, officially the most I’ve ever spent on gas. That price stands in stark contrast to the lowest I’ve ever paid, 69 cents a gallon in 1998. The $3.15 gas was only found after driving to three other stations, all of them like this:

Yes, I shot it with my new camera phone.

This is really a worthwhile read as this guy really takes several prominent creationists to task on their own turf…

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

My favorite line:

What bugged me were his incessant imprecations that we be humble before the glories of nature.
Humility? How dare these people talk about humility! You know what scientists do when confronted with nature’s complexity? First they spend five years or more in graduate school, living in near-poverty, having no life, studying all the time while being used as cheap labor by the university, just to get a PhD. Then they go out into a job market that presents the very real possibility of unemployment as the reward for all that hard work. If they’re lucky they’ll land a post-doc, and bounce around the country for a while struggling to find a permanent position. Even if they are lucky enough to land a permanent position they could very well find themselves in some two by nothing town in the middle of nowhere. They spend years trying to get a research program off the ground, scrapping for grant money, and fighting with ornery referees to get their research published.

And why do they do that? They do it because they know that’s what it takes if you want to understand nature’s complexity just a little bit better. That’s what it takes to make the tiniest dent in the sum total of human ignorance.

That’s humility.

What isn’t humility is having a used car salesman give you a brief description of some complex system, conclude after five seconds’ reflection that it could not have evolved, and then decide that only an omnipotent God could be responsible for such a critter. That’s not humility, that’s supreme arrogance. That’s pride and sloth all wrapped up into one.