(Continued from last week when I first considered enlisting because I was broke.)

Although I had forgotten completely about the Navy and journalism, chance intervened. My mother’s birthday is in February and I went over to visit her one day. While I was in her kitchen the phone rang. It was Petty Officer Hall. There was an opening in the Defense Information School, the training site for military journalists. Did I still want to enlist? He had to know and get me signed up in order to guarantee me the training. I remember standing there thinking that this must be karma. I rarely visited my mother. If I had not been there at that very moment it is doubtful that I would have gotten the message or acted upon it in time. So I said yes and took the train back to Coney Island to sign the papers. A few weeks later I went off to boot camp to complete basic training and be indoctrinated as a sailor, which was the prerequisite to getting the journalism training that I wanted.

Boot camp was a memorable experience. It is an exercise in brainwashing accomplished through a great deal of yelling and insistence on following meaningless rules just for the sake of building the habit of taking orders. If I close my eyes I can still remember the hot bourbon-and-tobacco breath of my drill instructor, Petty Officer First Class Gibson, standing almost nose to nose with me, screaming, “Do I look like your momma, recruit?” One instance from that 9-weeks of calculated abuse pertains to my journalism saga.

It was about midway through the cycle when I was told I had to take a typing test to qualify for the journalism training program. I used an old manual typewriter. I had to type either a dozen or 15 words per minute accurately. I failed. The boot camp authorities told me I could not go to the training program. No problem, I said. You can send me home. Because I was guaranteed a spot in the school and if you can’t hold up your end of the bargain, I should not have to finish my enlistment. I would have been more than happy at that point to call the whole Navy thing off. But whoever was in charge of such decisions figured it was the journalism program’s problem to teach me to type. Boot camp couldn’t afford to lose a recruit.

Next: DINFOS-trained killer

]]> http://minimediaguy.org/2009/06/22/navy-journalist-by-chance/feed/ 3 http://minimediaguy.org/2009/06/12/stumbling-into-journalism/ http://minimediaguy.org/2009/06/12/stumbling-into-journalism/#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:19:14 +0000 Tom Abate http://minimediaguy.org/?p=1339 My first job in journalism was for the U.S. Navy. How that came to be takes me back to the winter of 1973 when I dropped out of New York University. I was about 19 and barely getting by as a waiter at a restaurant when I got laid off.  I briefly managed to get a job installing windows but I lost that after just a couple of weeks and so one day I found myself with only train fare, then 35 cents, to get myself to the Navy recruiting station in Coney Island.

Why the Navy? To see the world. I naively thought I could enlist and get whisked away that very same day. It turned out to be more involved than that. I also chanced to get an outstanding recruiter, Petty Officer Hall, who took the time to talk me through the various specialties for which I was eligible to get trained.

What caught my eye was a designation called Navy Journalist. Watergate was then all the rage and I was impressed by the potential for having the same title as the guys who had brought down Richard Nixon. Petty Officer Hall told me I would have to wait for an opening in that training program, and I said fine. As the reality of joining the service loomed closer, I had started to get cold feet. He asked me for a phone number. I didn’t have a phone so I gave him my mom’s number. Then I jumped the turnstile to take the train back to the apartment I had expected never to see again – I literally had only one-way train fare at the time.

When I arrived home I found in my mailbox a financial aid check for about $1,500 dollars. I should have returned it but instead I took it as a sign that I was not destined to join the military. I paid the rent and took a ski trip with my then girl-friend.

But the money went quickly and within a month or two I was broke again.

To be continued.

Which fortunately leaves me free to heap derision and disdain on this bean-counting analysis that reeks of moral relativism like a chain-smoking French deconstructionist whose underarms have never been dishonored by deodorant.

Let me explain this seemingly bipolar view. I truly appreciate that this libertarian think-tank used its financial support from nouveau corporate media to pull together facts on everything from Internet advertising trends to magazine expansion (see niche breakdowns page 77) to the revelation, at least to me, that more than 3,000 free-circulation local papers have a “combined circulation . . . larger than all the daily newspapers in America.”

That seems impressive until you realize those are “shoppers” as we used to call such advertising-only weeklies when I was a small town businessman in Eureka, California, where the Tri-City Weekly was a fine example of that genre. So when the authors of Media Metrics call this a golden age of media, what they really mean is that this is a golden age of advertising. There has never been a better time for national and international brands to advertise goods and services. And that is not a bad thing until you consider that banks are failing, household debt is high, and “the U.S. is experiencing the worst food inflation in 17 years,” as MSNBC reported in April.

So one might fairly ask whether this more-is-better analysis makes sense when getting more media offer more temptation to buy more things with money we don’t have.

I especially enjoyed chapter six on “the natural decline in media localism” in which the authors make two contradictory arguments. First, they say, the “decline of ‘localism’ is much-lamented but quite natural phenomenon as citizens gain access to news and entertainment sources of broader scale and scope.” Translation – people are more interested in Paris Hilton’s life than in their own.

In the event, however, that our logic rejects this rather specious supposition, the authors offer a contradictory fall back — a 2007 University of Missouri report, “The Community Newspaper Study,” which offers statistics about satisfaction with local news coverage. The 2007 report is compares to a 2005 report to assure us that if we do decide to act locally instead of leer globally that we already have satisfactory local news outlets.

But from what little I know of statistics the Missouri report seems to lies somewhere between extraordinary anecdote-gathering and piss-poor statistical sampling.

For instance the report summary says: “In the 2007 survey, 505 interviews were completed with adults who lived in areas whose total population was 25,000 or less in the United States . . . in 2005, 503 interviews were completed with adults who lived in newspaper markets of less than 100,000 people.”

Even assuming that sub-25,000-person communities are the same as the sub-100,000 variety, how do we know that the communities surveyed in each of the two years are equivalent for statistical purposes, so that we can lump all 500 or so interviews together? And what is the margin of confidence on a sample that small?

We aren’t told, but come to think of it who cares! Paris Hilton’s videos are more engaging than the city council meetings I can watch on my local cable provider’s public access channel.  So thank you, Progress and Freedom Foundation, for giving me evidence instead of emotion, and for helping me realize that this is a golden age of media — in fact it is a golden shower raining down on civic-minded Americans from sea to shining sea.  

Legal, non-violent, direct action can succeed where Congress has failed

The U.S. Senate seems poised to pass an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act that will retroactively protect telephone companies that made illegal wiretaps for Bush Administration. Senators Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd have filibustered the bill but their principled action has no chance. It’s not like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The pro-wiretapping faction has more than the 60 votes needed to force a vote, reports The Nation. Majority Leader Harry Reid will send the bill to the floor despite his supposed personal opposition. Apparently, he lacks either the courage to just say no, thus forcing the cracen Senate majority to remove him before voting their cover-up.

On this Fourth of July weekend this knowledge makes me heart sick. But I’m past the point of being sad. And I don’t want to get mad, or even. I want to get active.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. The Tenth Amendment reserves ultimate power to the people. Let’s form some hybrid of grand jury and/or citizen posse to re-establish the rule of law in this regard — to defend our rights and the Constitution in this case in which our elected representatives have let us down.

Here is what I will do: I will send this note to the leading groups already involved in this fight, notably the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and suggest that interested parties form a new ad-hoc web site as a center of direct action. The mandate of this direct action website should be simple while clearly spelling out both the goal and the range of permissible tactics.

I think the goal should be to force the Congress to investigate the illegal wiretaps and report to the people.

The methodologies should as imaginative as the American people themselves. I will hint at a few below after suggesting one ironclad requirement — each and every action should be legal and non-violent. And by non-violent I mean that not just a prohibition against physical or verbal assault. Not so much as a strand of wire should be touched. We are right and they are wrong. Dirty tricks subtract from our moral authority.

The image of Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians (see above or click here) suggests the theory behind this approach but as for tactics, here are some starter thoughts. What if we knew there were legal declarations that telecos are required to keep in district offices. Or what if we learned of state regulatory hearings, of the sort that common folk regularly avoid, but we might be able to persuade a couple of activists to take the day off from work to attend and speak. Would it be legal to organize a 411-day in which thousands of Americans dialed directory assistance, and ask for a supervisor? The Constitution allows Americans to petition the government for a redress of grievances. But perhaps, to paraphrase the Doors’ in the Soft Parade: YOU CANNOT PETITION AT&T WITH PRAYER!

I’m not sure, the whole point being to put our head together in a way that has never before been possible in human history to coordinate a series of action directed at the lawbreakers themselves. And to continue these small but persist actions so as to cost them little bits of money that will — if we are united and determined — add up to big bits of money. And that should eventually get the attention of their shareholders who may step in an perform the investigations and take the corrective of Congress seems incapable.

As for why make this suggestion on this issue, I suspect anyone who has read this far already knows. Because this is how the Nazis started. A lot of people get their knickers in a twist when the other N-word is used, so lets not get hung up on labels. Maybe this is just a period of compassionate fascism.

But whatever it is I don’t like it. And this is where I’d to draw the line between mere discontent and direct action. Alone, I am nothing. But if we band together, quickly, I am certain we can succeed. I’ll circulate this and report back if there is interest. Meanwhile, if you like this idea, do what you can to circulate it and begin the process of forming this ad-hoc group.

(On an ironic note, I found the above graphic at the bottom of a White House web page headlined, “Governing with Accountability.” From this I infer that these guys have a sense of humor, because otherwise their self-identification with Gulliver would suggest they see themselves as beleaguered — which would be so clearly irrational as to suggest they have a bunker mentality. And I do not wish to further inflame the situation.)

]]> http://minimediaguy.org/2008/07/05/can-citizens-find-and-punish-illegal-wiretappers/feed/ 0 http://minimediaguy.org/2008/04/30/learning-to-think-like-a-molecule/ http://minimediaguy.org/2008/04/30/learning-to-think-like-a-molecule/#comments Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:35:23 +0000 Tom Abate http://minimediaguy.org/?p=1235 In 16 years as a daily newspaper reporter I’ve covered some mind-expanding stories including the race to map the human genome which revealed nothing so much as our stunning ignorance of the baffling complexity of the smallest, dumbest purposeful thing in the universe, the organic macromolecule.

Molecules, you will recall, are strings of atoms. Macromolecules are more complex strings. I’m not certain whether only organic molecules can form macromolecules; polymers are non-organic and may be macromolecules. But I do know that organic macromolecules, such as most famously DNA, do engage in purposeful action. And non-organic molecules do not. The most prolific macromolecules are more colloquially known as proteins. Our science has no idea how many proteins exist in life’s repertoire. But what we do know is that proteins are tiny little machines that run every function in every living organism. These macromolecules — think of proteins as long strands of rough pearls — literally fold and unfold, just as you might open and close your hand. Proteins are the smallest functioning unit of cells. They are the gears and levers of life. Proteins direct my fingers to press the appropriate keys on my keyboard. Proteins focus your eyes on the words and conduct them to the brain where they are reformulated as thought. To borrow a phrase that might succinctly explain the magic of life: It’s the macromolecules, stupid!

I felt obliged to offer that background before I tried explain what molecules have to do with media because it was a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, speaking at a biotechnology conference in 2003, who first drew the connection between the ability of stupid proteins to perform miraculous feats and the possibility that the machinations of macromolecules hinted at a revolution in the coordination of human affairs.

The conference in question turned out to be my last junket as a biotech reporter and it was held in a swell California venue, the seaside city of Monterey. The event commemorated the 50th anniversary of the characterization of the shape of the DNA molecule which opened up a new way of thinking about the inner workings of cells as collections of gazillions of complex organic machines.

My published clip for that event made no mention of the Marine general’s remarks* which were so amazingly incongruous so as to stick in my head. So imagine this ramrod-straight Marine Corps general telling a few dozen slouching scientists and their hangers on like me that he found leadership inspiration in molecular biology. More often than not, the general explained, the Corps anticipated that future “battles” might involve two or three Marines from a platoon engaged in guerrilla conflict, none above the rank of private –  and God forbid they should get cut off and out-of-radio contact, and be unable to think for themselves.

Now despite the fact that enlisted Marines are commonly known as “jarheads” I do not mean to suggest that the general compared them to dumb-as-brick proteins. But as a former enlisted man in the U.S. Navy, I still recall quite vividly the night when a bourbon-and-cigarette-breathed drill instructor stood nose-to-nose with me to shout, “DO I LOOK LIKE YOUR MOMMA, BOY?” — which absurd question I did not take personally but rather as proof that insofar as the Navy was concerned I was indeed a dumbfuck as was the swinging dick to my left and right to use the Boot Camp parlance.

Thus it struck me rather forcefully to hear this retired jarhead general talk about a form of organization that fell rather lightly on the rank and file because on the day that two riflemen get stuck in the boonies, back to back, with nothing between them and being overrun but their training and wits, they will be truly fucked if they have been conditioned to act purposefully only when orders are delivered in a shout at nose distance.

That was in 2003, but since I was then 49 and did not anticipate going into combat I had no immediate use for the thought. So I parked it until three years later when a brief meeting outside yet another conference in Monterey — Technology, Entertainment and Design or TED — caused me to dredge it up from memory.

Again my story about that TED conference made no mention of my chat with Rod Beckstrom, a co-author of “The Starfish and the Spider,” a book subtitled: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.” But you can see the obvious connection and understand my receptivity to the notion of leaderless yet purposeful groups. However, as I had no venue to write about that in the newspaper I once again put that fanciful notion to bed.

Recently, however, I revived this idea of a leaderless media in a posting of my own titled, The Pyramid and the Cloud. That posting looked backwards at corporate media and was part of a series of blog entries in which I argue that hierarchy of journalism is at war with its truth-seeking mission. That is quite a conundrum given that the only journalists who draw regular paychecks work for corporate hierarchies. Those essays which start with a posting titled, Take Me To Your Leader, suggest reforms for corporate media to loosen their control mechanisms through blogging and thus delegate more independent truth-seeking power to the rank-and-file.

So I obviously hope for some movement in that direction on the part of Organized Journalism by which reference I do not mean to liken Corporate Media to the La Cosa Nostra. But after 16 years inside the system, I fear that newspaper leaders may not be as progressive as Marines in recognizing the need for new forms of organization to meet the operational challenges of competition for attention in a networked world (here let me mention “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” the book/philosophy by Web guru David Weinberger).

Meanwhile, let me redirect my molecular thinking toward creating a metaphor that would help unorganized journalists aggregate in purposeful ways with minimal overhead. That is the lesson I extract from nature. Systems of extraordinary complexity can function smoothly with no one shouting orders! Tomorrow I will suggest how some of the mechanisms to coordinate purposeful combinations of scattered content creators may already exist — and how we can use molecular biology as a template to help us understand what other software tools, social norms and perhaps loose organization might be needed to derive greater purpose and profit from Disorganized Journalism which is not a knock on citizen journalism but a statement of fact.

* Though I did not write about Lt. General Paul Van Riper’s remarks on molecular biology I learned that he had played an Iranian leader in a 2002 wargame in which his tactics inflicted, on a U.S. fleet in the Persian Gulf, the worst (simulated) defeat in naval history. I wrote a story about that in 2003. Earlier this year a New York Times article about U.S.-Iranian tensions in the Gulf repeated Van Riper’s lesson about how a loosely coordinated attack by inferior forces had so completely bamboozled America’s overconfident military brass.

Sea of Faces by Livefunky and Jessica Torrant

Jim Manzi of Lotus fame has a new interest in the reinvention of media. Below are excerpts from an an essay, (The End of the Literary Industrial Complex) that he published at the Boston startup Gather.com. In the essay Manzi both laments and celebrates the fracturing of the mass audience:

We might retreat into information ghettos . . . societies also require a shared understanding of key precepts; shared values at some level; and a willingness to search for, debate and ultimately invest in a societal common ground . . . a common information experience in the last thirty years is the demise of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite where more than half the nation might gather for their daily dose . . . People have been looking for some time for new, personal centers of gravity to replace other centers that have been marginalized or destroyed . . . No longer must I accept much of my content from what I have called the Literary Industrial Complex, that group of concentrated media organizations with their small elites and self-reinforcing arbiters delivering my news and information ‘top-down.’ . . . Gather, with its member-contributors, has an opportunity to create a new kind of community.

Manzi goes on to talk about creating an Information Republic. I am not sure what that might mean but having been introduced to the thought (thanks to Rosemarie Moeller) I’ll look into this further.

I have my own ideas on how to re-aggregate the scattered contributors to online media forums and, being a conservative sort, I prefer to adapt rather than invent. I wrote a series of essays a while back that looked at content producers much like Prairie farmers. Content producers stand at a disadvantage to network providers, much as farmers were once held hostage by railroads. So the farmers formed producer cooperatives — assemblies of individual producers bound together in a legal way to increase their clout. I laid out that vision in a three-part series titled: Food for Thought. Please take a look if you have the time. I think my job at this point, is to reduce those three essays to a quick slide show.

Thanks to my sister, Rosemarie Moeller, for bringing this to my attention.

]]> http://minimediaguy.org/2008/04/18/manzi-says-lets-gather-to-revive-media/feed/ 0 http://minimediaguy.org/2008/04/14/thank-the-lord-for-the-people-i-have-found/ http://minimediaguy.org/2008/04/14/thank-the-lord-for-the-people-i-have-found/#comments Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:39:07 +0000 Tom Abate http://minimediaguy.org/?p=1219

Let me pause today to thank the people who have helped me spell out the problems with professional news-gathering and suggest the blog- and people-centred approach that makes better ethical and business sense.

The professional journalist of the 21st Century will not be a gatekeeper but rather a connector — connecting people to ideas, to other people, and to products or services. The old journalist shouted, “Coups and Earthquakes,” to quote the title of Associated Press writer Mort Rosenblum’s famous if dated book. People sill want to see and hear about great events but the first reports are now more likely to be uploaded by someone on-scene with a camera phone and Web access. The professional journalist will provide context and connections to help the audience react to the news. The Web is an interactive medium. The audience is not passive. Professionals must get interactive or get left behind.

But I needed help to present that argument and a place to work, and both were provided in unexpected ways, starting with the friendship and technical assistance of Charlotte Yee, a former statistician and public information officer for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Charlotte has created the Feds Hall of Shame site for federal whistleblowers — those who disclose official mistreatment or misdeeds to find that the system regards them with hostility. Charlotte completly overhauled the look of my blog and was wise and funny as I worked through the mental gymnastics that helped me take my stand. I owe Charlotte a debt which I intend to pay by helping her to encourage whistleblowing.

Network provider Scot (Birdhouse) Hacker held my hand at critical moments when my primitive understanding of Web technologies made me fear that e-gremlins were conspiring against me. Scot updated my WordPress blog platform the day before I began publishing — which either changed or broke most of my familiar publishing tools. I visited Scot in a panic and left with a tutorial and a workaround to an as-yet unsolved glitch involving Internet Explorer. Thank you for your patience Scot, and blessings to Mary Hodder who aimed me at you some years ago.

Tim Bishop helped with key edits early in the series that helped me set the tone. My kin and lifelong communicant, Deep Cuz, aka The Cuzzola, fed me several very useful links — an astonishing act of mind-reading as I don’t know that I broadcast a message of intent. Yet The Cuzzola discerned my direction and fed me links. May the blessings of Kahoutek be upon him!

Artist and comic novel publisher Doug Millison created the series of illustrations that added a thought-provoking visual dimension (see Mario). Doug is a friend from my UC Berkeley days and his son, Watson, who turned 21 the other day, is the first child of one of my friends who I ever held in my arms. Doug and I will be working together on future visuals around the theme of media reform.

I began writing these posts at the Starbucks in Yucca Valley, California. It offered a wireless hotspot near Joshua Treet National Park where I attended a group campout with my 15-year-old son. The campout was sponsored by the HomeSchool Association of California (HSC). Flailing at the keyboard by day and singing around the campfire at night was how I stayed sane. Or what passes for sane in my context.

I met some great people at that Starbucks starting with Dan Kelly, the artist who created the caricature of me, above. Dan, a retired Lockheed engineer, is a regular at that coffee house and his artworks — of native animals with mythic themes — adorn the walls. He sketched this piece at my request.

I had fun introducing people to each other and it was in playing this yenta role that helped crystallize the notion of the journalist as connector — in this case on a personal level. For instance in separate conversations one day I met Evelyn Bornstein, a retired Los Angeleno, and Carole, a woman of working age who asked that I not use her last name. Both were relative newcomers to that rural locale and we had separate conversations lamenting their cultural deprivation. The next day they happened to come in at the same time and I introduced them. Not bad for a stranger.

Yucca Flats is just west of 29 Palms the site of a gigantic Marine Corps base and I met HM3 Keith Parmalee, a Navy corpsman, the day before he shipped out with a Marine unit for Iraq. May the God bless you and bring you home safe to your lovely wife! ( I will mail out that book I promised to send you later today.)

Susanne Kern, the German tourist traveling with friend, Thomas, thank you for allowing this stranger to accost you with tales of the truly beautiful northern stretch of California. I mentioned Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park (about 320 miles north of San Francisco) a magical place where you can hike through cathedral redwoods to the Pacific Ocean. If you visit there you may find a special treat at Rolf’s Park Motel and Restaurant along Highway 101. If Rolf is still there he is a Bavarian chef who makes an awesome Wiener schnitzel.

Mike and Kathy Culwell of Corona allowed me to use their home office for two days at the end of our camping trip. I hope to see you guys at the next HSC campout. I know Aeneas is ready!

After a week in the desert and vicinity I flew to New York City where I got an incredible series of assists from my extended family in the New York metropolitan area. How great is it to have a sister and a brother-in-law who are never home except in the evenings to feed and entertain me while I worked all day, polishing the ideas that I had dreamed up in the desert. I’ll tell everyone I know about the Dolly Inn, where the fabric softener is included with the service.

During the two days I spent at my J-school reunion at Columbia I had a safehouse in Harlem just a stone’s throw from the Cotton Club. What blessings!

Thanks to all, including last but not least, my immediate family who are stuck me in my worst moments.

Jane Tillman Irving, top left, with some of us oldsters of ’91

I spent several days in New York City last week with fellow alumni of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (class of 1991). Other (than) one or two quick visits, the two-day event was my first re-immersion into the culture and campus where I was confirmed as a professional journalist.

In a moment I’ll share some of the intellectually stimulating and personally uplifting experiences I enjoyed but first, true to the ethos of my craft I must lede with my one gripe. But it’s a big one — to this day folks at school still talk about journalism with a reverence bordering on the religious, a mindset that greatly inhibits the desperately-needed self-reformation of mainstream media.

I will brook no argument over the fact that journalism deems it a duty to reach into the barrel and pick out the rottenest apple because I learned that lesson from legendary broadcaster, Fred Friendly, who visited one of the large class sessions back in the day when Joan Konner was dean and Steven D. Isaacs was the school’s ethicist-in-chief. It was at one of these big sessions that Fred offered the following parable of news judgment: if 100 planes land at the airport safely and one doesn’t what’s the news?

Of course there is but one right answer, yet even then, when I was new to professional journalism, I was leery of this notion that our solemn mission was fault-finding. It seemed both self-righteous and distorted, because when professional go dirt-hunting of course they’re going to find scandal, even perhaps when they are hoodwinked into falsely maligning the occasional Puff Daddy. Perhaps because I came at journalism with the eye of a science writer I have always felt as if my proper mission were more like: Behold this marvelous creation and here are some of its fascinating niches, but please pay particular attention here because there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.

My two-day re-submersion into Orthodox Journalism only strengthened my conviction that the “sacred mission” is the wrong metaphor to guide journalism, but this pseudo religious mantra does at least help expose the hypocrisy of America’s Fourth Estate.

Let’s start with the sanctimonious references to past glories of journalism, natural though this may be at an alumni gathering. But we are journalists, the self-anointed guardians of freedom. Surely we know that we are the first Americans since the Civil War who can be arrested without right of appeal to a judge thanks to the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which suspended Habeus Corpus. I’m sure most Americans would say, “What?” but given our work and our duty, we know that this right has been a bulwark against tyranny since 1215 when English nobles forced King John of Robin Hood fame to sign the Magna Carta.

So without spoiling the fun I would have thought we should have worn black armbands or some such to acknowledge that, while we stood guard over civil liberties, Congress turned back the clock of freedom to the era of the sundial. But how can Orthodox Journalism question the political system at such a deep level when this righteous profession is deeply embedded into the fabric of the system? If journalism is righteous then the system must righteous, except for those sins which it is our solemn, if dishy, duty to expose. Nor can journalism seek absolution for its stenographic reporting of many utterances together constituted the Big Lie that made Congress so fearful as to forget what happens when power approaches the absolute.

Oh, well, enough kvetching. Let me share a few of my personal highlights:

Most inspiring: Dele Olojede is a Nigerian native who came to the Columbia J-school circa 1987 as a political refugee of sorts and had a long career as a U.S reporter. He got an alumni award last week and in listening to his acceptance speech I learned that he had won a 1995 Pulitzer Prize for work done in 94. I took notes of his remarks. He spoke quietly about how he had decided in 1994, as a foreign correspondent in Africa, to cover the Mandela inauguration and NOT the Rawandan genocide. He said he had always wondered “if I had been in Rwanda at the start of the genocide” and had written forcefully about it would there have been 800,000 lives lost? Even sitting in the back of a large ballroom this man radiated integrity the way a wood stove puts out heat. Dele said something to the effect that anguish over winning the Pulitzer for covering what many have been the wrong story was part of his motivation for going back to Nigeria. He plans to start Timbuktu Media “to build a civic space first in Nigeria and then in the rest of Africa.”

Most Useful: A woman in a green blouse at the Class of ’68 session Friday night asked: Is anybody pairing older and younger reporters? Or words to that effect. What a notion. Pair experience and beat savvy with eager and new-media savvy. If anyone knows the speaker was please comment. It’s a great yet simple idea that could do a lot to improve the newsroom.

Most energetic: Columbia J-school prof Sree Sreenavasan showed a room full of journalists how to use blogging and new media tools to improve their print product or create new digital news outlets. The audience ranged from never-bloggers to daily-bloggers, and I think everyone learned something useful. Sree has posted beaucoup tips online.

Most Disturbing: Professor Mike Shapiro’s case study session led a roomful of working press through an exercise in whether or not to publish a titillating story on libel-proof but flimsy she-said, he-said input. I was profoundly disturbed by willingness to run with the scandal and I think it shows the prevalence of the dirt-mongering mentality that got the LA Times into trouble.

Most telling: My concept of culture is the complete collection of Star Trek DVDs so I decided to expand my horizons at a lecture from aesthete and critic David Hadju. And I’ll be damned if he didn’t deliver some news I could use. Hajdu talked about the notion of product placement throughout history. Seems like ever since Homer entertainers sucked up to the rich and powerful, a practice that continued up through the Renaissance when painters PhotoShopped their patrons’ faces into artworks. Hadju said this practice stopped during the modern industrial era ((which corresponds with the rise of democracy, n’est-pas?) during which time the “starving artist” made integrity the cornerstone of art. Nowadays, Hajdu said, culture is going to back to this suck-up future, as evidenced by the placement of Tequila references in a Broadway remake of Sweet Charity. So I’m thinking, is this Aristocracy 2.0?, so I ask Hadju something like: Does this mean we’re returning to a he-who-pays-the-piper-calls-the-tune paradigm? And he says something like: Yes. Which I find very useful because it dovetails with an essay from techno-seer Kevin Kelly who recently wrote the New Age Guide to Sucking Up As a Business Model. (Memo to self: work on this ingratiating thing.)

Most Businessy: The final session I attended was a gripe session by the alternative press at which I heard Victor Navasky, editor of the leftist, money-losing Nation, echo the latest Big Idea from Chris Anderson, the libertarian editor of the new-agey, fabulously rich Wired. Navasky said that since The Nation began posting its articles on the web it has experienced a huge spike in subscriber-ship from about 15,000 to 150,000 — which is exactly as Anderson predicts. If I have the numbers wrong someone please correct me, but if I did goof it’s because I was practically nodding off at the end of two-days of speechifying that culminated with a 25-minute victory lap by San Francisco alternative media icon, Bruce Brugmann. Brucie baby thanks for the tip of the hat at the event, but next time you appear at a one-hour session with four speakers, do the math!

Doug Millison mashes up a 1979 B&W graphic by Josh Gosfield

In this final essay in a series let me explain why I accuse mass media of dereliction of duty for helping mislead the nation into war, for uncritically swallowing the sensational and for too often ignoring complex problems until they erupt into crisis.

Idealistically I am just a very sad American who feels that our nation has strayed from Lincoln’s mission to be “the last best hope of Earth” and that much of responsibility for this lies with the failure of the working press, of which I am part — although I am now on vacation and speak only for myself.

But I am a pragmatist who does not put much stock in hand-wringing. And while Mario Savio’s impassioned remarks (see graphic above or watch video ) resonate with me, I would not take his suggestion literally because only two types of persons throw anything, especially themselves, into machinery — saboteurs and candidates for the meat grinder. I am neither.

Nor have I merely been critical, for more authoritative critiques abound, including “Breaking the News,” “Rich Media, Poor Democracy,” “The Vanishing Newspaper,” “Fighting for Air,” and “The New Media Monopoly“.

Instead, to speak up without getting ground up, I tried on Tuesday and Wednesday to suggest how the corrosive effects of corporate ownership on journalism could be decoupled from the reality corporate ownership will persist. For insofar as Corporate Media are like the dinosaurs, it would take a meteor strike to extinguish them and I don’t think the ensuing fallout would suit anyone’s interests.

So I have suggested how to improve the credibility of mass media by giving rank-and-file media workers blogs, hosted on company websites, so as to drill thousands of connections down into communities, and from these to pull up ideas and stories that would make better journalism and better business than the all-too-common practice of rewriting the empty press releases issued by the officialdom.

But I’ve spent the last three days saying that and this throat-clearing only serves to betray my apprehension at today’s task — showing, not merely telling, how today’s mass media newsroom breeds the moral cowardice that ails professional journalism. For only when we recognize the sickness can we seek the cure.

So let me recall when I first joined the San Francisco Examiner in the summer of 1992, a 38-year-old white male who’d done a lot in and around media but had never worked in a daily newsroom. That job was my dream come true and I did some silly stuff at first. Early on I remember calling Carl Sagan on some science story and asking more than once something like, “How many stars there are?” until he caught on and uttered his signature line, “billions and billions.” I trust that Carl, wherever he may be, has either forgotten or forgiven this, but I mention this because I remain in many ways a kid who hasn’t lost the thrill of meeting great people and witnessing historic, and so I occasionally still do things that are silly.

Another seminal moment in my early Examiner days was when former colleague Dennis Opatrny called me over and said something like, “I wanna show you what kind of paper you work for.” With that he keyboarded me into “the staff basket” — an internal bulletin board for everything from yard sales to lengthy screeds aimed at headlines, stories and sometimes each other.

That staff basket has long since disappeared in the various technological and corporate metamorphoses that continue to reshape the San Francisco daily newspaper scene. But back then it used to let off hot air like a whistling tea kettle. I grew up in a Greek and Italian family where argument was almost a form of affection and I remember feeling like I had found my long-lost, extended family of truth-seekers. And if my staff basket inputs were a little too Brooklyn at times, I got cut some slack because we were short-staffed underdogs and I worked hard enough to earn the right to pound the table at times.

But let me tell you how even in those halcyon days I bumped up against the limits on free-wheeling debate and here I must name a few names because the first rule we learn in J-school is to attribute who said what to whom. This lets the audience assess motivations and allows parties to challenge misstatements. I think the working press too frequently sets this rule aside on issues of war or peace or even silliness.

Being pragmatist I also think it’s good business to name names because it is people who subscribe to newspapers, tune in to broadcasts or click on web sites. And they like to see and hear themselves. Two Stanford business school professors wrote a great article in which they asked Hoover Adams, founding publisher of the Dunn, North Carolina, Daily Record how his paper had achieved a market penetration above 100 percent. This is what the publisher told the eggheads:

It’s because of three things: Names, names, and names . . . . A local newspaper can never get enough local names. I’d happily hire two more typesetters and add two more pages in every edition if we had the names to fill them up.”

Of course I’m not a real publisher. I’m just a blogger trying to dial into American newsroom and the guy who has nailed that channel is Romanesko and he always names names. So let me take a page from his book and tell you about two interactions with former Examiner managing editor Sharon Rosenhause that suggests why we must change a system that puts super-human expectations on mere mortals.

Today Sharon is managing editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a leader of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and an advocate of newsroom affirmative action – the importance of which will become apparent when I discuss the second of two meetings I will use to illustrate my point.

But first things first. My initial closed-door meeting with Sharon occurred when she called me into her office for a gentle remonstrance over a screw up on my part. It involved a daily I must have written for the Ex sometime before Gray Davis ended his term as California state controller in 1995. I couldn’t find the e-clip because the online archives of Examiner stories starts in ’95.

But I recall the circumstances clearly and it was my bad — throughout the story I called this elected official by his first name, “Gray,” rather than the last-name convention, “Davis.” I recall Sharon sitting behind her desk, shaking her head and asking me how “such a talented writer” could have made such a goof. I think she said something about how it got through copy desk but I was preoccupied with feeling dumb.

Our second closed-door chat was different. I knocked on her door sometime in summer or fall of 1996 to complain about what I deemed to be the Examiner’s heavy-handed tilt against Proposition 209 a hot issue on the November 1996 election.

Prop 209 ended up passing and amended the California constitution to invalidate or complicate state and local government affirmative action programs. I visited Sharon to object to the tone and headlines of stories such as “Left forges new alliance aimed at fighting the right,” by Carol Ness; “Thousands Rally in San Francisco to ‘Fight the Right’ ” by Susan Ferriss; and “New Civil Rights Warriors” by Katherine Seligman and Kathleen Sullivan.

What I recall quite vividly is how Sharon used a single phrase, like a verbal Aikido move, to flip me on my back so to speak. “What is your problem with affirmative action?” she asked. I had come in to talk about balance on the news pages and suddenly I was defending myself against her correct observation that, as a guy raised in sleeveless t-shirts who still “tawks like dis” on occasion, I did have a problem with affirmative action, so maybe the perception of bias was in the eye of the beholder.

I do not mean to rehash the affirmative action debate nor suggest that the editors of the now-defunct Hearst-owned Examiner were wrong to reflect the liberal bent of the San Francisco Bay Area. I truthfully don’t know what is the correct course for mass media journalism, to cling to impossible concepts of objectivity or get edgier and closer to local constituencies.

But my point is that we don’t have any empirical system to understand our audiences and so we fall back on the time-honored method of going to the mat to solve such difference. That may have even worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when there there were enough media outlets and thus enough head-butting contests so that the Fourth Estate somehow got the job done.

Now there are fewer outlets and fewer people. Yet our news judgment system still relies on thousands of journalists at different organizational levels having discussions on all sorts of issues day after day after day in a vacuum of empirical means for figuring out what ought to get covered. The proper operation of this system presupposes an inexhaustible willingness for some participants to get back-flipped day after day after day. Either that or they learn to go along to get along because after a while hitting the ground gets old.

Here I speak from experience because about a year after this encounter with Sharon I started taking Aikido lessons under a terrific sensei and learned how to side-step trouble. But I started at age 44 and after four years of taking falls my body began to cringe at the thought of another pounding. So I quit.

But we don’t have to keep doing journalism they way they do Aikido. We can find a gentler way to arrive at a meeting of the minds by coupling interactive technologies with cultural changes in the newsroom. Let’s push the power to publish down into the ranks and offer thousands of journalists outlets for their interests, curiosities, even frustrations.

Liberating these suppressed voices is a business opportunity because interactive media is not like mass media. Interactive media is about making connections. People to people. People to information. People to products. Whatever. The old media business model based on distribution is dead. Stick a fork in it. Web-heads like David Weinberger have been trying to tell us for a very long time the Internet is a two-way street. But we still have this mindset of the one-way trip to the driveway. And cannot get to these new land of connections with Soviet-style central planning. We must allow newsrooms to follow their audiences into the 21st Century.

In many years of covering Silicon Valley I’ve noticed how those guys promulgate “laws” to lend authority to their educated guesses. I’d call this a cheap trick but make lots of money doing this so let me tell you about Metcalfe’s law which says the more people who use a network the more valuable it becomes. More connections means greater value plus better journalism. It’s a win-win.

I can’t believe I said that! It’s obviously time for me to stop and thank you for your attention. This project has consumed most of my two-week vacation and I’m already late for an alumni schmooze fest at Columbia J-school. Oh, well, I’ll be late for work on Monday, too, because I’ll be spending a leisurely Sunday with my table-pounding family and taking the first flight back to San Francisco on Monday morning.

But at least I will arrive, as they say, tanned, rested and ready.

# # #

This concludes the fourth in a series of essays laying out the journalistic and business reasons for reforming mass media newsrooms. How? By letting all staffers cultivate part-time blogs and training editors to skim these blogs for briefs and story ideas. The series argues the need to flatten the newsroom hierarchy and empower the staff to become mini-publishers and demonstrates a  new business model in harvesting high-value clicks from specialty blogs and making connections. Finally, why the current newsroom hierarchy breeds moral cowardice and mediocrity and how a business model inspired by Silicon Valley can reverse both the financial and ethical slide of mass media.)

1.  Take me to your leader

2. The Pyramid and the Cloud

3. Newspapers don’t FARK yourselves to death

4. Follow the audience into the 21st Century

# # #

Collage by Doug Millison of NonHuman Communications

In Hollywood everyone has a screenplay. In New York the unpublished novel is the thing. In Silicon Valley, which I’ve covered for most of the last 16 years, it’s all about inventions. So at the risk of sounding like I’ve gone native let me tell you about two magic bullets that could cure the brain death afflicting newsrooms — the editaser and dewhisperfier.

The editaser is a smart stun gun to find and punish editors who assign stories based on stuff they’re read or seen in other media. The dewhisperfier is the antithesis of the cone-of-silence from the 1960s television series, Get Smart. It would force rank-and-file journalists to complain out loud and generally behave like the heroes of newspaper epics such as His Girl Friday, or Inherit the Wind, or The Paper.

Before I proceed let me correct any misconception that I am talking about the paper from which I am currently on vacation, and which I consider to be the Lake Woebegone of newrooms, where the editors are wise, the reporters fearless and the copy desk misses nothing.

No I am talking about mass media and I base my worries on two lessons that I learned at the Columbia University J-school (class of ’91) where I will be attending an alumni gathering this weekend.

It was while I was at J-school that ex-New York Times correspondent James Feron gave me the idea for the editaser. Feron co-taught my home room class with science-writing professor Ken Goldstein. One day Feron mentioned that he had a Times colleague who never started an assignment without first sleuthing out from where and whom inside the building the assignment had come. As a reporter I’m trained to recognize the detail or quote that encapsulates the story. Though I wasn’t quite sure at the time what Feron was trying to say I was sure it was what one former editor, Kenneth Howe, called the objective correlative.

Let me pause to explain my protocol on naming names, which I consider a bedrock of journalism that allows a reader or viewer to better assess statements and anecdotes. As I articulate my concerns and suggest reforms for the untrusted and deeply-troubled mass media I will name former colleagues and past incidents, within the bounds of propriety. Current colleagues and issues, however, I deem protected by the obligation of employer and team loyalty. Plus I consider telling tales out of school smarmy.

But I digress. The dewhisperfier was also inspired by J-school recollections of what should have been pep talks by Big League journalists. But their body language showed more pessimism than pep. They whispered and frowned in tete-a-tetes with the profs who had arranged the visits. This head-shaking puzzled me because they had the jobs we wanted and yet . . .

After I got into the corporate world, by which I mean both journalism and the business beats I cover, I realized that I was witnessing Dilbert syndrome — a form of cognitive dissonance that afflicts many professionals, including journalists, who can’t live up to their professional norms and expectations.

Take My Girl Friday whose plot revolves around editor Walter Burns’ zany efforts to keep wise-cracking reporter Hildy Johnson from quitting. What a myth! If a reporter today said, as does Hildy — “I wouldn’t cover the burning of Rome for you! — would Walter say, “Hildy, Hildy, Hildy,” or, “One less pink slip.”?

If newspapering was ever as insouciant as is portrayed in His Girl Friday it isn’t like that today. What kind of film would it be if Hildy was afraid to tell Walter to take his job and shove it. Meeting Walter’s expectations would become her career skill while Walter, basking in her talented yet submissive admiration, would become overly impressed with his own discernment. I would re-title the modern remake The Jayson Blair Project — a tale of the inherent corruptibility of the mentor-protege model.

That was an exceedingly bad manifestation of the archaic way in which we try to make journalism. What ails newsrooms today is too much incentive to look up and too little to look down. We survived Citizen Kane because there were enough Pulitzers and Knights to keep the system in balance. How many media voices are there, now? Not enough. Today’s corporate media are to news in the 21st Century like the condottieri were to war in Renaissance Italy — not terribly skilled, lacking in principle and costly.

The imperious editor, as popularized today by the Spiderman-bashing J. Jonah Jameson, is as useless as Pharaoh. His day has passed. Hierarchies were useful when we need to build pyramids. But an historic change is occurring today. The pyramid is being smothered by “The Cloud” — one of the names used to describe the Internet, that anarchic disruptor of all modern industry.

Sociologists have coined the term “network society” to describe the reorganization of wealth and work that is being driven by this new mode of organization. David Weinberger’s “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” offers a more better metaphor and read. Network society is built around small teams with low overhead and high skills. They just do it while hierarchies convene committees that meets for hours to produce minutes.

It may be a difficult cultural adjustment but newspaper execs have the fix at their fingertips — give every person in the organization the power to publish to a paper-sponsored blog (If you have not already, please glance at my similar statement on this yesterday).

Imagine over time hundreds of people in your organizations spending perhaps 20 percent of their time finding and posting items of interest. Sound like a waste? Unless you’ve shut down their browsers they’re already spending a good part of their days looking at videos, shopping or passing jokes.

Let’s go with the flow and harness some of this curiosity and restlessness. With mild discipline and some training these e-pubs will find niche readers to replace the mass audience that has dissolved into droplets. Newsrooms must draw these thousands of currents inside and then ask editors to do a job they’ll find more fulfilling than attending meetings. They will look into this array of inputs for patterns. Some of these patterns will become stories — and many of blog posts will make briefs, brites and picture boxes. Journalists will form a symbiosis with what ex-newsie Dan Gillmor calls “the former audience.”

Sure media organizations are experimenting with citizen journalism or what investors call “user-generated content” (meaning free labor). Online journalist Jonathan Dube recently described an opinion forum created by New Hampshire Public Radio and a citizen media site created by CNN. I am sure there are other examples of reaching out to readers.

But this must be more than a technology bolted-onto the pyramid. A new way of gathering and disseminating news is here. It will require a change in attitudes at the bottom and the top. Those accustomed to whispering at the base of the pyramid must reach for the clouds. Those at the apex will have to decide whether they love journalism enough to let it go.

I am confident the powers that be will do the right thing. Or perhaps I’m just hoping to keep getting paid vacation like this one. But as a backstop I’m offering open source licensing to anyone wants to help design, build and/or finance my two inventions.

(Note: The title of this posting pays homage to Eric Raymond’s 1997 essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, about Linux, a prime example of open source software development. Thanks also to print journalist turned blogger Tom Foremski who helped me realize that journalism is an open source activity. Foremski’s posting, “The Holy Trinity, is worth regarding in this regard.)

Tomorrow: Newspapers: don’t FARK yourselves to death.