Is there anything really "new" about the media?

It seems to me what's really new is not so much content as the speed with which it's shared -- and the numbers of people who can share it.

The much-buzzed about Bill'n'Hillary Sopranos spoof is really an old hat trick for the couple, who made pioneered parodic videos during his eight years in the White House. In 1994, the Clintons satirized the "Harry and Louise" ads that helped bring down her health care plan in a video made for the annual Gridiron Dinner.

In 1994, played the "Harry and Louise" health care in front of the Gridiron Club; another year, it was Hillary as Forrest Gump before the same audience of newspaper reporters, publishers and assorted Washington VIPs. The tour de force came in 2000, when Bill Clinton brought down the house at the White House correspondents dinner with a video that showed him as a lonely lameduck house husband, watching the laundry tumble in the White House basement, while his wife hurried off to her campaign dates. (In one scene, he chases her car down the White House driveway, paper bag in hand, hollering "Honey, you forgot your lunch.").

The difference is that this time around, the Clintons' initial audience was the world at large. The earlier videos aired before the Inside the Beltway press corps, like an off-Broadway tryout, before they were released to the news shows by the White House.

To me, this demonstrates two things: 1) the democratizing force of the Internet -- no longer is it just a privileged few who get to see the nation's powerful poke fun at themselves and 2) in an online world, politicians need to take more risks. No longer can you afford to try out your jokes before the hometown crowd to see if they work. Now you go straight to the mass audience. I wonder if it will liberate some, but intimidate others from trying at all?

Bloggers: Will they eat the media or vice versa?

That's the question I considered in this paper for my New Media class:


One of the most stunning transformations of our times has been the democratization of the media. The rise of desktop publishing, the Internet and digital video means the franchise on a mass audience no longer rests exclusively with those rich enough to buy a printing press or operate a movie studio.

But will what should be a golden goose of access for the masses turn out to be foie gras for the media monopolists?

It's certainly starting to have that overstuffed look.

In this paper, I propose to examine the promise and the perils facing the new media by looking at what's going on with blogging. What began as a means for citizen advocacy and networking has been expropriated as a channel for commercial use (see all the blogs by lawyers and PR specialists) and mainstream media expropriation.

While this isn't necessarily a bad thing -- blogging seems to encouraged both the established press and the corporate establishment to speak more in more candid voices -- it's definitely a different thing from what Dave Winer envisioned when he defined blogging as "the unedited voice of a person."

As a member in good (or is it bad?) standing of the Mainstream Media, I can guarantee you that very little, if anything, that is unedited gets on the pages, electronic or otherwise, of today's news media. Indeed, there have been celebrated cases of reporters being fired for blogging overexuberance.

Still, the mainstream press has yet to be toppled by bloggers as the source par excellence for news. This despite the fact than any (wo)man with a laptop is a Citizen Kane for the new millennium.

Why is this? I would argue that it's the very proliferation of alternative news sources that gives the old standbys their staying power. As of June 13, 2007, the Technorati website reported that it was tracking a mind-boggling 86.3 million blogs. Just a little more than a year ago, when Carl Sessions Stepp was reviewing a book about blogging for the American Journalism Review, the number was 23.5 million.

With this kind of information glut, it's not surprising that people are looking to experienced hands to edit it all down to a manageable package. That's why former Heinz CEO, now international investor Tony O'Reilly said he's putting his money in the media -- including the dead tree variety. "In my view, a newspaper, properly edited and presented newspaper, is the ultimate browser," O'Reilly told Charlie Rose on the TV host's show Dec. 28, 2006.

So where does this leave the corps of citizen journalists that digerati such as Dan Gillmor and J.D. Lasica are trying to recruit?

If bloggers want to avoid being overshadowed and/or subsumed by the mainstream media they vow to revolutionize, they need to break away from the media pack. There are many interesting blogs that succeed because they give people news and information they cannot get elsewhere. . Efforts like Baristanet, a blog that chronicles the community of Montclair, N.J., show the possibilities. The University of Maryland's J-Lab is encouraging the development of other such ventures with its New Voices grants.

Besides hyperlocal news coverage, blogging can also provide powerful when it's hyperfocused. With fewer and fewer news organizations making the investments to do intensive beat coverage, dedicated bloggers can fill the gap by covering the stories that are too insidery to break through the days Paris Hilton headlines. That creates a record and a readership among opinion leaders that can have a ripple effect. A good example of the kind of blog I'm talking about is Steve Clemons' Washington Note, widely read by foreign policy wonks.

A larger question is how long the utopian euphoria that seems to motivate many bloggers can sustain the phenomenon. Advertising on the Internet still pays far less than advertising in print journalism. And as Samuel Johnson, a man who was as prolific in his day as the bloggers are in theirs, once famously noted: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

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Obsolescence on Steroids

When I got the laptop I'm typing on, I was the envy of my newsroom. It still seems pretty slick to me: it's an IBM T42 with an Intel Pentium chip that runs Windows XP. But last week, one of my AU interactive journalism classmates, Mark Heckathorn, forbodingly informed me: "Looks like you're going to need a new computer."

A check with the folks at the university's "hub," the office that handles computer issues for the Communications Department confirmed Mark's assessment. My trusty companion doesn't have enough RAM to do video editing. Already, in the extra course I'm taking with Brigid Maher, I'm seeing other limitations: Second Life seems to run in slow motion. Like some of us journalists, my little IBM just doesn't seem to be made for video.

This makes me sad. All my life I've had a problem with anthropomorthizing objects that I own (I gave away a car I owned because I wasn't using it as much when I moved back to DC from California and was worried it might be lonely). And nothing is more personal to a journalist than the keyboard she types on.

It also makes me wonder about how we deal with the obsolete in a world where technological chances are moving at such lightning speed. Will we one day be overwhelmed with computer junkyards? Where do pentium chips and lithium batteries go to die? And what are the environmental hazards of burying them??

RIP: The ultimate early adapter

Yesterday in Princeton, a bittersweet reunion: Generations of men and women who had their first professional journalism experience at the campus daily came to pay tribute to our mentor, Larry Dupraz.

Cigar-chomping, profane but a meticulous craftsman, Larry did not have the string of degrees that other Princeton professors had. Yet he was one of the school's great teachers. He died Dec. 24.

For nearly three hours in a huge chemistry lecture hall, dozens of Princeton grads got up to talk about how this man, a compositor and volunteer fireman, had changed their lives. The speakers ranged from Eberhard Faber, of the No. 2 lead pencil fame, to retired People magazine ME Landon Jones, to investment bankers, lawyers, a plastic surgeon and a few ink-stained wretches like yours truly. At the end, a marvelous slideshow by the Wall Street Journal's Tom Weber and his friend, Cincy lawyer, Doug Widmann, walked through Larry's six-decade career. Photos of him were interspersed the front pages he helped us make up. In the background: music of the period. The 'Sixties were my favorite: What Larry would have thought of having his photos run with with a voiceover by Jimi Hendrix is pretty amusing to contemplate.

I'm including Larry in my blog because he was, as one of the speakers pointed out, "the ultimate early adapter." Larry's career spanned three enormous changes in journalism production: He started out in the romantic era when pages were printed off metal type locked carefully into position, a mirror image of what it would be on the printed page. Larry was a master of proofing pages upside down and backwards. His professional life (but evidentally not his ego) was bound up in that skill and his ability to run the linotype machine. "I'm a hot lead man," he told some of the Daily Princetonian's student journalists. But in the early 1970s, Larry helped transition the paper to cold lead. Then -- and this is the extraordinary tribute to his work ethic and dedication -- in the 1990s, well after retirement, he learned MacIntosh's Quark so he could continue to help us "damn kids," as he liked to refer to us, put out the newspaper.

Like any good educator, he also made time for fun. He started a student journalist softball team (the iconically-named Yellow Rag) and hosted an annual picnic every Princeton reunions weekend so he could introduce the many generations of 'Prince writers to each other.

Here's to Larry. He may never have had a Princeton degree (though several classes made him honorary members), but he belonged on the campus nonetheless. He was a man who never stopped learning. It was an honor to have been among the many lives he touched.

Greetings from Virtual Reality

So I've finally cracked Second Life! Here's hoping it doesn't deprive me of my first one. I can definitely see how it appeals to the obsessive-compulsive in us all. The psychology of the experience is fascinating. Even though I am operating under an avatar, I felt incredibly intimidated when I visited the French island: What if they laughed at my grammatical mistakes? Maybe it takes time to shed the habits of a lifetime -- and get used to a fictional persona.

Redding up

In Pittsburghese, that's what I've spent much of the holiday weekend doing. I don't know why, but that's what we used to call cleaning up and putting things in order.

Another way to put it: I've been editing my life.

Living in a small apartment imposes a certain discipline: Every now and then, you have to sit down and do an inventory of your life -- deciding what to keep and what to toss -- in order to keep one's accumulated possessions from taking over.

This is painful. The hardest for me is parting with books. Every time I do, I realize that a chapter of my life is over: No, I probably will not read that novel again, or become an art historian, or. . . or. . .

The longer I have been a reporter, the more I have realized why I'm not an editor: The ability to zero in on the one key item; the strength of mind to know what to throw away -- those are not skills that come naturally to me.

And yet, in our information-saturated age, it seems to me that is a skill worth cultivating.

The sheer volume of what is published can be overwhelming and depressing. This weekend, I made many, many trips from my apartment to Second Story Books, a nice used bookstore in my neighborhood. I was stunned at how much they rejected: Good condition (no writing inside) hardback literary biographies and some fiction.

If even works like this, which made it through the ultra-selective publishing mill to find a place between hard covers, are considered to be in glut, then what are we to think about the stream of consciousness that is the Internet? Is any of it worth saving? Does it matter if it isn't?

Or is the idea of the internet not permanence but flow? A service like Twitter seems to me to give a whole new meaning to the term "stream of consciousness"... it is a stream of the collective consciousness, with the charm being not the profundity (because most of it is quite banal) but the reach. At any given moment I am in touch with funny, charming, boring, touching but human, every human observations from all over the globe. Does it matter if none of it is worth keeping beyond the moment in which it is created. As Doestoevsky once wrote: "It's life that matters, nothing but life, that endless, perpetual process of discovering. Not the discovery itself, at all."

These are some of the things I'm thinking about as I close several volumes of my life and ready the ones Second Story rejected for donating to the library. Here's hoping these little shards of myself find a happy home.

The world is flat

I spent today in the Museum of Natural History, taking a wonderful Smithsonian class on digital cameras. Like most gizmos of the computerized age, these devices are amazing little universes in which it is easy to get lost. Fortunately, teacher Eliot Cohen, was a terrific and inspiring guide.

What I was thinking about as I walked home on a crystalline May evening, however, was my fellow students. We were homogenous in some obvious respects: all white, all middle-ished aged, all probably on the affluent side (the fact that we have the leisure and the money to pursue digital photography is a dead giveaway).

But we were pretty disparate in terms of our experience and interests. On the semi-professional end of things, there was me, a journalist trying to extend my half-life in an increasingly multi-media field, and a fellow who has a small photography business that he's taking digital. There were some pretty serious hobbyists: people who have gone on photo safaris and who have expensive digital SLRs and know all about the editing software. And then there were a couple of folks who hadn't yet gotten up the nerve to take their new digital cameras out of the box.

The interesting part was how much I learned from EVERYONE. I have a very primitive digital camera and am thinking about upgrading, and I got as much good advice from the shutterbugs as I did from the more expert photographers. In some ways, the amateurs' advice was better because it was more practical.

It was a great example of the kind of shared expertise Internet mavens like to celebrate. And it did give me a sense of how much creativity and good advice is available out there. The rapid changes in techology have had a great democratizing effect: Forget the high priests of culture; there's much wisdom to be gained in the pews. The turmoil and tumult of our technological revolution can be painfully dislocating. But it also lets all of us start over again and view the world with beginners' eyes. That can be liberating.

This is dedicated to the one I love

Maybe I mean journalism. Or maybe I mean the journalist who has been my companion and inspiration for most of my career.

"The War As I See It" was the name of a column he wrote for a newspaper he started when he was a kid. I have adopted it for my motto because:

• The chutzpah that it took for a preteen living in Charlotte, NC to share with the world his views on the great battles taking place in Japan and Germany is the quintessence of journalism. The need to share stories and the conviction that those stories need to be told is what motivates most of us news guys and gals.
• This blog is, in a sense, an imitation of my friend's insanely optimistic preteen effort: The Internet makes it possible for each of us to write a neighborhood newspaper -- but now, we're publishing to the world.

To me, this is potentially the greatest contribution the Internet can make in an age when corporate mega-mergers are reducing the number of media outlets: Taking fresh voices from the neighborhood and broadcasting them to the world.