(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 43, one of my regular pod casts for The Student Operated Press)

There’s a crucial difference between balanced reporting and insightful reporting. You can listen to this difference by tuning into the Yes Network and listening to color commentator David Cone, the famously versatile former pitcher who once considered a career in journalism.

You can describe the game and gin up excitement with personal mannerisms the way television anchors increasingly do, or you can quietly shed light on the science of the game the way Cone (inset) does. He represents the difference between reporting as theater and reporting as insight.

When Cone tells you wrist and elbow action is as important as finger location in throwing strikes, you know a lot more than when another reporter tells you that you’ve just seen a changeup, which the camera has probably already told you. (more…)

If you’d like to look at the changing face of news, consider your own Google home page. Savor its interactivity. You can organize your news, weather maps, solar systems, art exegesis, you name it, and the list of “gadgets” grows almost daily. You can design your own newspaper.

But it’s no longer a paper, it’s news from the ether, and it’s being updated and reedited around the clock. More than all the words about the demise of the newspaper, your home page can tell the story. You can do with your cursor what it costs a paper-and-ink newsroom big bucks to do. (more…)

(This is the latest transcript of Hot Copy my regular podcast for The Student Operated Press)

One of the reasons I cherish The New York Times is its institutional eye for the easy-to-overlook and profound. The March 27th front page features a story by Brian Stelter called Finding Political News Online, Young Viewers Pass It Along. It may prove to be the most significant story of the first fifty years of the century, and to its credit The Times put it on the front page.

The story is about the socialization of news and imagery, not in the political sense, but in the sense that sharing news and imagery has become part of the way we socialize with each other. We like a blog post, a news story, an essay, an image, a poem, a quotation, and next thing you know it’s whizzing around the world to friends and family. What we’re accustomed to calling news is becoming as personal and intimate as a jewel box or a pack of baseball cards. (more…)

Municipal web sites tend to be passive-aggressive. In the guise of presenting vital information their subliminal message seems to be, And don’t ever say we didn’t tell you anything.

Rather than contribute to government transparency they tend to forestall inquiry by purporting to tell you all you want to know about the government you happen to be paying for. This is a ruse to distract you from all they’re not telling you. (more…)

What happens to e-mail happens to us. We delete each other. We bounce, trash, junk and leave each other unread or misfiled. It’s not surprising. Human minds created the computer and the Internet, so of course they would go on doing what they had always done, but with more dispatch.

We can train an e-mail program to identify junk mail, but if we want to express our particular displeasure we bounce e-mail. This is much the same way we filter people. There are certain “kinds” of people we categorize and screen out, but once in a while we feel compelled to snub someone.

We complain of torrents of e-mail: phishing expeditions, spam, erectile dysfunction remedies, fake Rolexes, lotteries we never entered, Dickensian Nigerian scams, but what is different is that now we have a computer model for what has always happened.

Somebody has always been rolling up his sleeve to show us fake watches. We have always been phished and scammed, often from the pulpit and the bandstand. Now we just train a program to filter it or hit a button, smile and move on. There is no danger the person we have rebuffed will drop his coffee on us, and if he bad-mouths us we won’t see or hear it.

What is missing is the vibe. We can readily see that the ED hucksters are not native speakers, so that provides a certain distance from them. We don’t get much of a vibe from the Internet, the way we do when eyes meet at a party or a rally or in the street. E-mail is a metaphor without the vibe. Good writing, of course, puts the vibe back in words, but there isn’t much good writing in our daily dose of e-mail, is there?

And yet there is no reason there shouldn’t be. Just because the quill gives way to the pen, and calligraphy to movable type, and typewriter to computer doesn’t mean we can’t write well. All we have to do is want to write well. So, perhaps when we get over the novelty, we’ll do just that. After all, there never was a time when a great deal of phish and spam wasn’t written.—DM

(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 39, Del Marbrook’s podcasts for The Student Operated Press)

Sometimes it’s hard to say just when the heyday of a great institution was. I had the privilege of working briefly for The Baltimore Sun in the mid-1960s. It might not have been The Sun’s noblest moment, but it was certainly still shining brightly and Maryland was still revolving around it. I worked on The Sun’s copy desk under the best copy chief I ever encountered, John Plunkett. I say I worked there briefly, because I soon accepted an offer I couldn’t refuse, to become Sunday editor of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel.

When I was at The Sun I had already learned a great deal about makeup and layout at The Elmira Star-Gazette in New York’s southern tier. By the time I got to Winston-Salem I had a free hand to experiment, and I think I managed to produce some lively and engaging feature pages. But there were many things I couldn’t do, not because my superiors wouldn’t let me—they warmly encouraged innovation—but because what I wanted to do was simply too expensive and time-consuming. (more…)

I feel a sob gathering in my chest every time I open our mailbox. All those glossy catalogues haunted by dead trees. I feel shame. So when Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com unveiled Kindle, a new reader capable of storing two hundred books, I wondered yet again if the world is ready to weigh the beauty of the paper-and-ink book against the relentless destruction of our essential forests.

Surely those catalogues and newspapers and magazines are greater offenders than the book, and surely the book of poems or literary fiction are even humbler ecoogical offenders. We know that reading seems to be in decline. And we know our invaluable forests are in decline, butchered for profit. We know why we need trees. They produce oxygen and carbon dioxide. They replenish soil, control erosion, reduce air pollution, and contribute to fish and wildlife protection. But we tend to think these considerations should bedevil our grandchildren, not us.

I’m a writer. I love books, even when they push me out the door and make me sneeze. I revere the technology that gave us books. But I see an inevitability in electronic readers such as Kindle. I don’t pretend to know when they will become popular. I’m not a marketer. But they make sense to me. More than that, I’m not offended or intimidated by them as a writer, and I think my sentiment is soundly rooted in history. (more…)

Yesterday was a landmark in the history of publishing. The weekly Circuits section of The New York Times led off with a story, An Entire Bookshelf in Your Hands by Peter Wayner, about e-book reader technology. Nothing unusual there. Circuits, like Wired magazine, has covered e-book readers all along. What is significant about yesterday’s story is that its underlying assumption is that e-books are here to stay and demand for them is growing.

In 1999 when Online Originals, the respected British online literary press, published my novella, Alice Miller’s Room, the media consensus which, as the poet Percy Shelley said of criticism, is often the measure of contemporary ignorance, held that e-books were a fad. Even now the critical establishment ignores original e-books on the arguable ground that they are vanity publications, the same argument it makes for dismissing print-on-demand books. This argument holds just enough truth to enable its purveyors to fob it off as axiomatic.

But technology is relentless, paying little attention to rear-guard reactions. The printed book industry is not chauvinist, it is protecting a huge investment, trying to milk it for all it is worth, fully aware that technology is reshaping our reading habits. The issue has never been about quality of technology or merit in writing. It has always been about money. But it suits the purposes of the old industry to couch the discussion in terms of quality.

Take newspapers. When we read them online they still look like their print originals, but it is now an interim look. There is no reason why it should last. The technology that dictated the appearance of today’s newspapers is antique. Hot lead gave way a long time ago to offset. That should have enabled newspapers to radically re-examine their appearance, but instead they merely tinkered with it, using the new technology to add color and improve appearances, but failing to make the big advances they now had the ability to make. You can make book on the fact that cutting-edge designers are hard at work shaping the look of tomorrow’s news on your iPhones, Nokias and even your laptops. It will look very different, and so it should. Today’s look is strictly transitional.

Books too will look different, because there is no reason not to take advantage of cyberspace’s hyperkinetic environment. There is no reason for static text and freeze-frame images, used merely to break up text, in the 21st Century.

—DM

This is the transcript of another of my weekly Hot Copy podcasts for The Student Operated Press. You can also listen to earlier podcasts.

Whenever you read the lead or off-lead story in a newspaper, whenever a TV anchor interrupts a newscast to bring you breaking news, you can be pretty sure the real story is living its secret life unnoticed.

Now that’s not a bad a lead for a story, is it? Your professor might approve of it. But, like most leads, it’s only a whiff of the story—and a bit misleading to boot. (Leads are almost always a bit misleading, but that’s another matter.) I said the real story is unraveling unnoticed. I meant it’s probably unnoticed by you, but it’s not unnoticed by the people to whom it means most, and it’s probably not unnoticed by news editors either. It’s like selective hearing; they’ve just chosen to ignore it. And the chances are it’s about money, about somebody making money in ways that are not good for society. But the media don’t serve society, much as they might like you to think they do, they serve corporate masters, CEOs who answer to shareholders.

I’m not going to argue that the media are at fault for giving you a day of burning buildings and forest fires while many of our cherished liberties are burning to the ground around us, but while we’re hearing all about the latest polls in Iowa and the obscene amounts of money people are paying to get elected one of the most momentous struggles of our time, a struggle that will determine just how free we’re going to be, is going on under the media’s’ noses and it’s hardly being covered at all. There’s a good reason it’s not being covered. It’s because the media are themselves vitally concerned and hopelessly burdened by the agendas of their Big Business bosses.

What I’m talking about is control of the Internet. The subject has been dubbed net neutrality, but that’s an entirely too bland term for what is going on. What is at stake is whether you and I can have the same kind of high-speed, equal-service access to the Internet that Big Business has, or whether giant telecommunications companies like Time Warner, AT&T, Comcast and Verizon will get away with creating a tiered, or multilevel system of Internet speeds so that certain providers can buy a fast lane ahead of you and me. It would be like a rich guy having a lane all to himself on a six-lane highway because he paid for it. You would get the lane you could afford. Net neutrality, on the other hand, would mean no special privileges for Big Money. It would mean equal access and equal service. It would reflect the democratic principles expressed in our Bill of Rights. A tiered system would give the corporations exactly what Thomas Jefferson feared they would acquire, power to corrupt democracy. There would be the corporations’ democracy, and then there would be yours. Yours would consist largely of the right to be hornswoggled. Controlling access to higher speeds and better service would be a form of censorship, just as our voting power is now being censored by Big Money. We don’t have the best candidates, we have the candidates who are best at selling themselves to monied interests. The best people in every community can’t afford to run for office, and so, rather than having the best government we can give ourselves, we have the worst government money can buy. (more…)

Every once in a while there is talk of some home-grown jihadi. Well, I’ve got news for Homeland Security. I know exactly where the home-grown jihadis hang out. Check out the swish computer stores in malls. You’ll find all manner of terrorists there who believe with all their metallic little hearts that you should be tortured in the interests of humanity.

I recently savored the sour-smile-cum-smirk on the face of one of these jihadis when he told me that recovering my e-mail might cost $1,200 if he and his co-conspirators couldn’t clone my e-mail onto my new hard drive. You would have thought he’d won the lottery, so pleased he was to deliver this bad news. Why any company interested in selling anything would hire people whose chief pleasure is saying no is beyond me.

Well, when do you think you might have my computer? I asked. You have to be a glutton for punishment to feed one of these terrorists such an opportunity to inflict pain. We’re pretty busy, it could be a week or so, he said smugly. Can you imagine somebody actually pays these snots to be exactly the sort of men you hope your grandson won’t grow up to be?

I’ve always told myself that the people who are obviously pleased to give you bad news and to stonewall your every effort to politely obtain help do so because they are underpaid and unappreciated. I renounce this politically correct line here and now. I worked in a lot of menial jobs and I usually managed to be a decent guy. These schadenfreudists are regressives. They do humanity no good, even if they do repair your computer, and they reflect the contempt for us of the companies that hire them as surely as murderous jihadis reflect the contempt of the madrassas that poisoned their dimly lit minds.

—DM