The news I had been subconsciously dreading since a couple months ago when internet start-up FloridaThinks went on summer hiatus arrived in my inbox at 3:07 am, as many other of its editions had over the last seven months. It read “FloridaThinks was a success in all areas except revenues. But financial reality demands that we cease publication.” Read the whole piece HERE.
From the beginning I saw their idea as very much in keeping with the spirit of The Village Square and was rooting them on.
As I was reading over the last edition of FloridaThinks, I heard Jonathan Alter say on TV “one of the big stories of our politics is the wacky has moved from the fringe to the center of our politics.” Had John and his cohorts launched an angry online screed, maybe they might have made a go of it financially. Fury is good for the bottom line these days, the market for mainlined ideological heroine is strong and growing. But offering up citizenship, doing the hard work of reading and understanding, it’s like serving up a plate of broccoli and apparently we’re not eating our vegetables these days. Of course we all know that over time broccoli makes you strong and smart and healthy and heroine kills you but we’re in no mood to be reminded.
So cheers to John Koenig and FloridaThinks for giving us the vegetables Florida needs to grow strong for seven months, and doing it in style.
And while it is sadly too late to change their financial future, maybe today’s the day to do something about someone else trying hard to get us the information we need to make good decisions about our future, either locally or at a state or national level. It can be as simple as restoring your subscription to your local paper.
“Gannett picks Pluck for moderation” reads a headline on a recent press release from “social media application developer” Pluck.com.
Gannett owns four Florida newspapers, so it’s not too soon to start praying that their publishers will resist headquarters’ decision to outsource” the task of “moderating on-line comments.”
The outsourcing has already begun at the Gannett papers in Green Bay Wisconsin and Hattiesburg Mississippi. There, as here, readers will continue to enjoy 24/7 access to the papers’ cyber-newshole to expound, editorialize and randomly pontificate on news stories, a 21st century innovation known as “posting.” Posters may make unlimited contributions to the cyber-marketplace of ideas irrespective of their personal knowledge of the events reported, willingness to identify themselves, or blood alcohol level.
Many posts appear to have been phoned in by Mel Gibson. Readers of delicate sensibilities have no recourse but to “report abuse.”
Most readers don’t bother because, as one Gannetteer put it: “Our online staff can’t be everywhere at all times, and it can be difficult to offer a prompt response to every claim of abuse.”
But Gannett’s not pluckin’ around anymore. Under its deal with Pluck.com, abuse reports will be reviewed within 30 minutes for “compliance with Gannett guidelines.”
The Pluckers will work from remote and undisclosed locations. They could be in Montana. Or on Mars. They could be holograms for all we know. Has the industry learned nothing from McClatchy’s ill-fated attempt to outsource the Miami Herald’s copy editing to India?
Not so long ago, when newspapers had 30% profit margins and a better public image, every word published under the paper’s banner passed through multiple layers of scrutiny by people known as editors who jealously guarded this prerogative.
Epic legal battles were fought all the way to the Supreme Court by journalists who would sooner have a root canal than yield a column inch to unfiltered commentary by anybody whose bread was buttered by someone other than the newspaper’s owner. If Thomas Jefferson came back from the dead with an op-ed piece in hand, he would be subjected to the same gauntlet of red pencils that everyone else had to run.
Chief Justice Warren Burger—a Nixon appointee and not a particular fan of the press—wrote, “For better or worse, editing is what editors are for.”
The 20th century publishers who opened their checkbooks to keep government out of their newsrooms would be stunned at how much of their branded corners of cyberspace have been handed off to cranks, crackpots and cowards, and downright stupefied at the watered down journalism gene pool we have to thank for Pluck.com.
—- Florence Snyder is a corporate and First Amendment lawyer. Contact her at lawyerflo@gmail.com.
(Why not hop on over to our friends at Purple State of Mind to read this post there and visit awhile as long as you’re there.)
Last week Glenn Beck used his infamous blackboards to write something I agree with. Beck says the cure to what ales us can be captured in a handful of words:
Thrift
Humility
Charity
Motivation
Hard work
Honor
Instead, Beck says what we’re doing can be more accurately described in a different handful:
Spending
Arrogance
Excess
Entitlement
Corruption
Redistribution of wealth
(First a detour to say that I don’t think redistribution of wealth belongs in that list. I don’t think it is even clear it’s occurring. My husband and I got an $800 credit this year for just being employed – what a leftist pinko sort of idea – and returning to the tax code under Clinton hardly seems excessive to me in the sweep of the history of tax rates.)
But otherwise I think this comes close to nailing it. As many of us agree that Western civilization seems to be toying with circling the drain, it is in no small part because of the many excesses afforded by our affluence. And it isn’t just elected officials who seem so good at the behaviors bringing us down, it’s who George Will called the “vaunted American voter.”
Yep. We have met the enemy and it is us. And if there is any hope for our future the first step – as any AA member knows – is admitting we’ve got a problem.
It is a moment for posterity when someone who leans left can watch Glenn Beck and find they substantially agree on the largest issues confronting us as a nation. Only thing left is to turn our attention to what we know we must do, sacrifice together for the greatness of America.
Uh, notsofast.
According to Beck it’s only half of us who are engaging in such behaviors, it’s only half of our elected officials. It appears that Obama could wake up tomorrow as Barry Goldwater and Beck would still have him in his cross hairs. (It should be noted here that many on the left think he already has.) In the constant Congressional parade of acting out, Beck was only able to see half of the transgressions.
This should make it extremely clear that we are getting our information from people who are essentially helping us mainline IV heroin to benefit their ratings. Where I come from, we call them pushers. They want to give us what we want, who cares about what we need. Each evening, they draw the water on our respective warm bubble baths of agreement and self-righteousness.
But nobody, no matter how many blackboards they write on, can make you climb in.
“Every speech I make I say the same thing: We’ve got a new generation of people who wake up every morning and they pick their TV channel that reinforces pre-existing prejudices, they listen to the radio show that does it and go to a website that does it and they go to bed at night not thinking the other side is wrong but that they are evil.” — Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe this morning.
Apparently David Gregory of Meet the Press passed on the idea of offering fact checks of guests after the shows. Last night on the Colbert Report:
Nation, it’s no secret. I’m a huge fan of the Sunday morning talk shows. They’re like a grownup version of Saturday morning cartoons only the cartoons have more productive debates.
… They certainly would endorse our strategy (if only they knew what it was). Our project We the Wiki, currently busily being built as part of our Knight Foundation project, will not allow for anonymous participation. You write it, you own it. We think anonymous commenting is one of the things that has caused our national dialogue to jump the shark and we think it needs to be un-jumped.
When news organizations, after years of hanging back, embraced the idea of allowing readers to post comments online, the assumption was that anyone could weigh in and remain anonymous. But now, that idea is under attack from several directions. The Washington Post plans to revise its comments policy, and one of the ideas under consideration is to give greater prominence to commenters who use their real names. The New York Times, The Post and many other papers have moved in stages toward requiring
that people register before posting comments, providing some information about themselves that is not shown onscreen.
The Huffington Post soon will announce changes, including ranking commenters based in part on how well other readers and trust their writing. “Anonymity is just the way things are done. It’s an accepted part of the Internet, but there’s no question that people hide behind anonymity to make vile or controversial comments that they might not choose to make in their real names,” said Arianna Huffington, a founder of The Huffington Post.
“I feel that this is almost like an education process. As the rules of the road are changing and the Internet is growing up, the trend is away from anonymity.”
The year is 2020, and all that remains of print journalism is the New York Times, USATODAY….and the National Enquirer. Google has been broken up into twelve competing companies. 97.9% of all news websites have installed pay walls. All state and local public records are available on-line…..for a fee. Vice President Marco Rubio has inherited the Oval Office from President Sarah Palin, who resigned to resume her career….as a journalist.
That’s the way it was in a world conceived by Miami First Amendment lawyer Tom Julin for The Florida Bar’s annual Media Law Conference. The Conference dates back to the 1970s when Wall Street was beginning to see journalism as a cash cow, rather than the watchdog the Founding Fathers intended. In the 1980s, as media companies’ profit margins climbed past 30%, hundreds of lawyers, judges and journalists crowded into hotel ballrooms to hear media A-listers opine on the future of journalism. Times and travel budgets being what they are, the 2010 Conference was a far less lavish affair. At times, the speakers outnumbered the paying audience.
One can only wonder how 20th century Conference speakers like Katharine Graham, Abe Rosenthal and Fred Friendly would have responded as Julin prodded veteran reporters, academics and fellow media lawyers to answer questions which have, for decades, vexed journalism think-tanks….in 140 characters or less. Julin lightened the mood with James Cameron-level audio visual references to narcissistic presidential hopefuls and their tango-dancing soulmates. Still, it was a sobering picture he painted of a not-too-distant future where the body politic has the attention span of a goldfish.
Some think that day has already arrived, but Conference-goers found reason to be hopeful that real news and well-reasoned commentary will adapt to the new and much leaner environment.
Some of the 21st century’s best explanatory journalism is happening on Comedy Central; Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone have the Peabody awards to prove it. These modern-day Mark Twains provide a national audience the kind of fact-based, impossible-to-ignore editorial voices that Florida used to take for granted.
Howard Troxler and Carl Hiaasen are, thank God, still with us. But Florida’s increasingly anemic editorial pages are no match for state government’s standing army of flacks and flunkies who pay lip-service to transparency while actively obstructing reporters in pursuit of stories their bosses don’t want told.
It’s always cause for celebration when front-page news slips past the government’s spinmeisters and makes it to the front page, and Conference-goers were spellbound as Gina Smith of the State newspaper in Columbia, S.C. described the combination of luck, instinct and shoeleather involved in her pursuit of Gov. Mark Sanford down the “Appalachian Trail” to the Atlanta airport.
To a roomful of reporters who are expected to do impactful investigations while blogging at 20 minute intervals, it was a cheering reminder that one reporter can change the course of history.
A reminder of another kind was delivered by the Miami Herald’s former general counsel Richard Ovelmen. In a moving tribute to his friend and mentor, legendary First Amendment lawyer Dan Paul, who died this year at age 85, Ovelmen recalled how Paul leveraged his bulging Rolodex in the service of all of Florida’s journalists—not just the ones who worked for Knight Newspapers and the New York Times Company in the decades when they could afford Paul’s eye-popping hourly rates.
Under Paul’s direction, Ovelmen recalled, Florida’s media lawyers took up the cause of reporters in places they could barely pronounce.
If a city clerk in Opa Locka withheld public records, or a judge in Palatka threw a reporter out of a courtroom, publishers of mom-and-pop newspapers could count on Paul to declare a constitutional crisis and dispatch an army of lawyers bearing briefs that argued, “News delayed is news denied.”
With 20th century media on life support, displaced journalists are bringing their craft to cyberspace. The lonely pamphleteer is on-line at places like Broward Bulldog, Health News Florida, and FloridaThinks, looking for a business model that will support the never-ending mission of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”
There’s a lot at stake, and The Florida Bar deserves thanks for reminding us that failure is not an option.
——
Florence Snyder is a corporate and First Amendment lawyer. Contact her at lawyerflo@gmail.com.
Parody photo courtesy of Random Pixels. Tom Julin’s “Journalism and Other Financial Disasters” was presented at The Florida Bar’s Media Law Conference, March 26, 2010.
“We live in a world of media fiction. Where talk radio and your business everything gets presented in black/white red state/blue state left/right terms. And I don’t think that’s the way the real world is. It’s not the way I carry about my life as exemplified by people I meet on a day to day basis. It only exists in the world in which you and I work. And I, frankly, have had enough of it. I frankly think that stirring the pot at the ends of the political spectrum as been terrible for the country and I want no more of it.”
“People in the middle need a voice. We’re underrepresented in the world of talk radio and on cable stations because the bookers they only look for those who they can introduce as a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat. That’s not the bulk of America right now. What about the folks in the middle?”
Smerconish wrote about his decision to register as an Independent: “Collegiality is nonexistent today, and any outreach across an aisle is castigated as weakness by the talking heads who constantly stir a pot of discontent.”
