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Tuesday, April 23, 2002
Journalism 2.x 
| | In Spread Thin, by Michael Wolff of New York Magazine remembers the insanity: |
| | Every day it was happening: Absolute nobodies, with only heart and imagination -- and strange new ideas about how to analyze and manipulate numbers -- took over heretofore unassailable, invulnerable, and oppressively dreary great American corporations. It was a class overthrow: outsiders against insiders, smarties against dopes, risk takers against old farts. |
| | And later shifts to what's happening now: |
| | Of course, reporters, editors, producers, and correspondents are righteous about not being business-culture stooges (Time Inc.-ers are always saying, Of course we can write about AOL Time Warner). But try calling up media biggies to get them to talk to you about their own companies, and then it's P.R. people and communications people and public-affairs people up the wazoo. |
| | This is another key feature of the business culture -- nobody is allowed to talk. If you say anything, you're fired. Worse, if you say anything, you're fired and your severance is gone. Indeed, even if you are fired, you've signed all sorts of nondisclosure and mutual-nondisparagement clauses. |
| | And since nobody's really outside the business culture anymore, this effectively means we're all muzzled. |
| | (But some of us have at least one foot — or one keyboard — outside that culture. Hey, Michael! Look over here!) |
| | Now, though, it is possible to argue that the Times and the Journal, no matter their own business worries, or even the growing geriatricity of their customer base, are in qualitatively better shape than their media-behemoth brethren. It is possible that they have been far-seeing rather than retarded. It's even possible that sticking your head in the sand is a pretty good strategy. |
| | Each company is a powerful niche media play. Each dominates its traditional market. Each has a hold on its audience dramatically greater than the hold any other consumer medium has on its audience. And the Times and the Journal brands are (unlike, say, AOL) true brands -- as distinctive and beloved products as you're likely ever to find. |
| | And, in at least the case of The Times, they're making themselves useful to the largest group of stringers in the world. |
| | Also the largest op-ed page. Check out What Joshua Says, for example (on April 7... can't seem to find the permalink). |
Less Rage, more Boy
| | This man needs a hooker. That's the short of it. For the long (and it's a worthwhile long) read the second link. |
CoFun
| | I've been wearing the Deep Fun hat Bernie DeKoven left for me when he was here a couple weeks ago. It gets warm and positive responses from people, which is always a Good Thing. |
| | Anyway, Bernie just wrote Of Magic and Meetings for 3M. A good piece that even mentions something I once said that I never would have remembered if somebody else hadn't published it. Very much on what Bernie calls "a playful path to wholeness." |
Why I think unprintable (but quite bloggable) things about the Print Center
| | In the Classic MacOS, printing was very easy. You chose your printer in the Chooser, and when you printed something it actually came out of the printer. |
| | With the Print Center in OS X, you have the power to "add" a printer, but you can't see if the computer actually knows the printer is at the other end of a live connection (as the Chooser did). The only way to find out is to print and troubleshoot the error. |
| | Right now I have two printers on an EtherNet network: a fairly new HP LaserJet and a fairly old LaserWriter. I can always print on the LaserWriter. I can print about a third of the time on the LaserJet. No explanation why. My wife's old laptop with OS 9 sees both with its Chooser and can easily print on both. |
| | So most of the time I just say screw it and print on the LaserWriter, which is in her office at the other end of the house. And the LaserJet, which does a much better job of printing stuff, sits idle. |
| | And I don't have time to do much more than gripe about it here. |
| | [Later...] I forgot to mention that I have a third printer: an Epson Stylus Color 860. It's nice that OS X comes with a driver for it, but not that it doesn't appear to offer any quality or paper choices other than "standard." Not much help for printing high quality photographs. |
Leveraging Lewis
| | I used to subscribe to every deep magazine I could, from one end of the political spectrum to the other — from National Review to The New Republic. And to Harper's, of course. After moving my office four times this last year, I let pretty much everything lapse out, and zero-based my renewals. After reading this piece, I just renewed Harper's. Lewis Lapham is a rambling crank who has been blathering elegantly about the end of All That's Good for longer than I can remember. But he's an amazing writer and the best of a nearly extinct breed, and he always makes me think. So I renewed today. Every magazine should have such a simple system, by the way. It's totally consistent with Harper's whole aesthtic, which I love. No pop-over (or -under) promotional windows. Just (with the exception of one banner that doesn't load) interesting, useful stuff. |
Given how often I say "fuck" and all
Another blahg story
O NO
| | I've been at the OQO Web site, trying to learn a few things about the company and its "ultrapersonal" computer. I have questions like, Will it run Linux? |
| | I'm sure it will. But the site is all-Flash. Beautifully done and completely annoying. I moved on. |
Googlewog
| | Our little boy, age 5, brought home a tadpole from preschool yesterday. While we were sitting outside looking at the stars in the evening, he said "I love my tadpole." I told him as gently as I could that the little creature's chances of survival in a cup of pondwater parked in the bathroom were not large. He grew quiet. |
| | "Are you afraid your tadpole is going to die?" |
| | "Yes." After a pause, he added, "What can we do?" |
| | "We could let him go out in the stream out back." This wasn't an encouraging idea. The "stream" is a trench that runs between culverts. And it's dry. This is Southern California. |
| | "Look on Google," he said. As it happened we had a laptop with us, which we were using to track satellites in the sky. So I looked up "tadpole care." There was an abundance of advice. As I began to read it out loud, I saw the kid was asleep. Now it's the middle of the night and I'm boiling lettuce for a pet the size of a booger. |
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