Women's Occupy Just 27% of Leadership Jobs in Media

Joyce Slocum is the interim CEO at NPR.

Via Bloomberg:

Women represent less than one third of the main decision makers at news companies worldwide as gender inequality leaves top management and governance dominated by males, the International Women’s Media Foundation said.

Women occupy about 27 percent of the leading managerial jobs such as chief executive officer and about 26 percent of governing board positions, according to a survey of 522 newspaper, radio and television companies by the Washington-based advocacy group. Women hold 39 percent of the senior management positions that include managing editor and bureau chief, the two-year study released today shows.

This taps into tons of earlier discussions about women's representation in media. Still, it's startling to see the numbers.

Killing the 'Literary Wife' Memoir Subgnere

(Flickr/UK Pictures)

I recently listened to Marueen Corrigan's review of feminist writer Anne Roiphe's new memoir, Art and Madness. I haven't read any of Roiphe's work—not even her highly acclaimed second novel, Up the Sandbox, which has been hailed as a "feminist classic"—but Corrigan's review certainly piqued my interest to read it. What I found most fascinating about Corrigan's review, though, was her thoughts on where Roiphe's new book fell in the sea of literature:

Art and Madness is a particularly hard-boiled addition to a distinct subgenre of female autobiography — memoirs written by women who came of age in the 1950s and who sublimated their own ambitions by attaching themselves to literary men. I'm thinking of testaments like How I Became Hettie Jones by the eponymous former wife of LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka; Manhattan, When I Was Young by Mary Cantwell; and the especially magnificent Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson, onetime girlfriend of Jack Kerouac. Educated at Seven Sisters colleges or their like, these young women wanted to live for Art — which, in the 1950s translated into living for a man who thought of himself as an artist. They found a place for themselves in the New York boho scene of the time, pouring drinks or tending to the other appetites of the resident drunken geniuses.

Roiphe is, after all, the erstwhile wife of Jack Richardson, a playwright who during the 1960s was called one of the most promising playwrights of his generation. But Roiphe clearly resents this connection, and, according to Corrigan's take on the book, is ruthless in her depiction of her younger self. She admonishes her former self for attaching to someone else's genius rather than exploring her own.

Though women today might feel more liberated to pursue their own craft and careers, Roiphe's critique clearly speaks to a perception about how men and women's work is perceived differently—and that's a sentiment that still remains true today.

Writers, like all people, are attracted to people like themselves. A 1993 American Journalism Review article addressed the question of married journalists and pointed to some prominent (at the time) examples:

[...] former Washington Post Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee and Sally Quinn, an erstwhile Style staffer at that paper. Or Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn of the New York Times, who shared a 1989 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on China. Or Ann Devroy of the Washington Post and Mark Matthews of Baltimore's Sun, married competitors. Merrill McLoughlin and Michael Ruby, who are married, are co-editors of U.S. News & World Report.

Of the couples called out in the AJR article, the male journalists are arguably more famous an influential than their partners. It's hard to say how literary couples of today, many of whom are still young and coming up in their journalistic and literary careers, will turn out. They will either challenge this paradigm or reinforce it.

After thinking through the many journalistic couples I know of today (an admittedly unscientific sample), I could name just one in which the female partner far outpaced her partner or husband: Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman. (Please, if you know of any other couples that might be in this category, leave them in comments.)

And it's no wonder. One need only briefly glance at the much-discussed Vida graphs to understand there's a dearth of female bylines to suss out why so many male journalists might be outpacing their partners in prestige.

Of course, we still have the potential to turn that idea—that "literary wives" will live in the shadows of their husbands or partners—on its head. Today in her farewell post at Feministing, Ann Friedman, in her tireless campaign to get more women to win at the literary prestige game, wrote about how women need to be more encouraging to other women. Such a message would be powerful if it especially came from a male partner.

Perhaps someday women will no longer be accessories to the "resident drunken geniuses" Corrigan described in this subgenre of memoir. Indeed, let's make sure the "literary wife" memoir is one that will be written about the past.

'The Next Rush Limbaugh': Conservatives Pumping Right-Wing Young People into Media Jobs

Hey guys, I have a piece on conservative journalism training found at CPAC over at AlterNet.

This year at the Conservative Political Action Committee in Washington, D.C., there were a number of targeted media trainings and journalism-oriented panels. A panel titled “Shining Light into Dark Places” sought to stress the importance of investigative journalism. Others included “Freelance Writing for Freedom,” “So You Want to be a Columnist” and “Want to be the Next Rush Limbaugh?”

Despite Sarah Palin's invectives against the "lamestream media," conservatives seem eager to fill its ranks with right-wing young people.

Check it out.

JournoList's -- and Journalism's -- Diversity Problem

(Chip Bok)

The accusations over the now-defunct off-the-record email list of left-leaning journalists known as JournoList, started by my former colleague Ezra Klein, have become increasingly bizarre. First, an anonymous sender leaked emails from my pal Dave Weigel that eventually caused the Washington Post to ask for his resignation. (Weigel yesterday landed a gig at the Washington Post Company-owned Slate.) Then the Daily Caller ran a weird series of vaguely accusatory stories that seemed to be reaching for some kind of vast left-wing media conspiracy (and not quite getting there). Now, other more radically right “news” outlets have decided to make a point dripping in anti-Semitism: “What’s also disturbing for me about the Journolist is the fact that so many of its members have Jewish names.” [Disclosure: I was a member of JournoList since its inception in 2007.]

I’m not going to bother dismantling this “argument” because Jesse Taylor over at Pandagon has already done that. The idea that Jews are running some kind of left-wing liberal conspiracy is such a crackpot accusation from the right that most left-leaning journalists I know make jokes about the Jews controlling the media. But even if the accusation is crackpot, there is a lesson to be gleaned from this group of influential left leaning journalists that partook in an off-the-record email list: The list of members who have publicly admitted their participation that has been cobbled together by Mark Levin on Facebook is overwhelmingly white and heavily male. If I had access to income of families, I’d also guess it’d tip toward the higher end of the spectrum (even though most journalists make poverty’s wages).

The fact that journalism is homogeneous — even leftist journalism that tends to actually care about this — isn’t an original observation. It is one worth making again.

After all, even though women make up the majority of journalism majors (and have since 1977), they make up only 34 percent of newsroom supervisors and 24 percent of television stations. Granted, the nature of media is changing to be less newsroom-focused, but the new brand of news is nowhere near reaching gender parity. Sara Libby pointed out that after the Washington Post named “America’s Next Great Pundit,” yet another “white guy,” and wondered why punditry never seems to include women, let alone women of color. (If anyone has access to a good study on LGBT journalists, I’d love to see it.)

Additionally, the number of reporters of color is staying stagnant or declining. A 2008 survey conducted by the American Society of News Editors showed that while the number of Asian American reporters had increased, the number of black reporters had actually declined. Latinos and Native American reporters made modest increases. Furthermore, the survey found that diversity among interns, who tend to be the pipeline for future jobs, had also decreased.

The Daily Beast’s Dana Goldstein (another friend of mine and former Campus Progress associate editor), once looked at a study from the UK [PDF], that found the journalists grew up in families with incomes some 42 percent above the average family income in the UK. This, Goldtein said, is journalism’s “elitism problem.”

To its credit, JournoList had many threads worrying over this very lack of diversity. There were long threads that debated the diversity of the list itself in addition to the diversity of government, media, and the blogosphere more generally. Still, on Levin’s published list of 65 self-admitted JournoList members, only ten are women. Far fewer are people of color.

Ultimately, achieving diversity is difficult. When hiring, folks tend to look to people that are like them, that come from their own networks and backgrounds. Finding and recruiting talented writers, reporters, and editors from different races and economic backgrounds takes more work. Assigning pieces to achieve gender parity in bylines takes recruiting and careful assigning, especially because men and women tend to pitch differently.

Of course, there is hope: Young people are a more diverse generation than ever. During my work at Campus Progress, we’ve gone to great lengths to recruit a diverse group of young people both in the publications that we support and the cadre of staff writers we work with to publish on our site. We could be doing better — cultivating a diverse group of writers, editors, and reporters isn’t a one-time thing but rather a constant work in progress. There have also been recent success stories of opinion makers becoming more diverse: Ta-Nehisi Coates is now one of the prestigious Atlantic bloggers and one of the most popular hosts on MSNBC is Rachel Maddow.

The point about “Jewish names” isn’t worth addressing, but it is worth noting that this group of well-connected and prominent media professionals is homogeneous in a lot of ways (even if the diversity of opinion often created rousing debate). We’re often told journalism is in a state of crisis, but the real crisis is one of creating a diverse group of reporters and pundits who can more accurately reflect the America in which they live.

Cross posted.

Double X Folds Back into Slate

Double X, a "new kind of women's magazine" that also had a habit of publishing some anti-feminst screeds (although I'm still a big fan of many of Double X's writers, including Amanda Marcotte and Latoya Peterson), has announced that it will be folding back into Slate. Double X will become its "own section, with our XX Factor blog, articles, and special projects already in the works," announce editors Emily Bazelon and Hanna Rosin.

Double X didn't exactly get a warm reception among other popular feminist and women's sites when it first arrived. Ann Friedman, deputy editor at The American Prospect (and one of the editors at Feminsting.com), labeled the new site "an eerie resemblance to the women's pages of yore." Her main argument was that rather than having a site especially for women, top news magazines and blogs should just have women integrated into the product.

Well, it looks like Friedman will get her wish. Gawker noted when it reported the news, "As you can see from the logo, Double X never made it out of beta." It's not yet clear if the consolidation will result in layoffs. If it does, I'm sorry to hear it in an era where the number of media jobs are endlessly shrinking.

Cross posted.

Let's Talk About Sex (Columns), Baby

The Nation reports that ever since Berkeley's "Sex on Tuesday Column" in 1996, students have been writing columns in the vein of what author Alex DiBranco calls the "student sex columnist movement."

At its core, the sex column phenomenon is a radical progressive movement in the sense of pushing against traditional silence and the status quo, which is a source of concern for many administrators, parents and even students. Challenges to the columns stem from a conservative mindset--whether that be political, religious or cultural.

The challenges, it seems, are numerous. Universities and state legislatures threaten to pull funding from campus media that publish sex columns. Ultimately, to me it seems like more expression about sexuality is a good thing. Sex columns, as trite and annoying as I often find them, sometimes do perform an important public service for people who feel alone in their sexuality. The good ones push conventional wisdom and social norms about what's "normal" when it comes to sexuality.

The Nation column pointed out that Dartmouth is a school known as a conservative campus, but the Dartmouth Free Press, a Campus Progress-sponsored publication, has been publishing a sex column for years.

The sex column entered the pages of the Dartmouth Free Press in 2004, when senior Sheila Hicks, sexual leftist and host of the campus radio sex talk-show, "In Your Pants," encouraged readers to send "the questions you probably wouldn't ask your parents or your clergy members" to Dartmouth's liberal, progressive and alternative biweekly. Clint Hendler, Free Press editor in chief during the latter half of Hicks's tenure, saw the column as "a way to put a thumb in the eye of campus elements who found a ready outlet in the Dartmouth Review for rather churlish and reactionary takes on steps taken by the administration and others to support safe sex and LGBTQ culture." Unsurprisingly, given the aesthetic of the paper, sex columnists for the Free Press tend to be more clear about having explicit political and activist motivations than those on campuses in general.

Heather Strack asserts in the Free Press, "A sex column is a significant statement of female rights. Not only am I a female columnist, but I am writing about a topic considered taboo and improper for a woman." Women are the main target of abstinence/purity movements; thus, even if most columnists do not state this as unambiguously as Strack, the campus sex column is not only about students seizing control but about hearing underrepresented voices. Though men are readers in equal numbers, the sex columnist is a (straight and queer) female-dominated profession, with a small minority of queer men.

It's true that not all sex columns are the same. Just as many are inspired by Sex and the City, Cosmopolitan, and Dan Savage (although Dan Savage's column is decidedly the most progressive of the three, since he actually acknowledges that non-straight couples exist), as they are by open and honest views of sexuality.

Sometime around my junior year (if I recall correctly) my alma matter's campus daily began publishing "Dr. Date," a letter response column that reads like a more inane version of Savage Love. The column, as I remember it, was awfully relationship focused and took more of an opportunity to snark than it did to educate.

Cross posted.

Traffic Bait, If I've Ever Seen It

Stay classy, NYTimes.

Activists and Local Journalism

I'm a big fan of David Simon's series, The Wire, as most of you probably are. I don't, however, really think that members of Congress should formulate policy about the future of journalism on Simon's opinions. Simon is a brilliant and talented writer, but he's not really a good person to weigh in on the subject for a lot of reasons. Even Simon doesn't think you should listen to Simon.

Ideally, rather than listening to me, you should be hearing from any number of voices of those still laboring in American journalism.

Simon hasn't worked at a newspaper since 1995. Journalism and media has changed a lot in that amount of time. Simon's opinions seem to suggest that he doesn't necessarily have a good grasp of what's going on with media today.

He dismisses "new media" because "bloggers contribute little more than repitition, commentary, and so forth." (Arguably, that is the role of this particular blog, but there are many blogs that contribute original reporting and simply use the blog as a medium.) David Simon sees value in paying real professionals to cover beats in the city. I agree that sometimes important things don't get covered because they don't have a full-time reporter writing about it. Still, I think I agree with Kevin Drum's response to the argument that local news coverage is suffering:

The fact is that most communities have a pretty hard core of activists who do go to planning board meeting and city council meetings and so forth. And 99% of the time, they just do their thing and the local paper does no more than print short blurbs about what's going on. And the rest of us ignore it.

But every once in a while, something becomes a big deal. Not because the Times or the Post does or doesn't have a reporter at a board meeting, but because the activists suddenly start screaming louder and the community gets up in arms about something. Then the local press starts to pay attention.

See, before it was really important to have reporters dissemenate the information activists gave them to the general public when something was really important, but (and here's where Drum and I diverge) now activists have their own means of publishing information and getting it out to people in the community, the local paper's role is sort of redundant. Rather than transcribing what the activists say, the activists can get it out there themselves. (Possibly at the cost of proper grammar, but in my experience what makes a good activist isn't necessarily grammatical skills.)

In a weird way, what we're seeing, after decades of trying to professionalize the industry of journalism, is a sort of de-professionalization. Anyone has access to publishing information, and those with things of value tend to get attention. That's not neccesarily financially sustainable, but it is the beast that we are dealing with now.

I also don't necessarily think that Simon's suggestion that media deregulation is the way to go. In fact, Simon himself was a casualty of media consolidation. What's really important is that what's profitable (gossip columns, specialized trade information) will remain profitable. The other stuff has to figure out another model. It might be that non-profits (which are acitivists in their own ways, even if, like with the Center for Independent Media, journalism itself is the cause) will end up subsidizing the production of information they feel is important. In the end, that's the role the local reporter filled anyway, they just didn't happen to be raising the rukus themselves.

Blogger = Elite, Wealthy

Oh dear. The Wall Street Journal conflates blogging with bloviating again (although Alan Murray has resonable things to say about charging for online content). It's a common mistake. A lot of old-school journalists make it. Russell Crowe's character did it in State of Play. I hear a New York Times reporter or other likewise presumed prestigious journalist make this mistake probably at least once a month.

It's okay. The Internet can be scary and confusing for some people. Here, let me explain. Blogging is a medium, not a genre. You can have a reported blog. TPM does it every day. You can have a blog that consists of paid adveritisng, much like infomercials on television or those junk glossies you can pick up for free at a coffee shop. You can also have an opinionated blog (mine is pretty much that), but the thing that links them together is not necessarily screeching about this or that, it is simply that they are all websites with dated entries.

It's interesting that the WSJ shows that there's some professionalization of the medium:

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That's almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click -- whether on their site or someone else's. And that's nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: "It's my work he'd say, I do it for pay."

But it also shows that there's some replication of the old media paradigm:

Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall. It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year.

Hm, that seems an awful lot like the Village Voice contributors of yore.

Look, media has always been dominated by a wealthy, white, male elite. For the most part, it still is today. Women are consistently about a third of bylines and minority reporters in the newspaper industry are on the decline. It's not exactly a represenative industry. It's true that many of the old paradigms are getting replicated in a new medium when you're talking about top-tier bloggers.

That said, there are plenty of people that blog that don't fall under the category of the WWME. That's why sites like Racialicious and Feministing have grown increasingly popular in recent years. At least these are sites that are devoted to a niche audience that has historically been neglected by more mainstream publications. I hope that blogging won't remain the stereotype of grizzled white dude reporter. Maybe these numbers will shift as the medium itself changes.

'Media Insiders' Demographics

Last week The Atlantic published a very informal "poll" where they talked to various media "insiders" were asked if the Internet had a positive or negative effect on journalism. About 65 percent agreed that journalism was suffering during the age of the Internet.

But here's the thing. The sample size was pretty small. In fact, it included 45 people. The demographics also came across as a little screwy. The average person that answered the poll was white, male, and 53-years-old. Just for fun, I decided to do a graphic representation of the people (who are listed at the bottom of The Atlantic article) who were included in the survey.

First, gender:


Next, age (you'll notice that the 18-24 age group, one that is the most "online) of any adult population according to the Pew poll in 2009 of generations online) aren't represented at all:


It's also important to note that the oldest people polled were television journalists Sam Donaldson and Jim Lehrer, who are 75 and 74 respectively. The youngest was Frank Foer, editor of The New Republic, who is somewhere around 34 (I got his age from a three-year-old New York Times article and added the appropriate years).

Now, I don't mean to be ageist. Obviously just because someone is a little older doesn't mean they can't use the Internet, but there are significant differences between how different generations view modern media. Increasingly young people (and the rest of the population) are turning to the Internet to get their information rather than to printed newspapers or magazines. Having a generation of media "insiders" that isn't representative of the population as a whole could be a bigger part of the problem than the Internet.

Finally, race and ethnicity:

The respondents were also heavily biased by their primary medium; more than half of respondents came from a print background:



Some the people polled by The Atlantic were also employed by the National Journal Group, the company that owns The Atlantic: Four of respondents, or about 8 percent, were employed by either Government Executive or by The Atlantic itself. The Atlantic, to be fair, has done a lot to embrace media changes, employing full-time bloggers and creating online "channels" for those with special interests like food or politics. But it's also important to disclose the fact that you are including some of your employees or colleagues in the poll that you publish.

Granted, I know that mostly The Atlantic decided to do this poll to gain some quick hits and generate discussion about the future of journalism. It is, after all, something that is weighing heavily on media professionals' minds these days. But a poll like this doesn't really tell us much except that a few of the old guard of media elites are distrustful of a medium that has been around for more than a decade. The Internet certainly isn't going away as means of distributing information. It's more than a little frightening that so many "insiders" think that a research tool like the Internet is doing harm to journalism.

Granted, I don't think that the Internet is a substitute for reporting. Nothing will ever substitute talking to experts and people that are deeply immersed in an issue. But I don't think the Internet is a "harm" to journalism. Maybe if they would've asked a few people under 30 they would have gotten some very different results.

Will the Star Tribune Print a Correction?

Michelle Bachmann is starting to remind me of George Will. They both recently have published wild inaccuracies on the op-ed pages of their respective hometown papers (of course, Will is a regular columnist while Bachmann is not) relating to global warming. Aaron Weiner at the Windy has the details, but this raises a question for me about the accuracies of op-ed pages. If newspapers expect to maintain their standards of journalism, then they should at least fact check the people they publish even (or especially) if they are on the op-ed pages.

I don't know if anyone has asked the Star Tribune to publish a correction for Bachmann's misreprentation of the facts, but someone should. After all, if newspapers like the Star Tribune hope to be relevant at all, they could at least be held accountable to the facts rather than letting new media point out their errors. That's not to say that the words aren't Bachmann's fault. She should be held responsible for what she wrote. But so should the venue in which she published it. This is embarrassing for them.

Agreeing to Disagree

Future New York Times columnist Ross Douthat says this of the List That Shall Not Be Named:

When I first heard about it, a while back, it seemed like it might be an example of the movement-ification of American liberalism, in which left-of-center types (especially people in the press) who once would have airily dismissed the idea that they belonged to a partisan "team" began attempting to imitate the conservative movement out of horror at its successes. But then again maybe the email list is just a wonderfully high-minded attempt to "illuminate standard political reporting with expert policy commentary," with no partisan purpose whatsoever.

Ah, if only liberals could do something as disciplined as all get on message. When I first moved to D.C. a lot of liberals whistfully talked about trying to be as "on message" as the Bush administration. But if there's anything I've learned in the last two years of blogging (oh my god, it's been two years) it's that if there's anything liberals love more than, say, Barack Obama, it's disagreeing with one another. And not just polite disagreement. Liberals can be mean to each other, really mean.

And I think that's probably a good thing. After all, sometimes when people you might broadly disagree with find holes in your argument it makes it better. It makes your thoughts stronger. Sometimes, it even changes your mind. I don't know if that's what conservatives would do if they were all on a secret email list together, but I think we can pretty much guess that a list of centrists, left-of-centrists, and outright flaming liberals will never be able to get on message. I just don't think it'd ever be possible.

News and Young People

Today Pew released a study that spells bad news for newspapers. The survey question asked if respondents read the news 'yesterday.' Overall news consumption is down to 39 percent from 2006, when it was 43 percent, but among those the numbers of online newspapers increased from 9 to 14 percent. Interestingly enough, they didn't bother to check demographics like income or race, but instead stuck just with age/generational groups. It turns out my generation, the Millennial generation/Generation Y, is overall the generation that is least likely to consume news. But our consumption of online news is about on par with Gen X, the highest consumer of online news. Take a look at this graph on the left.

I wonder if Pew also took more social networking into consideration. Some young people may consume news more passively as they use other social media. Sometimes they only read articles their friends post to Facebook or link to on their Twitter feed. But, even though social networking is all the rage, if this is true, I would still guess the trend would be limited to a very small and privileged class of young people.

Online Newspaper Rankings

Today must be the day for lists. NiemanJournalismLab published a list of the top 15 newspaper websites according to traffic. It's interesting to compare this to Editor and Publisher's ranking of all news sites that they published last month. Apparently Huffington Post is pulling in about 7 million readers, about on par with the fourth ranking website on Nieman's list, the LA Times. This just goes to show that you should compare HuffPo to other news gathering sites rather than to other blogs.

It's also interesting to look at their highest month of traffic. Many times they will list what caused it: for the NYTimes it was the Elliot Spitzer scandal, for the Wall Street Journal it was the Lehman Bros. collapse, for the Boston Globe it was the Red Sox, and for the Politico their highest traffic was in October 2008 -- right before the election. These things all intuitively make sense. If there is news happening somewhere, you turn to the paper that has the highest profile in that area or subject matter that they specialize in. The hint then is not to do more national stories, it is to do stories that cover the subject they are supposed to cover well.

Apples and Oranges

Time published the list of best blogs of 2009. This is firstly kind of weird because 2009 is still in its infancy, but also weird because there seems to be no coherent way that they chose their list. (They also include a list of the five most overrated blogs.)

When you put Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo, both which I would consider more competitors to a newspaper websites, with Andrew Sullivan's more traditionally political blog the Daily Dish. They then throw Google's official blog, which is really more like a way of distributing press releases about the company, into the mix. It seems clear that Time didn't really have any criteria other than that all of these things were on the Internet.

This is a really common mistake that people make. Just because things are all on the Internet doesn't mean that they are comparable kinds of information. Similarly, you wouldn't compare the print version of Auto World with The New Yorker or a student alt weekly. They are different kinds of information and even though they are both distributed on paper it doesn't mean they're comparable. This is what makes me think that old media is doomed. As long as they continue to lump all websites together they can never hope to make the transition to new media.

The other point is that this list of "top blogs" is pretty un-diverse as well. There are a ton of really great blogs written by women and people of color, but they didn't really make it into Time's list. Mainstream media can't realize the value of including diversity in media, and this may become another reason why these media companies may fail. One of the great things about the Internet is that more voices are added into the mix than the constraints of print costs could allow. But Time doesn't seem to acknowledge that.

Flag-Draped Coffins, Revealed

The Washington Post reports today that President Barack Obama is thinking of reversing his stance on allowing photographs of dead soldier's coffins to be taken and published, reversing an 18-year-old policy, in place since the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

This is obviously a difficult space to negotiate; it's a balance of allowing respect of fallen soldier's families in grief while allowing images of the human cost of war to be publicly circulated. Policies about disloyalty and anti-war messaging bans have been in place since World War I but the defense department still sends a press release every time a soldier (or sometimes a group of soldiers) gets killed in action. It doesn't make sense for flag-draped coffins, an overall rather un-graphic image, to be banned from public discourse -- especially when the names of those contained in the coffins aren't shown to the public. It's sort of sad it took a freedom of information request to get access to these images.

Mother Jones and the Interwebz

Mother Jones has a new redesign. It's charming. It's pretty. It's less clustered than their old one. But I still have some issues with it.

First of all, I would have thought that Mother Jones would have taken this opportunity of launching a new website of having some new, fresh, and interesting articles on their homepage. Instead, much of the content billed on the homepage is from their (now very old) January/February issue. They of course have new content from their blogs that they tease in a thin line of text-only hyperlinks at the top of the page, right under the header. But for the most part, much of the content on their homepage, while good, is stuff I've already read.

Secondly, I was horrified to discover that Kevin Drum, someone I've enjoyed reading since he was at the Washington Monthly, is back to a limited RSS feed. The title of his posts appear, but that's it. No teaser text. No full posts. I know that there's constantly a tension about full RSS feeds. The marketing-types will try to tell you that you need people to click over to a homepage so they can actually count who is reading the page. But for someone like me, who already scans many blogs and news articles, I find this just a waste of time. Sadly, this may mean I eliminate Kevin Drum from my RSS feed altogether. I may only read him every other day or every couple of days. Eventually, he may fall out of my daily routine and I may stop checking him altogether.

I don't mean to paint a doomsday scenario, but the reality is that if you're going to sink a lot of money into a redesign, you need to make a reason for people to go to your website. Limiting the RSS feeds and posting not-so-timely magazine articles may not be the best way to do that.

Update: Just as I was writing this post, Kevin Drum posted something saying the RSS feed is having "teething problems." I hope this gets worked out soon.

The Difference Between iTunes and News

No one knows what to do with the newspaper. Or the Internet. Or with intellectual property generally. Last week I wrote about Walter Isaacson's idea in Time magazine to charge "micropayments" of 10 cents for an article or $2 for a month's subscription. He got the idea from iTunes. Gabriel Sherman at Slate's The Big Money disagrees:

There is a multitude of reasons why [Apple CEO Steve] Jobs won't save newspapers (and it's not just because the secretive CEO hates the media). Put simply, journalism is not music. Yes, Jobs convinced consumers to pay for music in digital form. But unlike an individual newspaper link, an iTunes purchase becomes digital property a music lover can enjoy for life. (I must have listened to the latest Animal Collective tracks a dozen times last week before I got sick of them.) Compare that to a dispatch from Baghdad or an analysis of the stimulus bailout. No matter how illuminating and engaging, journalism is fleeting by comparison. What's the value differential between owning music for life and scanning one article? Hard to say. But it's probably a lot less than the 10 cents Isaacson proposes.

As I said at the time, I wasn't necessarily opposed to the idea Isaacson proposed, but we're forgetting how broadcast media evolved, almost entirely dependent on ads because it was impossible to tell who was "subscribing" and who wasn't. It's sort of similar with the Internet. You can password protect all you want, but that can decrease your traffic, which can decrease your advertising revenue. It's a bit of a conundrum.

It's also weird that Isaacson proposes this "micropayment" idea as the one that will save newspapers. All he's really doing is coming up with an additional revenue stream for websites. This idea of micropayments wouldn't eliminate ads. It would supplement them.

Then I saw Isaacson on The Daily Show, where he and Jon Stewart both managed to come across as the oldest foggies ever:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Walter Isaacson

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

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Not to say that there isn't a "tactile" quality to newspapers and magazines, but it's a little absurd to argue that because people like holding things, the newspaper industry is saved. That's, um, weird. Especially considering that people already use computers so much in their daily lives, and with more and more people accessing the internet on their phones, it's just odd to say that holding things is the new way. Sure, there's a bit of self-satire there, but it's just not the way of the future. Accept it and move on.

New York Times' Dripping Cultural Elitism

The New York Times had a piece about how people in Minnesota feel about the contested election that has resulted in the board of elections certifying Al Franken as Minnesota's newest senator. Some are annoyed, others have become more civically engaged. The story reads about how you'd expect a story about such a close election to read. Except, of course, the Times just couldn't help itself from a reference to the state's folksiness, almost dripping with Fargo-esque references:

Like a January wind-chill, the back-and-forth between Norm Coleman, the Republican incumbent, and his challenger, Al Franken, a Democrat — and the forever process of recounting and lawyerly sniping that has gone on since Election Day — is getting a little old even in this capital city of flat-voweled upper Midwest niceness.

God. I mean, I get it. Minnesota is different from New York, but come on. Not that different. The rest of the article reads like a straight news piece about a contested election in any other part of the country. But the Times just cannot give up noting how "cute" and "different" states like Minnesota and North Dakota are. I believe they might call it flyover country. As a Minnesota native, I'm getting tired of it. Stop. Please stop.

Dear Gossip Blogs: Elizabeth Edwards Knows Things About Health Care!

Well this is annoying. Campus Progress, our sister organization, sponsored an event with Elizabeth Edwards and Ezra Klein to talk about health care on Monday. Since then, the story that has come out of the event was that– gasp!–Edwards wasn’t wearing her wedding ring (presumably fallout from her husband’s messy and publicly exposed affair).

Megan said it first, but I’ll second it: Edwards is a smart, wonky person who knows her stuff when it comes to health care. As a victim of breast cancer, she’s had some invaluable up-close-and-personal encounters with the health care system. She’s critical of both the health care plans proposed by the major party candidates and is a committed advocate of comprehensive health care reform. How obnoxious, then, that after an hour-and-a-half discussion about the intricacies of the health care system all anyone can talk about is her personal life.

I’ve said it before, but quite frankly John Edwards’ affair and the fallout from it is none of the public’s business. It’s clearly a very private issue, and it’s a shame that the gossip blogs have seized on this. And if we’re really honest and take a long hard look at this, affairs aren’t all that uncommon. They happen to people every day, and have for centuries. To single one family out for public judgment is unfair and unwarranted.

Yes, I know that this is what gossip blogs do, but come on, people. Rather than pegging her as a victim, we should allow her to do her public work. Edwards is an intelligent human being with a lot to say about one of the most important issues today. Can we at least acknowledge that she deserves credit for that?

Cross posted at Pushback.