Humanity is younger than global warming and the conditions that cause and have caused global warming.
As the world heats, the authorities among our relatively young species look for industries to blame and nations to blame – and we come up with formulas and needs for more formulas, all of which are based on economic legislation and policies. Kyoto stands as a high-profile example – as the entirety of the Kyoto proposal rests on economic foundations, with penalties targeted at western civilization and the industries that feed western civilization. The need to do something – the act of doing something defined in economic terms – is underscored by parades of scientists who state and restate that the planet is indeed getting hotter.
Questioning these financial formulas is seen in popular media and culture as illogical and as misinformed ranting. Cocktail conversation on the subject takes on a certain smug and unruly demeanor should one suggest that we are living in an unusually calm period in geologic history; that we are existing between ice ages and that snow during winter is not an entirely welcome occurrence for our frail species; that life on our blue planet benefits from the wobbly course of its orbit – with the poles tilting as they do – and that from time to time that wobbly orbit can slip a bit too far and turn our sweet blue planet deathly white; that the planet heats and cools through vents on land and undersea and in manners that we do not understand.
“Seemingly,” wrote Bill McGuire in The Guardian, “the fact that we are still within an interglacial period, during which the ice has largely retreated to its polar fastnesses, has been forgotten – and replaced with the commonly-held view that one good thing you can say about global warming is that it will at least stave off the return of the glaciers.”
The conversation tends to grow quiet when the facts arrive at the party. We are an incredibly fragile species – and one that holds desperately to its crutches. The drinks are put down on the coasters and the coats are summoned when these subjects are explored. We need to believe that we are special; that there is a wondrous place for us when we die; that our wildly fragile planet is ours alone to nourish or to destroy.
A recent video has emerged on the internet and has spread virally under this curiously anthropocentric banner of power and economics-based logic (http://youtube.com/watch?v=bDsIFspVzfI). In the video, the narrator challenges the viewer to test the formula he has drawn up in four simple boxes. The quadrants point to a financial coaxing. Inaction will almost certainly lead to doom, as demonstrated in the Business 101-type rows and columns. One wonders how many other thorny global questions can be put down on graph paper.
And so we are left with a truth – the world is warming at present.
Can we create a cooler planet through economic incentives and investments? Even if we could, do we want to create an artificially air conditioned planet? The shortcomings in the above-mentioned video and in these questions are found in a dangerous ignorance of geologic time and history. Every 15,000 to 20,000 years, the planet cycles through a heating period – called an interglacial period – and we are nearing the end of one of these periods, according to the geologic record. When the heating ends, our orbiting rock starts to cool – and the earth will regress back to an ice age environment, where much of North America, Europe, and Asia will be covered in glaciers.
The geologic record points to frightening spikes in heating and cooling periods as well. An example of one of the more likely spikes we may witness is the ticking bomb that is Yellowstone National Park. One of the largest super-volcanoes in the world lies just beneath the surface of Yellowstone – and it is active. Recent reports in the press and in scientific journals have noted increases in this activity. Yellowstone’s last major eruption was 640,000 years ago – and it has been exploding with a fair amount of regularity every 600,000 years, so it can be argued that we are overdue. The ashes released from an eruption of this nature would significantly cool the planet and could hasten our return to an ice age.
Facts have a way of putting things in perspective. It is important to understand that we do not understand how the macro scales of the earth tilt. The planet is heating – but it is doing so through mechanisms and courses that we do not yet comprehend. It is important also to come to grips with the idea that we have not invented global warming and that its trends are not a byproduct of the relatively brief history of Homo sapiens.
In some circles, questions are being posed on whether or not the earth is a living organism – and the heating and cooling cycles may point to a larger behavior that can help us determine the broader nature of our host. Known as the Gaia Hypothesis, it states that “…the physical and chemical condition of the surface of the Earth, of the atmosphere, and of the oceans has been and is actively made fit and comfortable by the presence of life itself. This is in contrast to the conventional wisdom which held that life adapted to the planetary conditions as it and they evolved their separate ways.” If this hypothesis is proven correct, and if our host should become significantly warmer – mimicking the fundamentals of a fever – we may be in for a challenge that will transcend the collective weight of our currencies.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Reflections on a Declining Transit System and Our Origins
Our problem is with the switch.
This is announced through the train’s PA system. We are on a 7:22am train heading eastbound to Manhattan. A woman sitting across from me says something, but I am thinking about the switch. She is wearing a bulky wool coat and holding an earphone between her fingers – the other earphone is buried in her ear. She is looking at me peevishly.
“Were you talking to me,” I ask.
“What did they say? I missed it.”
“There’s a problem with a switch.”
“What does that mean?” She seems like an important person – has a satchel of documents and an expensive-looking scarf.
“It means you should probably get comfortable.”
The woman smiles awkwardly, stuffs the earphone back in her ear and closes her eyes. I listen to the hot air blowers and look out through the sparse trees at the small anonymous backyards. The land rises where it was altered to meet the tracks and the gray stones that swell below the tines and iron binding and the rails and our train upon the rails.
***
It is early December and we are having a bathroom done. Having a bathroom done means the original one must be torn apart. The gutted space – adorned in tufts of insulation and the snaking yaw of electrical cords and copper pipes – represents our only shower/bath. We do not live in one of those houses so common these days – one-to-one ratios of full baths to bedrooms, as if we are a country of mud-slung diuretic addicts.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Manufacturing, Mining, and Construction Statistics – Americans spent $106 million in alterations among owner-occupied properties in 2006 alone. This investment is partly due to an antsy culture that is nourished on its need to perpetually improve itself. It is also due to the simple fact that the older spaces in question no longer functioned properly.
Now I am throwing some necessities in a bag – a washcloth, a pair of underwear, a towel. It is just after 9 pm on a Tuesday night and it is starting to snow. I will have to drive about three miles west to shower at the YMCA. I have never showered there and am certain it is a very public facility. I imagine there will be plenty of open space – of the bare form and comfort usually reserved for prisons; there will be men propped here and there in casual repose, in all uncomfortable manner of natural states and postures.
“I’m sure there are curtains or something,” my wife says.
“There aren’t going to be any curtains.”
“Well, there’ll be something – compartments or walls or something. The women’s showers have curtained stalls.”
I toss a balled pair of socks into my canvas bag, zip it shut. “Maybe I can shower in the women’s locker room then.”
She does not offer this as an option.
***
The switch is frozen and we are waiting on a technician.
Every year, winter is a new phenomenon to the New Jersey Transit train fleet and the infrastructure that supports that fleet. I watch a slouched and somewhat obese man playing Tetris on his cell phone and he somehow demonstrates my interest in making our mutual situation known more broadly. I take out my Blackberry and go to www.njtransit.com. I plan to find a phone number and to speak to somebody there about winter and what it means for both atmospheric temperatures and the ability for metallic objects – like rail lines and switches – to retain temperatures.
Metals are conductors. They are conduits – and this is why they are used in cooking and in electric wires and cables and in industrial plates and insulators and in hosts of known technologies in need of conductors. I plan to mention all of this to the customer service person – but there is a Contact Us link and when I click it I am taken to a screen of blank forms.
You can use this form to send feedback to NJ TRANSIT.
I am not interested in using a form to send feedback. I want to talk to somebody about hot and cold transference and atoms and what it means in metals – and in turn what that means for switches and rail lines and the trains that ride on rail lines. I want to talk about the technician’s tools in this instance and how one taps a frozen switch.
This cannot be accomplished in a form – and I see that the form’s purpose is found in the consolidation and disposability of thought.
***
The men’s locker room at the YMCA is locked. It is now 10 pm. This is my only option and – having banked on it – I have run myself harder than usual on the YMCA treadmills and machines, and I am a study in perspiration and the bacteria that build civilizations in perspiration.
“The locker room’s locked,” I tell a bored-looking desk attendant. The whole thing seems irritatingly appropriate – a locker room should be locked.
“You need a key,” he says.
“I realize that. How do I get one?”
“You give me your membership card and I give you a key.”
The key has an elastic band and I affix it to my wrist and shuffle off like some kind of inpatient. There should be a sign somewhere or some direction on the whole card-for-a-key program. It could be that I am in need of too many signs. That is possible. The routine compass that I so regularly consult has limited notches in the points between North and East and South and West. And getting lost is getting easier.
The temptation is to exist on a line between two points, but it is more accurate to understand that I am living in a pudding.
***
Japan operates its network of trains through numerous tactical challenges. The population in Tokyo alone – at 12.58 million people – is 53% larger than that of New York City. Tokyo boasts the most extensive urban railway network in the world, operating 101 passenger train lines in the service of the city alone. It is estimated that 20 million people use rail as their primary means of transport in the metropolitan area daily. Beyond the strain of population, Tokyo also must contend with the structural threat of earthquake tremors.
And Tokyo’s trains are on time daily – to the minute.
We have just creaked past the switch and have come to another stop. We are told that we must now wait for a westbound freight train. We are on an eastbound train, heading for New York City where the day is ticking by. Referencing New Jersey Transit’s 2005 statistics, average daily boarding at New York Penn Station is a mere 68,000 passengers.
68,000 > 20,000,000 and Freight > Homo Sapiens.
I am unable to discern these equations.
***
A strikingly hairy naked man is staring vacantly at the faucets he has just opened. The shower space is a simple rectangle – maybe ten feet wide by twenty feet deep, with shower heads spaced four feet apart on both walls. I drop my bag onto a small bench and take out my towel and balled socks and underwear and everything. The man looks at me and nods when I look at him directly.
“You might not get hot water from that one,” he says.
I am not interested in receiving any advice at the moment. There are borders and there are DMZs – and some people say that they are one and the same, but they are not. I am not a communal animal. This is uncomfortable for no other reason than our common anatomy is ugly.
I open the valves and the spray is almost immediately the right temperature. I step into it, let it rake and permeate and work its magic unhindered. I am comforted in the simple closure of the washcloth upon my face. It is warm and heavy and I am malleable, having come as far as I have from the waters and going now back to the water and to the wilderness of origin – piped as it is.
This is announced through the train’s PA system. We are on a 7:22am train heading eastbound to Manhattan. A woman sitting across from me says something, but I am thinking about the switch. She is wearing a bulky wool coat and holding an earphone between her fingers – the other earphone is buried in her ear. She is looking at me peevishly.
“Were you talking to me,” I ask.
“What did they say? I missed it.”
“There’s a problem with a switch.”
“What does that mean?” She seems like an important person – has a satchel of documents and an expensive-looking scarf.
“It means you should probably get comfortable.”
The woman smiles awkwardly, stuffs the earphone back in her ear and closes her eyes. I listen to the hot air blowers and look out through the sparse trees at the small anonymous backyards. The land rises where it was altered to meet the tracks and the gray stones that swell below the tines and iron binding and the rails and our train upon the rails.
***
It is early December and we are having a bathroom done. Having a bathroom done means the original one must be torn apart. The gutted space – adorned in tufts of insulation and the snaking yaw of electrical cords and copper pipes – represents our only shower/bath. We do not live in one of those houses so common these days – one-to-one ratios of full baths to bedrooms, as if we are a country of mud-slung diuretic addicts.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Manufacturing, Mining, and Construction Statistics – Americans spent $106 million in alterations among owner-occupied properties in 2006 alone. This investment is partly due to an antsy culture that is nourished on its need to perpetually improve itself. It is also due to the simple fact that the older spaces in question no longer functioned properly.
Now I am throwing some necessities in a bag – a washcloth, a pair of underwear, a towel. It is just after 9 pm on a Tuesday night and it is starting to snow. I will have to drive about three miles west to shower at the YMCA. I have never showered there and am certain it is a very public facility. I imagine there will be plenty of open space – of the bare form and comfort usually reserved for prisons; there will be men propped here and there in casual repose, in all uncomfortable manner of natural states and postures.
“I’m sure there are curtains or something,” my wife says.
“There aren’t going to be any curtains.”
“Well, there’ll be something – compartments or walls or something. The women’s showers have curtained stalls.”
I toss a balled pair of socks into my canvas bag, zip it shut. “Maybe I can shower in the women’s locker room then.”
She does not offer this as an option.
***
The switch is frozen and we are waiting on a technician.
Every year, winter is a new phenomenon to the New Jersey Transit train fleet and the infrastructure that supports that fleet. I watch a slouched and somewhat obese man playing Tetris on his cell phone and he somehow demonstrates my interest in making our mutual situation known more broadly. I take out my Blackberry and go to www.njtransit.com. I plan to find a phone number and to speak to somebody there about winter and what it means for both atmospheric temperatures and the ability for metallic objects – like rail lines and switches – to retain temperatures.
Metals are conductors. They are conduits – and this is why they are used in cooking and in electric wires and cables and in industrial plates and insulators and in hosts of known technologies in need of conductors. I plan to mention all of this to the customer service person – but there is a Contact Us link and when I click it I am taken to a screen of blank forms.
You can use this form to send feedback to NJ TRANSIT.
I am not interested in using a form to send feedback. I want to talk to somebody about hot and cold transference and atoms and what it means in metals – and in turn what that means for switches and rail lines and the trains that ride on rail lines. I want to talk about the technician’s tools in this instance and how one taps a frozen switch.
This cannot be accomplished in a form – and I see that the form’s purpose is found in the consolidation and disposability of thought.
***
The men’s locker room at the YMCA is locked. It is now 10 pm. This is my only option and – having banked on it – I have run myself harder than usual on the YMCA treadmills and machines, and I am a study in perspiration and the bacteria that build civilizations in perspiration.
“The locker room’s locked,” I tell a bored-looking desk attendant. The whole thing seems irritatingly appropriate – a locker room should be locked.
“You need a key,” he says.
“I realize that. How do I get one?”
“You give me your membership card and I give you a key.”
The key has an elastic band and I affix it to my wrist and shuffle off like some kind of inpatient. There should be a sign somewhere or some direction on the whole card-for-a-key program. It could be that I am in need of too many signs. That is possible. The routine compass that I so regularly consult has limited notches in the points between North and East and South and West. And getting lost is getting easier.
The temptation is to exist on a line between two points, but it is more accurate to understand that I am living in a pudding.
***
Japan operates its network of trains through numerous tactical challenges. The population in Tokyo alone – at 12.58 million people – is 53% larger than that of New York City. Tokyo boasts the most extensive urban railway network in the world, operating 101 passenger train lines in the service of the city alone. It is estimated that 20 million people use rail as their primary means of transport in the metropolitan area daily. Beyond the strain of population, Tokyo also must contend with the structural threat of earthquake tremors.
And Tokyo’s trains are on time daily – to the minute.
We have just creaked past the switch and have come to another stop. We are told that we must now wait for a westbound freight train. We are on an eastbound train, heading for New York City where the day is ticking by. Referencing New Jersey Transit’s 2005 statistics, average daily boarding at New York Penn Station is a mere 68,000 passengers.
68,000 > 20,000,000 and Freight > Homo Sapiens.
I am unable to discern these equations.
***
A strikingly hairy naked man is staring vacantly at the faucets he has just opened. The shower space is a simple rectangle – maybe ten feet wide by twenty feet deep, with shower heads spaced four feet apart on both walls. I drop my bag onto a small bench and take out my towel and balled socks and underwear and everything. The man looks at me and nods when I look at him directly.
“You might not get hot water from that one,” he says.
I am not interested in receiving any advice at the moment. There are borders and there are DMZs – and some people say that they are one and the same, but they are not. I am not a communal animal. This is uncomfortable for no other reason than our common anatomy is ugly.
I open the valves and the spray is almost immediately the right temperature. I step into it, let it rake and permeate and work its magic unhindered. I am comforted in the simple closure of the washcloth upon my face. It is warm and heavy and I am malleable, having come as far as I have from the waters and going now back to the water and to the wilderness of origin – piped as it is.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Walking Shoes and The Consumption
I am walking past the shops on West 4th, enjoying the crisp November air that is snapping from the Hudson. I have become more slumberous, heavier now in the cooler tick – and the more carnal creep toward winter. I can feel it in my knees – weight and age and season – each step a nano-bit more ginger than the last.
I am breaking in a new pair of walking shoes. I am told that “walking shoes” has a distinctly dated ring, (the actual phrase shared with me was “elderly-sounding”), and in mixed company I will defer to the Dicks Sporting Goods “trail runners” identification. It is more acceptable to use the retail descriptive when attempting to be seamless in social settings. And seamlessness is important. But I am marveling at their rubber-toed ugliness now, their waterproof and cleat-soled utility, their cushy knee-preserving comforts.
I bought the walking shoes as a small material reward to myself. They are simple and tangible items that can be pointed to and brought out and worn and steadied and brandished. Dicks Sporting Goods was having an Election Day Weekend promotion. My walking shoes were exclusive of that promotion. That was what the Dicks Sporting Goods saleswoman told me. I am not usually drawn to exclusivities, but the promise of a deal around a democratic event pulled me in.
Yesterday was Election Day. I live in New Jersey, where the crisp air seems to originate today and where the Democratic Party columns were widely selected in curtained machines in towns in every county. New Jersey’s population is projected to decrease for the first time in recorded history. The projected reduction is due specifically to the ongoing increases in property taxes and automobile insurance. I am interested in population movements, and this abandonment seems so clearly tied to the Democratic Party and their fiscal policies. And yet the populations vote them in again.
I live in a misinformed state.
One of my neighbors had a political sign planted on his lawn. It read:
VOTE YES FOR PROPOSAL #3
I did not know Proposal #3 and was not sure that I could trust it. There are too many biblical and other conspiracy associations with that number for me to feel entirely comfortable in choosing it. A few houses north, another neighbor’s political sign read:
KEEP TAXES DOWN – VOTE NO ON ALL PROPOSALS
That one had a nice nihilistic ring to it. Vote no on everything.
Now I am in Washington Square Park. Here there are jugglers, lazing NYU students, miscreants and the alternative mindsets. But I am stopped by the strikingly friendly smile of a dark-skinned Caribbean man. He is beseeching me with a simple chrome-toothed smile – brilliant sunlight refracted and dancing in his mouth.
He is a Siren. Somewhere I know this truth – that he is some kind of sentinel, gleaming as he is in this small Manhattan park. Everything is easy. He is and I am and the cement below us both is – but that could be due to my shoes. A cadence is being readied, and then it is delivered – a kind concussion. And he is speaking.
“Yo,” he says, smiling – a dazzle of silver teeth, easy brown eyes.
I stop, my hands dumb and dangling at my sides. I have nothing to say – coming to a stop is comment enough.
“You shopping,” he asks.
I want to show him my walking shoes. I am in the market for other things – pants and maybe a new belt. My waist has a determination in its somewhat new thicker circumference. But it is not possible that he knows this. I guess I could tell him. I want to tell him so much more – a confession I have been honing like a yeast. I have so much to share, so vast an inventory to explore. I wonder too now if he is shopping – because he has found a store between us. I will say it and I will not say it together.
Mitochondria have their own DNA. I was brought up through the public school system to believe them to be the POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL. The reality is different. It is a completely different organism that lives inside the host cell – a symbiotic relationship struck a long, long, long time ago to give birth to the kingdoms of complex multi-cellular creatures. The bigger fact is that before Mitochondria, life – as simple as it was – participated in savage wars. Bacteria against bacteria against viruses against bacteria. The curiosity in all of this is that this partnership between an invaded strand of bacteria and its Mitochondria invader yielded every dimension of visible life form. It is simply the most productive known partnership ever.
Our species is a member of the visible life matter spawned from this partnership. This is why we share so much DNA with bacteria. We are also participants in this festering war between cells – punctuated here and there with the benign common cold and moving on through the more nasty viral and bacterial applications. It is my core and most fundamental belief that human beings have been assembled through this ancient partnership with Mitochondria to eradicate the single-celled enemies of the Mitochondria. That is our purpose. The assembly of our brain matter is a mobility to construct and deconstruct on visible and invisible planes. In this regard, we are puppet-like grunts – but our anthropocentric belief systems will likely not allow us to fully embrace our role in just one colony of an empire we can barely comprehend. The pharmaceutical onslaught that we have created is just one example of the Mitochondria’s war machine. We are a very impressive weapon assemblage, and our achievements in other areas and miscues in other areas are side projects against the overall Mitochondria objective.
I am not shopping. I am too much entangled in consumption. And there is a season upon us.
I am breaking in a new pair of walking shoes. I am told that “walking shoes” has a distinctly dated ring, (the actual phrase shared with me was “elderly-sounding”), and in mixed company I will defer to the Dicks Sporting Goods “trail runners” identification. It is more acceptable to use the retail descriptive when attempting to be seamless in social settings. And seamlessness is important. But I am marveling at their rubber-toed ugliness now, their waterproof and cleat-soled utility, their cushy knee-preserving comforts.
I bought the walking shoes as a small material reward to myself. They are simple and tangible items that can be pointed to and brought out and worn and steadied and brandished. Dicks Sporting Goods was having an Election Day Weekend promotion. My walking shoes were exclusive of that promotion. That was what the Dicks Sporting Goods saleswoman told me. I am not usually drawn to exclusivities, but the promise of a deal around a democratic event pulled me in.
Yesterday was Election Day. I live in New Jersey, where the crisp air seems to originate today and where the Democratic Party columns were widely selected in curtained machines in towns in every county. New Jersey’s population is projected to decrease for the first time in recorded history. The projected reduction is due specifically to the ongoing increases in property taxes and automobile insurance. I am interested in population movements, and this abandonment seems so clearly tied to the Democratic Party and their fiscal policies. And yet the populations vote them in again.
I live in a misinformed state.
One of my neighbors had a political sign planted on his lawn. It read:
VOTE YES FOR PROPOSAL #3
I did not know Proposal #3 and was not sure that I could trust it. There are too many biblical and other conspiracy associations with that number for me to feel entirely comfortable in choosing it. A few houses north, another neighbor’s political sign read:
KEEP TAXES DOWN – VOTE NO ON ALL PROPOSALS
That one had a nice nihilistic ring to it. Vote no on everything.
Now I am in Washington Square Park. Here there are jugglers, lazing NYU students, miscreants and the alternative mindsets. But I am stopped by the strikingly friendly smile of a dark-skinned Caribbean man. He is beseeching me with a simple chrome-toothed smile – brilliant sunlight refracted and dancing in his mouth.
He is a Siren. Somewhere I know this truth – that he is some kind of sentinel, gleaming as he is in this small Manhattan park. Everything is easy. He is and I am and the cement below us both is – but that could be due to my shoes. A cadence is being readied, and then it is delivered – a kind concussion. And he is speaking.
“Yo,” he says, smiling – a dazzle of silver teeth, easy brown eyes.
I stop, my hands dumb and dangling at my sides. I have nothing to say – coming to a stop is comment enough.
“You shopping,” he asks.
I want to show him my walking shoes. I am in the market for other things – pants and maybe a new belt. My waist has a determination in its somewhat new thicker circumference. But it is not possible that he knows this. I guess I could tell him. I want to tell him so much more – a confession I have been honing like a yeast. I have so much to share, so vast an inventory to explore. I wonder too now if he is shopping – because he has found a store between us. I will say it and I will not say it together.
Mitochondria have their own DNA. I was brought up through the public school system to believe them to be the POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL. The reality is different. It is a completely different organism that lives inside the host cell – a symbiotic relationship struck a long, long, long time ago to give birth to the kingdoms of complex multi-cellular creatures. The bigger fact is that before Mitochondria, life – as simple as it was – participated in savage wars. Bacteria against bacteria against viruses against bacteria. The curiosity in all of this is that this partnership between an invaded strand of bacteria and its Mitochondria invader yielded every dimension of visible life form. It is simply the most productive known partnership ever.
Our species is a member of the visible life matter spawned from this partnership. This is why we share so much DNA with bacteria. We are also participants in this festering war between cells – punctuated here and there with the benign common cold and moving on through the more nasty viral and bacterial applications. It is my core and most fundamental belief that human beings have been assembled through this ancient partnership with Mitochondria to eradicate the single-celled enemies of the Mitochondria. That is our purpose. The assembly of our brain matter is a mobility to construct and deconstruct on visible and invisible planes. In this regard, we are puppet-like grunts – but our anthropocentric belief systems will likely not allow us to fully embrace our role in just one colony of an empire we can barely comprehend. The pharmaceutical onslaught that we have created is just one example of the Mitochondria’s war machine. We are a very impressive weapon assemblage, and our achievements in other areas and miscues in other areas are side projects against the overall Mitochondria objective.
I am not shopping. I am too much entangled in consumption. And there is a season upon us.
Saturday, December 1, 2007
How Should Societies Pay For Their Journalism?
The question of how societies should pay for their journalism - or at least to compensate professional journalists and eradicate the credibility concerns - was addressed very recently by Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times. He was speaking in London and said that the greatest threat that independent writers and bloggers pose was found more in the "failure of resolve on the part of the people who make newspapers."
This is coming from The New York Times - where credibility issues have presented themselves, as they do in any news source from time to time. This notion of the Newspaper-as-Establishment-and-Stature is false, and the issues around fragmentation in journalism and reporting are not the newspaper industry's issues to resolve. Time and again the newspaper establishment lumbers and misses the point - and this is reflected most acutely in the sell-sell-sell recommendations now put upon The New York Times Company.
The public in any free society deserves the highest quality reporting across all given media buckets - print, television, web, radio. No single news source in any of these media buckets is consistently more credible or more able than another. This is important to understand against the wide varieties of reporting vehicles we see in the media landscape today.
Quality reporting can mean many things to the spectrum of audience tastes out there - it could be entertaining, pithy, intellectual, punchy, dry, long-form, humorous, etc. Quality reporting is defined by the desires and the lifestyles of the audience base. In some cases, sources that consistently break stories are seen in a more important light. In other cases, sources that take a more analytical view are deemed more valuable. On and on this goes. However, now the lines are obliterated. Google alone has brought anonymity to broad swaths of sources, and in the process the search engine has cannibalized the source brand and made it a commodity. The leading journalism brands today still believe incorrectly that an on-the-move American society will remain with them.
So how should a free society pay for its journalism? There is an undercurrent in comments like Mr. Keller's above: the free public is unable to discern the impartial journalism for themselves, and it is up to "the people who make newspapers" to sort it all out. One gets the sense that he was wearing a cape and matching boots when he made that comment - and that he has not read the financial reports coming out of his own publicly-traded company. The free public pays for journalism by choosing freely to consume a given story.
Much like the music industry's initial rejection of the song-by-song model brandished by web demand, "the people who make newspapers" do not want to acknowledge that we are in an era of story-by-story consumption. This consumption is measurable - and that measurement directly determines the payment a free society makes. Should consumers be forced to buy an entire music CD when all they want is one or two songs? That same question is being forced upon big and small journalism brands alike - but the answer has been in motion for years now. Outside of their control.
Newspaper brands in particular can protect their financial interests by getting together and prohibiting the search engines and crawling bots from quite effectively stealing their core intellectual assets. Nobody believes that Google's stock price would be north of $500 - or even north of $100 - if the journalism content arteries were severed. And would that denial not help the stock price of The New York Times Company? But this is another topic entirely.
Free society and free market forces have been demonstrating this deployment of journalism currency for some time. Advertising revenue follows these deployments very efficiently - and in that sense the reporting is paid for. Shelling out coins at a newsstand is simply a relic of a dead era.
This is coming from The New York Times - where credibility issues have presented themselves, as they do in any news source from time to time. This notion of the Newspaper-as-Establishment-and-Stature is false, and the issues around fragmentation in journalism and reporting are not the newspaper industry's issues to resolve. Time and again the newspaper establishment lumbers and misses the point - and this is reflected most acutely in the sell-sell-sell recommendations now put upon The New York Times Company.
The public in any free society deserves the highest quality reporting across all given media buckets - print, television, web, radio. No single news source in any of these media buckets is consistently more credible or more able than another. This is important to understand against the wide varieties of reporting vehicles we see in the media landscape today.
Quality reporting can mean many things to the spectrum of audience tastes out there - it could be entertaining, pithy, intellectual, punchy, dry, long-form, humorous, etc. Quality reporting is defined by the desires and the lifestyles of the audience base. In some cases, sources that consistently break stories are seen in a more important light. In other cases, sources that take a more analytical view are deemed more valuable. On and on this goes. However, now the lines are obliterated. Google alone has brought anonymity to broad swaths of sources, and in the process the search engine has cannibalized the source brand and made it a commodity. The leading journalism brands today still believe incorrectly that an on-the-move American society will remain with them.
So how should a free society pay for its journalism? There is an undercurrent in comments like Mr. Keller's above: the free public is unable to discern the impartial journalism for themselves, and it is up to "the people who make newspapers" to sort it all out. One gets the sense that he was wearing a cape and matching boots when he made that comment - and that he has not read the financial reports coming out of his own publicly-traded company. The free public pays for journalism by choosing freely to consume a given story.
Much like the music industry's initial rejection of the song-by-song model brandished by web demand, "the people who make newspapers" do not want to acknowledge that we are in an era of story-by-story consumption. This consumption is measurable - and that measurement directly determines the payment a free society makes. Should consumers be forced to buy an entire music CD when all they want is one or two songs? That same question is being forced upon big and small journalism brands alike - but the answer has been in motion for years now. Outside of their control.
Newspaper brands in particular can protect their financial interests by getting together and prohibiting the search engines and crawling bots from quite effectively stealing their core intellectual assets. Nobody believes that Google's stock price would be north of $500 - or even north of $100 - if the journalism content arteries were severed. And would that denial not help the stock price of The New York Times Company? But this is another topic entirely.
Free society and free market forces have been demonstrating this deployment of journalism currency for some time. Advertising revenue follows these deployments very efficiently - and in that sense the reporting is paid for. Shelling out coins at a newsstand is simply a relic of a dead era.
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