Noticed something interesting about Technorati's "top searches this hour" list: ever since the New York Times started its "TimesSelect" program and hid all its opinion columnists behind their paywall, the names of their columnists, and sometimes the titles of their columns, have been clogging up the top ten. Today, six of the top ten searches, in fact, are on Times' columnists names, and a seventh is on the title of Maureen Dowd's latest column, "Dancing in the Dark."
The Times has made a big mistake in taking their most popular content out of the conversation, and the network is routing around the error. People are turning to bloggers, figuring they'll find the gist or the text of their favorite columnists in the blogosphere, and their prayers are being answered. Bloggers are posting the full text of Times columns; I wonder what kind of traffic jumps they're experiencing. And I wonder if the New York Times is now planning to unleash its lawyers on them.
Last summer, during the course of a breakfast meeting with Thomas Friedman (which led to a great column by him embracing Andrew Rasiej's campaign), he asked me what he should do with his Times column on the web once it moved behind the paywall. I said, "Start a blog. There's a huge conversational tail that follows every one of your columns now, that's happening all over the net. If you have a blog, you'll draw a lot of it onto your page, and if the Times is smart, they'll use the fact that people are spending more time on your page to sell more online ads."
Friedman liked the idea, but admitted that he didn't think he had the time to do a blog right. It looks like he's dipping his toes into the water with his "Talking World Affairs" page, which is unfortunately only available to TimesSelect subscribers. Here's how he introduced it:
Welcome to Talking World Affairs. I'm inviting readers to submit comments on, queries about and contrary views to this week's columns. I'll respond to some of them regularly online. I get a lot of e-mail, so please don't be upset if yours isn't answered.
I'll be looking for quality comments and criticism, and I'll try to provide quality answers. But if you're just looking to vent, I would direct you to the letters to the editor section.
I may occasionally be doing some blogging as events arise, although my columns will remain the primary platform through which I express my opinions. But, like everything with the Web, we'll experiment as we go along. Having declared that the world is flat, and having long been a believer in the adage that all of us are smarter than one of us, I felt it was time that I flattened my column as well, and made it a little more interactive.
This is a start, but it's hardly enough. Posting one question from a reader a day (in a really dorky layout, I might add) and answering it is hardly the way to build a community online. If "all of us are smarter than one of us," Friedman should open up his page and let a thousand flowers bloom.
UPDATE: Doc Searls kindly linked to this post, and reminded me of the quote that was kicking around in the back of my subconscious as I wrote this: "The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it." (from John Gilmore, one of the founders of EFF) I like Doc's suggestion for the Times--if it has to revise its business model, it should charge only for access to the new news from the paper online, and then make it all freely available the next day and forward.
Two additional thoughts: the TimesSelect experiment, which I think will fail, is a great example of how the business side is dominating the editorial side of that institution online. One of the great things about the Times is how it mobilizes great resources on behalf of news-gathering, with the question of how to pay for its great efforts (such as its 9-11 coverage) taking a secondary concern. It's clear, still, that the Times leadership views its website first in business terms, and only secondly as part of its editorial product. This is a huge error, given that the Times has something like 14 times as many readers on line than it does of its print edition.
And secondly, think back to one of the great shining moments in print journalism in America, when the Times published the Pentagon Papers revealing the government's secret history of the Vietnam War. The Nixon Administration went to court and got an injunction stopping the Times from publishing. But then other newspapers around the country got copies of the documents and began publishing them too. And soon the government abandoned its case against the Times. That was a pre-Internet example of a network encountering censorship and routing around it.
I'm not suggesting that open access to the NY Times' columnists is as important as the secret history of the Vietnam War, but when you consider the ongoing cultural importance of the Times as an agenda-setter, it's not a good day when that institution chooses to cut its leading opinion-shapers off from a great number of people simply because they can't afford to pay a premium for the privilege of joining the conversation. No wonder people are angry at the Times and searching for ways around the paywall; they should be.
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ANOTHER UPDATE: Nothing like coming late to the party. I just now caught up with Jay Rosen's take on TimesSelect over at his invaluable blog Pressthink. Noting that the Times is touting "exclusive online access" to its columnists, he writes:
... do we value Nicholas D. Kristof’s column more if he’s an “exclusive?” We don’t. In fact, it’s probably the reverse. If everyone is reading a columnist, that makes the columnist more of a must have. If “everyone” isn’t, less of a must. “Exclusive online access” attacks the perception of ubiquity that is part and parcel of a great columnist’s power. In his prime Walter Lippmann was called “the name that opened every door.” Nick Kristof’s brand of human rights journalism, which depends on the mobilization of outrage, is simply less potent if it can’t reach widely around the world, and pass by every door.
Jay's key point: widely circulated opinions, such as the ones generated by their columnists, are more valuable than exclusive ones. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before the Times learns this lesson.
Katrina a la Bush. The url, RecipeForDisaster, says it all. Brings new meaning to the term, "kitchen cabinet." From the ever-brilliant Andrew Boyd.
I'm off to San Francisco for the MuniWireless conference this week, which I will probably blog about over at Personal Democracy Forum (where I am easing back into my editorial duties--big thanks to Chris Nolan for holding down the fort this summer). And also looking forward to spending some quality time with my west coast family. Still working on the campaign post-mortem. Stay tuned.
I promise to get back to my post-mortem on the Rasiej for Public Advocate campaign, but just came across this far more important post-mortem on the whole Katrina disaster. "Hurricane exposes government's shortcomings," is the understated title of David Wood and Chuck McCutcheon's article for Newhouse News Service, which is posted on the Times-Picayune's Nola.com blog. "How could this happen?" they ask, and their answers ought to taught in civics instead of the crap they force our kids to memorize.
-- Power and authority, as the founding fathers intended, are scattered across Congress, the White House, executive agencies and on through state and local governments. That complicates coherent planning, allocation of money and accountability.
-- Two- or four-year election cycles keep attention spans short and focused on the next campaign. Money is appropriated year to year, with results demanded immediately.
-- The executive and congressional bureaucracies stifle initiative and smother creativity, a problem some say has grown worse with the proliferation of congressional committees and subcommittees and the consolidation of independent agencies into the vast Department of Homeland Security.
-- The rising demands of bitterly fought election campaigns tend to stifle political courage and spur partisan squabbling.
Here's what some veteran DC watchdogs told them:
"If it's beyond the next election cycle, we'll worry about it next year after we get ourselves elected," said Winslow Wheeler, recently retired chief defense analyst for the Senate Budget Committee.
Work within the executive branch is similarly compressed, first by a four-year clock of presidential elections, then by the sheer number of crises.
[Gordon] Adams, senior budget director for national security in the Clinton administration, described his White House work this way: "I am standing with a paddle in the middle of a big room. All around the edge of the room, people are throwing balls at me. My job is deciding which balls to hit back. In the White House, that's long-range planning."
In that kind of pressure cooker, "you become risk-averse," said Wheeler, author of "The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security."
"If you are outside the conventional wisdom, you are vulnerable," he said. "Both parties have purged themselves of big thinkers and a diversity of views."
...."No one in government is making hard choices," said David Williams, vice president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonprofit reform group in Washington. "It's about handing money out. There's very little of somebody saying, 'No.'"
...."What is required here," [Richard] Ben-Veniste [a member of the 9-11 Commission] said, "is a level of outrage from the citizenry to require that those in positions of leadership lead the country in a way that transcends those retail political concerns."
Not so fast, Adams said: "We are the nation of quick fix. Americans as a culture are into the short-term mentality: Fix me now.
"The difficulty with an outraged citizenry is impatience, and it's very hard for an outraged, impatient citizenry to focus on the long term," he said.
"But that's what we've got to do now."
Let's start a new party and call it the "Long-termist" party.
Our campaign ended last night with a disappointing 5% of the vote. Disappointing, but not surprising.
With 99.87% of the precincts reporting, here are the details on the Democratic primary for NYC Public Advocate:
Betsy Gotbaum: 48.04%
Norman Siegel: 30.36%
Michael Brown: 9.09%
Andrew Rasiej: 5.17%
Jay Golub: 4.78%
Damon Cabbagestalk: 2.56%
Frankly, it was clear for some time that we weren't going to break out, for a whole bunch of reasons. But I am proud of the work we did, and our success in putting new ideas into the political debate in New York City (and maybe elsewhere).
The only thing that truly hurts is the notion that, despite being in the two televised debates, raising over a million dollars and building a real campaign, we got fewer votes than someone named "Michael Brown" who raised almost no money and didn't really campaign. Was it a sympathy vote for people who had heard that name in the news (the ex-FEMA director)? Or just people picking the most common-sounding name?
Whatever. Right now I need to get some sleep and take some time to reflect. Over the next few days and weeks, I promise a full and frank post-mortem on what we did right and what we did wrong, and what those of us who believe in the potential of new communications tools to transform politics should learn from this race.
Feel free to jump in with your own comments (I thought the comments on Dominic Basulto's latest post, for example, were pretty provocative.)
David Ignatius has a good point in his column today, performance does matter more than ideology to most Americans. I've always said most people don't care about the "big government vs. small government" debate, they just want effective government.
But Ignatius trots out Newt Gingrich as his exemplar of a new thinker, which is just plain kooky. Let's not forget, Gingrich's "innovative" ideas include privatizing social security, breaching the boundaries between church and state, and reviving orphanages for children whose parents are too poor to take care of them.
Andrew Sullivan says:
There seems to me a strong chance that this calamity could be the beginning of something profound in American politics: a sense that government is broken and that someone needs to fix it.
I would like to agree with him.
But here's why I'm worried: it isn't just government that's broken, it's the whole system for changing government that is broken too.
I hope I'm proven wrong, but right now it seems to me that we no longer have the ability to change direction. People may be turning, en masse, against Bush's failure to provide the most elemental of government services, public safety. But that doesn't mean they will turn to the only available alternative, the Democrats, when the next congressional elections roll around 14 months from now.
Two reasons explain that gloomy prediction. First, the right-wing media and money machine is very, very good at attacking anything that smacks as pro-government. In swing districts, Democrats run as pale imitation Republicans, or worse. To get substantial change, we'd need a surge in Democratic turnout (along with a corresponding drop in Republican turnout) that would not only sweep out a great many incumbents, but would also embolden a new wave of leaders to push for change.
This isn't impossible, of course. It happened in 1974, when revulsion with Watergate propelled a whole generation of reform-style Democrats into office. And it happened in reverse in 1994, when revulsion with the congressional check-kiting scandal was the straw that broke the donkey's back and propelled Newt Gingrich's Republicans into power in the House.
But here's the deeper problem. Democrats have to stand for something other than "not Bush"--and there are many reasons to doubt they can. The dirty little secret of Washington insider politics is that both parties benefit from the game. I hardly trust the Democrats to clean up the mess left by the Republicans, do you?
Right now, if the Democrats were a real opposition to Bush, they'd be howling at him for cutting $75 million for Army Corps of Engineers hurricane and flood control projects in the New Orleans district, while signing a $286 billion highway bill that included $231 million for a bridge to an island inhabited by 50 people in Alaska, which is to be named "Don Young's Way" in honor of the House Transportation Committee chairman. When Bush signed the bill, he touted it as a jobs program and ironically claimed, "This bill upgrades our transportation infrastructure and it'll help save lives."
But here's what you have to know about that bill: it passed the House and Senate with almost no opposition. At any point in the process, Democrats could have stood together and objected to a bill that directed tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to questionable projects (more than 6,000 by the count of Taxpayers for Common Sense) while shortchanging essential needs like New Orleans flood control. But they didn't.
That's because even the Democrats, who lack all power to initiate action in the Republican-controlled Congress, still get to earmark millions of dollars each to their home districts and then tout those "achievements" to the local press. For example, my congresswoman, Nita Lowey, was just in my local paper bragging about $2 million she got for revamping a highway overpass nearby in Ardsley. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, another Democrat, loved the highway bill, proudly citing the 30% increase in transportation funding that she secured for her state. Where was she when the Army Corps funding request was turned down? (Thanks to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner for noticing that bit of news.)
Why should we trust these Democrats to fix our broken government? They're part of the problem too.
But I'm really busy with this. Stay tuned for details. Too much has been happening too quickly to process with any perspective...