The New York Times published a disgraceful and very short-sighted article in Friday's paper, describing how to see live music in the city without paying for it. The writer visited great NYC music spots, clubs that I've seen both good friends and great stars in -- the Rodeo Bar, the old-time jam at Freddy's Bar and Backroom here in Brooklyn, Hill Country -- and proudly says that he spent only $30 for 27 sets of music at 22 clubs. "Waitresses and tip jars can be avoided, if you can bear the guilt," he says.

Read that again. This miserable little tightwad is proud of the fact that he sat down in a club whose owners are probably working their asses off trying to keep their heads above water, and are booking live bands out of the love of it, because they could make a lot more money hiring a DJ or installing a karaoke system. And he's proud of the fact that he makes their lives a little harder, and makes it a little more possible they'll give up and close down and we'll lose another live music venue.

And he talks up all these great local bands, great local musicians who are playing for the love of it and hoping that the tip bucket covers a cab ride home so they don't have to haul two guitars and an amplifier on the subway, and he's proud that he didn't put any money in. I wonder how all those musicians felt reading that article in Friday's paper?

If enough people follow his advice, there will be no music to see in the city. As it is, I've lost count of the great live music venues that have closed down. I wonder if he got paid for his article, or if the Times has figured out how to stiff writers out of their checks?

Tags: media, music, stupidity

Back in the spring, I collaborated on a pair of brief articles with Barry Bealer, CEO of Really Strategies, a content-management consultancy, about standards and how they're used in the real world. (Standards in this instance meaning markup languages for text and other metadata standards such as PRISM or IPTC for images, etc. -- hence the "angle bracket" reference in the headline.) Barry's half was about how standards help consultants and other "solutions providers" like himself; my half talked about the view of publishers and editors who have to deal with "content" (or what, in my case, we like to call "news") in the real world. The article was published in the April/May 2005 issue of the Software and Information Industry's Upgrade magazine, but there's now a PDF of Translating the Angle Bracket Crowd available to non-members on Really Strategies' web site. It's a short article, but I don't publish much writing nowadays so it's worth pointing out.

In separate semi-writing news, CyberJournalist.net published my "Top Ten Reasons To Read a Newspaper" earlier this month. It was a somewhat (but not entirely) humorous response to their "Top Ten Reasons For Reading a News Site." I've spent more than 15 years in online news publishing, and I believe in it strongly, but I read news in print as well as online and I think each medium has a place. Newspapers will probably change drastically -- just as radio changed after television was born -- but there are many advantages to offline reading and I don't think it's going to disappear.

My web site features both of these articles, as well as many others I've written in the past 15 or 20 years. (I don't have electronic copies of almost any of my published writing prior to 1987, when Brooklyn College's Kingsman newspaper moved from traditional cold-type publishing to a Macintosh typesetting system.)

Tags: media, writing

I just posted a response to Travis Nep Smith's "Top 10 Reasons For Reading a News Site," because today I seem to be in a particularly contrary, analog, curmudgeonly kind of mood. I think digital media has a great future, but paper and ink are pretty damn good too. So I present...

(Edit: Travis reposted my comment as its own article.)
( Top 10 Reasons to Read a Newspaper )

Tags: media

At this point, it seems fair to ask exactly when the intelligence in "collective intelligence" will begin to manifest itself.

Blogger Nicholas Carr, talking about the badly written and frequently inaccurate Wikipedia in his skeptical article about the community-driven "Web 2.0."

Communal writing, like communal software development, communal music-making, or communal anything else, benefits from expertise and organization. This should not come as a surprise, and it doesn't mean that open-source software, or blogs, or bluegrass jams, can't be wonderful. It just means that some things will never change, no matter what technology you throw at the problem. Ten years ago, it was "way-new journalism" where "everyone is a reporter!" Back then, the question was, "where are the editors?" Now it's "Everyone's an editor!" Riiiiiiiight.

Tags: media, stupidity, tech

Well, in the aftermath of the Post's exclusive coverage of Kerry's VP choice yesterday (see the Daily News' chortling about the gaffe; the Times also reported that News reporters sent a bottle of Australian wine to the Post along with the note, "Congratulations on your exclusive: Have a nice day.") my first newspaper boss, and the guy who taught me that the bulk of investigative journalism (at least in the pre-web days) was rolls of quarters, copy machines, and dusty file cabinets, had a great column with some suggestions for the new CUNY graduate school of Journalism. The deal? Free tuition and free housing,

but only if they promise to stay in town for the next five years and irritate those in power. In the process, they will overcome the stereotype that A.J. Liebling once wrote about the media: "You can buy most reporters in New York with a beer and a cheap steak."

Tags: media, politics, stupidity

In a scare story in today's New York Times, we're told that even high-end software jobs are vulnerable to "migrating abroad":

In the debate over high-technology work migrating abroad, there has been widespread agreement on at least one thing: the jobs requiring higher levels of skill are the least at risk.

However, it seems that Microsoft has "agreed to pay two Indian outsourcing companies, Infosys and Satyam, to provide skilled "software architects" for Microsoft projects."

But those architects are working where? "At Microsoft facilities in the United States." They're Indian citizens who come in on H1-B visas to work for the company. That's offshore? Only if you consider Redmond to be "offshore" of Seattle (which, I imagine, many do, but that's a separate issue).

U.S. software companies have been bringing citizens of other countries here on H1-B visas for years to work on projects, frequently for very high-end work. The number of these visas has dropped: From nearly 200,000 in 2002 and more than 300,000 in 2003, the H1-B cap dropped back to 65,000 in October of last year. (This fact sheet shows data from the Bureau of Citizen and Immigration Services through 2003; and this article discusses the cap. The Wall Street Journal also discussed it in March of this year, but that article is available only to paid subscribers.)

So, there's no news here -- the practice is nothing new -- and the description of this as "offshoring" is questionable. Is it "offshoring" because Microsoft is paying an Indian company to supply the workers? Is it therefore also "offshoring" when a U.S. company hires consultants from Accenture, which risks losing a a big homeland security contract because it's based in Bermuda?

The Times got the story from The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers , a CWA-backed activist group supporting the rights of technology workers. (And good for them, but let's try to keep our facts in line.) Surprisingly, the organization's article on the topic is a little more balanced, pointing out that nothing indicates the consultants replaced U.S. workers, and they are being paid U.S. wages for the work. WashTech's concern seems to be that Microsoft has been aggressively pushing managers to send work offshore, and the contract workers may be part of a larger plan to train high-level architects here, then send them back to India to run projects for Microsoft there. That might be an interesting "offshoring" story, but it's not what the Times wrote.

Tags: media, tech, words

Today's lead headline in The New York Times: Bush Doesn't Expect NATO to Provide Troops for Iraq. Today's lead headline in The Financial Times: Bush sidesteps questions over prisoners' torture. Tell me again how the Times has an anti-Bush agenda?

What's most amusing to me is that he didn't sidestep the questions, so much as answer them without admitting it. Growing increasingly frustrated at reporters' insistence on a straight answer, he kept saying things like, "What I authorized was staying within U.S. law." And thanks to The Wall Street Journal's exposure of what one NPR commentator compared to a criminal defense attorney's poking and prodding at the law, we know exactly what the administration interpreted the law to allow.

Tags: media, politics

Fox News leads CNN in ratings, but is having trouble charging as much for ads as its rival, according to yesterday's WSJ. This partially has to do with Fox's strategy of undercutting on price when it was started, and with CNN being owned by one of the big cable providers, but also with the quality of the "news." One media buyer says, "The Fox News Channel is not perceived as pure news, because it really is no different than talk radio," and therefore isn't worth as much to advertisers.

They're not hurting, mind you, with ad revenues running at about a million dollars a day. But it's still heartening to hear that partisan nonsense doesn't pay quite as well as actual news.

Tags: media

I had a depressing and stressful conversation last night with a former co-worker who is now a rabid fan of Dubya and a big supporter of US policy (if you can call it that) in Iraq. And eventually we got to the Liberal Media conversation (sparked by his actual use of the phrase "keeping the truth from the American people" in conversation, which I've never encountered in the wild before).

So this morning he sent me an example of the bias of the liberal media, quoting an excerpt from Rumsfeld's daily briefing:

There are two ways, I suppose, one could inform readers of the Geneva Convention stipulation against using places of worship to conduct military attacks. One might be to headline saying that Terrorists Attack Coalition Forces From Mosques. That would be one way to present the information.

Another might be to say: Mosques Targeted in Fallujah. That was the Los Angeles Times headline this morning.

But that was not the headline. The actual article (annoying free registration required, but feel free to use kficara/kficara) had nothing to do with a general US warning to stop using mosques as bases for attacks. It was about a single firefight between Marines and a group of insurgents, some of whom had holed up in the minaret of a mosque from which, the article says clearly in the second graf, "machine-gun fire had been raining onto Marines 200 yards away."

The headline didn't say "Mosques Targeted In Falluja," recasting the warning to stop using religious buildings to conduct attacks. The article actually is not about the warning at all. It's about one particular group of Marines targeting one particular mosque in which attackers were nested. And the headline says "Mosque Targeted In Falluja," meaning the single mosque discussed in the article.

Not that it will make a damned bit of difference, but I told him, " I think you sent me an example of Rumsfeld misquoting and distorting what the LA Times said, rather than the other way around."

Tags: media, politics, stupidity
Current Music: June Carter Cash, "I Used to Be Somebody"

The New York Times yesterday had a hilarious article on Richard Desmond, the publisher of the Daily Express in London, responding to a potential offer by German publisher Axel Springer Verlag's offer to buy the competing Telegraph. In a meeting with Telegraph executives, Desmond goose-stepped Cleese-like around the room with his finger under his nose, invited the Telegraph's publisher to "step outside," and finally led his executives in singing the banned first verse of "Deutschland Uber Alles" as the other group walked out of the meeting.

The Journal's edit page today followed up with an uncommonly amusing piece, perhaps defending Desmond, though it's hard to tell, but outlining the history of anti-German English humor.

It quotes ads by Spitfire Ale, made in the county of Kent, that feature slogans like Goering, Goering, gone and Spitfire -- downed all over Kent, just like the Luftwaffe. (The beer company's web site calls it "quirky World War [Eleven]-themed advertising," which is amusing although the thought of nine more of them is a bit bleak.)

Amusingly enough, the front page of today's Daily Express blares "Stop Le Nazi," responding to the UK visit of Jean Le Pen.

Tags: media, words
Current Music: Guy Clark, A Nickel For the Fiddler

I think it's implicit in the way that a Web site is produced that our standards of accuracy are lower. Besides, immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy.

-- Nick Denton, founder of the gossip blogs Gawker and Wonkette

So that one's going in the quote server. Not much more you can say about the level of political "reporting" nowadays. Wonkette's odious editor, Ana Marie Cox, said proudly, "They accused me of trying to out-Drudge Drudge. Which I love, and I'd do it if I could."

This was Slashdotted the same day that Romenesko pointed out a column by William Powers saying that people increasingly do not get their news from any single media outlet, but from referrals by friends, blogs, and the like:

Do you prefer The Washington Post, The New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal? Feeling strongly about such choices has become an eccentric affectation, like wearing a bow tie. Curious people see all of these outlets -- now and then, when they have a moment. But that's not how most of us get our news.

I guess I'm a bow-tie wearer; I still get a large proportion of my news from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. But on the other hand, I (obviously) also read things like Slashdot and Romenesko. In the end, I think it's less the type of medium (blog versus newspaper) than the quality of the journalism. People who think what they read on Drudge is "news" probably also consider The New York Post a reliable newspaper.

Tags: media
Current Music: King Crimson, "Sleepless"

The New York Observer's press column this week contrasts New York's two tabloids in how they handled Condoleeza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission. The News' front page said HOW COULD SHE NOT KNOW? while the Post cried THE LADY IS A CHAMP!.

Daily News editorial director Martin Dunn told the Observer, "I was going around the newsroom saying ‘That’s the difference between the News and the Post—we’re a newspaper, they’re a propaganda sheet!’"

Post editor Col Allen said the News is "becoming more and more determined to attack the Bush administration. They are doing so with increasing shrillness. ... Frankly, I think it’s borderline disloyal."

Sir, have you no ... never mind. Stupid question.

Tags: media, politics