Great piece at NY Mag about the reinvention of the Washington Post, including some fine-grained reasoning on just what is or isn’t clickbait.
“Some Post journalists worry that the Amazonian values of growing an audience by giving the customers what they want could conflict with journalism’s civic mission to report on unpleasant truths. “There’s gallows humor: Are we selling our soul for traffic?” says one longtime Post staffer. Veteran Post journalists have been spared traffic quotas, but junior employees who blog for the website feel the pressure to produce with great frequency. Baron disputes the criticism that the Post has employed so-called clickbait to juice readership. “The way I would define it is, it has a headline that tries to trick you to read the story and when you get to the story there’s nothing of any substance. I don’t think we have any of that,” he says. “I know what’s generated the traffic here. And it isn’t clickbait.” Clickbait or not, it’s clear that the Post is playing a volume game, publishing a vastly higher number of stories than its competitors. According to a recent analysis, the Post, which has a newsroom of about 700, generates 500 stories per day, compared to 230 at the Times, whose newsroom has about 1,300 employees. That’s also about twice what BuzzFeed publishes daily.”
We could use a “Citizen Bezos” just now…
The whole thing is worth reading; makes the point that in addition to the gee-whiz stuff, there is an old story, namely an immensely rich person buying and retooling a newspaper.
A friend pointed me to Allan Kozinn’s take on a recent dust up in the little world of classical music criticism in newspapers. A reviewer filed a notice of a production of a rare Rossini opera, liked most of the singing, disliked the production, got a couple of trivial things wrong, one a straightforward photo credit (whether that was him or not is unclear), and then things spiraled out of control.
A blogger before his time?
The opera company PR person asked the paper to correct the errors, and this escalated to charges and counter charges, with the review disappearing and then reappearing on the web, with accusations against the editor, complaints about the critic, attacks on the company for meddling with coverage, and finally the resignation by the reviewer.
Most of this is neither new or newsworthy. In thirty years of writing reviews on and off (and a couple decades more of reading them), I can remember incidents–a couple uncomfortably personal–of PR flaks complaining, something they have every right to do. I also know first hand that editors change reviews, one hopes for the better, and spike reviews, including probably the most damning (but amusing) one I ever wrote. Something they too have a complete right to do.
It’s easy to forget that reviews are a (admittedly somewhat oddball) species of journalism, and that even critics are ultimately subject to the authority of editors. The best professional decorum would be not to complain publicly on either side. Certainly, artists rarely gain from complaining about subjective opinions–something Berlioz, himself a critic was on to–nor do I think writers stand to gain from publicly complaining about their editors, no matter the merits of the beef. Gripe privately, but abjure public second guessing about what should or shouldn’t have been done. To talk about “sides” is to talk past the issues a bit, and seems to me to indicate the game has already been lost. But if you have to draw them up, to me at least, the editor isn’t completely on the writer’s side, nor the source’s side, nor even the reader’s side, but stands in the middle of these and other forces, including standards and practices of the publication.
And judging from this story, and the disdain everybody–including the flak–is eager to drop on the hapless editor, the thing that most strikes me is the front row view of what a crappy job it must be to be an arts editor of a print publication. For starters, you are manning your oar solo in the leaking boat of print journalism. In this case, it doesn’t like sound the editor was equipped to know whether the concerns about the reviews in general were valid. He wasn’t experienced on this kind of desk–but I can’t imagine getting anything but a blank stare if I approached an editor at a major daily and said “what do you make of opera company x’s take on our coverage and their claim about our reviewer’s dislike of Regietheater?”) Maybe once upon a time that could have been a discussion about what was interesting about the question, reasonable and fair for the coverage, and maybe a feature or interview might have grown out of it. Now? Don’t make me laugh.
What the editor did do is make the point that he would like to cover the arts and perhaps tapping media was away to increase interest beyond the passionate few. That is the way forward. Classical coverage’s death in news papers is lamentable (but not that lamentable) and hot diatribes, whatever else they do, don’t make it any less dead. But as the piece points out, rich media-based reviews could draw on a new generation of journalists and might–God help us–actually get some of a new generation of audiences interested. There are questions about the technology, rights, and attitudes of the performers. These are non-trivial, but the fact that tens of millions of people view media-based reviews of films and video games on YouTube suggests that at least some of the technical obstacles are surmountable, and some artists are doing this for themselves. No doubt, some bloggers and web publications are already on it as well, and on the front-end, arts producers and presenters have started using media creatively for education and outreach. (For me, reviews always had a “back end” educational goal anyway. I write a lot of program notes, which are reviews in reverse and with out the snark.)
That newspapers are past their sell-date makes me sad. And reading my morning Post gets more and more like some kind of exercise in historical reenactment. (“How did you get your news in the olden days, gramps? Well, sonny, this person delivered a parcel of rolled up paper to our door and we sat in a chair turning pages as we drank our coffee and shared amusing items with one another.”) But having written hundreds, I’m certainly not going to mourn the demise of the overnight review. If its death hastens a better way to cover music, and engage people, bring it on.
Nice essay on the value of the humanities by the lit prof, Arnold Weinstein, with this gem,
“How much do you know about Shakespeare,” I once asked a friend who has committed much of her life to studying the Bard. She replied, “Not as much as he knows about me.” Remember this the next time someone tells you literature is useless.”
No news to anybody in the archives and records world, or researchers who work with public documents or manuscripts for that matter, but huge amounts of the original written legacy of the last 30 years is falling into the digital abyss as formats become obsolete, hardware is hard to find/non-functional, and magnetic storage media itself crumbles into dust.
But maybe there’s hope: A paper in Nature reports on a novel approach to saving the archives, applying techniques from digital forensics. Stanford’s efforts to save the Stephen Jay Gould Papers from oblivion gives an example of the impetus.
The Gould papers were an early indication of an issue that’s been rapidly worsening: four decades after the personal-computer revolution brought word processing and number crunching to the desktop, the first generation of early adopters is retiring or dying. So how do archivists recover and preserve what’s left behind?
From, “Digital forensics: from the crime lab to the library” by Mark Woverton.
The approach is to fit out archivists with the skills of a crime investigator (who will star in the spinoff “CSI: The Manuscript Division,” I wonder?).
The list of dead or dying media that a UNC prof mentions– floppies, Zip disks, CDs, DVDs, flash drives, hard drives–reads like my career. I’m sure that any digital traces of a monthly opera newsletter I contributed to and later edited for years was delivered to the printer and archived on SyQuest discs, a medium and a company both long gone. So is PageMaker, the program we designed it on. The newsletter was no great shakes, but probably somebody put stuff on SyQuest worth saving, be it a data set that has otherwise impossible to recreate info, a great novel or an archive of legal docs.
Fragments of Sappho’s poetry. (By Masur (Own work) [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons)Seems like UNC is on the job, with a tool called BitCurator, so maybe future generations won’t have to depend on the digital equivalent of somebody using a scrap of Sappho’s poetry as a wine stopper to rescue a legacy. (I know that story may be only a romantic legend, but it’s still evocative.)
A Few Reasonable Words 