Looking for the Mouse in Media: Clay Shirky on Deploying the Cognitive Surplus for Public Good

Ever wondered: where’s the time going to come from for all these nifty open source ventures that people are planning? Well, Clay Shirky says we got plenty. He just gave an extremely useful and imaginative speech to Web heads about where we are in media time.

Shirky, who teaches at NYU but in a different program, has a new book out: Here Comes Everybody (“The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.”) This speech stands alone. You can read it here, but you should really watch him here— after absorbing this post. The clip is less than 15 minutes. It lets you think along with Shirky as he explains “the cognitive surplus” we developed during the age of TV.

This is a huge deposit of waking hours lived in front of the tube, a vast expanse of free time occupied for 40 years by commercial television. We’re at least starting to find the architecture of participation (Tim O’Reilly’s phrase) that would turn some of those couch-born hours into sentient activity, followed naturally by inter-activity, as in massively multiplayer games, which can lead (for some) to public works and social goods, as with “the online encyclopedia anyone can edit.”

The imagery is geological: the release of trapped deposits. He thinks we can reverse the time sink for people once marooned on the receiving end of a one-way system that didn’t care what you thought or brought to it, since it couldn’t afford the costs of interacting with you. I was one of those people—1964 to 1974 were my wasted years—and Clay says he was one. We both watched Gilligan’s Island and tried to decide who was cuter: Ginger or Mary Ann.

So I took his talk very personally. I would love to have those hours back for something a little more constructive. But where does that love go?

One place it’s gone is into making certain that my daughter, Sylvie, doesn’t get marooned. I’m glad she has her own blog with her friend Julia Jarvis. (They’re both fifth graders and their site is about American Girl dolls.) She has a foothold on the producer side of the transaction, and understands the Web as an author’s medium.

A cognitive surplus means the total amount of unoccupied free time available (think of it as “screen hours”) after the basic needs of society have been met. Television swallowed up most of the surplus American society produced during the period of relative affluence after World War Two.

Clay figures it took 100 million hours of people around the world writing, checking, editing, gathering, and talking it over (and fighting!) to make all versions of Wikipedia. “And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.” Therefore if 99 percent of the TV watching in the US remained as is, and we broke off just one percent for the information commons and other cool stuff we could have 100 Wikipedia-class projects per year.

What we need are lots and lots of different projects that try to deploy this surplus— and “fail informatively.” So the kid in the basement, the developers at the Web 2.0 conference, the Knight Challenge winners and others with new media ambitions should go forward with their best ideas. Because….

Someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.

Let’s summarize:

Q. Where do people get the hours to participate?

A. From the de-commercialization of their time!

Q. Yeah, but people like to consume their media. Sometimes they just want to sit there… Right?

A. Right! They also want to produce (sometimes) and share what they made (some of those times). They want to be audience, producer, distributor… at different times. Deal with it or die!

They also expect to operate their media. At least more and more of them do. Clay illustrates this beautifully with a story about a four year-old girl who wanders around behind the DVD player as its playing her show. When her parents ask her what she’s doing, she pokes her head out and says, “I’m looking for the mouse.”

I heard that and thought: Yes. That’s what I’ve been doing for maybe 20 years or so. Looking for the mouse in American journalism. And many other people have been seeking the same thing in their separate but interrelated domains.

To the really young people—Sylvie’s generation—any device that ships without a mouse is “broken.” It happened a long time ago, of course, but the modern professionalized press, producing the journalism that’s called mainstream now, shipped without a mouse back then because it was built for overlay on a broadcast—one-to-many—system.

“We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience.” Dig: Those are the trapped deposits. Watch Shirky explain them… and then get to work! My favorite moment, because it was the most personal: Clay’s wicked response to the television reporter who asked… “where do people find the time?”

Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine writes about what the girls—my daughter and his daughter—are doing:

Lately, I’ve been thinking a great deal about how the connections and collaboration the internet enables change — improve, I say — the nature of friendship in profound ways that will, in turn, change society in unseen ways. Yesterday, I wrote about ambient intimacy, that is, our ability to stay in touch with the little details of friends’ lives. I’ve argued that the permanence of connections enabled by Facebook links and Google search alters our relationships; this is on my mind because I’m about to write that chapter in my book and because I’m going to see an old friend thanks to Google later this week.

Now add one more dimension: creation as an act of friendship, collaboration as a means of staying in touch, media as a social act. That is what is happening in the American Girl blog: Julia and Sylvie can share by creating. Play is social. Media is play. Social media is fun…

Sylvie and Julia are just doing what comes naturally — they’re having fun together. And so I’m sure both of them with will roll their eyes at their crazy dads for blathering on about it here and there and not understanding the point, for making it sound boring, for taking the fun out of it.

I can say with some confidence that Sylvie thinks being mentioned in PressThink is fun. But she can probably think of tons of things that are more fun.

Some of what Jeff says in his post is also covered in this short video clip of me explaining The Ethic of the Link and the Rise of the Web.

Meanwhile, Adrian Monck has a different view:

Is online activity any more worthwhile than watching half an hour of the Phil Silvers Show? Or any more worthwhile than sitting in an audience whilst Shirky is speaking?

Is Shirky saying there is a problem with spectating and entertainment?

Well say it then! And give us some evidence - not just some flashy but superficial historical analogies, some geek-speak and a little Nike philosophy of the Just Do It school.

(Did I say I didn’t like this essay, by the way?)

On whether online activity is any more worthwhile than watching half an hour of the Phil Silvers Show, I would say yes, definitely. Shirky says activity is better than inactivity. And: “However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.”

This was cross posted at Idea Lab.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 10:15 PM | Comments (3) | Link 

The Presses Stop But the Press Goes On: Capital Times Lives on the Web

Over drinks the night before meeting, Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger went years past where I planned to time-travel the next day. Talking about the presses they’d just spent tens of millions of pounds buying, he shrugged and said:

“They may be the last presses we ever own.”

Jeff Jarvis, The Last Presses, Buzzmachine, Dec. 5, 2005.

Take a look at this photograph. It shows employees of the Capital Times in Madison, WI, holding one of the last editions of their newspaper, an afternoon daily founded in 1917. These people are losing their jobs, and the newspaper they brought forward six days a week will no longer stretch across the big machines you can see behind them.

The photo isn’t a celebration. The people in the picture, though proud of their work, are not full of that fighting spirit. They are gathered to mark the end of something. Every day they put out a newspaper that won’t be put out that way any more. Behind them are the last presses at the Capital Times.

The presses have stopped but the press goes on. That’s my headline. Here’s the New York Times account and a local report. I wanted to add my own.

There’s no photograph of it, but the Capital Times was re-born on Saturday, which was a day of pain and hope for journalism in Madison. Ambivalence too: about the Web, and the lost authority of print-on-paper. Generational blues were felt. The good part is pretty simple: the Cap Times (“Your Progressive Newspaper”) will go on reporting the news. Journalists like John Nichols will go on editing and writing opinion. But the production logic will shift. The Cap Times is now on online newsroom—a NORG, in fact—with an independent editorial voice, plus two weeklies in tabloid form.

I see a web-to-print play aborning, to me a wise try. Plus they aced the distribution part of the exam: new tabs inserted into the morning daily, the Wisconsin State Journal, which in turn gains circulation from the demise of the afternoon paper, putting the ex-afternoon paper’s weeklies into way way more homes than the fading daily ever reached: 17,000 compared to 104,000 in the new arrangement. For the Cap Times it’s a brand new public to inform. Potential influence has been expanded. The journalism has to change, and no one knows how yet.

This outcome—which includes a flying leap into the digital unknown by a staff not known for its Web savvy—is the result of unique circumstances in Madison. For the people there who care about newspapers, the ground shook on Saturday. Some said goodbye to all that, and left the trade. Others went forward with a new thing. A lot of cynicism remained.

The deal was reported in February: The Cap Times would cease publication as an afternoon daily and change itself into an online journal with two weekly print editions— a news and opinion tabloid on Wednesdays, an arts and entertainment one on Thursdays.

The two papers have separate newsrooms and editorial pages, but they long ago combined other operations, splitting the profits 50-50 even though the Capital Times was smaller, weaker, and not a money maker. The paper sustained a decent-sized news staff: about 60-65 compared to 100 or so at the Wisconsin State Journal. In the end 24 people were cut from that staff. Seventeen of them are in the last presses photo. This is the pain part. The paper ran bios of each. According to the New York Times, about 40 people remain in the newsroom.

“Today marks our last edition as a traditional daily newspaper of the sort Americans knew in the 19th and 20th centuries,” said the editorial on Saturday. “Starting tomorrow, The Capital Times will be a daily newspaper of the sort Americans will know in the 21st century.” Which of course is the hope part.

The founder of the Capital Times, William T. Evjue, split from the Wisconsin State Journal at the height of World War I. Evjue strongly backed Wisconsin’s Robert M. La Follette, and his crusading populism. The State Journal less strongly. (It’s owned by Lee Enterprises, an Iowa-based chain.) The two papers competed as businesses for thirty years but then called a truce and combined in 1948, which was a lot earlier than other deals that created Joint Operating Agreements between rival newspapers, as they are known. The theory is: you preserve two editorial staffs, two voices.

In 1970, on his death, Evjue transferred ownership of the paper to a foundation he had started. His will demanded that profits not invested in the newspaper be distributed to the community as grants. (Assets today are $25 million.) This saved his newspaper from a cookie cutter fate, allowing Evjue’s voice to carry and linger long enough for heirs to bring it across into the next era. Ideologically, the Capital Times cut a distinct—and left-wing or to later generations “progressive”—path. It of course opposed Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was from Wisconsin. (See this history and this video from Nichols.)

“Capital Times will carry on the fight in a new form,” vowed editor emeritus Dave Zweifel, the paper’s dominant figure after Evjue’s death. He spoke across 91 years of Wisconsin progressives in commemorating Saturday’s events. Zweifel summoned a different photograph, showing Evjue turning the key on new presses in 1961.

The players may be different in 2008 than they were in 1917. The powerful lobbies of the railroads and banks have been replaced by even more powerful corporate lobbies and their deep-pocketed associations. All too many laws are written for the elites, not for the public. Money controls elections, and politicians, groveling for money themselves, refuse to do anything about it.

In other words, if peace and justice are to be served, there’s a lot of work ahead…

And so after today, we’ll be pushing a different button from the one Mr. Evjue pushed on his new press back in 1961. He didn’t shy then from forging ahead, embracing new technology that would make his paper better and stronger.

The button we push tomorrow will move The Capital Times to the Web seven days a week — as one of our reporters put it, from your mailbox to your inbox — giving us the opportunity to carry Bill Evjue’s message to more people than ever before.

This passage reminds us that newspapers have always been good for propagation, as well as information. The Capital Times is a newspaper trying to pass along its DNA (non-profit, progressive daily) and possibly influence the course of the press after the “jump” into another frame. Will it work? I have no idea. But it makes sense, what they’re doing.

I asked my friend and colleague Lew Friedland, who teaches journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and studies social capital, what these events meant for the press in Madison. I also asked him what PressThink readers should know that would not be apparent if you don’t live in Madison. He told me the Cap Times suffered for being the afternoon newspaper, which used to be the more valuable slot.

However, the Capital Times is also a decidedly progressive, left-of-center, newspaper and, although Madison still remains a town that is left-of-center by almost all American standards, it is not as far left as most people outside of Wisconsin believe. It is a city of about 250,000 in a metro-area of 500,000. Much of that surround consists of middle-class, middle of the road suburbs, and while neither paper has succeeded in expanding its circulation to match growth in this area, the Wisconsin State Journal has been aggressively pursing this expanding audience, while the Capital Times has been mostly indifferent, focusing on the city, the progressive community, and younger audiences through its lifestyle tabs.

I have deep respect for the Capital Times, its editors, and staff, but it has operated as an island in many ways, upholding journalistic traditions while much of the community has been changing around it. In fact, it was insulated from having to change by its unique economic arrangement.

It’s also true that the management, Capital Newspapers, strongly favors the morning Wisconsin State Journal. While most observers believe the State Journal is not making money (it’s hard to tell; Lee Newspapers holds its figures close to the vest), the Capital Times loses large amounts of money. In economic terms, the size of the newsroom (before being cut for the changeover) was at least three times the size of most with its circulation. That may be a reasonable decision, if the goal is to put out a strong alternative newspaper. But it was only possible because of the terms of the Evjue agreement. In an open market, the paper would have been killed a long time ago.

Essentially the paper is part way between a commercial and non-profit venture, and was being subsidized by the joint ownership. I don’t think this is a bad thing, and, indeed, may be a model for sustaining professional local journalism in the future. But we need to understand it in this context.

It’s exactly these quirks that made possible a flying leap at the Capital Times that other other newspapers still treat as implausible, even though their present situation is impossible. “This is the kind of bold move the American newspaper industry should have made five years ago,” wrote Jarvis today. Friedland told me there’s a lot of competition online; the Cap Times is getting into the game after others have established themselves in local news for the Web.

Madison is a great town in many ways to try a daily online news experiment. It has one of the highest broadband penetrations in the nation (thanks to the University of Wisconsin and significant financial, government, and high tech industry). But because the Capital Times is fully committing itself to the net somewhat late, it also has major competition. The Isthmus is one of the best alternatively weeklies in the country, independently owned and published, with a strong history of local reporting, and it’s Daily Page is widely read. Dane 101, a collaborative blog, is a younger, hipper alternative to both the Daily Page and the Cap Times, and has carved out a younger audience, mostly around arts and music, but it also covers local issues.

School Information System is a widely read collection of blogs, forums, and documents on the local school system, and while it has its own skew (deregulation, anti-tax, favoring the middle and upper middle classes) it has a wide readership and has had impact on this important local issue. Two daily student newspapers have online editions, and our own Madison Commons pulls together news from many neighborhoods with serious coverage of local public issues in a public journalism vein. This is a pretty crowded ecology into which to launch a daily online news journal. Add to this the fact that the joint web edition of both papers (madison.com) has really lagged the overall curve of local online journalism and there is a definite competitive disadvantage.

Still, I think there is room, if the Capital Times can reinvent itself as a breaking online news journal, with many links to existing sources, and, ideally, a strong current of citizen journalism. But that won’t be easy. Bluntly, the paper has had a strong tradition, but has not been an online innovator. It is almost starting from scratch, which could be an advantage, if it can inherit the best of its tradition, but in a very different, much more grassroots driven organizational form. I hope it does, because it is one of the few newsrooms with the reporters and capital to show us what local online journalism might look like. But it has a large challenge ahead.

Friedland’s colleague, Sue Robinson, who has been studying the transition at the Cap Times, names some of those challenges: “The introduction of new technologies to a staff that hitherto has not had much training across media platforms. The welcoming of citizen interaction within the production process. The 24/7 wire-service-like deadline. What it means to maintain objectivity as a journalist who must be heard and seen in their audio recordings or video formats. There is a going to be a significant adjustment period, no doubt, and at the end of it, the CapTimes’ newsroom culture will be altered in a fairly fundamental way.”

Mark Eisen, editor of the Isthmus, wrote a lengthy piece on the passage of the Capital Times: The End of an Era. He admitted that as “a gray-bearded print guy, I’m just as much in the fog as the next uneasy pressie.” But….

The one thing I’ll bet on is that the new weekly Capital Times that debuts April 30 with a free circulation of 80,000-plus will be aimed at the urban advertising market that Isthmus has cultivated for 32 years.

Ditto with 77 Square, the entertainment/culture weekly that the Cap Times staff will produce for free distribution and insertion in the Wisconsin State Journal.

To be sure, Cap Times editors and reporters see themselves as re-imagining founder Bill Evjue’s progressive vision for the Internet age. But, functionally, the new editions are all about the advertising.

Heard of convergence? Here you have an alternative weekly that went daily on the web competing with a daily that gone’s weekly in print. It is by no means certain that the Capital Times can succeed, because it’s not clear which development path is better. For example, if I were those guys, one of the skills I would immediately try to master is aggregating local news better (and faster) than anyone aggregates local news. But the Isthmus is already very good at that, while Dane101 produced a first-rate account of the shift at the Capital Times— better than the paper’s own. (See 101’s excellent round-up of reactions.) The Cap Times editors have a blog up about their re-invention drama, but clearly they are behind at blogging.

My concluding thoughts are these:

• I know this isn’t how they’re thinking about it in Madison, but from my perspective Saturday marked the debut of a local newsblog and opinion site in Madison with an editorial staff of 40, and a web-to-print engine that is ready to start clicking. Those are basically good facts for the Cap Times. It’s up to the staff to bring journalistic imagination equal to them.

• “Breaking news, 24/7” is not an idea for how to succeed, but one obvious and necessary element in the solution. (See David Blaska on commodity news.)

• I think it’s interesting that, up until now, the “progressive” newspaper hasn’t been very progressive on the Web. Why is this? Might it be an advantage, as Friedland suggests? Might it betray a weakness, a legacy cost still to come due?

• If I were Paul Fanlund, the editor of the Cap Times, I would set a first year goal of developing 400 solid contributors of news, expertise and opinion able to work with my 40 pros at headquarters, and I would calculate that to get the 400 I would need a to register about 4000 participants in various networked journalism projects.

The professionalized press we have today is approximately as old as the Capital Times. Both come out of the progressive era. The mainstream press went one way, a tributary in Madison took its own (some say lazy) path. The headwaters are the same. One newspaper broke away from the other in 1917. Then they got back together in 1948. Now the State Journal carries the Cap Times into Madison homes. That’s not really two newspapers, but one with two branches.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 1:08 AM | Comments (13) | Link 

"Where's the Business Model for News, People?"

This was originally published at the Britannica Blog as Newspapers and the Net: Where’s the Business Model, People?, part of a week long forum on the future of the newspaper and whether we care if it dims. I made a few small revisions.

In The Great Unbundling Nick Carr states the problems facing newspapers clearly and well. He has a good grasp of what the Web is doing to the economics of news and advertising, and this is why he’s able to be clear. I liked his ending:

“How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?” The answer may turn out to be equally simple: We don’t.

I think he’s right. It’s possible we will lose some of the public goods that newspapers under the old subsidy system were able to bring forward. People ask me about this all the time. When I tell them there’s no answer at the moment a strange look comes across their faces. A social problem with no answer? Is that even allowed?

Posted by Jay Rosen at 12:04 AM | Comments (9) | Link 

From Off The Bus to Meet the Press

Original appeared April 14 at Huffington Post as The Uncharted. It has 700+ comments. I have made some changes and updated it with additional links and fresh reports. This is the next-day, PressThink version. Scroll down to After Matter for links to the debate over this episode.

When a story goes from OffTheBus to Meet the Press in two days certain things are lost in the velocity. One of these was OffTheBus itself, the site I started with Arianna Huffington last year. I knew the waves from Mayhill Fowler’s on-the-scene story, No Surprise that Hard Pressed Pennsylvanians Turn Bitter, were going to make Tim Russert’s show Sunday. I tuned in to see how he and his panel of insiders would handle.

Would Russert see the novelty of the situation? An Obama supporter and donor, who also wrote regular dispatches for Huffington Post’s pro-am campaign coverage site, OffTheBus, recorded Obama’s words at an April 6th San Francisco fundraiser, and then wrote about what concerned her in them. From there it exploded into campaign space. Pretty good story, as the Guardian recognized, followed by the Times of New York and the Times of LA. Heads up, candidates, your supporters include bloggers and they will exercise their First Amendment rights. Barack Obama found that out this week….

Posted by Jay Rosen at 2:14 PM | Comments (80) | Link 

The Love Affair Between McCain and the Press Sprains the Brain of the Liberal Blogosphere

At Attytood, where I check in regularly, Will Bunch had some news for me on Saturday. Liberal bloggers declare war in Philly over media, McCain. He later changed it to, “UPDATED: Liberal bloggers say media-McCain love will be the battleground in the fall.” Having just written about that affair, I was interested in his report:

The left-wing blogosphere is declaring an all-out war against the mainstream media – desperately concerned that inside-the-Beltway reporter-love for D.C. fixture McCain is already creating too large a mountain for any Democratic nominee to scale.

“This campaign is not going to be between the Democrats and the Republicans,” said Philadelphia’s Duncan Black, who writes under the name Atrios and whose highly popular progressive political blog, named Eschaton, inspired the gathering of bloggers and political activists called Eschacon ‘08.

“It’s between the Democrats and the media.”

I look forward to learning more about how “the media” stepped in for “the Republicans” in 2008, such that the media now have to be defeated for the Democrats to win. But even that provocative idea stops well short of war.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 1:18 AM | Comments (116) | Link 

Just How Did John McCain Obtain What He Has in the Bank with the Press?

NBC’s political director, Chuck Todd, said it this week: “Even if he gets dinged on the experience stuff, ‘Oh, he says he’s Mr. Experience. Doesn’t he know the difference between this stuff?’ He’s got enough of that in the bank, at least with the media, that he can get away with it.”

He’s got enough of that in the bank. This phrase made people wonder what kind of depositary institution we were talking about. (The immediate occasion was McCain’s strange assertion on March 18 that Al Qaeda in Iraq was being trained by the Iranians.)

• Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly: “Remind me again: where does all this cred come from?”

• Glenn Greenwald at Salon: “Whether McCain’s foreign policy views are entitled to respect is something that the voters ought to be deciding in the election.”

Posted by Jay Rosen at 12:57 AM | Comments (54) | Link 

Obama tells the Best Political Team on Television: You Have a Choice

(I don’t usually do quick reax posts, but….)

I was watching CNN for Obama’s speech. Moments after it concluded Wolf Blitzer was asked to tell us what he heard in it. Wolf’s ear is the big ear for the Best Political Team on Television, according to CNN. So he went first. And according to Blitzer, Obama’s speech boils down to a “pre-emptive strike” against various attacks that are still to come, in the form of videos, ads, and news controversies that are sure to keep Reverend Jeremiah Wright and “race” in play as issues in the campaign. (For his exact words see the bottom of this post.)

Wasn’t the speech about that very pattern?

This is a style of analysis—and a level of thought—we have become utterly used to, especially from Blitzer but also many others on TV: everything is a move in the game of getting elected, and it’s our job in political television to explain to you, the slightly clueless viewer at home, what today’s tactics are, then to estimate whether they will work.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 1:55 PM | Comments (64) | Link 

Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality

It is rare that a single article advances American press think. In fact, it is rare for American press think to advance at all, which is one of the reasons our press is so vexed these days. Take Clark Hoyt’s latest effort as New York Times public editor. It goes like this:

Many readers have complained to me that the Times is not “shooting down the middle” in its coverage of the 2008 campaign. But I’ve been monitoring and grading the coverage myself, and I have a surprise for some of you. “The Times has not been systematically biased in its news coverage, even if it has occasionally given ammunition to those who claim otherwise.”

Ta-da… An unbiased press! Now I do not doubt his word. Clark wouldn’t cook the books. But this is a conversation that’s savagely stuck, gamed not to go anywhere— for all sides. Professional journalists do not improve the situation when they double down on their neutrality and present objectivity as a truth claim about their own work. It is this kind of claim that compels people to furnish—furiously—more chapter and verse in the very bad and very long book of media bias. Which then causes Hoyt to speak lines like, “Bias is a tricky thing to measure, because we all bring our biases to the task.”

The only exit from this system is for people in the press to start recognizing: there is a politics to what they do. They have to get that part right. They have to be more transparent about it.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 10:36 AM | Comments (83) | Link 

"An Attractively Against-the-Grain Enterprise..."

Thursday I posted a little exercise in pattern recognition. Today I am back with the answers I received.

I spoke of three “vetting” stories that went awry at the New York Times: Obama’s youthful drug use (Feb. 9). Hillary’s marriage as Topic A among prominent Democrats (from May, 2006.) And of course McCain’s friendship with a lobbyist. (Feb. 21. I wrote about it here, and here.)

Each story left people scratching their heads: what were the editors thinking? Each was part of the “vetting” ritual in which the press imagines itself asking the hard questions of politicians who actually could be president. As Time’s Michael Scherer wrote, each is “a story that doesn’t exactly say what it is saying, or only says part of what the reporters seem to believe, or seems to be saying something it is not, or something like that.”

Posted by Jay Rosen at 1:11 AM | Comments (79) | Link 

Three Vetting Stories Went Awry at the New York Times: Find the Pattern.

Here’s my letter to Romenseko, the news trade’s online gathering place. (Also at the Huffington Post.)

FROM: JAY ROSEN

Romenesko readers, help me out here:

The New York Times trying to “vet” Obama. (On youthful drug use.)

The New York Times trying to “vet” Hillary Clinton. (On the state of her marriage.)

The New York Times trying to “vet” John McCain. (On cozy ties with lobbyists.)

Each story went weirdly wrong. Each story left people scratching their heads: what were the editors thinking? Each was part of the “vetting” ritual in which the press imagines itself asking the hard questions of candidates who would be president. Each has a touch of the bizarre to it.

My question to you: what is going on here? Anything in common among the cases?

It’s just a question. I’ll post any good answers I find.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 1:47 PM | Comments (24) | Link 

Public Editor to Bill Keller: "You Haven't Got it."

As I expected, Clark Hoyt, public editor of the New York Times, told the Times what Ben Bradlee tells Woodward and Bernstein in one memorable scene from All the President’s Men: “You haven’t got it,” he says about a draft of their story. The reporters try to argue back, but Bradlee cuts them off. “Get some harder information next time.”

That is what Hoyt told Bill Keller and the Times staff in his column Sunday, What That McCain Article Didn’t Say. Next time you decide to suggest that a leading presidential candidate had an affair that compromises his reputation and threatens his entire campaign, my god, get some harder information. You cannot go with a story like that and base it on what anonymous sources believed. Your angry readers are right. And you were wrong to run it.

Ombudsman columns are rarely so definitive:

Posted by Jay Rosen at 1:03 AM | Comments (125) | Link 

Cliff Notes Version of the Q and A with New York Times Readers About the McCain Investigation

You can read theirs. Or try mine, which distills theirs down to the press think in it.

This is derived from the Q and A with readers that ran in the New York Times Feb. 21, intended to explain what led to this article from the day before, an explosive report on John McCain’s involvement with lobbyist Vicki Iseman. The paper said it had received more than 2,400 comments on the article and 4,000 questions from readers.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 1:01 AM | Link 

For the New York Times, Too, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Risks

New post! Public Editor to Bill Keller: “You Haven’t Got it.” (Feb. 25)

A few riddles, questions and observations about the story that everyone—including John McCain—is talking about this morning: For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk by four reporters at the New York Times…

• Lots of people will be asking why now? but my first question upon reading the story was different: why endorse? The New York Times endorsed McCain for the Republican nomination on Jan. 25, when it was clearly working on this story and had the basic facts in hand. The endorsement does not mention his image for rectitude, which today’s story assaults, but still, it’s an endorsement, an institutional seal of approval. If the facts in today’s article were not enough to make the Times re-think its endorsement, then why were they good enough for the front page of the paper, eight years after the events in question?

Posted by Jay Rosen at 10:15 AM | Comments (74) | Link 

The Campaign Press is a Herd of Independent Minds

The piece is called The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. It’s about how the campaign media cannot easily make decisions, change course, or learn from its screw-ups because it is a “herd of independent minds.”

Todd Gitlin (who’s been a critic of horse race journalism for even longer than I have) began his response to “Beast” this way:

I ranted to a “60 Minutes” producer that the campaign coverage was shallow, trivial, preoccupied with the evanescent ups and the electrifying downs, the insiders’ moods, the rumors and gaffes, and incurious about the candidates’ records, and the weight or weightlessness of their arguments, the truth and untruth of their claims, and seemingly indifferent to the stakes of the most consequential election on earth. “I know, I know,” he said. “We talk constantly about how to do it better next time.”

That was in 1980.

Seven “cycles” ago. (A cycle is what a campaign insider calls an election.) Obviously the horse race fulfills a purpose for the press, and that purpose goes on… and on. But what is the point? You’ll have to read The Beast Without a Brain to find out. (Begins after the jump…) Oh, and don’t miss Zack Exley’s detailed report at OffTheBus: Organizing Matters: The Lesson from Hillary’s Nevada Win. A good example of what the horse race press doesn’t know and never will.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 10:38 PM | Comments (67) | Link 

"Most of them are not ideologically driven; they just want to get on the front page."

If you’ve been paying attention you know that Mike Huckabee’s rise is bringing out the contempt for social conservatives and evangelicals among the conservative elite and its ecosphere, as Mark Ambinder calls it. John Cole (“Enjoy your new GOP, folks…”) and Andrew Sullivan (“This is their party. And they asked for every last bit of it…”) pounced on the squirming shown as Huckabee climbed in the polls during December. Arianna has written about the reaping and sowing. Steve Benen and Kevin Drum too.

Watching this pattern, The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat defined Huckenfreude as “pleasure derived from the outrage of prominent conservative pundits over the rising poll numbers of Mike Huckabee.” (And “Huckenfreude” is fun to say.) Some particularly good examples of that outrage are Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal and Rich Lowry in the National Review. But also see James Joyner.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 1:01 AM | Comments (247) | Link