Photo by Vicki's Pics via Flickr

Last month, book publishing giant Simon & Schuster made headlines by blindly leaping into the future and presenting the world with its first ever “innovation in reading” – the “vook.” A vook, the clever conjunction of video and book, is a new type of media intended to combine the exhaustive detail of the written word with the fast-action of cinema (i.e., explosions) into one seamless entertainment experience. You read some, you watch some. A perfect balance for the changing world.

Okay, so maybe it’s not exactly a new idea (perhaps you’ve seen something similar on this place called the Internet?), but there’s something notable, even praiseworthy, about Simon & Schuster’s new tech venture. Which is to say: No one’s going to buy the veteran publishing house is revolutionizing the noble diversion of reading (because they aren’t), but, even so, they’ve managed to establish themselves as the first in a confused and petrified industry to ignore their base nature and take a risk on electronic-only content. That’s right, the vook has no printed counterpart and can only be readwatched with an e-reader, an iPhone, or a good ol’-fashioned personal computer. And this is not insignificant because writing — one of the most conservative of all world art forms — and book publishing — a business more than a little infatuated with its own tradition — haven’t really had to face major changes in, oh, the last 500 years or so.

And now somebody’s gone and thrown logic out the window.

So of course some of Simon and Schuster’s peers have derided the vook as pure silliness while others have commended their ingenuity. But is anyone surprised at the gambit? Not hardly. Though no one’s coming out and admitting it, business analysts for book publishers around the globe will be peeking through their fingers in trepidation during the coming months, readying themselves to pounce on the vook trend if it looks like there might be a payoff at the end.

Who can blame them: Purveyors of the written word live in a terrifying new world. Having watched their comrades-in-arms at newspapers and magazines all but collapse at the hands of bloggers and internet ‘zines (you know who you are), bookmakers and sellers tend toward doom and gloom when it comes to their future. But this is despite the fact – or more likely because of the fact – that no one in book publishing knows anything about how they’re being affected by the 21st century. Clearly, sales are down, and it’s already cliché to lament how no one reads anymore. But at the same time, one could argue that people are reading now more than ever, or at least that young people now are reading more than the generation before them. Just in text message format. So the question for book publishers is: How do we reach out to a broader, and mostly disinterested, audience? And they haven’t got a clue, so now the experiments start and …

In stumbles the vook.

Somehow, though, the idea of adding video content to a book seems to be missing the point. I mean, really, who’s the audience for this? (And don’t say ‘book buyers.’ They’re as set in their ways as bookmakers are.) Though the plan is clearly to lure in a crop of tech-savvy teens, the e-reader has already proven itself to be the least cool invention of the 21st century (excepting maybe the Comfort Wipe); “not sexy” is the phrase most commonly batted around e-readers — no doubt kids will be lining up at their local Best Buy once they hear that “not sexy” now comes with bonus video content. (Side note: A friend recently explained to me that in order to sell books, publishers should make them more like video games, and then get rid of the book part …)

But maybe we’re being a bit unfair. From a pure functionality standpoint, the vook is not without its charms. Of the four Simon & Schuster releases, two are self-help titles, one being an all-natural skin-care guide called Return to Beauty and the other an exercise guide called The 90 Second Fitness Solution. And that’s perfect because who – wanting help – wouldn’t grab the most they can get for their money? Surely, a description of how to make sunscreen out of discarded lemon peels (I’m guessing) isn’t as thoroughly enlightening as that same written description coupled with a video of the author showing precisely how one would take a lemon peel and grind it into her pores. And the same would go for a cookbook, or a book on carpentry, or really any other sort of how-to book. The more illustrative the instructions, the more the reader stands to gain.

The bigger wall of doubt comes when we consider the vook with regards to the novel. Or with regards to popular biography and history. Or even science. Anything that we typically think of as “literary” is at issue because these are the guys that define what a book is to so many people. (Not to mention, these guys are the industry’s bread and butter.) And now we’re going to make them more universal? More modern? Or simply in some way better?

According to the vook’s fiercest champions – yes. And here’s why: Suppose Mark Twain or J.R.R. Tolkien or (giggle) Socrates had the means to extend their imaginings off the page and plant them more firmly in our minds through the use of sound, color, and movement. Wouldn’t their stories be altogether more compelling, more fully realized?

Or how about this: what if your favorite author – let’s just say Simon & Schuster’s own workhorse, Stephen King – is given a camera when he renews his contract and is told to go wild with it: Make a mini-movie in your living room. Give video commentary to every paragraph in your new book. Film your cat wearing a tube top. Do whatever you want. It won’t matter because you’re Stephen King and people will buy the shit out of it. Wouldn’t people – well – buy the shit out of it?

As for the first argument, sure. If you can convince me that any of the old masters or really anyone who aspires to wordsmithing as a trade is as good with a camera as with a pen, then yes. I’ll take ten of ’em right now. The problem is that most modern writers, novelists or otherwise, aren’t directors. Sure, some of them write for the screen, but very few of them would know what to do behind a camera. Otherwise they’d be in Hollywood already (casting themselves in sex scenes with unreasonably hot partners). So hire an outside studio? Part of the point of the vook – because digital video production can now be done so cheaply – is to create something special for little or no money. But this is book publishers we’re talking about. If they had enough money for actors and directors and special effects, they wouldn’t be in this frantic mess to begin with.

And the Stephen King free-form montage? Now we’re just talking about add-ons. Admittedly, we’re a society obsessed with details and information and excesses, and we treat our authors, even the less popular ones, like celebrities. We devour them. But don’t we already have book Web sites to give us the story behind the story, and author Web sites to tell us what their dogs’ names are, and book blogs to tell us what they like to listen to while writing (see: LargeHeartedBoy.com, or even the New York Times’ “Paper Cuts”)? Of course, there’s always room for more extraneous data, but people tend to draw the line when that data isn’t given up for free. When was the last time you bought a DVD for its special features? Or better yet, when was the last time you bought a DVD in a new, unfamiliar format just for the special features?

Undoubtedly, someone, somewhere, at some point is going to do something great with this, and we’re all going to stare at this media Jesus’ creation and say, Damn, it’s so obvious. Why didn’t I do it first? It’s only a matter of time. But the thing is, when this happens, it won’t come from the book publishers, and we won’t have to call it a vook (or anything else that reeks of such boardroom cleverness). It will be organic and will choose its own name because that’s the way innovation works. Bookmakers will try to jump on board and make a mess of it, but that’s okay. They survived radio and movies and TV (and Nazi Germany), so there’s no reason why they won’t survive this, the ADD-Internet age. That is, as long as they can keep themselves away from their own revolutionary ideas.

Photo of Meghan McCain by Tobyotter via Flickr

Yesterday, Atlantic reporter Mara Gay offered her readers a handful of takes on the state of women in the Republican party. “Pundits are predictably split lines on whether to love or fear Liz Cheney’s new red-blooded, anti-Obama, neoconservative foreign policy group, Keep America Safe,” she wrote. “But they agree that she is part of a vanguard of conservative women who are rising to lead the GOP.” And, from the looks of it, they certainly do. Still, following the Meghan McCain Twitter incident — where the daughter of the former presidential candidate was called, among other things, a slut for her tank-topped, sweatpantsed TwitPic appearance — one has to wonder whether this isn’t something of a mixed blessing: Sure, having its very own roster of nationally recognizable female icons might, at first glance, be a positive, but the length of the leash that’s been afforded to them seems to undermine any would-be positive gains here.

Take a look at Sarah Palin. When unveiled, as part of this past fall’s main political event, she brought to the national Republican party stout dedication to … the sort of ever-smiling, folksy character that most television audiences from the 1950s and ’60s would remember as being the perfect second-tier female figure — it was June Cleaver at the Republican National Convention (complete with a horribly cliched storyline about an over-zealousness for shopping). Whether or not the portrayal was fiction, it was hardly the portrait of a political powerbroker. And it was a window into just how far Republican women have come.

Now comes the nonsense with Meghan McCain. McCain, who, with her Tweeting and her cursing and her MTVing, was doing her level-best to help her party shake its (to co-opt her phrasing) pantsuit-y properisms, was put in her place for it. After posting the image, and receiving a whole bunch of flack, McCain reported that she’d been called a slut. She then wrote, in what seems like a rather measured response to such misogyny, that she was “going to take some more time to think about it but seriously I was just trying to be funny with the book and that I’m a dork staying in.” Shortly thereafter she tweeted that she “want[ed] to apologize to anyone that was offended by [her] twitpic,” further declaring that she had “clearly made a huge mistake” and is “sorry 2 those that are offended.” This last statement was, no doubt, the result of a public-reaction calculation, made to minimize any damage that the photo might have caused. But this isn’t the gross part. Nope. The gross part would be the fact that some of her Twitter followers were so threatened by the (very minor, it seems) appearance of sexuality in one of their (assuming here, that most of her Tweeting readership is sympathetic to her political views) emerging leaders, that they all ganged up to shut it down. Chalk up another win for the in-the-kitchen-character-building set.

Whether the likes of Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and Liz Cheney will have to face — if they should ever climb into the true national spotlight — such a character reduction remains to be seen. But, with the GOP trending toward allowing for a larger role for women, it would serve them well to refrain from taking away their freedom to be anything but mid-20th-century homemakers.

Howard Fineman

Shame on You, Mr. Fineman
A one-act musical written after discovering that Howard Fineman, Newsweek’s Chief Political Correspondent, Senior Editor, and Deputy Washington Bureau Chief, had shamelessly stolen from my Unfit story from Sept. 28, “UNFIT for an Uncomplicated Strategy” (in which I postulate that Barack Obama is employing a rope-a-dope strategy to win the debate over health care reform), for his MSNBC editorial from Oct. 7, “Obama Channels Ali in Health Care Prize Fight” (in which he postulates that Barack Obama is employing a rope-a-dope strategy to win the debate over health care reform).

(Scene: A small cluttered home office in Austin, Texas. A YOUNG MAN sits at his desk, staring at a photograph of Howard Fineman. His mouth is open, his eyes are filled with tears, the palms of his hands are turned heavenward in a pose of infinite pain and disappointment. He has no pants on. On the wall behind him hangs a poster with the words “Ethics of Journalism” written in enormous type.  A MALE CHORUS sits around him, wearing fedoras and trench coats. They each hold a pad of paper in one hand and a pencil in the other. A slow dirge plays in the background, like something you’d hear at Yom Kippur services.)

YOUNG MAN (Speaking to the photograph): I can’t believe you did this to me. After all those hours I spent listening to you talk about the Iraq War. Fineman!

MALE CHORUS (Chanting soberly): Fineman! Fineman! Fineman!

YOUNG MAN: After I defended your position on the political viability of a public option to my friends. Like a fool! Fineman!

MALE CHORUS (Still chanting soberly): Fineman! Fineman! Fineman!

YOUNG MAN (Getting more agitated): After all that time I devoted to reading your damn columns. How could you do this to me? Fineman!

MALE CHORUS (Their chanting becomes more excitable with each word, as the music starts to build in intensity, volume, and rhythm): Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman!

YOUNG MAN (Jumping to his feet and clutching the photo to his chest, he lets out a mighty wail): Oh, Fiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnemaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnn!!!!!

(The music transforms into an uptempo jaunt, complete with tambourines and trumpets. The YOUNG MAN leaps onto his desk. The MALE CHORUS jump from their chairs and gather around him, pencils and pads out, as if taking notes at a news conference. Ripping the photo to shreds and throwing them around the room like confetti, the YOUNG MAN begins to sing)

“I’m Indignant!”

YOUNG MAN:

Oh, Fineman!

MALE CHORUS:

Fineman!

YOUNG MAN:

Though your name rings out at MSNBC
As a man of ethical pedigree,
With your degree in Journalism from Columbia,
Still I’ll tell everyone from here to Northumbria
About your sinister reportorial calumny.
You stole from me!

MALE CHORUS:

You stole from him, you really did,
Oh, Mr. Fineman!

YOUNG MAN:

I am just a simple sort of man
I try to write the best I can
Then you come along with your Newsweek magazine
And distort my theory with your glossy sheen
Stealing from Unfit … what kind of man?!
You stole from me!

MALE CHORUS:

Stop, thief! Stop, thief! Stop, thief!
Oh, Mr. Fineman, you devil, you!

YOUNG MAN:

First I wrote, “Obama rope-a-dopes”
Then you replied, “Obama rope-a-dopes”
Then I wrote, “Health care’s on the way”
And you type, “Should be here any day”
You stole from me!
I’m indignant! Indignant, I say! And I demand satisfaction!

MALE CHORUS (Bending over and putting their hands on their knees, they whisper repeatedly to the music, which is more subdued now.):

He’s indignant. Indignant. And he demands satisfaction.
He’s indignant. Indignant. And he demands satisfaction.

YOUNG MAN (Turning to his computer, he reads from the screen): Look at this here: I wrote, “Now any Republicans who continued screaming and shouting about the danger the president’s health care plan posed to America’s social fabric would come off looking petty: They would be representatives of the ‘party of no,’ disagreeing just to be disagreeable in a time when insurance premiums kept rising, more and more Americans were losing their coverage, and the economy was sinking deeper into the tank.” And then you wrote, “The GOP and the Blue Dogs risk being accused of mere obstructionism on what everyone agrees — after listening to all the talk in recent months — is a deadly serious social and fiscal problem.” (He throws his hands in the air and shakes them like a preacher at an old-time revival church) Indignant!

MALE CHORUS: (Doing the same): Indignant!

(While the MALE CHORUS continues their chanting, the YOUNG MAN returns to reading aloud.)

YOUNG MAN: Let’s see, let’s see. Ahh, here we go: “Then you sit back and let people get used to the good that can come from government involvement in the health care industry – the reduced premiums, the fixed prices, the guaranteed coverage. ” That’s me. Now you: “But the drawn out process also has underscored the depth and seriousness of the problem. Few now would dispute the basic idea that we are spending too much money for not enough good, sensible health care.” (Hands in the air) Indignant!

MALE CHORUS (Throwing their hands up): Indignant! (They resume their chant.)

YOUNG MAN: Okay, let’s see. Right, right, right. Not that. Ahh, yes. (Clearing his throat like an orator) Me: “Now you have to get some version of health care reform passed (not a perfect bill, of course, but one that speaks to the issues you find most pressing), finding common ground among Democrats both left and centrist while leaving Republicans out in the wilderness, now both blindly contrarian and powerless.” And, once more, Mr. Fineman: “Turning the enterprise over to Congress has made for an agonizing process, but I get the sense that his Republican enemies and Blue Dog doubters may be on the verge of punching themselves out.” Indignant, I say!!!!

MALE CHORUS (Jumping up and down like the newly converted): Indignant!

(The music grows even more intense, still rhythmic but now vaguely atonal and primordial, like the climax of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” The YOUNG MAN points to a chalkboard on which are written the words “My Revenge.” He sings and kicks his legs furiously while the MALE CHORUS freezes in a tableau of fear and amazement.)

“Vengeance”

YOUNG MAN (Singing):

Here, sir, is what I plan to do
To exact my sweet revenge on you:
First things first, go to your house,
Find your laptop, grab your mouse,
With fervent animosity
Search your browser history
Prove that you’ve been to my site,
Vindication! Sweet delight!
Then put back on my shoes and socks
And take that laptop straight to Fox
Just in time for Hannity’s show.
And then, my friend, the world will know
That Fineman is a plagiarist
A stinkin’, low-down copyist,
Who read my piece and liked it so
He thought the whole wide world should know,
But better, he thought, to come from he
‘Cause no one’s ever heard of me.
Ha! Ha! Ha!

MALE CHORUS:

Ha! Ha! Ha!

(The YOUNG MAN considers for a moment.)

YOUNG MAN:

Then again, that may be true.
Who’s heard my name? Not you or you?
I mean, who am I to say what’s right?
This might drive traffic to my site.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Howard Fineman, steal away!
We’ve got new stories everyday.
“When you get too drunk to write
Visit Unfit Times. We’ll treat you right!”

(The YOUNG MAN and the MALE CHORUS spin wildly about the room, arms interlocked, as the music turns into a swinging, lewd burlesque number with crashing cymbals and wailing trombones. 15 VOLUPTUOUS FEMALE DANCERS come dancing onstage in a line, waving fans and winking suggestively to the audience. Balloons fall from the rafters. As the music climaxes, a nude HOWARD FINEMAN appears from offstage with a notebook in his hand to run around the stage copying from the notebooks of the MALE CHORUS.)

ALL (Singing):

Steal your stories here at Unfit Times!!!

(Exeunt.)

]]> http://www.unfittimes.com/2009/10/08/unfit-for-ethics/feed/ 1 http://www.unfittimes.com/2009/10/02/unfit-to-be-a-tool-of-democracy/ http://www.unfittimes.com/2009/10/02/unfit-to-be-a-tool-of-democracy/#comments Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:26:40 +0000 Mike Kanin http://www.unfittimes.com/?p=1894 This morning, Jim Romenesko offers his readers an interesting snapshot of what it looks like to be online in the fall of 2009. In his first post of the day, the veteran media guru shared a Howard Kurz column that, as the headline noted, offered details about how the “[c]ountry’s growing hunger for information is ‘being met unequally.’” The basics? Vast swathes of the poor and rural sections of the United States exist sans Internet, and, thanks to that fact, they are robbed of access to what has become the otherwise most convenient method of personal news gathering. Then, just above that snippet, Romenesko clips an L.A. Times recap of a “Google exec’s talk at the UC Berkeley Digital Media Summit,” which included the sentiment, he writes, that “[c]onsumers might be drowning in media, e-mail and ‘the social stream’.” Put together, this reads something like: Now, even as U.S. citizens of any real means may have access to too much media, their have-notted counterparts have access to none at all. Anyone else see a nifty parallel here? Maybe one that has something to do with the widening gap between U.S. rich and U.S. poor?

What does this say about the thing’s prospects as the ultimate democratizer?

So today, we here at Unfit would like to try an experiment. We realize that this will probably offer something of a small-sample-sized, totally unscientific look at things. But, we’re curious: Is the Internet for rich people? We’d like you, loyal readers to help us figure this out. Please tell us a bit about yourselves (broad strokes here, people — we’re not data-mining), and your feelings on the subject.

If this doesn’t work, we promise that we won’t ask you a question ever again.

The Newseum, decked out in all its First Amendment glory

There’s a 4-D movie theatre in the colossal Newseum in Washington D.C. that attempts, with the aid of all the tricks and gadgets of modern-day interactive moviegoing, to paint journalism as the noblest and most exciting of professions. Whether journalism is noble or not, I’ll leave for others to decide (though the preponderance of celebrity-news round-up shows would seem to argue for the latter), but as for its being exciting, that I can vouch for. For the last five years, my life, like those of the three “stars” of the Newseum’s “I-Witness” re-enactments – Revolutionary War chronicler and free-speech advocate Isaiah Thomas; trailblazing investigative journalist Nellie Bly; and Edward R. Murrow, who broadcast radio reports from a London rooftop during the Nazi Blitz – has been an endless stream of explosive moments and high intrigue that only 3-D glasses, B-grade special effects, and bucking movie-theatre chairs could ever do justice to. It’s one thing for a viewer to feel an adrenaline rush while dodging Red Coat fire at Lexington or Luftwaffe fire in England, but just imagine the excitement one would feel experiencing in four dimensions the simulated joy of jumping from my bed directly into my desk chair at one in the afternoon to read e-mails and then stare idly at the wall until the desire for breakfast becomes overpowering.

This way, ladies and gentlemen; please form an orderly queue.

This cinematic oversight aside, whoever came up with the idea for the Newseum is a curatorial genius, if only because its mandate is so broad as to be almost infinite, or perhaps nonexistent. Technically, anything that’s part of “news history” will do, meaning just about anything from human history will do, from explications of the principles of reporting to exhibits about Hurricane Katrina and Woodstock. As long as a journalist was there, or as long as the world of news reporting can somehow be tied in, any exhibit will be welcome. It really is brilliant: a museum with a mandate to cover everything.  And who wouldn’t pay $15 to see everything?

So what do you, the visitor, get for your money?

A 74-foot marble carving of the First Amendment on the museum’s outer wall (just down Pennsylvania Ave. from the White House, like 45 words of warning to anyone who takes up residence there), exhibits on reportorial ethics, a Great Books Gallery featuring “influential and historic works on freedom and the rights of man,” an enormous map pointing out the status of the press in every country of the world, video footage featuring famous newspeople and politicians explaining what a free press means to them, and quotes from Thomas Jefferson, Cato, John Locke, Thurgood Marshall and dozens of other great thinkers spread throughout the museum reminding visitors of the importance of the journalistic independence.

This is the Newseum as institutional defender of America’s Constitutional ideals: a museum for the people, by the people, and reminding the people.

Then you’ve got exhibits on modern-day media bias; video footage of newsmen from Fox, NBC, and NPR defending their impartiality and impugning their colleagues’ lack thereof; a hallway with hundreds of front pages from international daily newspapers; an interactive newsroom, where visitors can sit behind an anchor’s desk or pick up a pen and paper and see what it’s like to be a real reporter; and the Internet, TV, and Radio Gallery, an look at ever-changing technology and the effects it’s had on the industry of news-gathering.

This is the Newseum as timely cultural marker: un-stuffy place-to-be, tuned in to the concerns of the day.

And last you get an exhibit about Woodstock and the birth of rock journalism, chunks of the Berlin Wall and the World Trade Center, an entire room devoted to the hunt for John Wilkes Booth, a sports theatre, a history of Pennsylvania Ave., a South African ballot box, a gallery of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs …

This is the Newseum as whatever it wants to be and whatever gets bodies through the door. This Newseum features something for everyone: conspiracy theorists, history buffs, nostalgists, sports fanatics, lovers of liberty, lovers of fine art. This Newseum is omnivorous, ecumenical, comprehensive, and diffuse.

At one point late in my visit I was watching footage of Tom Brokaw reporting from the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and when the screen went dark, I was left staring at my reflection. At first I laughed; I had spent the previous hour feeling pretty proud of myself for being part of such a noble profession, but I realized it was ridiculous to think that what I do and what Tom Brokaw has done over the years could even be spoken of in the same sentence. Scribbling notes down in my little notebook in that enormous monument to journalistic integrity, I reminded myself: “This man reports from moments of real historical weight, and you write parodies about playing basketball in your pajamas.”

Then I realized that the distinction didn’t matter. Journalists, writers, reporters, unbiased witnesses, critical thinkers: We’re all getting swallowed up by the black hole of Internet dilettantism, social-networking literary democratization, and up-to-the-second celebrity sensationalism.

And this is the Newseum as natural history museum, exhibiting artifacts from humanity’s past. And journalists as we’ve known them will soon be like those neanderthal tribes in their glass display cases: on the hunt but made out of wax.

Photo by Jessica Merz

Dear Readers,

We here at Unfit Times are kind of new to this whole interactive media thing. So, sometimes, we may miss a few of the more… nuanced mores that dictate the way you internet people expect to be treated while you’re spending time online. As for the fact that we haven’t engaged in any sort of dialogue with those of you who’ve been kind enough to comment on our posts, well, that’s kind of a biggie, and we’d like to correct it. And to prove how totally sorry we are for ignoring your responses, we’ve decided to initiate a monthly mailbag, which will aim to cover some of the conversation that we’ve left ourselves out of.

Here goes:

Way back on the 9th of July, GlenStef responded to our suggestion that tears were a reflection of human hubris with a suggestion of his or her own: “Hi there,” they wrote, “Not sure that this is true:), but thanks for a post.” For those of you who’d like to explore the origins of human tears, we’d suggest you travel on over to this super interesting discussion that took place on the Australian Broadcasting Network in 2003. If you do, we’re guessing that you probably won’t run into GlenStef, who seems to be a spambot. Oops.

A day later, AP asked “what’s with the paint scribbles in the upper left [of the new Texas license plate]? Are Texans especially prone to sloppiness or early 90’s-era design motifs?” Having lived here for not much more than nine months, AP, I can offer you only an under-informed perspective. So I’ll turn to the wisdom of a native Texan. Which is to say I’ll push the button on my handy Willie Nelson quote-generating iPhone app: “How,” says iWillie, “would you like to bite that in the ass, develop lock jaw and be dragged to death?” Exactly.

On August 4, Sal wrote, “you pretty much just verbalized everything that i think is wrong with the world’s current politics, pop culture, the art world, education, religion, employment, our generation, television…… and, hell, fun and happiness too.” It was in reference to a specific post, but, because it doesn’t have my byline on it, I’ll let it stand as a general assessment of the type of work that we do here at Unfit.

[basking...basking...]

August 18 brought us James, who, in response to our pronouncing the official death of the compact disk, offered these thoughts: “While I agree that CDs are now artifacts, that doesn’t make them any less useful. At some point people are going to realize that standard quality mp3s are pretty poor quality on the digital scale. mp3s compress while CDs do not, and for that reason alone they will be in demand as a source of high-quality recordings for future generations. As repeated downloads and uploads take their toll on mp3 files I fully expect to hear from DJs looking for a decent copy of my minimalist techno CDs. Bottom line: I agree the medium is dead, but don’t sell those Autechre CDs just yet.” He’s got a good point. In fact, a little while ago, I went shopping with a record nerd friend who was buying up all kinds of used CDs. What’s that that Warren Buffet said? Something about greed and fear — and being able to find 1/2mench on disc for like five dollars?

Robert Hampton thanked us for our “few kind remarks about the last Democratic president con cojones” after he read our take on why today’s Dems could use a helping of LBJ-style whoop-ass. You’re welcome, Robert. (We here at Unfit are nothing if not polite.)

A bunch of you were kind enough to weigh in on Rosenblatt’s September 1 summation of the state of the written word. Thanks. Unfortunately, I am not a philosophy scholar, and so — sans iAristotle app — I’m forced to sit that one out. But, please, by all means, continue. Maybe we’ll figure out a way to get to you next month.

That’s it for now. Keep reading, keep commenting, etc., etc.,

Unfit

Disaster Twitter, a New Wrinkle

Of all the iconic images associated with the attacks of September 11, 2001, the footage of then-President Bush’s fuck-me stare — delivered, now-infamously, as he was about to grace an audience of Florida school children with his best reading voice — is perhaps the most honest summation of the mixture of horror and panic that most of his fellow citizens felt as they watched the World Trade Center crumble on national television: At least for a day — and, in most cases, probably longer than that — U.S. nationals were left in the very unfamiliar position of post-national-trauma lockdown. And, though the news media did its best to service us — parked as we were in front of our TVs, with little else to do but wonder about when the next plane would hit — with a stream of reliable information, there were, naturally, a few rumor-fed hiccups in those confusing first few hours.

Lucky for us, there was no Twitter. Or Facebook. Or any other web 2.0 gadget that might have been used to turn what was already an uncomfortable level of panic into something that might have, in its ability to undo civil order, made us long for the likes of Al Haig.

Picture this: The 9/11 sequel hits. Old media either waits to source unconfirmed reports or runs them in a crush to beat both their competitor networks and the social-media machine. By now, the latter group has already produced a collective avalanche of tweets and status updates, which — in their first-person anecdotal nature — are generally inaccurate and vague, but are, nonetheless, submitted for network-viewer consumption. And as the whole thing starts to spin out of control, the first victim post shows up. Maybe it’s a heart-rending farewell. Maybe it’s a horrifying call for help. Maybe it’s a citizen’s APB for a possible attacker. Whatever it is, it gets tweeted and retweeted. And picked-up by blogger after press agency after network until the thing is ringing in the collective heads of an already frightened public. But this time it’s not a report of one-last-cell-phone-call from a doomed plane; it’s the actual thing — and it’s happening in real time.

A small-scale example of the sort of frenzy that our new media reality can create was blogged about on TechDigest this past April. There, Daniel Sung reported on the information spread associated with DIY swine-flu reporting. “There’s been a Chinese whispers effect whereby a host of tweets built around anecdotal evidence, to put it kindly, have produced a mixed bag of misinformation and hysteria,” Sung wrote. “My personal favourites [sic] are the opportunist: ‘Simple cure for the new BHS (Bird/Human/Swine flu) as reported on TV last night is the drug Tamiflu…already a prescription on the market’ and the poetic: ‘In the pandemic Spanish flu of 1918-19, my Grandfather said bodies were piled like wood in our local town…swine flu = danger.’”

This is not an argument for some sort of disaster-sensitive Twitter censorship. That sort of thing would only serve to compound such a tragedy. Instead, this should be taken as a neurotically instructive take on the relationship between new media and the stuff so many seem to be ready to (at least) supplement it with: If you find yourself still marveling at what you believed on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, maybe you should reconsider your need for instant information.

Michael Kinsley Hacks Away at the State of the Correction

We here at Unfit would like to think that we avoid hackery. Of course, in this day and age — what with “satisfy instant demand” being the watchphrase for the news business — it can be kind of hard to totally dodge the posting of efforts from the … less-than-graceful side of things. So we also like to think that we can understand when some hack (veteran journo or no) finds his or her way to the electronic folds of a major daily publication. But, if this hack should, in the process of proving his or her ineptitude, also undermine the credibility of their publication, we’d further like to think that this makes them fair fucking game.

Take the Washington Post’s Michael Kinsley for example. In his most recent column (the one that ran on Friday, September 4), he used his op-ed space to point out the ridiculousness that one can find when they spend a few minutes in the Corrections section of the New York Times. Fine. Corrections can come off like the worst of the nerdlinger semantic debates. And if he’d stuck to the cutting and pasting of tortured errata columns, Kinsley would still only be a hack. But then something told him that he should try and make a bigger issue out of all of this. So he did:  “The fad for elaborate and abject corrections, and factual accuracy in general, is based on the misperception that when people complain about the media getting it all wrong, what bothers them is [a lack of accuracy],” he writes. Fad for factual accuracy in general? Even as newspapers have long tinted their coverage in order to advance the political agenda of their publishers or to bring in the readers, it’s always been done under the cover of factual reporting. Which is to say that calling factual accuracy a fad is kind of like calling William Randolph Hearst a journalist.

Worse, though he’s probably correct in his assumption that the general public cares more about “the refusal of the Times and other papers to call President Obama a socialist or a Muslim, or to say outright that talk radio hosts are vermin,” Kinsley’s completely missed the point. Corrections are run, yes, superficially, to make amends to the record. And because they appear in the paper, they might seem to exist solely for the purpose of being a public mea culpa and factual amendment. That is until you actually think about it for more than 30 seconds. The correction is the best bit of tangible evidence of the implied contract that should, even in these bloggy times, keep journalists honest. To be corrected is fucking shameful, and, for any self-respecting journalist, the fear of ending up on that page is strong enough to, if all else fails, keep you doing good work. Kinsley’s flip treatment of corrections and — seriously? I mean, really … — facts is totally perplexing.

That it ended up in the pages (even if they are of the op-ed sort) of one of the more respected dailies on the face of the planet is an embarrassment. There are hacks, and then there are hacks. And then there’s Michael Kinsley.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Now-former Creative Loafing boss Ben Eason has fully wrecked two media institutions. In an attempt to balance out the massive amount of money that he spent acquiring the Washington City Paper and the Chicago Reader (full disclosure: I’m still pretty connected to the former), he stripped away so much of their respective newsrooms that they were no longer able to function as the widely respected, feature-reliant alt-weekly stalwarts they had been. Worse, he seemed to think it was all a good idea — or at least that it was the best way forward. So out went the cover stories (mostly) and the staff writers and in came the Best Of… issues and blogs.

With Eason pushed aside, and a firm called Atalaya Capital Management — the folks who Eason owed a bunch of money to — now in charge, the Reader’s Michael Miner recaps the past couple of years in CP/Reader history in a post titled “That Didn’t Work Out So Well, Did it?” For the most part he’s right: The CL purchase was a colossal mistake for Eason and the folks who sold those papers to him — if we believe that profit wasn’t the only motivation for their move. But that doesn’t mean that the CL-era was a total waste for WCP and the Reader. And indeed, at least as far as a quick (if painful) education in Internet publication is concerned, it seems as though maybe Eason offered at least one small positive: By forcing his acquisitions to shift from a dated, print-primary model into their current, web-first approach, he dragged them to place where they could better consider their respective futures.

But Eason’s methods were probably never going to work for either the Reader or the City Paper. When CL welcomed them into its fold, both publications were storied franchises with impressive CVs highlighted by the sort of stuff that alt-weeklies used to be known for: deeply researched cover stories, generally great coverage of a hyper-local nature — features that were made by skilled journalists crafting excellent prose. Sure, Eason’s papers — a minor chain with entries in a handful of Southeastern cities — handled some of the regional issues that define an alt-weekly, but they never achieved the top-of-the-line status that his new Chicago and D.C. outlets had. For their part, CP and the Reader may have once been the favored destinations for their respective city’s citizens’ local-coverage needs, but when CraigsList and other electronic media started to erode their readerships (as they had for every other print publication), they appeared to be in line for a major refitting.

Which is how Eason found himself in the awkward position of trying to remake the two former heavyweights into welter-versions of themselves. He fired staff. He cut budgets. Each of the papers (including some of the original Loafing outlets) absorbed some serious psychological hits (the entire CP production department, for example, was trashed in favor of a more centralized layout effort). So when, on Tuesday, his effort — a tortured one at best — came to a court-ordered end, the only positive that seemed to emerge from this whole thing was that the forced march toward modernization that he’d prodded CP and the Reader into taking was (if for no other reason than a lack of resources) not likely to be reversed. What the new owners have planned is anyone’s guess but — good or bad — any future moves will, of course, echo back to the Eason era. And though the lay-off-surviving, pay-cut skeleton crew that’s been left to run things may be thrilled to see him go, when they look back on what’s happened, they’ll have that small piece of solace; it may not have been the best way, but at least they moved forward.

Even if they’re still forced to crank out those Best Of… issues.

A copy editor’s job is supposed to be surgical: Go in, make as few cuts as possible, clean up, get out — and do it quickly (deadlines people!) — so their finest work, writer’s bias aside, should be barely noticeable. The big stuff? The thematic issues, the shoddy workmanship, the inability to tell a story? That should be the province of folks who aren’t obliged to worry about proper grammar. Still, inevitably, stuff gets through and, in addition to serving as the syntax police, the copy desk will find itself asking just how the fuck whatever piece of garbage it might be combing through made it all the way down the chain without a lede or any sort of conflict, but with six different types of factual errors. (Let my personal experience stand in for the general population of Editorialland when I say that this is the sort of thing that tends to set them off.)

Which is how, sometimes, the copy folks find themselves in the ghostwriting business. And though that result may not be the most efficient use of a publication’s editorial staff, it is something that — if it happens at an infrequent rate — can be tolerated. Unless, of course, the copy desk sucks at composition (and someone up the line doesn’t bother to fix that mess). Whether or not this sort of editorial goatfuck befell the staff of the New Yorker sometime before the publication of its August 3rd issue, I can’t say. But, judging by the stunted prose (at least by its high, feature-y standards) on exhibit there, it seems like something was amiss. Fortunately, for our purposes, the magazine ran a two-part Siberian travelogue that allows interested parties an apples-to-apples look at what happens when someone falls asleep at their keyboard.

A description of the Siberian landscape from part one:

The problem with Siberia’s big rivers is the direction they flow. Most of Siberia’s rivers go north or join others that do, and their waters end up in the Arctic Ocean. Even the Amur, whose general inclination is to the northeast and whose destination is the Pacific, empties into the stormy sea of Okhotsk. In the spring, north-flowing rivers thaw upstream while they’re still frozen at their mouths. This causes them to back up. This creates swamps. Western Siberia has the largest swamps in the world. In much of Siberia the land doesn’t do much of anything besides gradually sag northward to the Arctic. The rivers of western Siberia flow so slowly that they hardly move at all. There the rivers run muddy; in eastern Siberia, with its real mountains and sharper drop to the Pacific, many of the rivers run clear.

As many of my colleagues (and perhaps readers) will attest, I am not a copy editor. But there are a number of things that caused me a bit of grammatical pain when I first read the section reprinted above. Here, the prose seems to never pick up any sort of momentum and, at one point — “[t]his causes them to back up. This creates swamps. Western Siberia has the largest swamps in the world. In much of Siberia the land doesn’t do much of anything besides gradually sag northward to the Arctic. The rivers of western Siberia flow so slowly that they hardly move at all.” — it seems like everyone was doing their respective level best to re-create an eighth grade geography paper.

Now take a look at this description of the Siberian landscape from part two. Remember, same author:

After the Kuznetsk Basin came a long interval of meadows. We saw dark-clothed people working the hay fields in big groups as in an old bucolic painting or riding to or from the work in horse-drawn flatbed wagons whose hard rubber wheels bouncing on the uneven pavement made the flesh of the passengers faces jiggle fast. In this more peaceful region, we camped one night on the banks of the Chulym river at a popular spot with a gravel bank more convenient for bathing and washing than the usual swampy mud.

This passage is a well-assembled, far less halting example. The only difference? The date on the issue.

Sure, there’s a question of preference: Some editors like to chop sentences (especially lengthy descriptive ones) into more digestible fragments. Others prefer something with a bit more flow. But, in either case, it’s rare to see such screaming evidence of an editor’s eraser — even if they’ve had to completely rewrite the thing.

Besides, this is the New Yorker, what’s supposed to be the pinnacle of feature-style, well-written journalism. For any other publication this sort of thing would be bad — for them, it’s a relative travesty.