Blogroll update
The links in the sidebar have changed a bit, with some new ones appearing and some others vanishing. I'm going to shake it up monthly from now on to give everything a better chance of being clicked on: if your blog has been shunted off, it'll probably be back in August.Thoughts while reviewing DVDs:
1.Hey, this film is directed by John Cassavetes! I simply must listen to 1990s accordionist electro-pop punk Angel Corpus Christi’s song, John Cassavetes!
2. Hang on, 1990s accordionist electro-pop punks playing songs about liberal heroes of Hollywood? That doesn’t sound very likely.
3. [Googles] Oh yes, there she is. And there’s the song. It’s still absurdly excellent.
Everyone knows that Anna Wintour is imperious, dictatorial and impeccable. The trailer for this behind-the-scenes-at-Vogue documentary promises to reinforce that image. Good news for us, because the scene of her telling Oscar de la Renta what’s in and out of his catwalk show looks mighty entertaining; good news for Wintour too, because I imagine that her ferocious reputation is the most valuable thing she’s got.
But what looks most interesting – for people infatuated with journalism and publishing, anyway – is the way this film follows in detail the process of putting together an issue of a magazine. September is the big month in Vogue’s year, and Anna critiques everything in hand-stitched detail: the fonts, the message, and above all the looks.
(Image by Leo Reynolds, used under Creative Commons licence)
When Chris Anderson’s Free! article appeared in Wired at the beginning of last year, the financial crisis was still shallow enough for his thesis to look bold but almost plausible:
anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs. There’s nothing new about technology’s deflationary force, but what is new is the speed at which industries of all sorts are becoming digital businesses and thus able to exploit those economics. When Google turned advertising into a software application, a classic services business formerly based on human economics (things get more expensive each year) switched to software economics (things get cheaper). So, too, for everything from banking to gambling. The moment a company’s primary expenses become things based in silicon, free becomes not just an option but the inevitable destination.
[...]
But free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn’t mean that someone, somewhere, isn’t making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this. The monetary benefits of craigslist are enormous as well, but they’re distributed among its tens of thousands of users rather than funneled straight to Craig Newmark Inc. To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.
Wired, Free! Why $0.00 Is The Future Of Business (15 February 2008)
Journalism is more subject than most things to this downward pressure on price, and publishers put everything into the free model. Pretty much every local and national newspaper gives away their content for nothing online (bar the Financial Times, because as Clay Shirky points out, “financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share”, so it’s also one of the few kinds of information that can be successfully paywalled).
In the free economy, newspapers are fully-realised advertising delivery services, their content (or “journalism”) functioning as the lure to get readers looking at the marketing material. But then, around the middle of 2008, a rumbling downturn became a full on recession. Fewer advertisers had the budget to subsidise journalism. Free had faltered, and the reviews of Anderson’s book have reflected the unkind conditions. Closures, job cuts and commissioning freezes sped up alarmingly, and Rupert Murdoch announced that News Corp would be charging for content.
There was a general feeling that Murdoch was making a mistake by going against the course of history. But, out of all the branches of media, newspapers and magazines have been unusual for their passionate embrace of free content. The music industry (at least in its major incarnations) has pointlessly fought and scrapped with its fans to get them to pay physical-object prices for digital products. But the games industry – even though it makes a product that’s almost as vulnerable to rip and burn as words and music are – has reacted more coolly.
Many developers have taken the line that a certain amount of piracy is inevitable and non-fatal. They use DRM, but don’t invest in it at the expense of their relationship with customers. They acknowledge that gamers can get other games for free. They acknowledge that the games they’re making are distributed illegally through P2P networks. But their marketing teams work hard to ensure that the company’s own portal is the one that gamers want to go to when they download the game, eagerly cultivating the loyalty of their customers. Newspapers and magazines could supply that sort of service.
But they can only escape the death-grip of Free if they offer something worth paying for. And, as David Simon pointed out, newspapers have been treating journalism as an avoidable expense for decades:
When you hear a newspaper executive claiming that his industry is an essential bulwark of society and that it stands threatened by a new technology that is, as of yet, unready to shoulder the same responsibility, you may be inclined to empathize. And indeed, that much is true enough as it goes.
But when that same newspaper executive then goes on to claim that this predicament has occurred through no fault on the industry’s part, that they have merely been undone by new technologies, feel free to kick out his teeth. At that point, he’s as fraudulent as the most self-aggrandized blogger.
Anyone listening carefully may have noted that I was bought out of my reporting position in 1995. That’s fourteen years ago. That’s well before the internet ever began to seriously threaten any aspect of the industry. That’s well before Craig’s List and department-store consolidation gutted the ad base. Well before any of the current economic conditions applied.
In fact, when newspaper chains began cutting personnel and content, their industry was one of the most profitable yet discovered by Wall Street money. We know now – because bankruptcy has opened the books – that the Baltimore Sun was eliminating its afternoon edition and trimming nearly 100 editors and reporters in an era when the paper was achieving 37 percent profits. In the years before the internet deluge, the men and women who might have made The Sun a more essential vehicle for news and commentary – something so strong that it might have charged for its product online – they were being ushered out the door so that Wall Street could command short-term profits in the extreme.
Reclaim The Media, “Wire creator David Simon testifies on the future of journalism”
The problem for print journals is that they’ve been exploiting Free stuff for a long, long time before Anderson offered it as the future. The lure of churnalism is that someone else has already done the work for you. Copy, pictures and editorial line all arrive without the expensive business of researching and reporting. This obviously works fine when it comes to maximising profits in a closed marketplace – but when the internet means that marketers can reach the public without needing to pay the newspaper as an expensive middleman, and the public can see that the same story is appearing in paper after paper, neither party is going to feel much need for newspapers.
That’s why it’s disingenuous for someone like Steve Connor to protest that his failings should be overlooked because commercial pressures make his own bad reporting inevitable. His failings perpetuate those commercial pressures, and means that journalism is increasingly likely to be a leisure activity of the impassioned or a tithe on the desperate and ambitious. Anyone who wants to save professional journalism – the kind of journalism that, as Simon says, “requires daily, full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out until the best of them know everything with which a given institution is contending” – should be interested in cultivating better journalists.
Any support for the Sense About Science campaign to prevent libel laws from being used over issues of scientific evidence must be a good thing. Only, in the case of the Daily Mail championing Simon Singh, it’s not totally clear whether they’re backing his cause, or recruiting him to their own.
When I blogged at Liberal Conspiracy about libel and privacy laws, I suggested that Mr Justice Eady was enjoying a moment of grace with the press. That moment is over now, as far as the Mail is concerned:
Justice Eady’s critics accuse him of creating, almost single-handedly, a privacy law in Britain as a result of his interpretations of the 1998 Human Rights Act, in which he invariably seems to give more weight to privacy than to freedom of expression.
Most notably, Justice Eady ruled in a case involving Formula One boss Max Mosley that it was wrong for the News of the World to expose his liking for sadomasochistic orgies with paid ‘ professional dominatrices’, saying: ‘I accept that such behaviour is viewed by some people with distaste and moral disapproval, but in the light of modern rights-based jurisprudence that does not provide any justification for the intrusion on the personal privacy of the claimant.’
In another high-profile case, he stopped a cuckolded husband selling his story to the Press about a sporting celebrity who had seduced the husband’s wife. Adulterers, said the judge, deserve privacy like anyone else.
Via a succession of such rulings, the judge has built up a formidable body of case law upon which public figures can rely when they wish to gag newspapers or publishers.
What’s really interesting is how the Mail bend Singh into their own ongoing narratives. Before you even get into the body copy, just in the headline, Singh has been labelled as the “brave scientist” going up against an implaccable system – just as Andrew Wakefield was a “brave scientist” when the Mail was generating vaccine terror. The medical evidence is presented in standard ‘debate’ style: the chiropractors claims are balanced with a neutral “However, many in the traditional medical profession view the therapy with deep suspicion.”
And the Mail is careful to keep this within the limits of free speech rather than evidence or public interest: Singh, the article says, “won’t stop until he has guaranteed that the principle of free speech - which is something about which judges such as Justice Eady seem remarkably nonchalant - remains at the very heart of our British way of life.” They’re on the right side for now. But this isn’t a watershed in the Mail’s commitment to accurate journalism and responsible medical coverage. The medical pages today contain the usual mix of wonder drugs and alarmism, and when Singh’s case is over, they’ll be ready for their next Wakefield.
(Picture by avlxyz, used under Creative Commons licence)
When I decided to launch myself as a freelance writer in February this year, I chose a shockingly bad time to do it. A recession, collapsing advertising budgets, online competition – at one point, it looked as though magazines were going under as fast as I could query them. I’ve been fortunate enough to have got as much work as I need every month since I started, but every week includes as many disappointments as triumphs. For every pitch that leads to a commission, I’ve probably made five or six that went nowhere. Honestly, the ratio could be even worse: if I kept a full tally, I’d probably burn my keyboard in despair.
Or, maybe, I’d send a letter like this one from “Scared Journalist”:
I spent the last four and a half years studying print journalism in college and watching vacantly as the newspaper/magazine industry crumbled before my eyes. The decline never bothered me. I always figured I had what it takes to get a job even in an extremely competitive market: Before I ever graduated, I had completed four internships at newspapers, magazines and a Web site, published almost a hundred clips (including longer, high-quality pieces), and left a good impression with everyone I worked with. I knew I wanted to be a journalist, and I knew that I wanted to write for a living.
Now, six months after graduating, my parents still pay my cellphone bill and I am working full-time making ice cream. I make a couple hundred bucks here and there freelancing for a magazine I interned at, but otherwise my “freelance” career, as well as my journalism career, is dead in the water. I find myself despondent and unable to send out any more cover letters, and I can’t find the time or motivation to research a story idea enough to send it to an editor because I assume he or she will simply reject my half-baked idea. I’m panicking, but I fear failure so much that I can’t even get started. Freelancing seems to be my best option career-wise, but I can’t summon the willpower and enthusiasm to do it. Plus, I lost my license to a DUI conviction (that got me fired from one of those newspaper internships), which has immobilized me and left me unable to relocate to a new job until October. The DUI also contributes to my job-hunting anxiety.
What I see is that my passion for journalism and writing is waning. Working full-time has taught me that work is work and play is play, and that I need to maximize the efficiency of my hours I spend at work in order to maximize how much I can play outside of work. I am looking into jobs in other fields that pay better. Is it healthier to stick it out working at an ice cream store and desperately try to make it as a writer, or should I pursue a career where financial security is more realistic?
Weirdly, Cary Tennis’ answer to this isn’t a brisk “grow up”: it’s a mythopoetic stream-of-consciousness about the role of the journalist and the times in which we live, reassuring Scared with the promise that “If you are a true journalist, you are supposed to be having a hard time. This is how the world makes writers. It kicks their ass long enough that they start finally telling the truth.”
Apparently Tennis missed an ass-kicking session, because his reply misses a few obvious truths. If your passion for your chosen field in on the wane because you haven’t got a job you want six months after graduating, then maybe you don’t love the field as much as you thought. Six months is a fairly minimal delay between finishing education and launching a career. Scared has been able to get paid work in journalism during that time, too – despite the industry being in quite the tight spot.
And the main barrier that Scared identifies to the job hunting process is a driving ban which lasts until October. That’s not “having a hard time”. That’s being a reckless moron and being suitably punished. So, if Scared finds it that painful to take a parental stipend on the phone bill, they’re probably not cut out for trying to make it as a writer. Let it go, Scared.
(Picture by Telstar Logistics, used under Creative Commons licence)
Making a living as a writer isn’t hard because the universe is trying to make you a better journalist. It’s hard because there are more writers than paid work, and plenty of aspiring writers willing to do the equivalent of a paid job for no money at all (that’s those internships Scared was so pleased with). You might come through the apprentice period more experienced, more determined, more skilled – but whether you’re actually any good after all that depends on how much talent you started with. And even if you are good, the work still might not exist.
The Onion AV Club offered a more pragmatic, and wiser, version of the same live-through-this counsel:
Becoming a critic, an essayist, an editorialist, or a screenwriter isn’t the kind of career that you come to via the want ads, any more than you can follow a conventional up-the-corporate-ladder job track to become a novelist, painter, or songwriter. These aren’t the kind of jobs where anyone’s ever “hiring,” really. By and large, if people want you to write for them, they’ll call you.
And why do they decide to call you? Usually because they’ve read your writing, or because a mutual acquaintance recommended you, or both. That may seem like a paradox, but it really isn’t. Up above, I said that the number of paying media outlets is narrowing, but there are more opportunities than ever for aspiring writers to ply their trade, via blogs and the like, and our modern wired lifestyle is such that you can develop collegial relationships with fellow writers that you’ve never actually met in person. But it all takes time and effort, and in the meantime, yes, you’re probably going to have to get “a real job.” To put it on a personal level: I started getting paid to write criticism and features while I was still in school, but I wasn’t able to do it full-time until about seven years after I graduated, and that was only because I was being partially supported by my wife. It took another seven years before I started making enough that my parents stopped asking when I was going to go back to work.
There aren’t really any access courses for a life in letters (well, apart from being born with a daddy who can supply the start-up for My First Style Rag). Just working, networking, dusting yourself off, and hoping you’ve got the means of your own self-belief.
How did I feel about Michael Jackson dying? Relieved, as though a huge matter of collective guilt had finally expired and could be shrugged off at last. However baroque the revelations of the house-clearing are, however outrageous the posthumous exposés, he’s not going to do anything worse. The area of doubt which stops Billie Jean from going the same queasy-making way as I’m The Leader Of The Gang (a bigger area anyway, because Billie Jean is in entirely another realm of brilliance) might be able to stay intact.
Also interpreting and commemorating, but much less self-serving than I am:
k-punk on what changed with Jackson:
The death of this King – “my brother, the Legendary King Of Pop”, as Jermaine Jackson described him in his press conference, as if giving Michael his formal title – recalls not the Diana carcrash, but the sad slump of Elvis from catatonic narcosis into the long good night. Perhaps it was only Elvis who managed to insinuate himself into practically every living human being’s body and dreams to the same degree that Jackson did, at the microphysical level of enjoyment as well as at the macro-level of spectacular memeplex. Michael Jackson: a figure so subsumed and consumed by the videodrome that it’s scarely possible to think of him as an individual human being at all… because he wasn’t of course… becoming videoflesh was the price of immortality, and that meant being dead while still alive, and no-one knew that more than Michael…
MagCulture on how the most radical editorial line on Jackson is the most mundane:
But the cover of next week’s Time does something different. This cover is the best memorial for Jackson I’ve seen yet. No hype, no weirdness, no judgement. Just a stripped down normal-looking human posing and smiling in jeans and vest.
And Queenie and Popjustice say, let’s listen to some music. Ok then.
How can self-destruction be explained? What rationalisation can we put on something as brutal and seemingly-voluntary starving yourself? Bishop Martin Shaw attempts to constrain the extreme asceticism of radical and mystic Simone Weil within religious terms:
Some would say that Simone had an obsessive/compulsive personality that led to the eating disorder: anorexia nervosa. Whether neurotic or anorexic, such labels come nowhere near a true understanding of this refined soul who dared to face the darkest of human circumstances and there find the Light of Christ.
It’s not an eating disorder if you do it for God, apparently. Shaw’s distinction feels unfair, as though he has to wrangle Weil free from the anorexics, with their reputed vanity and girlish lack of substance. But saying that Weil couldn’t have been an anorexic because she was too serious simply feeds the romance of anorexia and the valourising of self-harm.
In fact, the language used by Shaw’s interviewee to explain Weil’s transcentant not-eating was easily reconcilable with the self-justification of anorexics: Sara Maitland (not included in the transcript) described Weil as being concerned with bodily purity. Well, quite. Out of all the complicated physiological and social causes of anorexia, I’d argure that this sort of celebration of the frail heroine is probably more dangerous than any number of size zeroes on the catwalk. Even a mystic can be sick, but for supposed-critics to echo that sickness and turn a horror of consumption and flesh into a devout experience – that’s just stupid.
Related: Paperhouse reads: Wetlands
Some would say that Simone had an obsessive/compulsive personality that led to the eating disorder: anorexia nervosa. Whether neurotic or anorexic, such labels come nowhere near a true understanding of this refined soul who dared to face the darkest of human circumstances and there find the Light of Christ.
Sara Maitland is a writer who has a special interest in Simone Weil – and I asked her whether the eating disorder was significant in Simone Weil’s spirituality.
I’ve got a new post up at Liberal Conspiracy, where I ramble speculatively about the way Lord Justice Eady’s decisions on media law seem to be acting in combination against scrutiny at all levels of reporting: the sex scandal, science coverage, and anonymous whistle-blowing:
It’s not unusual for public figures to experience severe reversals of reputation, and the distance between “nation’s sweetheart” and “national disgrace” can be as short as a few column inches. But Lord Justice Eady’s recent rehabilitation in the eyes of the press is a remarkable one – for the swiftness with which some editors have shifted position, and for what it suggests about the future possibilities for scrutiny in the media.
As a few of you know, my first adventure in blogging was a knitblog called Knit Wrong, Purl Wrong. For a while I crammed the knitting stuff into Paperhouse; eventually, it was obvious that a politics-and-culture-slash-knitblog, while highly unusual, was never going to have much reach. So, I let the yarny stuff slide. But now KnitWrong has returned!
Hop on over and thrill to the contents of my knitting bag, dear ones.
A while ago, when I wrote a review of Freakonomics, I got a comment from a reader who made it quite clear that they didn’t think I knew the hell what I was talking about: “As for rationality. People don’t make decisions rationally, or for that matter irrationally. Just not how we’re wired.”
I think that Cian is sort-of right, and I don’t think that Cian being sort-of right means that I’m totally wrong. It’s not a zero-sum game. Most people make most of their decisions in the hope of achieving the best outcome – but because the amount of social, economic and cultural data to be parsed is too huge for most people to survey, many decisions come out pretty eccentric. “Our brains work like big coincidence detectors and use improbable coincidences to make decisions about what is real”, as psychologist Tom Stafford explained. If a coincidence is neither big enough nor improbable enough, it may not register at all.
MMR is a good example. From a medical outcome point of view, the rational decision would be to take the jab and have done. But what if you’ve been made aware of the vaccine damage hypothesis, but have no experience of the diseases the vaccine is protecting against? Then you might be more fearful of the vaccine than the disease, and the rational response to that (however irrational the data) would be to avoid vaccination.
And what if non-vaccination had some other benefits that don’t show up in the epidemiology? Like a powerful feeling of community with other anti-vaxxers and a belief that you are part of an important narrative of repressed knowledge? Those social factors could be very powerful incentives, and might push the decision-maker firmly away from vaccines.
Why am I dwelling on a months-old blog comment today? (Hint: not just because I am slow-brained and resentful of correction.) Because I came across two excellent blog posts lately which used analogies with irrational economics to rationalise apparently illogical behaviours.
Tom Ewing parses some data on boom-and-bust in baby names:
the rapid spikes of popularity and unpopularity in some baby names look very much like the inflation and bursting of market bubbles. And the driver of unpopularity is the sudden increase in perceived risk (social risk, in this case). Would it be true to say that the more people’s ‘network perception’ plays a role in decision making, the more likely rapid popularity spikes are?
Aaronovitch Watch compares David Aaronovitch’s ongoing apologia for the Iraq war to the behaviour of a scam victim:
What clearly went on in 2002 was either that there was intentional deception, or that the government believed that Saddam had WMDs, and therefore because it believed this, thought it was a gamble worth taking to portray the evidence as much more conclusive than it was. That’s the sort of thing that people go to jail for if they do it in a set of accounts; if this isn’t “lying”, then there were no liars in the executive suite at Enron.
Aaro himself, notoriously, was persuaded by the government case to make a massive investment of credibility points into a decidedly subprime vehicle (the parallels between the September dossier, in which poor quality underlying material was layered, structured and given the imprimateur of a supposedly neutral agency to create the illusion of AAA status, and the CDO market, are perhaps fertile ground for someone more desperate for a column than myself). Unlike the investors in Bernard Madoff’s funds, however, he seems determined to defend the very people who swindled him. Nice one.
Aaronovitch Watch, “What is this, the missing chapter of Voodoo Histories?”
To which the only thing I feel like adding is that people quite often continue to pour funds into a duff investment they’ve been persuaded to make, because the social cost of admitting the mistake seems greater than the financial cost of continuing it. Similarly, the social cost of changing your child’s name is usually even greater than the cost of sticking with something that’s turned out to be a bit common. Even irrationality can have a rational outcome.
