Apt. 11D

The New York Times Discovers Brooklyn!!

Who knew Brian Williams was so funny?

News Corp. - A New Corpse

I was just playing around with ideas for a title about Rupert Murdoch. As usual, I was typing too fast and wrote "New Corpse," instead of "News Corp." It's kinda fitting, so I left it. 

Today, Murdoch went before Parliament to answer questions about his knowledge of the phone tapping scandal by one of his papers, the News of the World. During his testimony, someone tried to attack him. 

I'm enjoying this scandal as much as the next person, for a number of reasons. 

Rebekah Brooks is a fascinating person (with very nice hair). She seems to have a habit of leaving her bags about and to have a very loose idea about journalistic integrity. This is my favorite Brooks story:

On another occasion in her early days, furious that the paper was about to be scooped by The Sunday Times’s serialization of a biography of Prince Charles, Ms. Brooks disguised herself as a Times cleaning woman and hid for two hours in a bathroom, according to Mr. Morgan. When the presses started rolling, she ran over, grabbed a newly printed copy of The Sunday Times, and brought it back to The News of the World — which proceeded to use the material, verbatim, in its own paper the next day.

The rich dinosaur with the media empire and a family dynasty angle is pulp fiction material. 

This story is so horrifically awful -- phone tapping on the 9/11 victims!! -- that the villains are unambiguously villains. The only question may be about whether the Murdoch knew about the phone taps. 

It will take some time to answer some bigger picture questions. Has the mainstream press been forced to resort to these desperate measures, because of competition with online news sources and financial pressures due to a dwindling audience? What will be the long term costs of this scandal on the broader News Corp industry and the newspaper industry in general?

Will News Corp be the next media corpse?

Sorkin Disses Bloggers

There were some angry tweets directed at Aaron Sorkin yesterday. In an article describing his media diet (I love this series in the Atlantic), he says says that he prefers to get his media from the experts and he stays away from blogs.

When I read the Times or The Wall Street Journal, I know those reporters had to have cleared a very high bar to get the jobs they have. When I read a blog piece from "BobsThoughts.com," Bob could be the most qualified guy in the world but I have no way of knowing that because all he had to do to get his job was set up a website--something my 10-year-old daughter has been doing for 3 years. When The Times or The Journal get it wrong they have a lot of people to answer to. When Bob gets it wrong there are no immediate consequences for Bob except his wrong information is in the water supply now so there are consequences for us.

He does get some props for his description of the comment section at Yahoo News.

The homepage on my web browser is Yahoo, which I'm told it shouldn't be, but I've just been too lazy to change it. From time to time I'll read some of the comments under stories on it to get a sense of what it must be like at a Klan meeting.

 

Female Writers on the Ha-Ha Shows

More here. 

What's a Blogger To Do?

So, the New York Times is going to make it harder for you free-loaders to read their online articles. Everything is going behind a paywall. You'll get to see 20 articles for free every month, but after that, you'll get hit up for money.

Since I'm a heavy linker to the New York Times, I'm not sure how I should handle this. I could just lift more of their text and put it into the blog, so you won't have to bother with the paywall. Or I could stop linking to the Times articles and find similar sources on free websites. Not sure what I'll do yet. 

Is anyone planning on paying for a subscription who didn't pay before? 

Is this a smart move for the Times? Will it bring in more revenue? Stanch the movement towards making content completely worthless? 

A Pub Chat

A few weeks ago, I went to the New Yorker website to look up a link for my blog. I clicked on a link to enter myself in a contest to win free tickets to see Malcolm Gladwell, a staff journalist, and David Remnick, the editor for the magazine. A few hours later, I received a notice that I was one of the first hundred to sign up. I won! Yay! Such a geeky prize.

My friend, Suze, was my date for the evening. We squeezed into a tiny table in Joe's Pub on Lafayette Street and ordered wine and nibbles. I have to say that Suze and I were both pathetically gleeful to be there. We're both avid readers of the New Yorker and, after this crappy winter, it was good to be out and about. 

There was a stage set for Remnick and Gladwell. With dramatic lighting and microphones and arm chairs. Just in case they didn't want to talk about journalism anymore and wanted to break into a Liza Minelli medley. 

When they came out, Remnick immediately brought up the Gladwell's social media article from a few weeks ago, where Gladwell wrote that social media only created weak ties and wasn't sufficient to push a people to form a social movement. He took a lot of heat in the past few weeks, since social media may have played some role in the uprisings in Egypt. 

Gladwell was pretty hostile to his critics. He scoffed that his critic was some blogger from Huffington Post. Why should we listen to some pajama-wearing blogger, he asked? Some pajama-wearing blogger who lives in Brooklyn, he added for extra laughs. 

Well, I'm not sure why we should listen to a journalist who doesn't like to travel north of 14h Street. 

Look, it was a very entertaining evening. Those guys were funny and witty and shared lots of amusing stories. But they didn't know anything about revolutions or social media or Egypt. That's okay. Journalists don't have know be experts in their field. But they have to acknowledge that they aren't experts and they really have an obligation to talk to people who spend their lives studying those subjects. 

Why should anyone care what Malcolm Gladwell thinks about Egypt and Facebook, when there are people who have travelled to the Mid East, are fluent in Arabic, and spend most of their waking hours learning about this subject. Gladwell has a gift for being entertaining, which is great. Probably the Arab expert is long winded and boring and doesn't have nice, fluffy hair like Gladwell.  Gladwell should be translating the long-winded Arab expert, not pretending to be a more entertaining version of the Arab expert. 

There's a long standing grievance between political journalists and political scientists. That night, the political journalists lost. 

Anderson Attacked

Anderson Cooper, my boyfriend, was just attacked in Cairo. Oh my!

Soundbite Nation: Selling the Tiger Mother

Last Saturday, friends began sending me links to the article in the Wall Street Journal about a Chinese mother's method of raising her children. These links were the first flakes of snow. On Sunday, strangers that I follow on Twitter started responding. I began formulating a response in my head on Sunday night, and after the kids got on the school bus, I wrote a quick post. Parenting politics is a regular feature at Apt. 11D, so it was a natural fit.

The rest of the week was a full fledge storm of punditry on Tiger Moms -- Today Show segments, blog posts from Huffington Post to every mommyblog, full page articles in every traditional newspaper. Even the foreign policy blogs found an angle. And it hasn't ended. David Brooks had to add his two cents this morning.

The commentary in the snowstorm had its interesting moments. How much should we pressure our kids to do well academically? Do we worry too much about self-esteem? Should parents be tough sometimes? Those are all good topics for discussion.

At the same time, I feel a bit used. Chua certainly exaggerated certain aspects of her book to gain the attention of an agent and publisher. The WSJ certainly removed any remaining subtlety from the discussion. Pundits who failed to read the book (myself included) made the discussion even more two dimensional and created a snowstorm of coverage, because controversy sells. The public likes to hate bad guys and readership numbers soared. Chua's message could be reduced to a sentence and that works in the media world that needs its soundbites reduced to 140 characters.

I'm a very small player in the media circus, though I do think that I have some power in bringing certain issues to light. This power, no matter how minor, comes with responsibility. I'll keep talking about Tiger Moms and the next topic du jour, because there must be something about these topics that taps into national concerns and frustrations. I understand that people need to vent. But I also wish that we weren't being lobbed soft topics that have been carefully constructed by cynical pubishers and editors. I'm tired of being manipulated.

Jon Stewart on the Memorial

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What People Want

Over the past year, I've been liking Double X more and more.

Double X is a group blog on Slate that features smart women writers who tackle political topics that they think women might like. While there are plenty of women on the Internet writing great stuff, the topics that they cover are limited - parenting, feminism, lifestyle. Now, I love all those topics and write about them quite a bit here, but I would like to see more women, in the Internet and elsewhere, discuss a wider variety of topics. Double X has been doing that.

I was just flipping through the past week of posts, and I was surprised that many good posts went by with very few comments. Emily Bazelon's post on the insanity defense and the Elizabeth Smart case only recieved 40 comments. The post that recieved the largest amount of attention was a post about Sarah Palin and Kate Gosselin. 4,000 people commented. It was an interesting, well-written post, but did it really deserve so much more attention than a thoughtful post on Elizabeth Edwards or Archie comics?