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September 10, 2009

Tim's thoughts: I *absolutely* wish I still had access to my MSU and UChicago email accounts. I remember on Septe... >>

Kleinfeld's Got the Past Futures Beat

I'm sure you saw this, because the NYT's been promoting it: Remembering a Future That Many Feared by N. R. Kleinfeld. The idea is to look back to September 12, 2001, and recall the widely-shared fears and assumptions of the moment:

New York would become a fortress city, choked by apprehension and resignation, forever patrolled by soldiers and submarines. Another attack was coming. And soon.

[...]

If a crippled downtown Manhattan were to have any chance of regeneration, ground zero had to be rebuilt quickly, a bricks and mortar nose-thumbing to terror.

First: What did we think would happen? Then: What actually happened? The reporter's job is straightforward. Interview the past. Report the present.

This setup is so good it made me gasp—really—as I started in on the first few grafs and realized what Kleinfeld was up to. Talk about context. We can't improve our decision-making, our foresight, if we never go back to look at the decisions we made—the futures we feared—and compare them to reality.

This kind of story—maybe it's more "history light" than journalism, I don't know—ought to be standard practice. Let's look at the wailing and teeth-gnashing of just nine months ago, re: the economy. First: What did we think would happen? Then: What actually happened?

Our memories are so short. Our imaginations are so... adaptable. We don't notice them changing. This story totally represents a kind of Long Now thinking, if you ask me—in the sense that it says our vision of the future is something we can inspect, analyze, criticize, report. I mean, that headline says it all, and some copy editor should get a prize for it: "Remembering a Future." Exactly.

Anyway, this is all to say, big ups to N.R. Kleinfeld and the NYT. This was a great idea.

Robin-sig.gif
Posted September 10, 2009 at 11:30 | Comments (2) | Permasnark
File under: Journalism, Recommended

The Correspondent-Fixer Dialectic

Tim says,

George Packer on the death of Sultan Munadi: "It's Always the Fixer Who Dies."

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 10:52 AM

September 8, 2009

The Atlantic Has a Good Month

Robin says,

I still have a soft spot for The Atlantic, the magazine that introduced me to, um, thinking. Certainly to the thrill of great journalism. It hasn't always been as interesting in recent years (James Fallows provides an epic ongoing exception) but wow, this latest issue is really good:

A paean to Al Jazeera, the only cable TV network in the world that actually offers "a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously."

California's new energy economy.

Love this one: the myths that led media companies astray. Because, "[if] we take Netscape's public offering in 1995 as the birth of the Internet era, on average over the next 10 years the biggest media conglomerates achieved less than a third of the returns available from the S&P as a whole. But even more telling is that these companies, as a group, had also underperformed the S&P for much of the previous decade, before the Internet upended their industry. Indeed, one aspect of the media business has remained largely unchanged for a generation: the lousy performance of its leading companies."

And the cover story, a powerful piece by Andrew Sullivan, written as a letter to George W. Bush about torture and "absolute evil"—clear, descriptive, urgent.

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 11:29 PM

September 3, 2009

Anna Politkovskaya

Robin says,

The Russian Supreme Court orders a fresh investigation of Anna Politkovskaya's assassination.

I was on a panel with Politkovskaya and Piers Morgan back in 2005, in Stockholm. She made both of us—rightly—seem like complete lightweights. Pure gravity and courage.

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 3:30 PM

August 13, 2009

The SHOCKING TRUTH About Health Care Reform!!!1

Robin says,

You have, no doubt, seen this site. I hear it was engineered in just a few days by a Republican web operative working round-the-clock with a team of Estonian PHP hackers.

Here's an audio interview with the site's shadowy creator.

Comments (2) | Permasnark | Posted: 5:19 PM

August 6, 2009

CJR's Got Your Back

Robin says,

Now this is what meta-media is for: Dean Starkman provides a smart, sweeping analysis of Matt Taibbi's feisty muckraking. His verdict is nuanced and not easily blockquotable, but the bottom line is: Taibbi can't be dismissed.

Starkman doesn't let him off easy, though. This is by no means central to his analysis, but it's a fun line (and also good advice):

The weakness of the piece is where others might find strength, its polemical nature and its hyperbole. When you call Goldman a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money," you're in a sense offering a big fat disclaimer—this piece is not to be taken literally and perhaps not even seriously.

I actually didn't know about CJR's The Audit feature—of which this is a part—and I'm a new fan. This is really valuable work.

Comments (1) | Permasnark | Posted: 11:45 AM

Rupert Murdoch Forgets He Ever Saw That Crazy Flash Movie

Tim says,

Five years ago, Rupert Murdoch sat down at his computer and spent a few minutes watching a movie made by two journalism students. When he rose, he proclaimed that "he and his fellow newspaper proprietors risked being relegated to the status of also-rans if they did not overhaul their internet strategies."

Then he bought MySpace and the WSJ. He also bought a locket with Matt and Robin's picture inside.

But now, instead of following the clear lesson of that movie - that is, merging these two properties to make WallSpace? MyStreetLiveJournal? - he just might out-grey-lady the Grey Lady by contending to become King Cash on Paywall Mountain.

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 9:42 AM

August 5, 2009

They Are Safe

Robin says,

I'm so happy to be able to finally link to this. My god. I can't even tell you.

Current is wall-to-wall with Laura and Euna's work in commemoration, and (we don't usually do this) streaming it online, too. It affords you a glimpse of the courage that led them so close to North Korea in the first place.

You can also leave a message here if you like.

Welcome home, Laura and Euna!

Comments (1) | Permasnark | Posted: 10:51 AM

August 3, 2009

It Really Is Snark Week

Tim says,

... but that doesn't mean Christopher Shea isn't right:

I'm as big a Julia Child fan as the next person... But how many pieces about Child's cultural significance can media outlets run before it starts to look as though reporters and editors have a financial stake in the forthcoming Nora Ephron movie about her?
Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 2:44 PM
Tim's thoughts: Re: Robin's point about the NYT above. It's weird. Just biographically, I didn't see it in the Ti... >>

The Stupidity of Serendipity

Having just two weeks ago posted a link to what I think is a reasonably intelligent take on the importance of serendipitous discoveries in old and new media, Damon Darlin's not-quite-an-essay in the NYT is by comparison offensively stupid.

Let's just juxtapose these two excerpts:

  1. When we walk into other people