Author: Hans Eisenbeis

Last night, we stayed late at the office in order to crash a
party upstairs. We were finishing the new issue, too. Needless to say,
we were thirsty. Someone here in the art department (always the
hipsters at any magazine) had received an invitation to the WEA/ADA
office holiday shindig up on the seventh floor.

WEA is Warner Elektra Atlantic, and ADA is the Alternative Distribution Alliance.
In other words, the music biz—or at least Time Warner’s local folks
whose main job is to make sure Best Buy and Target stores get their CD
inventory. We’re told that Best Buy and Target are today the two
largest retailers of music on the planet, followed closely by Wal-Mart.

Now,
we’ve seen our fair share of music-biz hipsters on elevators, and we’ve
gibbered about Pavement and Modest Mouse enough to know how to inveigle
our way into a high-buck party in a swank office with leather couches
and atomic sound systems. We made our way up.

There were
beautiful boys and girls everywhere, and there were framed records on
the walls, and there was a spread of salsa and hummos and celery
sticks, and a god-awful lot of liquor, beer, and wine. We tried to
chit-chat with the powerful people, but the powerful people were
standing back with arms folded over name tags, avoiding eye contact,
trying to make sure—we guess—that no one set the place on fire.
(Smoking! Inside the office! When was the last time you saw that? Rock
‘n’ roll!)

We were overwhelmed by the memory of working more
directly with the music industry, the way we did a few years ago. Any
setting like this is always a study in extremes. You have very
powerful, very wealthy executives in tony offices, with unlimited
expense accounts, surrounded by starving artists and prestige laborers.
That is, the music industry is a star-making industry that attracts all
sorts of good-hearted people who will work
for peanuts as long as they can be in an office that plays cool music,
and allows you to wear leather pants and tee-shirts to work. (The
magazine business is not dissimilar,with one minor difference: We don’t
get filthy rich. Also, leather makes our butts sweat. We hate that.)
The neatest trick is when big money gets paired with a brilliant idea,
and deserving people receive their just reward—from an ingenious
A&R guy, to a cutthroat distribution manager, to a superoriginal band that represents the future of rock ‘n’ roll. It does happen.

This
is a neat trick because it is the rare exception. Money tends to be
conservative, hunger tends to be desperate. It happens just often
enough to be maddening—powerful people with equal amounts of money and
curiosity, willing to take a risk on creativity.

We mention all
this, because we ran into an old friend at the party, Simon Peter
Groebner. He is now comfortably installed in a permanent position with
the Star Tribune, where he writes about music, and god bless him for
it. We’ve known Simon Peter for almost ten years now, and he’s been
through a lot. The life of the writer and editor can be a difficult
one, especially if you can’t pick up and move to another city. Back in
the day, we used to run into Groebner at places like the music
conference SXSW, down in Texas. It was not uncommon to find that Simon
had hitchhiked the whole way, and was sleeping on whatever floor of
whichever record executive’s hotel room he could weasel for the night.
That was certainly rock ‘n’ roll, and we always felt a pang of guilt
for being—at the time—at the front end of the gravy train.

Anyway,
Simon Peter at one point took one of the coolest jobs in the Twin
Cities. He became the editor of FATE magazine—an awesome, pulpy,
salacious little publication that explores the supernatural and the
conspiratorial. FATE is one of the oldest magazines in the Twin Cities,
having been launched back in the forties. In the 1980s, Carl Weschke,
the wiccan head of Llewellyn publishing in St. Paul, bought the
magazine. It seemed like a match made in, erm, a parallel universe. By
the late-90s, Simon Peter was working on the magazine, and quickly rose
through the ranks to become its editor in chief.

This was
right at the peak of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X-Files. The time
could not have been better for FATE magazine to boldly go into new
markets, and capture young readers. Simon Peter, in his first job as an
editor, put together one of the finest business plans we have ever
seen—laying out just how he and his team were going to take FATE where
it had never been taken before, into the big time and into the
mainstream.

The main problem with FATE was that it remained
inertly earnest. It was a magazine locked in the 1950s. It ran stories
about UFOs and Loch Ness Monsters without acknowledging the exploding,
post-ironic world of pop culture. It spoke to its audience as if time
had stood still for them, too. In other words, FATE was comfortable
with a fringy readership that could not tolerate any real skepticism,
or tongue-in-cheek irony, or even the mainstream popularization of its
subject matter.

Llewellyn at the time was totally cashing in
on the phenomenon, becoming the world’s largest publisher of “occult”
books, especially a series about witchcraft specifically for teenage
girls. It was pretty cool.

So. Everything was perfectly in
place. A brilliant young editor with a great idea and a solid business
plan, and plenty of money at his disposal. The only thing missing was
the go-ahead, the nod of confidence, the “damn the torpedos, what are
we going to lose, money? We can always get more money!*” kind of
entrepreneurial spirit. (*Those, by the way, were the actual words,
uttered three years ago, of our own publisher. Yes, we know how lucky we have been.)

Alas. Llewellyn took a pass, the magazine was downgraded and eventually sold to an old-school FATE steward,
and Simon Peter moved on. Today, he’s a made man, but we can’t help
looking back with deep regrets at what might have been, if his bosses
had had any adventurous spirit at all.

Maybe they could see into the future, and they didn’t like what they saw. Fate can be such a bore.—The Editor in Cheese

We were thrown into a mild fit of nostalgia today, courtesy of Slate magazine. In graciously quoting an article from The Rake written by Albert Eisele,
Timothy Noah erroneously cited it as being from the current (December)
issue of the magazine. We certainly don’t mind if Slate quotes us and
makes us look smart and timely. But that essay was published in May of
2003.

Almost from the date we launched the magazine, we’d been
working on Albert Eisele. He is the editor in chief of The Hill, in
Washington D.C., and a native of Minnesota who made his way to the
capitol when he was Vice President Walter Mondale’s press secretary.
Eisele was a high-value target in our magazine’s hunt for interesting
and smart writers working on unexpected stories. Anyway, we thought it
would be very interesting to get Al’s perspective on the long decline
of Minnesota democrats on the national stage. Where were the men and
women who could steward the state’s good name? What had Minnesota’s
reputation become in Washington? How was it possible that the same
state that had produced two solidly liberal vice presidents, and two
radically liberal presidential candidates—how had this same state
produced Sentor Norm Coleman? The same Sen. Coleman who, during this
peacable holiday season, has been making a national ass of himself by loudly demanding the head of Kofi Annan?

We
don’t remember if we asked Al to try to keep his piece light— not too
heavy-handed in terms of partisan preferences. But we scarcely needed
to tell him how to keep ‘er between the fenceposts. After all, he’s got
decades of experience reporting and editing political stories in the
most neutral way possible. In fact, we were very pleasantly surprised
by his assessment of “The Minnesota Model.”

It turns out that
Minnesota’s long tradition of progressive politics has as much to do
with the Republican party as the Democratic party. Nationally, we are
frequently remembered by our historical highwater mark of Hubert H.
Humphrey (and his hand-picked acolyte, Walter Mondale). But before that
generation of red-faced and owlish liberals took the dais, there was a
previous generation of Republicans who had established the standard:
Moderate government, reasonable taxation, widespread committment to the
common weal (especially education), an abhorrence of corruption (and
the appearance of same), embracing the global palliative of the UN, and
so on.

Al Eisele’s essay reminded us that the values we hold
dear here in the blue heartland are values that used to be shared by
both parties, that were actually established by the party of Abraham
Lincoln.

Sen. Coleman should bear the scruffy ears and
remarkable intelligence of a loveable political mutt. But the
inevitable view of him is not charitable. Even party flacks see him as
a flip-flopping turn-coat who once was Paul Wellstone’s biggest
supporter, who then became a Republican for no apparent reason other
than to get elected mayor of St. Paul, who now finds himself spouting
some of the most silly Republican clap-trap. He is a favorite lap-dog
of President Bush’s, which is probably the most obvious betrayal of any
moderate impulse he might ever have had. There are many things you can
say about Sen. Coleman. But you would not say he is his own man.

Our Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, also has the manner and bearing of a centrist Republican like Clark MacGregor or Elmer Anderson.
(The latter, we note, had a John Kerry sign in his lawn in the weeks
before he died, rest his honorable soul.) But the boyish gubernator is
constantly proposing radical-right nonsense such as reinstituting the
death penalty, and weasling out of unflattering revelations about his strange business dealings.

The problem as we see it is that the perceived

shift to benighted, self-serving, I-got-mine Republicanism is being
followed by a real one. But maybe this is a temporary thing. The last
election was a sign, we think, that things are evolving back toward the
middle, at least here in Minnesota. Still, we prescribe a strong dose
of historical perspective, just to insure a speedy recovery. There are
still some nasty viruses abroad.—The Editor in Cheese

We were amused to see StarTribune.com, along with virtually
every other online news outlet in the country, trot out the “Breaking
News!” banner yesterday for the Scott Peterson trial, whatever that
was. In an effort to string this along, first the big news was that the
jury had reached a decision. Then, a few minutes later: Verdict to be
announced later this afternoon! The appointed hour arrived. Scott
Peterson receives the death sentence!

Now,
we’re not going to grouch about the depredations of cable television
and second-string newspapers. They do what they have to do, and anyone
still trying desperately to hold them all to a higher standard has a
long row to hoe indeed. We are intrigued, actually, by the phenomenon
of the newsworm— which is similar to the earworm, where an annoying pop
song gets into your head through no fault or voluntary act of your own.

We
have almost literally no knowledge of the Scott Peterson affair. We
have actively ignored it. He killed someone—his wife? She was pregnant,
or had a small child? He was trying to weasel out of it? He looks a
little like our brother, especially those petulant lips? All of this
detail somehow got through the active, aggressive, angry filters we
have in place to not waste our time on such an obvious and vacant ploy
for our attention. We are proud to declare that we have wasted no time
on this (other than right now), so the filters have done their job. And
yet it has been a story with such a high level of saturation, it’s like
trying to keep your feet dry in a canoe.

We do not know whether
television stations interrupted regular programming to announce this
staggering news, but we think probably they did. (If we had to guess,
we’d say the daytime viewing audience could not wish to see anything
more titillating or gratifying.)

And we think back with a deep sense of pride for our countrymen when we think of the idiotic CBS producer
who was fired for breaking into CSI:NY to convey the news that Yaser
Arafat had passed away. An impotent world leader in the most embattled
precinct on the globe! It’s not like he was going to be alive again by
the time the 11 p.m. news came on. What was she thinking?!—The Editor
in Cheese

We’ve carped a lot lately about that annoying person who
claims that “the mainstream media” does not cover this story or that
story. Our boilerplate response is that this person has simply not
looked hard enough. (Hint: Most public libraries now provide free web
access—when they are open.) As an afterthought, we often ask: What
story were you looking for, precisely?

If
you honestly believe that newsrooms are driven by national politics,
that reporters at real news organizations are secretly trying to get
you to vote for a Democrat, then we think you maybe don’t understand
journalism very well. The only bona fide, premediated prejudice that we
know of is to be the first to report a credible story.

This is
why so many media people are so bent out of shape about the Fox News
Channel. Fox has successfully convinced its viewers that all other news
outlets have a liberal bias. The only formulaic way to distinguish
yourself from all other news organizations in one stroke is to be what
all the others are not—subtly but unmistakeably partisan. (You want an
example of a news organization that does the same thing on the lefty side of the equation?)

The
other day, we got into a conversation with a particularly smart
neo-con. He seemed smart to us, anyway, because he was willing to talk
about facts rather than opinions—a rare bird indeed. We said, “Facts
are not partisan. The truth is not, itself, predisposed to one
particular party or another.” He seemed to disagree. We proceeded to
talk facts, and we found that the facts themselves were frequently in
dispute, even when they came from what any normal person would consider
a neutral source. It was news to us, but even the University of Maryland folks who found a majority of Fox viewers believe the opposite of the reported facts—are being attacked.

(Typically,
convoluted arguments are fomented about particular semantic and
syntactical questions. If you have no stomach for this kind of
tit-for-tat, skip to the next graf. Sometimes you have to get dirt
under your nails to gainsay an idealogue. An example: PIPA found that
most Fox viewers believe Saddam Hussein solicited uranium from Niger,
whereas this is simply not true, and has never been proven. But if you
are a neo-con, you say this: Niger does not equal Africa! There are
studies—the Hutton Report, the 9/11 Commission—that show British
intelligence suggested it was solicited from somewhere else in Africa.)

“It depends on whose ox you’re trying to gore,” said our neo-con friend.

See,
that is precisely the problem. There is no ox to gore. Reporters at
real news organizations don’t give a toss for anything but the
late-breaking, exclusive-scoop, over-the-fold story with their byline
on it. To put a point on it, with our example: Either Hussein went
looking for uranium in Africa, or he did not. If he did, it would have
been reported that way. The sketchy intelligence President Bush may or
may not have believed and based his actions and his speeches on is
irrelevant. There is no independent, verifiable proof that Hussein ever
went looking for uranium in Africa, which is why it has never been
reported by a news organization. So why do Fox viewers believe this
untruth?

It is interesting to find neo-conservatives now arguing
so vehemently on the side of epistemological relativism— that there is
no news, that there are no facts, that can be communicated WITHOUT some
sort of normative spin, without an “ox to gore.” Call it the Heisenberg
principle of journalism— we cannot observe and record reality without
promoting (or denigrating) George W. Bush.

We can’t speak for
neo-conservatives, but we guess this is now the state of things: A
“truth” is a self-evident moral proposition like “abortion is wrong”
which does not require any physical evidence. Observable, recordable,
verifiable, repeatable scientific facts, on the other hand, are
rudderless things that make no sense until they’ve gotten a hard shove
to the left or the right. What a strange world we live in!

Still, there is an easy solution. One word, actually: OMBUDSMAN. Fox News still doesn’t have one.—The Editor in Cheese

You might find this hard to believe, but we get writers around
here who constantly want to use the F-word in their stories—and
presumably in their lives. (My daughters call this the “F-swear,” which
they’ve heard daddy say once or twice, I’m sorry to say. To which I
have responded, “Do as I say… not, uh….. as I do—say… er. Never
mind. Just don’t use that word. It’s a bad daddy word.” ) Why do so
many writers wish to use that word? Because they see so many other
writers getting to use that word in other publications.

When
we first launched The Rake three years ago, we considered whether or
not we were going to print that word. It slipped into a few early
issues, but only in direct quotes, and more or less under our breath.
(If you can find the issue and the story, I will personally buy you
dinner and drinks, no kidding. But you may have to sign a
confidentiality agreement, heh heh.)

We never would have
decided that it was OK to print the word in display type (a headline,
or a pull quote, or any other loud context), and we always intended to
work very hard to find alternatives to the word, even in direct quotes.
This can be an interesting challenge, and it leads to some artful
editing—which is one of the little word-geek things that makes this job
fun.

For example, in this month’s short story, by Sara Woster.
The story is about a young girl whose father spends a lot of time
teaching her outdoor survival skills. At one point in the story, the
girl is speaking to another girl—a teenager—at the side of a hotel
swimming pool somewhere in South Dakota. Here is the exchange:

“How long can you tread water?” Laurie asked, inching toward her father, who was holding open the door to the hotel.

“Who cares? It’s the goddam prairie. There is no water,” the girl said.

Now
Sara’s original draft had the girl saying “It’s the fucking prairie.”
That is a much stronger word, much more acidic, and really works a lot
better than “goddam.” It rings truer, and hits the ear better. But a
policy is a policy. We made the story a teeny-tiny bit worse—something
we never otherwise do, especially in a piece of fiction—because we
simply do not print that word. It wasn’t that big a trade-off, in the
grand scheme of things, and Sara was gracious about it.

When we
were considering whether or not to take a hard line on this policy, I
called up Adam Moss, who was at the time the editor of the New York
Times magazine, and I asked him if the word “fuck” had ever appeared in
the New York Times. Everyone at the Times knows the answer to that
question. The word “fuck” appeared once, in a direct quote from Richard
Nixon.

So that is now OUR official policy, too, and we think
it’s a good one: Only Richard Nixon gets to say “fuck” in print, and
he’s dead (though I suppose he is still imminently quotable).

Also, we get to say it on the web. Just this once, maybe.—The Editor in Cheese

Today, the AP reports the tragic news
that a person with a gun charged the stage at a rock concert and opened
fire. Last night in Columbus, Ohio, Damageplan was one song into its
first set when a man opened fire and killed three people before being
shot and killed himself by police officers. Among the dead: “Dimebag”
Darrell, real name Darrell Abbott. It’s the first I’ve heard, but the
AP tells me he was among the finest “metal guitarists” of his
generation. He was killed on the same day John Lennon was murdered.

I
certainly don’t want to insult a man tragically killed in the prime of
life. I don’t mind insulting the AP, though. Several things struck me
about the report as it appeared at the New York Times. First, I wonder
how much gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair there must have been in
newsrooms all over the country this morning. First, call the music
critic! Do we have a music critic? Does he know anything about this
band, this “Damageplan”? The early wire says “formerly of Pantera,”
I’ve heard of them, they’re big, right?

Next. Shit, better brew
another pot of coffee, this is going to be a long meeting with copy and
standards. Is it gonna pass muster to use this guy’s name—”Dimebag” in
the lead? I mean, fer chrissake, that means DRUGS. And it was a
nickname. But that’s what everyone knew him as. “Darrell Abbott” means
nothing to people. Yeah, but “Dimebag”… drugs! OK, but first
reference ONLY!

OK, I’ll stop pretending at this point, because
I honestly don’t know how newsrooms work, and The Big Cheese is too
busy to ask (new issue). But what I thought was goofiest about the AP
report was this paragraph:

“Telephone numbers for both Darrell
and Jerry Abbott are unlisted and could not be reached early Thursday
by The Associated Press.”

Two thoughts on this:

A) You
do not just look up a rock star in the phone book. Anyone who has ever
dabbled in music journalism knows that you first subscribe to Pollstar
magazine for several hundred dollars, then one to twelve months later,
you get a special phonebook that allows you to look up any major record
label, then a record-label phone-tree connects you to a “publicity and
media” office, then you send a fax describing the reason why you called
the PR office, then you are given the number of a PR person, who then
promises to get back to you “later today” which is code for “after you
call me about a hundred times for the next two weeks and finally reach
my assistant,” who then must repeat the process with an agent, who then
repeats the process with a personal handler, who then “might have him
call you sometime.” This whole process may start over, if any one
person in the line of command is away from his or her desk. Shortcut:
Say you are with the Times or Rolling Stone, and this is for a cover
story. Can you hold? I’ll connect you now.

B) Who did they expect to answer the phone at Dimebag’s house? And what would the AP have said if he’d answered?—Jem Casey

We were surprised to open up Monday’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune to see Jon Tevlin’s article on religion in the workplace.
Surprised, because it was very similar to a feature story that was on
the cover of the New York Times Magazine about a month ago. We’d
noticed Russell Shorto’s feature, not only because it was a compelling
cover story, but because its main subject was a small bank in outstate
Minnesota. Also because the photographs, taken by white-hot Minneapolis
photographer Alec Soth, were wonderful.

We’ve already commented recently
on the phenomenon of follow-on news stories: The New York Times or the
Washington Post do the heavy-lifting on a story, get all the glory for
the scoop, and when the parade has passed, all the local papers shuffle
along shoveling up the remainders, maybe a little ashamed that someone
in Manhattan managed to break a local story under the noses of a whole
newsroom full of local reporters.

Tevlin does acknowledge the
source of his interest in Riverview Bank, after a fashion. Near the end
of his piece, he notes that Riverview Bank, on its website, claims to
have converted Times “freelancer” Shorto during an “interview for a
newspaper article.” (Shorto denies this.) When we emailed Tevlin about
his follow-on article, he told us there were lots of other interesting
loose ends to tie up in the Riverview Bank story, and he was onto them
the day after the Times article appeared. The St. Paul Pioneer-Press,
in the person of business reporter Dave Beal, was also on the story.
They published their own follow-on November 11.

There is nothing
wrong with this practice per se. While we don’t want to inflame
professional jealousies, it would be nice if writers acknowledged where
they get their story ideas, particularly if it’s from other writers. It
is merely vanity that prevents someone from writing “as first reported
in the New York Times.” But this sort of story poaching goes on all the
time; local daily newspapers are especially bad about doing it to
nationals, weeklies, and monthlies. They have done it to us here at The
Rake. (We’ve already given up hope of ever working elsewhere in this
town. Funny how if you write about media in New York, you’re guaranteed
a job practically for the rest of your life. If you write about media
in the Twin Cities, you’d better keep Monster.com bookmarked.) For our
own part, we admit to being allergic to a story if it has appeared
anywhere else our esteemed readers may have been exposed to it. This
falls under the principal of giving your readers a little credit. And,
as we love to point out, a newspaper article and a magazine story are
two very different animals. Tevlin’s story was different from Shorto’s,
though it was clearly provoked by it.

Still, we were surprised that the Star-Tribune photographs
were so similar to Alec Soth’s. One Strib image depicted the exact
scene as the shot on the New York Times Magazine’s cover: An office
wall with a handsome painting that shows one modern businessman
introducing another businessman to the robed and haloed Jesus Christ,
as if to say,”I’d like you to meet my boss, the Son of God.”

The
striking similarity in the photographs seemed a breach. Were we being
naive? We can see how you might make the argument that, just as
Riverview Bank is sitting out there in the public domain for anyone to
write about, their office interiors and personnel are not themselves
copyrighted. And given that Tevlin’s lead specifically refers to this
painting, it falls under the definition of pure documentary
photography, right?

We don’t know. It doesn’t seem possible that
Stormi Greener, an excellent photographer in her own right, was unaware
of Soth’s photos when she shot hers for the Star-Tribune. To our eye,
it seems obvious that someone asked her to take precisely the same
pictures Soth had taken for the Times magazine— photos that are
undoubtedly under license and embargo, and not therefore available to
the Star Tribune or anyone else. You look and see what you think: Here is Soth’s photo for the Times, and here is Greener’s.

We
got ahold of Alec Soth in Paris, and he was a little surprised. “Wow,
that is quite similar,” he said. But he was willing to believe that it
was a coincidence—and that probably an editor at the Star-Tribune
should fall on the sword for this. (We know from experience: It is
ALWAYS an editor’s fault!) Jon Tevlin told us he thought you could send
dozens of photographers to Riverview Bank and they’d have taken the
exact same photo. The Jesus-in-the-executive-suite artwork is a “no
brainer,” he said. Times magazine editor Gerald Marzorarti politely
declined to comment, and Greener has not answered a call and an email.

This
photographic facet of the follow-on story undoubtedly falls into a grey
area, and maybe it illustrates the difference between fine art
photography and photojournalism. Soth’s photo is striking in part
because it is so artful, whereas Greener’s has a solid if unremarkable
gravity as photojournalism—and it’s almost the same picture!

But
it’s the art within the art. When we first saw the cover of the Times
Magazine, we were convinced that a Times art director had pulled off an
amazing illustration. Indeed, the point of both the Soth and the
Greener photos was actually to reproduce the astonishing piece of
framed, evangelical art, in situ. Perhaps the real injured party here
is Nathan Greene. He is the formerly anonymous born-again capitalist
who was responsible for painting “The Senior Partner.” He’ll
undoubtedly get his reward—and maybe his copyright—in the next
world.—The Editor in Cheese

We have very little patience for the ongoing conversation
about blogs and whether anybody cares about them or not. Like most
things, it makes very little sense to judge a whole medium or
phenomenon generically. There are good blogs and there are bad blogs.
(Helpful hint: paid professionals are paid professionals for a reason.
They have a huge advantage over the passionate amateur, because they
don’t have to actually work an honest job for a living. This is no
guarantee of quality; it just guarantees that you can complain to their
bosses if they really stink.)

That
said, there have been lots and lots of first-rate bloggers who have
made the leap to the pros. One thing you can say about blogging is that
it gives a person lots of daily practice in the craft of writing (or at
least summarizing and linking). Exhibit A: James Lileks. We think this
man has entirely gone off the deep end of paranoia, and he should be
ashamed of his chameleon-like conversion to a shrill conservative
alarmist in the wake of 9/11 and fatherhood, whichever came first. But
we are also awed by his command of the language, and the ease with
which he can turn a delightful phrase and a killing joke. Being
professionals around here, we know that good writing trumps bad faith
every day of the week. We count ourselves reluctant fans, but admiring
fans nonetheless.

We launched this daily blog thing about a
month ago, and all along have been kind of openly obsessed with media
and media criticism. This is a beat we don’t cover so much in the
magazine. Seeing as how the blog here is supposed to open a window into
our office (More windows! Open-able! Yes please!), it’s natural that
our “water-cooler” chatter has more to do with the internal workings of
the media business than with what we publish in the magazine.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the blog. Yesterday, we decided to publish exactly the same thing on the blog and at the website,
under the aegis of the magazine. When it was offered in a non-blog
context—without the blogspot.com URL and without the other obvious
visual scaffolding of a blog that you see around you here —we were
suddenly being read all over the internet. Do you know why?

Yesterday’
s piece was a text-book case of blogging. We read three or four
commentaries on media, and then added our own, without any new
reporting or factual information. We just saw some interesting
connections, and we hoped that we were able to convey them in clear,
entertaining language.

Now, we don’t know if we succeeded in
doing that, and we earnestly hope the next paycheck is still on its
way. But we do know that the marketplace is already judging blogs not
on their context but on their content. Folks like Wonkette, Andrew
Sullivan, TMFTML, Dong Resin— these are all amazing writers, all of
whom are now being paid to do what they have a real talent to do.

The
first two were great writers long before the word “blog,” or even the
Web existed; the latter two were “discovered” by traditional media, and
have since been put to work earning their own way. We’ve even been
known to harrass a blogger or two until they’ll take money from us, no
kidding.) We could give you lots of other examples, but then we’d have
to start tracking down URLs, and we hate having to do that. Maybe
that’s what the essential difference is between a blogger and a “real
journalist.”—The Editor in Cheese

In yesterday’s Sunday Times, Frank Rich makes a point we were trying to make ourselves a few weeks ago.
In the aftermath of the election, USA Today had published a story that
suggested Big, Bad, Liberal Media was scratching its collective head,
wondering where it had gone so terribly wrong in understanding the
country–and more to the point, underestimating the electoral muscle of
the anti-intellectual, conservative, white male, NASCAR masses. In
fact, even Frank Rich’s boss, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The
Times, was described in that article as being somewhat flummoxed–so
flummoxed in fact, that the best idea he could come up with was to
reopen the Times shuttered Kansas City bureau.

Yesterday, Rich
looked at the problem as it applies to network TV news, what with the
recent retirements of Rather and Brokaw, and the ascendency of Brian
Williams. He suggests that network news is desperate to win the hearts
of red America, so desperate that they are making a point of decamping
to Toledo and Dubuque and Denver. NBC news is going to great lengths to
establish the bona fides of Williams–hey, he’s a part-owner of a
go-cart track! He drinks Budweiser! He showers AFTER work. (Well, no
maybe not that. But hey, he’s got a mitten loofa too, just like
O’Reilly! Wait, that’s kinda faggy and liberal, innit?) Why would they
do that? Is it because they seriously believe there is news happening
out there that they are ignoring because of their bi-coastal myopia?
What Rich said better than we could ever hope to say was this: They are
chasing an audience, not a news story. And that is a real sign of
declension, and a cause for worry.

Salient, fact-checking
moment: Why chase after Fox News viewers who are rabidly partisan and
reality-challenged, and in any case, are far outnumbered by network
viewers? The problem is perceptions and myths. As Louis Menand makes
very clear in his wonderful story in last week’s New Yorker, the
already unassailable “take-away” from election 2004 was the “values
fallout.” There was no values fallout. Menand points out that this was
strictly a misreading of exit poll numbers with no clear consensus on
why people voted in any particular way. (This is probably, like
everything else, the fault of Democrats. Republicans could care less
why they won–the less said about that the better, as far as they’re
concerned.)

The key to this little conundrum is the very real
frustration that great media organizations like the Times and the New
Yorker and almost any other thoughtful organ of print journalism are
feeling. You can print the facts, the truth, the most compelling sorts
of historiography–but you can’t make that horse drink the water.

We
had the same sinking feeling after reading Rich’s essay that we had
reading all those terrific pre-election presidential endorsements–that
there isn’t one person in the country who’d read it and have his mind
changed. In these fractious times, even the Times is preaching to a
choir. One can certainly forgive them for trying to either expand the
choir a bit, or take their show on the road. (Incidentally,interesting article today covering the same territory with NPR, but with a racial facet;
Tavis Smiley wonders how to get more blacks to listen to public radio.
How is this different from trying to get more conservatives to read the
New York Times? Discuss…)

To have a small but vocal crowd of
knownothings grow into a hateful GOP monopoly of government that has,
in no small way, been underwritten by a deliberate campaign of
falsifying reality and pre-emptive accusations of “liberal bias”– this
has diminished the power of the entire industry of journalism. Facts
are not partisan, but many people don’t seem to believe that anymore.
We guess you just feel the pinch more at the top, where you’re
accustomed to the respect afforded the “paper of record.” When it
develops that the news is not the news, but an exercise in servicing an
audience, you get– well, modern TV news.—The Editor in Cheese

Yesterday at Slate, Jack Shafer
claimed that “the best place to judge journalists is on the printed
page.” That seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to say… if you’re
judging them on their journalism. But that was not the point of his
article—which purported to follow up on an “anonymous tip” regarding
the speaking fees of New Yorker writers. It seems that someone out
there feels that New Yorker writers shouldn’t take money from anyone
but their employer, evidently because it compromises their professional
neutrality. The tipster wanted Shafer to judge whether writers should
take speaking fees, and Shafer sort of deflected—for the right reasons,
in my opinion.

I’m not sure why Shafer persists in sourcing this
“tip” to an anonymous person. It’s hardly a secret that many
journalists do all kinds of moonlighting, and it’s silly to pretend
that their little jaunts to the lectern—or the NPR studio, or the CNN
set—aren’t going to have something to do with their area of interest
and expertise.

It seemed strange to me that Shafer would insist
on attributing the charge of calumny to this anonymous source when all
you have to do is scan your TV guide, or your local University
bulletin, to catch up on who’s having their bread buttered on the
public circuit. But it becomes clear that he’s siding with the
particular writers his “source” tells him to check out—The New Yorker’s
Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki, who are friends and colleagues
of Shafer’s. In other words, he wanted to reassure his powerful friends
on the other end of the ethical microscope that it wasn’t his idea.

Still,
it was a nice essay regarding the ethics of journalism. But the answer,
to us, is significantly less complex than Shafer makes it out to be: If
money compromises journalists, then we shouldn’t pay them anything,
ever. Journalists, like anyone else in any other profession, need to
worry about job security and the value of their personal stock, and
taking a multi-channel approach to reaching your audience is good work,
if you can get it.

Now, that is a much different proposition
than being paid by a subject to write about him, her, or it—which is
that bright red firewall you might have noticed between a piece of
journalism and a piece of advertising. In my view, the media
marketplace does not need the ethics cop that Shafer declines to be. In
fact, I believe it is slightly condescending to think that readers are
too stupid to sort out advertising from editorial content; they
recognize catalog copy from magazine copy.

(This, by the way,
does not mean readers automatically prefer editorial to advertising the
way editors and writers think they do— they just know the difference,
and are capable of enjoying both. Nor does it mean that we should
therefore get lax about distinguishing advertisements from editorial
material, where there is any possible confusion—if that is something we
care about. We do. Not everyone does.)

Not
long ago, I was reading the letters of Harold Ross, the founding editor
of the New Yorker. I was struck by the fact that Ross frequently
exercised his authority even over the advertising side of the magazine.
He was pathologically skeptical of all advertising, considered it a
necessary evil, pored over the advertising copy, complained if he felt
it didn’t comport with the magazine (he was famously squeemish about
ads for toilet paper) or if he felt it made dishonest claims, and even
occasionally nixed advertisements. (Imagine that happening today.) But
if you look at copies of the New Yorker from that era, you instantly
understand why Ross worried so much about it: Advertisments in the
thirties and forties were almost always narrative in form, and were in
many cases almost indistiguishable from the editorial copy adjacent to
it. While there are many contemporary examples of ads like this that
intentionally try to blur that line, I guess it is a blessing in
disguise that ads today have become so strongly image- and logo-driven.

Is
this nervous Nellyism a relic of a bygone era? I think the issue
remains, but has been simplified considerably, for one reason: This is
only an issue if you make it one, if you build your business on a
particular value like “neutrality.” If you are at the top of the
journalistic food chain, through either luck or hard work or fiat, you
will not be forgiven for the sin of putting personal gain ahead of your
employer’s integrity. In other words, you self regulate. Of course, if
your employer has no integrity, then it’s no foul.—The Editor in
Cheese