Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog

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Carl Icahn has done his hostile deed in an attempt to take over Yahoo at its annual meeting next month, offering up a slate of directors for shareholder consideration. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has the details, including the letter from Icahn to Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock. Icahn personifies the word “colorful” in his thoughts about the “botched” Microsoft-Yahoo merger.

I am perplexed by the board’s actions. It is irresponsible to hide behind management’s more than overly optimistic financial forecasts. It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo’s closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer. I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet.

That last thought is significant, especially because Mark Cuban is one of the directors that Icahn wants on the Yahoo board. The always outspoken — and often controversial — Cuban is no friend of Google and is thinking out loud about how to beat them (with his Mahalo, Cuban has a considerable dog in the fight), prompting John Battelle to note that Cuban “is clearly drinking and blogging again.” That’s because Cuban’s Microhoo strategy is a doozie: “What would happen,” Cuban asks, “if MicroSoft or Yahoo or a MicroHoo went to the 5 top results for the top 25k searches and paid them to leave the Google Index?” He reasons that at $1,000 a site and 100,000 sites, “thats only $ 1 Billion Dollars.” (sic)

Battelle rolls his eyes and invites Cuban to try:

One big problem: No one would do it. Well, some would, but assuming that folks would be willing to be paid to screw over Google assumes folks 1. have no soul and/or 2. hate Google. I pray that for most folks, #1 is not true, and Google prays that for most folks, #2 is not true. So far, I think we’re both right.

But hey, Mark, you have the money! Why not find out?!

Carl Icahn is a smart and colorful fellow who’s making a hard run at this (and getting a ton of attention for it), but by putting Mark Cuban on his Yahoo wonder board at the precise moment Cuban is talking about paying people to leave Google’s index boggles the mind.

According to Parade Magazine (via David Weinberger), here are the top ten baby names for boys and girls this year.

As David points out in his piece, we rarely find common names like these anymore (He calls it the “long tail” of names, LOL). The preference seems to be to so badly misspell the name that the identity of the person becomes “unique,” to which I can only ask, “WTF?”

I noticed a couple of years ago that receptionists began asking me to spell my first name. This shocked me, until I realized that there are now dozens of ways to spell a simple name like mine. Why do parents do this? Don’t we realize that we’re creating a friggin’ monster here?

Oh, I forgot. Everybody’s “special” these days. My bad.

One of the great things about the Web is the immediate access to knowledge and information, something about which I’ve written here often. All of the institutions of colonial modernism are under attack, in part, because their place in the culture — their authority, if you will — is granted by access to protected knowledge. This culture clash is uncomfortable for those whose position is being picked apart, and so they’re fighting back with arguments that are often specious, at best.

One such argument has been thoroughly dissected here, that of terrified elitist Andrew Keen and his assertion that amateurs will surely destroy the world. This meme — this attack on everyday people with access to knowledge — has been picked up by others with something to lose in the culture clash and is now rather widespread among all elites.

And it’s absolutely wonderful to find the occasional person who kicks back against this crap, and I was introduced to a spectacular example today in the form of Mike Caulfield, his blog and an entry titled If a Columnist Calls a Tail a Leg…

In this outstanding piece of work, Caulfield elegantly deconstructs a Keenish form of argument by Monica Hesse in, of all places, The Washington Post. Her column is provocatively called “Truth: Can You Handle It?” She attacks what she pejoratively calls the “wiki-world” and uses what she feels is a false quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln to make her point.

Unfortunately for Ms. Hesse, HER Lincoln reference is the one that’s wrong (Oops!), and Caulfield’s legwork on the matter is worthy of any journalism award.

Go read the whole thing. You’ll thank me later on.

In a Vanity Fair article, Buzz Bissinger explains his tirade (tirade here) last week on HBO’s Costas Now against Deadspin blogger Will Leitch. Bissinger later apologized, not for his feelings but for the manner in which he expressed them. It was a classy move.

But the Costas segment was a stunning illustration of the real angst between mainstream sports writers and the sports blogosphere, which is increasingly setting the agenda for all sports reporting these days. As a guy who’s been following this for a long time, I found it painful to watch Bissinger make a fool of himself, and I felt equally uncomfortable watching Costas try and defend the status quo. Both are incredibly smart guys, but they’re blinded by their own perspective.

Costas referred to sports writers with “real credentials and real access.” The comment was obviously meant to separate “real” sports writers from (unreal) bloggers, and this doesn’t get anybody anywhere.

He also referred to the “legitimate complaint” about the sports blogosphere, namely the tone of gratuitous potshots and criticisms. Both Bissinger and Costas used quotes from commenters to make their case, which caused Leitch to note that, “surely we can differentiate between the blogger and the commenters.”

As I’ve written in the past, sports journalism has changed dramatically since Watergate brought to the surface the form of journalism known as “gotcha.” It has gone from entirely cheerleading to some excellent and insightful work by serious writers, be they mainstream or other. There’s still the sense, though, that access to athletes is a gift granted by their owners (yes, they are “owned”), and that this can be a significant conflict of interest, especially when such access crosses from professional to personal. Professional sports leagues are going out of their way to restrict access, because they want to control their message, and the extent to which the mainstream press is forced to go along with this is sad.

One of the very definitions of “news” goes like this: dog bites man, not news; man bites dog, news. So the norm is not news, and therefore when athletes perform according to their gifts and expectations, it doesn’t fit the definition of news. The exceptional athlete — Tiger Woods, for example — is certainly newsworthy, but the PGA’s slogan is “These Guys Are Good.” In that light, a “good” performance isn’t news, but a bad performance is. Yet we rarely see stories when “these guys are bad.”

Hell, show me, shot-by-shot, the 15 that John Daly scored on number 9, because that’s news.

So there is a symbiotic relationship between sports and sports writers, and that’s okay. But that isn’t the only form of sports journalism, for the output of this symbiotic relationship is fair game for observers (and fans), because both (the sport and the pro writer) are on the same pedestal. News about the news is one of the hallmarks of the blogosphere, and it may make the mainstream press uncomfortable, but it is every bit as much “journalism” as that which is published by the pros.

Moreover, I most disagree with the assertion by blogosphere critics (such as Bissinger and Costas) that bloggers are a part of any real or perceived “dumbing down” of the information stream. Any time I hear that, I’m immediately drawn to the Lippmannesque reasonings of colonial thinking, that culture must have an elite class to lead the ignorant and emotionally-driven masses. That is insulting and just plain wrong. The voices from the mass may seem crude to the pedestal dwellers of the culture, but those voices count as much as anyone’s.

In the beginning was the newspaper, and the newspaper was with the people, and the newspaper was the people. And the people, being people, needed a place to put announcements of a legal nature in order to self-govern, so they chose the newspaper. This made sense at one time, but the model continues today, despite two important facts: One, the newspaper is no longer with the people, and, two, there are much more efficient ways to handle such things. Today, the “legals” section remains one of the last, highly profitable (and exclusive) branches of what’s left of the money tree that used to be the American newspaper.

Over the last few years, attempts have been made to remove the exclusive nature of these announcements from the newspaper industry, and the voices are getting louder. In Pennsylvania, a bill is moving through the state senate that would allow such announcements to be distributed through free, community papers, and the slight opening of the door to non-exclusivity is not going over well with Pennsylvania newspapers.

An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer says the opposition is framing their argument as one of public access. Deborah Musselman, director of government affairs for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, told the paper, “The idea was that people have a right to know what their government is up to,” adding that the bill would “make it a lot harder to know what your government is up to because you wouldn’t know where to look to find the information.”

Um, okay.

There’s been some name-calling in the matter, with newspapers being referenced as a “cartel,” and the free dailies being called “junk mail.” There’s a whole lot of money at stake:

Local governments now must place legal notices in a “newspaper of general circulation” in a county. The bill would expand that to include “community papers of mass dissemination” that are distributed free through the mail or delivered by carrier to all households in a political subdivision.

“Right now, the legal-advertising law grants an exclusive monopoly that doesn’t recognize that there are other bona fide options out there,” said Jim Haigh, a consultant to the Mid-Atlantic Community Papers Association, which represents 300 free papers in seven states, about half of them in Pennsylvania. “We are just looking for fair competition.”

Haigh argues that community papers would do a better job of getting the word out. They are sent free to every household in a community, while newspapers require a paid subscription that not everyone has.

The bill has the support of associations representing municipalities and schools, which long for cheaper ad rates.

“We are always looking for ways to get the message out to more individuals, but at the same time to save money,” said Holly M. Fishel, research director at the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors.

Whether this bill passes or not is just a blip in the overall disruption of the mass media model. I’ve yet to hear of any broadcasters getting into the fray, and that’s interesting, because eventually there will be a digital version of all of this. The technology exists today for law firms, school districts and municipalities to publish these themselves, to be aggregated by a smart third-party, and there’s no reason that couldn’t be any local media company.

That’s oversimplified, to be sure. These types of announcements are a part of our various branches of government, so they cannot be considered lightly. There are issues of accessibility to digital media by ALL members of the community, tampering with the announcements, and questions of governmental control of the Web — all things to be seriously weighed and discussed.

But this is another attack on the classifieds armor that used to be a primary revenue support for local newspapers, and it’s hard to believe this one will end pretty either.

(Originally posted in AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)

A stunning development in the game of chicken that Yahoo was playing with Microsoft. After high-level acquisition discussions broke down today, Microsoft closed its collective briefcase, withdrew its offer to acquire Yahoo, and went home. Deal or no deal? No deal.

While most observers are citing price as the issue (Microsoft upped their bid to $33 a share; Yahoo wanted $37), a bigger issue appears to be Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s tactic of cozying up to Google as a way to fight a potential hostile takeover. This drew half of all the text in Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer’s withdrawal letter to Yang:

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

· First, it would…(encourage)…advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them…

· Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.

· In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit…

· This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms…

· It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

This is going to be THE big story over the next few days, as people in the know delve into the facts, but the real thing to watch will be the stock prices of both companies come this time Monday. Yahoo’s is likely to tank, which will mean lawsuits from every direction. Hell, in a few days, $33 a share may begin to look like a lot of money.

(Kudos to Michael Arrington, who appears to have broken the story AllthingsD, who broke the story. Thanks, Dale.)

…your daughter says, “but Dad, some guys NEED to have their eyebrows waxed.”

Just shoot me.

When I first began writing and publishing my essays, it followed a period of cultural study that led me to the conclusion that we were at the dawning of the Age of Participation. It’s one of the key concepts of my view of postmodernism/postcolonialism, and I always develop a warm smile when thoughts that I believed were original at the time begin to show up elsewhere. As I’ve posted before, this is a part of touching the unbroken web, and I wouldn’t trade it for all the money in the world.

In watching a documentary on the Doors the other night, John Densmore made a statement about playing some nights at the Whiskey A-Go Go in Los Angeles during the late 60s, where the band really got their break. Densmore said there were some nights when it was magical, “and nobody owns that.” He was describing touching the unbroken web, something all artists have felt at one time or the other.

So when I read or hear about others speaking of an “age” or “period” of participation, I can’t run out and scream, “Hey, you’ve stolen that from me!” All I can do is rejoice that I was privileged enough to “see” the concept as others have and do.

Below is a must-view video from Blip.tv of a speech by Clay Shirky at this year’s Web 2.0 conference. I’m not suggesting that I’m in his league in terms of intelligence or extemporaneous speech, but listen to the absolute brilliance of his experiences with the unbroken web, especially the epiphany with his four-year old daughter.

The Industrial Age is another way of describing the era of cultural modernism, and I agree with Shirky that what we’re witnessing today — participating in today — is something brand new and that the future is very bright as a result of it.

Click To Play

As if it really needed defining, right?

In an ongoing case that continues to baffle common sense, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has refiled its suit against Universal Music Group for bullying YouTube into pulling a 29-second clip of little Holden Lenz “dancing” to background music of the Prince tune “Let’s Go Crazy.” The original suit was tossed out by Federal district court judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose, who said the EFF hadn’t proven their claim that the clip’s fair use of the song was “self-evident.” Any sane human being could recognize that it was, so the EFF’s new case spells it out, and it’s precious:

“The video bears all the hallmarks of a family home movie–it is somewhat blurry, the sound quality is poor, it was filmed with an ordinary digital video camera, and it focuses on documenting Holden’s ‘dance moves’ against a background of normal household activity, commotion and laughter,” the new complaint charges. “The snippet of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ that plays in the background (not dubbed as a soundtrack) of the Holden Video could not substitute for the original Prince song in any conceivable market.”

Kudos to the EFF! There’s no reply from Universal yet, and they’d be well-advised to just settle the thing, because if this makes it through the courts, it’ll become a fatal setback in their efforts to win the personal media battle through the legal system.

It was, as we say here in Texas, dumber than a bucket of hair to push this case in the first place (the video had only 29 views when Universal lawyers found it - now over 463,000), and anything from here on out just adds to the foolishness of Universal’s actions.

Doc Searls has been justifiably irked about certain aspects of Facebook (namely those relentless friend requests), but I apparently don’t know enough people for that to be a problem. I do, however, have a serious bone to pick with Linked-In and their endorsements and recommendations application. “Endorse so-and-so. It only takes a minute.” Well, what if I don’t want to?

It seems innocent enough, but here’s my quandary: how do I endorse some and not others in such a public place? If I endorse Joe but not Bill, how’s Bill going to feel if he finds out I’ve endorsed Joe? I also just don’t like the feel of a “request for endorsement.” It seems so, presumptuous, doesn’t it?

I think I object mostly to the expectation of acceptance that’s implied, so rather than use the thing as I suspect it was envisioned, I just refuse to endorse or recommend anybody. It’s not personal, folks.

I’ve been seeing this picture all over the Web today, and if you haven’t, you probably need to have somebody call an ambulance, because you’re likely not breathing. The picture is the hook for hundreds of scandalous stories of Miley posing topless, apologies (another), accusations, blame and the like. Miley is, of course, only 15-years old and a rising (hell, she’s already “risen”) star of the family-friendly Disney company. The photo comes from the latest issue of Vanity Fair, and I’ll spare you the other details.

I just have one question. How is this picture - in any way - considered “topless?”

Huh?

There is just no way you can stretch the language enough for this to be topless, for the word MEANS to expose one’s breasts. No breasts that I can see here. Move along.

This manufacturing of conflict is the American way of life for celebrities, and it’s a sad commentary on all of us. We’ve all seen as much from a 15-year old heading to the prom, so please, people, get over it.

The Senate, with the full blessing of our two Democratic candidates, is about to put the skids on the FCC’s decision to loosen cross-ownership rules, whereby media companies can own both a television station and a newspaper in the same market. Damn those big media people, huh? They want to control the voices in our communities, so we can’t let them narrow choices “for the American people.” Word.

Given the realities of the current media conundrum, however, this strikes me as a bit like waving off the RMS Carpathia on its journey to rescue the survivors of the Titanic. I mean, really, folks; who cares if big media is owned by one person? It’s all drifting slowly into the sands of yesterday anyway.

The issue is over independent and varied voices, which is a BIG part of the disruption in the first place.

Odd that I find myself actually siding with Kevin Martin.

It was two years ago this morning.

She will always be my inspiration. Today, I published another essay. She would be proud.

Here is the next in the ongoing series of essays “Local Media in a Postmodern World,” A Reasonable View of Tomorrow.

Media companies continue to reduce expenses in the wake of falling revenues, forcing newsroom restructuring on a fairly regular basis. Where this will end is anybody’s guess, and while some of it must be blamed on the economy, we all know that disruptive technologies and changing consumer behaviors are the biggest factors. I’ve felt for years that a likely future scenario is the rise of independent journalists who sell their output to local and other media outlets, and this essay expands that thinking. It features an interview with Gabe Rivera, creator of Techmeme, a remarkable aggregator of the tech media space. Techmeme is a perfect example of how the niche content of independent journalists could be brought together in one place to form an immediate understanding of what’s important, although the scale isn’t there yet to accomplish it at the local level.

There also doesn’t exist a definitive revenue model for such a scenario. Money. however, doesn’t always flow where we want it to flow, and its flow isn’t very predictable in a time of change. Of more importance, to me, is where is journalism headed, because money has a way of following eyeballs. The tools exist for anybody to be a publisher today, and this is the underlying reality that we cannot escape.

The first volume of this essay series is now available in book form (Reinventing Local Media), and you can find it at Amazon.com.

I had the great fortune to meet civil rights pioneer Dr. Benjamin Mays about a year before he passed away. At age 94, he was a guest on The 700 Club in the mid 80s (I was the show’s producer), and I’ve never forgotten a part of that interview. Pat asked him what was wrong “with today’s youth,” and his answer surprised everybody. “Parents,” Dr. Mays said, “are afraid to let their children experience the things that helped shape their own character.” Here was a man who had been through hell talking about shielding children from pain. Character. What an interesting word.

I thought of this today, because Chez Pazienza has posted an insightful journey into essentially the same question. Chez feels that the baby-faced David Archuleta is going to win American Idol this year, because he’s a textbook heartthrob for young teenage girls, a group that represents who’s really “in charge” in the marketing world of the west.

All adults have to do, is take back the world from their kids.

Don’t pretend that you don’t know what I’m talking about, because it’s become impossible to ignore: A generation of parents who spoil their children rotten — hubristically buying into the notion that their specific spawn is somehow special and deserving of society’s deference — combined with the technology that gives every computer or text savvy kid a voice, whether he or she deserves one or not, has conspired to hijack a good portion of what we see and hear. It’s a Wiki world, one in which a vocal majority can literally rewrite the rules and twist reality to suit its needs, and right now, the ‘tweens are the most vocal — and what they need, apparently, are crappy, overproduced, Disneyfied Stepford Teens to scream for and sing along to.

This is why Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers are all but inescapable right now — and why David Archuleta is next.

I don’t know about American Idol. I, gasp, don’t watch it, but I do relate to what Chez is saying, and it takes me back to the studio at CBN that day in 1983.

And I wonder what will happen when a generation awakens to the reality that they aren’t so bloody special after all. Character is refined in the fire of pain, even that which is felt at the receiving end of the word “no.” I agree with Dr. Mays that we do our children a disservice when we protect them from every form of pain that helped shape our own character. In so doing, we leave them weak and defenseless, and a shame to us and them.

Lately, as I’ve cruised cable before bedtime, I’ve come across a reality show where parents choose who will take their son or daughter on an exotic vacation. The other night, two of the guys vying to date this beautiful young woman actually waxed their eyebrows (ack!). It’s probably just a generational thing, but it was curious that neither could “keep it in their pants” in previous relationships. Eyebrows, yes. Faithfulness, no.

A couple of really special guys.

BTW, Chez has now “published” his journey out of a heroin nightmare, and it’s fascinating reading. You can buy a download at his website, Deus Exmalcontent.

In a piece called “WebMD Dampens Financial Prognosis On Ad Slowdown,” Online Media Daily reports that WebMD has lowered its financial guidance for 2008, citing a softening ad marketplace. I don’t have much to say about that, but it does give me the opportunity to display my favorite paragraph from the entire website (from the “About” page).

Note that I’m not linking to them.

A web application for realtors that’s been around awhile challenges the traditional media company role (and anybody else’s, for that matter) in the creation of hyperlocal information sites. Those media companies trying to execute a hyperlocal strategy will likely find Connecting Neighbors websites already in place in at least some of the communities they’re trying to reach. Connecting Neighbors targets neighborhoods and operates 14,000 websites across the country.

In a remarkable example of how anybody can be a media company today, the sites are managed and sponsored by realtors, who use them to mine for potential clients. While declining to provide site statistics, Connecting Neighbors Marketing Manager Lisa Knight told me that the sites do very well, especially with a sponsor who dedicates time and resources to marketing it within the neighborhood. Simple yard signs (like the one pictured on the right in Huntsville, Alabama), postcards and word-of-mouth are all it takes.

Connecting Neighbors offers you the opportunity to become the exclusive Neighborhood Expert in your targeted market, while locking out your competitors. Begin building relationships in your market today!

The sites are simple and spartan, but packed with useful information and opportunities for user-generated content. There are publisher disclaimers throughout the site where users interact, just like you’d find with any other media company. Classifieds are free, local news comes via Topix.net (note: your local news is likely being presented on these sites via Topix), a directory, recipes, lots of referrals and links, and the general “feel” of a community site. The difference is that it’s run by a realtor who’s using it to mine for clients. How terribly smart!

A few sites serve communities beyond just a neighborhood, and the company has experimented with aggregating neighborhoods. Some of the content is provided by feeds, but the quality of the sponsor’s marketing is what makes the difference in generating content from residents of the neighborhood.

The price to the sponsor varies and is based on the number (and in some cases, the prices) of homes in the neighborhood being served and the services the sponsor chooses to offer. “On average, our one time setup fee is $1.65 per home,” added Ms. Knight, “and on average our monthly hosting fee is $0.09 per home.” The Connecting Neighbors website lists the following options:

• A Neighborhood Website that allows residents to connect with one another, read community news, post free classified ads, share pictures, and more.
• A Neighborhood Newsletter that features information specific to the neighborhood and is emailed to residents each month.
• A personal Neighborhood Marketing Coach assigned to help announce and promote the program to neighborhood residents.
• Quickshow multimedia presentations to engage and welcome residents to their Neighborhood Website.
• MLS data integration (where available) to constantly provide up-to-date real estate information.
• Relationship Manager feature (where available) for Members to manage all of their communications with their new prospects!

This provides two important lessons for media companies. One, anybody can be a media company today. Any. Body. I have been harping on this for years, but those of us in “professional” media feel we can take our time in exploring niches, when we really can’t. The discovery of a company such as Connecting Neighbors, to me, is like getting to the end of a voyage to plant a flag on some distant land only to discover there’s at least one other flag already there. Two, the people formerly known as the advertisers are spending money that used to go to us in order to bypass (expensive) filters and speak directly to potential customers, something about which I have also written in the past.

We may look at these sites and feel a sense of well being, because they’re not “up to our standards” or they don’t carry “a trusted brand,” but in the end it’s all about meeting information needs. Connecting Neighbors does that well, and the users (a.k.a. the people formerly known as the audience) could give a hoot if it’s sponsored by a realtor or not. Moreover, if a media company did this, they’d likely look to realtors, among others, to sponsor them the moment they were launched.

The message here is loud and clear: certain well-funded advertisers don’t need us anymore.

(NOTE: Originally published in AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel client newsletter)

Steve Boriss offers insight into the roots of “professional journalism” in a Pajamas Media piece called “News Should Be Neither Fair Nor Balanced.”

Thomas Jefferson sought to establish a nation that featured maximum free expression, with a public allowed to think for themselves and their collective wisdom valued as “the consent of the governed.” He wanted newspapers to support this system by dispersing information and engaging in a process of opinion-driven “attack and defense” — in his view, this was the best and only way to get to the truth, deal with unknowns and unknowables, and absorb the personal preferences of a free people. Jefferson put his money where his mouth was. When his rival, Alexander Hamilton, helped found a newspaper to promote federalist ideas, Jefferson co-founded with James Madison a tremendously unfair and imbalanced newspaper to attack it. In case you missed it, this means that Thomas Jefferson did not believe in fair and balanced news either.

Boriss also looks at one of my favorite topics, the Creel Committee and provides an outstanding comment about the fruit of committee member Walter Lippmann, the father of professional journalism.

His proposed remedy has become our journalism of today — a rough-and-tumble craft that now falsely presents itself as a scientific profession, claiming to deliver singular truths using objective methods backed by a process of verification. Fairness? Balance? What do they have to do with it? Why settle for that when journalism elites can deliver something even better — true, correct answers in all matters of public policy?

It’s great to see other observers writing about these things, because they’re important at a time when we’re all trying to figure out what to do and where to go next. Journalism is a trade best practiced by passionate writers who wish to use their gifts to make a difference and advance the culture on behalf of everybody. Facts need no protecting, so argument should be one of its roots, for what good is knowledge based on experience, education or, yes, opinion, if one is unable to express it? As Jeff Jarvis has been writing lately, the contemporary press functions largely as a single entity — what he’s calling the “press-sphere” — and I certainly don’t believe that was ever the intention or view of the people who wrote the First Amendment.

As I read Steve’s essay, I couldn’t help but think that we wouldn’t be having this conversation, if the financial stress on mainstream media wasn’t as acute as it is today. And since I honestly believe the discussion is overdue, I have to view what’s taking place as a “correction” of some sort. Life is like that. It has a way of bringing things back to the source, when excess moves them away.

Walter Lippmann genuinely felt that the “mass” of people in our culture was prone to myth and superstition, and he wanted to do something about it. An educated elite who would lead, he believed, was the way to go. Perhaps he was right, but his solution has proven to a disaster, because it turns out that even educated elites are in it for themselves.

From John Battelle via Denise Caruso comes this wonderful video of Charlie Rose interviewing Charlie Rose about the Web. Even if you don’t like Rose, this is funny.

God love the genius of the people formerly known as the audience.

“‘Charlie Rose’ by Samuel Beckett”

Read my latest essay.

Then read Scrolling: No Longer a No-No by Poynter’s Fons Tuinstra, where he writes that scrolling is actually the tool of choice for younger users.

Told you so.