PressThink: The Walter Winchell of Montclair: Guest Writer Debra Galant on the Joys of Local News Blogging

The Walter Winchell of Montclair: Guest Writer Debra Galant on the Joys of Local News Blogging

"It’s satisfying, when you find yourself standing in a long line in the new $8.6 million parking deck on a Friday night because there are only two pay stations, to be able to whip out your cell phone, take a picture and then post it on the blog – and to have the mayor write in almost immediately..."

Special to PressThink

The Walter Winchell of Montclair

by Debra Galant
Founder & editor-in-chief, Baristanet.com

I grew up, the daughter of a journalist, just outside the Beltway, and I remember looking forward to the Father-Daughter Ball at the National Press Club as the high point of my year. I remember nothing about the ball itself, nothing at all; but years later, I met someone else who also went to the Father-Daughter Balls as a girl, and she glowed with the same memory. Was it the Freudian anticipation of dancing with our dads? Did they gorge us on chocolate? Was it dressing up? (Oh, surely not in my case.) Or was it simply the dark paneled seriousness of the place, the temporary admission to what even a child could see was a temple of power.

I experienced that same sense of institutional awe years later, when I started freelancing for The New York Times, and one of my editors gave me a walk around the place. Those historic front pages on the walls, the private dining room, legendary men in the same elevator I was riding in: it all combined to create a well-burnished patina of authority and prestige. And over the next decade I discovered that even the lowliest freelancer could lever a tiny fraction of that authority, and by doing so, have doors opened and phone calls promptly returned.

In other words, I have dwelled in, or near, or at least been somewhat associated with, some of the most hallowed halls of journalism.

Now, on the other hand, I dwell in the journalistic equivalent of a roadhouse – a neighborhood newsblog – where I stand behind the counter, a dirty dishtowel over my shoulder, barking at the rowdies in the corner to keep it down, serving up mugs of draught and occasionally pulling up my skirts to show a little ankle.

We call this saloon Barista of Bloomfield Ave. or Baristanet. It is one of the growing number of neighborhood news sites, unconnected to any established newspapers, that serve up local news in a blog format. These include H2oTown, the New Haven Independent, Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn and Pittsburgh Dish, although they’re not all as disreputable as ours. We have a group of commenters, equivalent to a small motorcycle gang, which proudly calls itself the “eight trolls” and likes to snarl at soft-hearted liberals. I know some daily readers of Baristanet, who are afraid to comment for fear of being pounced on. And there are some threads on our site that actually make me blush.

This was not exactly what I was setting out to accomplish when I decided, in the spring of 2004—inspired by a blog meetup in South Orange, NJ where I met Jeff Jarvis—to start a hyperlocal blog for three towns in northern New Jersey.

I pictured it more like a café, hence the name “Barista”—the job of one who serves cappuccino—“of Bloomfield Ave.” I pictured recapturing the readers I’d lost when the New York Times decided to offer my column to another writer. Which I did. I pictured making a ton of money. Which I may. I saw the product, quite clearly, but I didn’t yet see my readers. I didn’t see how they would emerge as individual personalities, with opinions of their own, and how this would alter both the product and my experiment.

When I try to explain Baristanet to someone who’s never heard of it before, I often say “it’s like your weekly small town newspaper meets the Daily Show.” We—and I say we because I work with two equal partners, Laura Eveleth and Liz George—write about many of the same small-town events that those birdcage liners do, but with a jaundiced eye. We won’t, for example, print a picture of a big fake check unless we’re making fun of it.

Irreverence—or snarkiness, as it is called in the blogosphere—is nothing new. In fact, it’s the lingua franca of this medium. I knew from the start that irreverence would be part of our brand.

But it’s unusual for a local paper. The question was, how would that attitude play in our own backyard? And a second, related, question: would it alienate advertisers? In other words, could you do a Wonkette or a Daily Show in the same place where you live, shop and take your kids to school?

I also knew from the start, just based on the demographics, that our readers were smart. Most are college educated. Many hold advanced degrees. About half of the New York Times staff lives within my coverage area. Still, you don’t know ahead of time when the irreverence will hit the fan.

The first time it did—big—was after I overheard a mom at the community pool grumbling about the money she spent on dues and shrugging in the direction of a group of lifeguards, all sitting around a table, playing cards. I hadn’t thought about it until then, but these kids did spend an inordinate amount of time hanging around, nowhere near the pool, laughing and having fun. At the time, there was only one lifeguard watching the pool, and another chair was empty. There were only a couple of children in the pool.

I took a picture of the lifeguards playing cards and wrote the headline, It’s So Much More Fun Watching Each Other. A friend of mine got so mad he’s barely talked to me since. And the lifeguards, and their friends, had no sense of humor whatsoever.

I’ve also found Montclair’s liberal elite to be profoundly humor-impaired at times, especially during the 2004 presidential race. And I say that as a lifelong Democrat.

But for the most part, we think it’s the humor, and the quality of the writing, that keeps the readers coming back. That’s what always seems to surprise, and endear, people who discover us anew. That they can get a local product with as much sophistication—in design as well as writing—as anything produced out of New York.

But there’s also the real-time aspect of what can be accomplished by instant publishing. Like telling readers about kids selling lemonade to raise money for Katrina right now, or reporting a high school bomb scare minutes after it happened-– or even just providing an up-to-date community resource for closings and cancellations in the case of snow.

As I recall it, the day that we first went over 1,000 hits was the day that an electrical line fell down on a street near a local shopping plaza and started a fire. A photographer named Scot Surbeck, who’d been reading our blog, took a picture and sent it. Then later that night, there was another electrical fire a few blocks away. And this time, several people sent us tips and pictures. They were all standing there in the street, watching the night sky turn white and wondering what to do. These are the things that mean nothing, or little, in the grand scheme, but which, in the moment, are completely fascinating.

After that, if there was a blackout, or an explosion, or a murder, people would go to us immediately to see if we had it. And if we didn’t, they’d send us a tip.

And in addition to all that there’s the conversation-– like last week’s 245-comment debate on New Jersey’s planned indoor smoking ban. In our better moments, Baristanet is more like a good dinner party than either a coffee shop or a roadside tavern and I, as the Barista, am the perfect raconteur and host.

What makes a good dinner party? It’s not the food. It’s not the candlelight or the quality of the stemware. It’s what intelligence you pick up at the party, and how amusingly it is delivered. It doesn’t matter nearly as much if the food is fresh and local as if the intelligence is fresh and local. It’s also the crackling repartee, delivered in online form as comments.

I’ll give you an example. And this is a story that pre-dates Baristanet, but when it happened I thought, I wish I wrote for the local newspaper. If I wrote for the local newspaper, this is exactly the kind of story I would write. This is the story that, in a way, inspired Baristanet.

This involves the same pool where the lifeguards were all hanging around playing cards, only a year or two earlier. After a long political battle, the pool had just been built, but because of construction delays, it didn’t open until the last day of July. With the entire swimming season compressed into one month, tempers flared, especially on those afternoons—and there were a lot of them—when the pool closed for late afternoon thunderstorms.

One Friday afternoon, with not a cloud on the horizon, after I’d put in a full day of writing, I walked to the pool and was astonished to find it closed.

There had been no thunder; I’d been writing the whole afternoon on my front porch, half a mile from the pool. The parking lot at the pool was empty, but one by one cars arrived. Moms and kids spilled out, their arms overflowing with towels and pool bags. We all stared forlornly at the chain-link fence and wondered why the pool was closed and where the lifeguards had gone.

Well, somebody said, they must have closed the pool for thunder and made everyone go home. The policy was 20 minutes. So if we kept waiting, the lifeguards would come back and re-open the pool. We waited 20 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour, longer. No lifeguards, no pool manager.

People pulled out cell phones, called town hall, the mayor, members of the pool’s board of trustees. Nobody knew what was going on, and people were furious: me more than anyone. That’s the moment when I imagined writing about this for a local paper. It was exactly the kind of thing that was never covered in the local paper—it didn’t, after all, happen at a town council meeting or come from a press release—and it was exactly the kind of thing that everybody talked about.

When the manager finally did appear, hours later, he offered no excuses and no explanation. There’d been thunder. The pool was closed.

We found out the real story months later, after it was discovered that the pool manager had been embezzling money from the pool. It turns out that hot August afternoon, he’d heard some distant thunder and decided to close the pool and take his entire lifeguard staff out to the movies.

These are the stories that people want to know. They still want to know why the pool is closed on a sunny August afternoon. These are the stories that you almost never get in the weekly local newspaper, which is typically staffed by 20-something journalists straight out of school and with no ties, or real sources, in the community.

They also want to know if the hot new restaurant that just opened is any good, whether their neighbors are also furious about new leaf raking regulations, and why the 6:18 from Penn Station was being held up in Bloomfield, and not allowed to continue on into Glen Ridge.

In fact, in the case of the 6:18, it was nothing, which we reported.

Passengers aboard the 6:18 train from Penn Station were held up in Bloomfield for about five minutes tonight due to reported police activity at the Glen Ridge station. According to the police, train personnel thought they saw someone on the tracks. Nobody, however, was found.

As is typical when we run stories like this, the critics are ready with their favorite line: “must be a slow news day in Baristaville.” When you live by minutia, you die by minutia, and occasionally the wisecrackers point that out. As it happens, though, the reason we knew about the 6:18 from Penn Station was because a CBS news producer Blackberried us about it from the train. And a number of other journalists on that train came to our defense in comments.

I was on that train too and logged onto baristanet when i got home to find out what had happened. it’s called local news—and though maybe in the scheme of things not terribly critical — it’s nice to know what’s going on.
Posted by: mary | Mar 9, 2005 10:28:38 AM

when there’s cops on the tracks, you wanna know what’s up.
Posted by: dana jennings | Mar 9, 2005 9:17:19 AM

It’s a tremendous amount of fun to be the Barista of Bloomfield Ave., or as I sometimes call myself, “the Walter Winchell of Montclair.” It’s fun to be a professional smart aleck, to be a big fish in a small pond, to cut through the exasperating bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. It’s satisfying, when you find yourself standing in a long line in the new $8.6 million parking deck on a Friday night because there are only two pay stations, to be able to whip out your cell phone, take a picture and then post it on the blog – and to have the mayor write in almost immediately with a promise that he’ll look into it.

Power of the press? Maybe. But not power of any press with newspaper covers going back past the Titanic. Not the power of anyone with a special press pass, or access. Just the power of anyone with a cell phone and a computer, who has also taken the time and energy for 20 months to build and nurture a readership – even a sometimes rowdy one.

And I have to admit that the power is all that much sweeter because we created it ourselves, from scratch, just as my father did 40 years ago with his business partner Lou Rothschild, when they set up a newsletter to cover the government regulation of the food industry right at the beginning of the food additive era.

My father did become a wealthy man by becoming a publisher, because he and Lou chose their niche well. They were solid reporters, good businessmen and wrote with total objectivity. Their product was absolutely indispensable to food industry lawyers, Naderites, academics and the regulators themselves.

My dad follows the comings and goings of Baristaville all winter from the laptop in his den in Florida and though he doesn’t know any of the players, he still finds it compelling and funny.

Like my father, I’m a publisher. But I’m not sure I’m a journalist. Journalism is nonfiction. It belongs with history and politics and business and current affairs. I read, and write, novels. I’m more interested in why the pool is closed tight on a sunny day than in the town government’s master plan. I’m more interested in a little girl’s enchantment by the National Press Club 40 years ago than I am by the powerful men and women of the National Press Club today, and the powerful men and women they cover.

Mainly, I want to make you laugh— and to get paid for it.

After Matter: Notes, reactions and links.

Bio:

Debra Galant, former Jersey columnist for The New York Times, is founder and editor-in-chief of Baristanet.com. Her first novel, “Rattled,” a comedy of bad manners set in the rapidly developing New Jersey countryside, is coming out from St. Martin’s Press next month and is a Book Sense pick for February.

Who said the suburbs are boring? Not in Baristaville.

Here are some of the Barista’s favorite posts from the past year and half, in no particular order: dissing the Girl Scouts … an error-studded letter from the principal … bad karma in the Whole Foods parking lot … civil disobedience at Bloomfield High … a wacky suggestion for deer control … a bile-spewing hip-hop band in Glen Ridge … a strange wrinkle in the Nutley pizza wars … $300 colanders … a coconut virtuoso … Soprano sightings and everything we wrote last April 1.

Tim Porter replies to this post, which made him recall his first small town newspaper job when “we all lived among the people we wrote about.” He thinks “all reporters have had these feelings (at least I hope they have). But, somehow over the decades, somehow in the march toward bland professionalism (even at the smallest of papers) we drove the fun out of journalism - both for our readers and for ourselves.” Then Jeff Jarvis responds to Porter.

Stephen Baker at Businessweek’s Blogspotting: “In a perfect world, Baristanet would spur our staid hometown newspaper, The Montclair Times, to liven up its act. My fear, though, (as a former weekly newspaper editor) is that the blog will kill it—leaving no one to cover the boring but necessary newspaper-of-record jobs like covering school boards and planning commissions.”

Writing about this post, Jon Fine, Business Week’s Changing World ‘o Media columnist, asks: Is this the new local newspaper?

Also, Paul Bass wrote a thoughtful piece for the New Haven Advocate in September about how Baristanet inspired him to set up a local newsblog of his own.

More information on the Glen Ridge pool manager was dredged up by Philip Read of the Star Ledger, who wrote about it in January, 2004. The story is not available online.

Ed Sanders, the Glen Ridge pool manager accused of cashing the paychecks of employees and pocketing the money, was suspended with pay from his teaching job at Montclair High School yesterday.
“He was notified today that he had to go home,” said Montclair High School Principal Elaine Davis.

Sanders, 41, who lives in Glen Ridge, was charged last week with three counts of theft, forgery and misappropriation of entrusted property, said Glen Ridge Police Chief John Magnier. He was freed on $25,000 bond Friday, and his case has been referred to the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, Magnier said.

Sanders is accused of stealing about $14,500 from the pool, which opened July 31, by cashing the paychecks of student lifeguards after they had returned to school. Police said the lifeguards did not know they were still on the payroll or that Sanders had cashed their checks. A police investigation began in December after members of the pool’s finance committee noticed some discrepancies in the pool’s accounts and brought the concerns to police. Sanders said he is awaiting his day in court.

Liz George, partner in Baristanet, did a guest post at PressThink, a review of Backfence.com (Nov. 30, 2005) Baristanet was also featured in PressThink’s Are You Ready for a Brand New Beat? (April 11, 2005)

In October of 2005, Tom Grubisich wrote “I’m skeptical, show me” account for Online Journalism Review. “Community news sites get a lot of hype, but can they produce quality journalism?”

See also From citizen journalism myth to citizen journalism realities in Editors Weblog. (Dec. 29, 2005)

DeepBlog.com has a fine list of Local Citizen Journalism News and Information Blogs. Organized by region.

Glaser Goes Up a Level. Online Journalism Review columnist, PressThink guest author, and new media chronicler Mark Glaser—as good as we have on this beat—will be debuting a new blog at the PBS site on Wednesday Jan. 18.

It’s called Media Shift (www.pbs.org/mediashift) and, according to the network’s announcement “will offer a continuing look at how digital media such as blogs, RSS, podcasts, citizen journalism, wikis, news aggregators and video repositories are altering the way we live, play and work.” Glaser had been in negotiation with PBS for some time, so it’s good to see the deal is done. PressThink caught up with Glaser, and tossed him a few questions about his plans:

JR: What does “Media Shift” mean? And as one of my favorite professors taught me to say when any author spoke of a “shift,” that would be from what to what?

Mark Glaser: There is a lot of shifting going on, technologically and in readership and viewership of media. In TV, it’s about time-shifting with TiVo or having content on mobile devices or backpack journalists using digital cameras. In newspapers, it’s about readership going from print to online and news sites brimming with multimedia and citizen journalism. In radio, it’s about kicking the commercial habit with satellite radio and Net radio and podcasting as a new form that’s of and by the people.
But bigger still is the shift from top-down control of media to control from the bottom, from the people, who are tired of corporate ownership and meddling and just want to be served, want to have a greater voice. And from mass market hits for music and movies and TV shows to smaller interest groups all along the Long Tail.

You can’t hear a media exec speak anymore, without the word “shift” coming up again and again, because the ground below them is shifting uncomfortably.

JR: Obviously you saw something that wasn’t being done that Media Shift will be able to do. What is that thing?

Mark Glaser: MediaShift will look at the cultural and societal impact of the shift in media from top-down to Everyman and Everywoman control. There are indeed a lot of blogs covering this to some extent, and most I think are obsessed with how old media is going down in flames and the business buyouts and ramifications.
My interest is in the people themselves, not the journalists, but the “former audience,” the people who are taking control, interacting and creating media in new ways. I want to tell their stories rather than just my own story or my own observations or what the CEO or VP of such-and-such media company thinks. And I want my readers to join in whenever and however possible so it is a group endeavor, citizen media style.

And honestly, Jay, I’m not sure what MediaShift will become. I’m sure when you launched PressThink you thought it would be one thing, and then it became something much different.

JR: That’s true. Thanks, Mark.

Glen Greenwald steps in between PressThink and The New Republic’s The Plank: “In some ways, The Plank is the national headquarters for petty journalistic elitism and the fallacy of credentialism.” See: Invasion of the dirty masses. Greenwald thinks the blogosphere is more meritocratic than the meritocratic elite that speaks its mind at the TNR blog.

If that interests you, then see also Ezra Klein’s reply, and the comments thereon. “… a breathtakingly misguided attack.”

Daniel Glover at National Journal criticizes “the conservative bloggers handpicked by the Republican Party to cover the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito” and to meet with party big wigs:

Why? Because the content they wrote from Washington, while being feted by the Republican Party, did not pack the same punch as their normal fare. Too often, they sounded more like unofficial stenographers for the GOP than the passionate, independent watchdogs that they normally are. The bloggers… let pass a rare opportunity to grill senators and top officials about topics that matter to the bloggers. They let their sources set the agenda.

As I understand Glover’s point, he’s not criticizing them for going to DC, but what they wrote. He thinks they lost their nerve when they were welcomed in. See this report, and this one.

New York Magazine cover story (Jan. 16, 2006 issue): A Guy Named Craig. “How a schlumpy IBM refugee found you your apartment … and now finds himself killing your newspaper.” It contains this:

At the convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors last spring, two panelists at a session on the crisis in the industry flashed a slide of Newmark and asked the editors how many of them knew who Craig Newmark was. A faint show of hands. Craigslist? A few more.
“The shocking thing is that this was someone who was not only a threat to steal their business but was in the process of doing it,” says Jay Rosen, a blogger (the name of his blog is PressThink) and professor…”

I was talking about this event, as reported and interpreted by Tim Porter.

Joseph Epstein—scholar, critic, essayist of the old school—asks Are Newspapers Doomed? in Commentary. It includes:

My father certainly took it seriously. I remember asking him in 1952, as a boy of fifteen, about whom he intended to vote for in the presidential election between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I think I’ll wait to see which way Lippmann is going.”
The degree of respect then accorded the syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann is hard to imagine in our own time.

I’ll be teaching a class in news bloging this semester; and we will probably be producing some special reports. Watch for more about this in the weeks ahead.

Posted by Jay Rosen at January 16, 2006 3:51 PM Print

I don't know if I would use the word troll, because ultimately, at the other end of those posts of yours there is a person truly at rage with the press.

Rage, rage against the lying of the write! :-)

Seriously, catrina - your points are well-taken. And I agree with you, the particular story is, in and of itself, a minor one. But when the New York Times is calling an E-4 specialist an "officer," when the New York Times is running photos of artillery shells and calling them "remains of US missiles," when the NYT is publishing graphics asserting that a 1/4 inch-thick piece of metal bolted onto a Hummer can defeat a 155mm IED that would blow the entire vehicle off the road, when major media outlets still don't know the difference between a soldier and a marine, when they are reporting that white phosphorus is a "chemical weapon," when they falsely report that the Army sends soldiers "straight from boot camp to the front lines," when the Times is publishing articles by people who don't know what a "Medal of Honor" is (the Times thought it was an award for songwriting), when the Times writes that the Administration has not been publicizing its war heroes (despite dozens of press releases on people like Brian Chontosh and Jose Piralta), then it's pretty damning evidence that the lack of basic knowledge of things military is screwing up coverage. And in a couple of cases, such as the white phosphorus story, their incompetence affected the national discourse in some very significant ways.

Look, the newspapers have a problem. And it's largely a problem of recruiting demographics. Our national media is headquartered in New York City. Seven of the ten zipcodes with the LOWEST rates of military service per capita are within the immediate environs of all three network headquarters, the Journal, the Times, Newsweek, Fox, and Time Warner.

That's going to seep into coverage. It does again and again.

My blog, Countercolumn, focuses on that disconnect - the cultural disconnect between the media and the military, because I've got one foot in both camps. (Well, I write commercial stuff for a living now. I was a Time, Inc. reporter before I went to Iraq.)

I don't hate the press. I love the press. My best friends are all soldiers, musicians, or pressies. But I hate incompetent coverage. And it wasn't until I went to Iraq, lived there for a year, got satellite TV and internet, and I could see how bad the coverage was, that I really became ticked. The media was simply not serving the public well. And it was a lot more than human error making its way into the copy.

I'm here banging on the table to tell people like Lovelady and Rosen that the media has a problem so big you can drive a truck through it. My focus is on war coverage, natch, but there's lots of spillover. (Don't get me started on the failures of my own discipline, the financial press, during the late 1990s, and prior to the Savings and Loan crisis. Actually, the screwed up financial press is worth a thread in itself.)

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 16, 2006 4:04 PM | Permalink

Jason your list of press faux pas is familiar. Most are as mischaracterized by you and the others repeating the list as you claim the papers are. Are you saying the house wasn't bombed? Who cares about an unexploded Canadian shell? It's a Pakistani with a soveigneer from somwhere. The press really doesn't know what the MOH is. I've heard all of this nutty fallacies before. I see nothing has changed around here. Pity, that.

Posted by: George Boyle at January 16, 2006 8:30 PM | Permalink

Ah, George, somebody had to do it, eh? The "essence of the truth" argument. "False but accurate."

Tell me, if you read something from a near-illiterate -- cant spil ur punkchewate an telin al tha truf wit no captal leturs -- do you give it any credence? Minimal, eh? If any... it's exactly the same thing. When you make a major mistake in a domain I know, I stop reading. Oh, those idiots again. Your TRVTH goes completely unheard. You've wasted your time, and the money of your sponsors.

And that's not even counting the times when you insult people without even knowing you've done so, just because you don't have any idea of the background of the situation. Every time you do that you lose audience... and you never figure out why.

"The essence" is an excuse, an argument made by a lazy elitist -- you don't have to work; you're right because you're Anointed to Declare the TRVTH. And it doesn't work, won't work, and can't work. If you can't get the background right you've lost your audience, and it doesn't matter whether the rest of it is true or not. And if you maintain that attitude you're eventually going the way of the coelecanth, still around in small numbers but nobody wants it for dinner.

Regards,
Ric

Posted by: Ric Locke at January 16, 2006 9:12 PM | Permalink

I'm here banging on the table to tell people like Lovelady and Rosen that the media has a problem so big you can drive a truck through it. -- Jason.

You're right, Jason. The media (whatever that is) does have a problem so big you can drive a truck through it.
But that problem has nothing to do with the Boston Globe publishing a story exposing a local councilman as a fool on page b2. (The elementary fact that to report something is not to endorse it has apparently escaped you.)
And the problem that the press does have will not be solved by a media that reflexively prints military press releases from Iraq -- or from the Pentagon, or from the White House.
We don't need more mindless cheerleading. We need more dispassionate analysis.
For most of us, one John Burns or one Michael Ware or one Jill Carroll is worth 10,000 military flacks. (And I say that as a former military flack.)
Meantime, a gentle reminder -- this thread is supposed to be about Debra Galant and Montclair, NJ.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at January 16, 2006 9:40 PM | Permalink

You forgot the transitional sentence, Steve. "I’ve also found Montclair’s liberal elite to be profoundly humor-impaired at times, especially during the 2004 presidential race. And I say that as a lifelong Democrat."

My favorite moment: "And I have to admit that the power is all that much sweeter because we created it ourselves, from scratch, just as my father did 40 years ago with his business partner Lou Rothschild, when they set up a newsletter to cover the government regulation of the food industry right at the beginning of the food additive era."

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 16, 2006 10:21 PM | Permalink

Steve,

I went and looked at Baristanet for a moment. It looks great... but it means nothing to me, and that's the way it should be. I live in a small town in Texas, and will probably never visit the place Ms. Galant knows and loves.

The connection is this -- if I posted something there, pretending it had some relevance to the people who live in that area, I'd be sneered at and ignored, and that's the way it should be. I'm totally ignorant of the area, the people, the culture, even the weather. The same thing will happen if Debra tries to post something on a (putative) local blog that means something to me.

Communities are not just geographic, though, especially in the Internet age, where people can belong to many communities, not just the one around their house. Communities can be communities of interest, whether it be for hobbies or just from commonality of knowledge. And when you, or I, say something about a community, and the members of that community see ignorance, they either don't pay much attention or reject it utterly. Debra's readers won't care about my advice for clearing mesquite. There are many people posting on baristanet who don't have valid advice for me on the subject, either.

The Press is unique. The Press needs to be able to talk to all communities, whether they be geographic or intellectual. We all know they can't have deep knowledge of all communities, and we're prepared to gloss that over and forgive it. But when the Press pulls a howler, then refuses to acknowledge the criticism of the pertinent community, the members of that community get a bad taste in their mouth; and, since any given person may be a member of many communities, an offense to one may spill over into others and probably will.

Debra Galant doesn't have all that much trouble with background and context -- it comes with the territory, so to speak, and if she really does have a live community there any errors will get fed back and corrected quickly. You don't have that luxury, so you have to work harder -- or else you have to kiss it off, to declare that "false but accurate" is good enough, to talk about the "essence of the story". The problem with doing that --

In the specific instance, you show me a busted up house and a couple of people in native costume. In front is an inert practice round from a 155mm howitzer propped up on a sandbag -- and you tell me it's part of a missile launched from a predator drone. Hmph, I say. The house is a set, somewhere out in the desert east of LA; the two people are Moishe Horowitz and his son David, hired from Central Casting at scale and costumed, and as soon as the photo shoot was over the whole crew went to Palm Springs for dinner. The whole thing is just another staged Bush-bash. No? Tell me where you established enough credibility to contradict that. More important, tell me how I can believe that you did enough checking to see that it wasn't something equally fake, equally staged. You can't, because you haven't established the credibility or the diligence; in fact, your egregious error and total failure to check something easy tells me you were too lazy to check the hard stuff, either.

Was the trout good?

Posted by: Ric Locke at January 16, 2006 10:33 PM | Permalink

Are you saying the house wasn't bombed?

Hmmm. Yep. I could say precisely that.

By the way, which of my examples, precisely, do you believe are "mischaracterized?" Most of them are criticisms I initiated myself, and as far as I know, are not widely circulated, (except for the NY Times running the picture of the intact arty shell and calling it the remains of a US missile - a true howler if there ever was one.)

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 16, 2006 11:03 PM | Permalink

Hate to tell you, Ric, but I've never been to Palm Springs, and I don't know who the the hell the you in your post refers to.

"You showed you a busted up house and a couple of people in native costume" ?

Who is You ? It sure as hell ain't me.

As for David Horowitz, everybody's favorite left-wing activist recently turned right-wing activist, have you checked out your accusations about him with him ?

You really ought to. I'm pretty sure he'd raise a stink if he knew.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at January 16, 2006 11:14 PM | Permalink

But that problem has nothing to do with the Boston Globe publishing a story exposing a local councilman as a fool on page b2.

No. But the Boston Globe failing to publish a story about the local councilman trying to pass off porn pictures as evidence of US atrocities has a lot to do with "that problem." Specifically, that too many newsrooms have no idea what they're looking at.

We don't need more mindless cheerleading. We need more dispassionate analysis.

I agree with you there. But my point is, unfortunately, that the major newsrooms are so ill-informed about the military that they are incapable of performing dispassionate analysis.

The republic relies on them to fulfill that role. They're letting us down.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 16, 2006 11:15 PM | Permalink

I think anyone who has regularly read Jason's blog since near its inception knows that Jason is equally critical of the military as he is of the press. He also gives praise where praise is due in regards to both the press and the military.

It seems to me he is not asking for newsroom staffers who "reflexively print military press releases from Iraq -- or from the Pentagon, or from the White House." He is simply asking for the national media to staff their organizations with journalists or editors with the expertise necessary to quickly and accurately identify military-related errors, misunderstandings (such as the purpose and context of a specific operation), and mischaracterizations (ascribing authority to an officer or witness that they do not possess) that would (at least should) render that reporting unworthy of professional respect. Such a person doesn't even need to be a full-timer.

And finally, if you regularly read in particular the daily press releases from Iraq on the Department of Defense website, they are hardly "cheerleading" pieces--rather, they are extremely dry and dispassionate. However, on the front page stories you will find articles specifically highlighting the activities and successes of military personnel and Administration officials, in addition to the challenges facing military personnel on the battle field. But it is only natural to expect the Administration and military to be an advocate for its own people, policies and actions despite the challenges being faced.

Whether the national media is writing an article reporting, criticizing, or praising military-related affairs, asking them to possess the discipline in-house to identify any problems that would reduce the credibility of military-related journalistic product seems perfectly appropriate, as it would be with any other subject.

Best Regards,

Shawn

Posted by: Shawn in Tokyo at January 16, 2006 11:51 PM | Permalink

::shrug:: Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

But, in fact, I'm railing against an attitude that you tend strongly to defend, so I identify you with it.

Ms. Galant has context running out her ears. She's deeply familiar with her subject, and knows she'll get called if she makes a mistake. She also knows that, because she's been diligent in the past, her mistakes will be forgiven, even laughed at in a communitarian way, and she'll be given the benefit of the doubt.

And she's gaining audience. What she distributes is useful to people, so they're anxious to consume it.

The first sentence is true, although you pat yourself on the back entirely too much. The second... is the hole, and the truck's in fourth-high and upshifting. Opinion is cheap; there are, what, six million blogs and counting? "Analysis" is almost as cheap. Both are useless without facts in the background. And if the "facts" you have are in "fact" false, your analysis is not just worthless, it has negative value.

The specific story Jason, George, and I have been on about is an example. It's an absolutely useless story, of no value to anyone except as an example of Press error. The only thing I know about that story is that the reporter was either clueless or lying about at least one point central to it, and that the layers and layers and layers of editors and fact-checkers between reporter and publication were either also lying, out to lunch, down the pub doing shooters, or somewhere other than doing their jobs. That being the case, I can't draw any conclusion whatever about any other aspect of the story -- and if you pretend to be able to, I know I can't trust you, either, so your analysis is worthless to me as well.

No, I don't think you should mindlessly repeat press releases from anybody. But if the Press is going to present its work as analysis, it had damned well better show what it's analyzing. That's what's missing, not "dispassion".

Posted by: Ric Locke at January 17, 2006 12:07 AM | Permalink

If you want to call yourself the Walter Winchell of Montclair, that's fine with me, I guess.

I wouldn't want to be known as the king of the gossip mongers, the person who made popular our culture of celebrity.

I don't like the idea of prying into people's private sex lives, and making stuff up about them.

I'd like to think I would not have supported Joe McCarthy and his hunt for Reds under the bed, as did Winchell.

In his heyday, Walter Winchell was as famous as any reporter ever has been, but he's not -- or at least he shouldn't be -- anyone's role model.

Posted by: Dexter Westbrook at January 17, 2006 12:25 AM | Permalink

Winchell was far from perfect, but he sure did perk up the prose. From Wikipedia:

But Winchell had a style that others found impossible to mimic. He disdained the flowerly language that had characterized newspaper columns in the past. Instead, he wrote in a kind of telegraph style filled with slang and incomplete sentences. Creating his own shorthand language, Winchell was responsible for introducing into the American vernacular such now-familiar words and phrases as "scram," "pushover," and "belly laughs." He wrote many quips such as "Nothing recedes like success," and "I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret."

Posted by: Debbie Galant at January 17, 2006 12:48 AM | Permalink

My view of Winchell comes through Neil Gabler's book. Certainly he is not presented as role model material.

The Barista of Bloomfield, the saloon keeper, the Winchell of Montclair, the dinner party hostess, the human switchboard, the outraged mom with a printing press, the novelist looking for laughs from live readers... are different phases in which Debra presents herself.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 17, 2006 12:54 AM | Permalink

So, if a blog has an error, no worries, because blog readers will make corrections and everything's cool.

But if the New York Times shows a photo with erroneous information on its website (and apparently only on its website, since no one saw it in print) it's a mark of a lying and unrealiable medium even though the TIMES corrected it.

Thanks, Ric and Jason, you've lived up to expectations one more time. It's not the first time you've taken up bandwidth to worry over a journalistic sin that has already been corrected.

As Steve noted - as entire threads at PressThink has expounded - there are any number of truly grievous journalistic sins to consider. But the failure of the Times to meet the somone's anal-retentative fixation on military nomenclature standards is perhaps better served somewhere else.

Meanwhile, back at Baristanet -

Posted by: Dave McLemore at January 17, 2006 1:03 AM | Permalink

Actually, Tim, some of the comments are pretty good, a fair mix of opinions. I particularly liked the guy whose response to recruiters visiting local schools with handouts and free pencils said he fought in Bosnia for a pen. But it was a very good pen.

Posted by: Dave McLemore at January 17, 2006 1:07 AM | Permalink

Dave: Yes, I liked that too. It was a Bic pen, after all.

But then, we musn't attribute the quality of comments to the blog's author, right?

Posted by: Siyphus at January 17, 2006 1:11 AM | Permalink

No, but the blog's author's words certainly provided the inspiration for the thoughts expressed by the readers.

Which, I assume, was the idea.

Posted by: Dave McLemore at January 17, 2006 1:45 AM | Permalink

Baristanet (imho) could benefit from some sort of tagging system - keeping ed/op and news apart as has been done for a while. It would also help with keeping track of things (like the lifeguards, who I'm now curious about, even though I don't live there ;)

Or maybe that's not their thing. It's still far too early to tell which way is right or if each 'area' will need a different approach, cutting out the cookie-cutter loving penny pinchers - aka big media.

2006 is gonna be an important year. A lot of people aren't talking about it yet, but Chi-Town Daily News - aka The Chicago Daily News - has popped up on the radar and is looking good.

Best of luck to Galant, Williams, Orren, Dougherty - all of us. We have a long row to till, but it will be worth it. Some of us are already bearing fruit. It's spreading...

Posted by: kpaul at January 17, 2006 7:50 AM | Permalink

Ms. Galant forgets to mention one thing: those "8 trolls" she mentions were in fact tagged as such by another, constantly disgruntled and predictably leftist poster. The number 8 was specifically given, too, by such poster. Yet in spite of numerous requests that the poster actually identify those whom she views as "trolls," no answer has been forthcoming.

So the grouping of posters as trolls (they often add "8T" to their Baristanet names) is a kind of expression of solidarity, a linking against much of the perpetually wet feathered outrage that Baristanet's reliably liberal majority posters specialize in on a daily basis. Baristanet has perforce contributed to the sense of community of said trolls. They have fun with the appellation, invite others to join and always evidence a wide variety of viewpoints among themselves. There are worse clubs to join out here in suburbia, believe you me.

Posted by: cathar (8T) at January 17, 2006 9:30 AM | Permalink

Shocking, just shocking that there would be instances of predictable leftism and all-too reliable liberalism at a wholesome place like that. Sounds like you have come to a good solution, though.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 17, 2006 9:36 AM | Permalink

Debra I know this perhaps seems silly but my big question about local blogging is how does one attract readers? (And sorry if "blogging" is the wrong word choice for what you do).

The difference between writing tracts about national issues and writing stories about the local pool closing is that the former *might* be of interesting to anyone interested in that national issue while the later would have a limited interest area (geographic) and since the sheer numbers of those who read blogs are fairly low, I can only imagine the percentages in one particular geographic area to be even smaller.

Let's say I live in a city like my old hometown, Akron, Ohio. It has a population of 250,000 but also a really bad daily newspaper plus lots of those small "birdcage liners" of the sort I used to write for. Of those 250,000 residents how many are potental blog readers? 250 maybe? 100 maybe? 500? How do I get those 500 readers to come to my website? Like literally...where are they going to hear about it?

The great thing about big blogs is they can become almost self-sustaning after a while. Readers send you tips. Other readers take over some of the writing. But until you get to that size how does one "attract" the tips and get the readers?

Posted by: catrina at January 17, 2006 10:08 AM | Permalink

Dave,

The only thing the New York Times has corrected was the caption. Not the culture that excludes experts on the subject matter and makes excuses for errors.

All you've done is popped a pimple. Sorry -- that doesn't cure cancer. It just makes a pimple go away.

I would be delighted if the errors were over more than just nomenclature. But if you think the only errors the press makes concerning coverage of military affairs are over nomenclature, you are simply deluded.

The nomenclature errors are the easiest to explain to an unsophisticated audience. But there are many more errors that go far deeper than that.

For example, the utter inability of the press to grasp combined arms doctrine during the white phosphorus story.

The press's unfamiliarity with maneuver warfare theory and the writing of military theorists Boyle and Liddell-Hart seriously hamstrung their analysis of nearly all aspects of the Iraq war. See these link for an example of how:

http://iraqnow.blogspot.com/2004/06/new-york-times-blows-it-again-big-time.html

http://iraqnow.blogspot.com/2003/12/reporters-and-maneuver-warfare-theory.html

The point is, if you're so uninformed you can't tell a soldier from a marine, if you can't tell an arty shell from a hellfire missile, if you can't tell an enlisted rank from an officer, you are not going to be able to add value, even to a lay discussion of military affairs.

Why pressies keep trying to say "well, it's no big deal if we're ignorant" and keep making excuses for their lack of knowledge - after we've been at war for years - is beyond me. But some of you are still sticking up for everything except getting it right.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 17, 2006 10:14 AM | Permalink

Ric, it's perfectly understandable that it might mean nothing to you. I often feel the same way when visiting other local blogs, until I stumble on a nugget that piques my interest. What's funny is how often folks who have no connection to our locale actually come and visit. This week numerous posters from Iceland responded to a story that ran a year ago describing a local teen who was selling her own design creations and saving up for a trip to Iceland. They provided all sorts of interesting travel tips and just enjoyed that they had blipped on our radar. Reminded me of the whole Conan O'Brien/Finland connection. There's a unique connectedness that takes place in blogs that does beyond opinions to create a community that can extend itself. It's exciting to think we can create that kind of atmopshere.

Posted by: Liz George at January 17, 2006 10:52 AM | Permalink

But the failure of the Times to meet the somone's anal-retentative fixation on military nomenclature standards is perhaps better served somewhere else.

Meanwhile, back at Baristanet -
Posted by: Dave McLemore at January 17, 2006 01:03 AM | Permalink

Yeah, we wouldn't want to expect accuracy from the press. That's anally setting the bar too high.

Posted by: Walter Duranty in the House at January 17, 2006 11:33 AM | Permalink

You're over-analyzing, Jason. And Walter misses the point. (Even Jason acknowledges the Times corrected the error.) So far, nothing news.

Did the Times' writers know their maneuver warfare? It's irrelevant. The Times' report assumed there was some operational concept involved in the effort to target Saddam's leaders. But the story wasn't that the Army missed but that the intel was so poor, the attacks were pointless and caused needless civilian casualty's. 's efforts to take out Saddam's leaders missed but that the intel was so poor, the attacks weren't even close.

Your narrow focus on what a news story should be makes it very difficult to discuss things with you. Anyone so inclined, however, can certainly go to your blog. My point of criticism was that this particular thread on this particular discussion is not the place to fixate, once again, on the media's unfamiliarity with the Army War College.

Posted by: Dave McLemore at January 17, 2006 12:26 PM | Permalink

Yeah, kudos to Jay for bringing such an intriguing story about a northern New Jersey blogger. It's almost as compelling as watching paint dry, or Lovelady salivate.

Posted by: Walter Duranty in the House at January 17, 2006 1:16 PM | Permalink

catrina,
How did we attract readers in the beginning? We went to street fairs and handed out balloons, marched in parades, printed up postcards and put them in stores, gave away beach balls at local pools, sent links to everyone we knew, and took advantage of existing yahoo groups and forums to get out the word.

The biggest part of our start-up budget was for tchotchkes printed with our logo - a couple thousand dollars worth.

I believe the key is always having someone hear about your product twice. They see a postcard and it doesn't register. Then their best friend mentions it. Click.

Posted by: Debbie Galant at January 17, 2006 1:57 PM | Permalink

You're overanalyzing, Jason

I hope that's not what passes for informed, specific discourse in your newsroom, Dave.

And if you think the attacks were pointless, you are as ill-informed as the Times. Pressure on headquarters has an effect on the battlefield. Even if you miss. That is the point of maneuver warfare theory. The very fact that the command nodes are targeted, and must be relocated constantly, be concealed, and minimize their electronic signature is important, and has a battlefield effect, for a variety of reasons, even if the first bomb doesn't hit its target.

For a reporter to try to cover warfare without grasping this calculus is like assigning a reporter to a finance beat who doesn't understand MPT or assigning a reporter to the science beat who doesn't have a clue about germ theory.

The inadequacy of coverage, to those of us who have put in time to study the field, is more than inadequate. It's glaring.

And its editors like you who enable the incompetence, when it's your job to be purging it from your ranks.

I mean, if you don't, just who is supposed to?

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 17, 2006 2:00 PM | Permalink

I remain skeptical of the overall viability of "hyper-local" blogging for one big reason....

Jay has featured a large number of successful "local" bloggers that all have one thing in common --- they are truly gifted writers. The fact is that I couldn't care less about "local blogging" and its development and blah, blah, blah....

but people like Liz, and Debra, and Lisa, and the others who have been featured by Jay have made the subject interesting because of their writing skills.

someone (Catrina, I think) asked how one builds an audience for local blogs --- and I don't think it has anything to do with subject matter, or point of view, or frequency of posting. I suspect its really about the writing -- that people keep coming back not for the "news", but for the delight of reading good prose.

....and, I suspect, that people like me who are lousy wordsmiths could never attract the kind of audiences that Lisa and Debra sustain with apparent ease...

Posted by: ami at January 17, 2006 2:10 PM | Permalink

I don't think it's the principle of maneuver warfare to target sites that don't exist. That's the point, Jason. They didn't miss. They had the wrong target. There was no there there. The intel was bad. Please don't try to tell us that's a fundamental military principle.

Apparently, not only are you over-analyzing, you're also reading into the story your own misinformed biases.

And don't call me an editor. I work for a living.

Let's talk about something else. Hey, how about those local news blogs?

Posted by: Dave McLemore at January 17, 2006 2:13 PM | Permalink

An excellent point, ami. How can this hyper-local blog sustain itself? As much a labor of love as it apparently is for Debra, the demands on talent and time are, I suppose, phenomenal. And leaves some questions: How to maintain the quality? How to keep up the pace?

Posted by: Dave McLemore at January 17, 2006 2:18 PM | Permalink

So off-line advertising. That's kind of unusal in the world of blogging which most people just post and post and try to get bigger, more popular blogs to link to them. I didn't see how that sort of viral marketing could work for baristanet because of its smaller area of interest.

I was wondering if you actually ran ads in newspapers, but handing out balloons at those typical neighborhood street fairs is probably a better idea.

Posted by: catrina at January 17, 2006 2:24 PM | Permalink

What would Barista be if it were incorporated into some larger news portal/site/whatever...like the Newhouse's New Jersey Online?

I suspect it would wither and die.

So it is perhaps a publication(?), a news enterprise, that is not scaleable. It can't reproduce itself completely without having a Debra at the helm. And it can't grow the way sense that a big newspaper tries to zone itself to serve local readers.

I'm amused that we can learn all about the several-months-old lifeguard scandal on Barista, but we can't learn about it from the big newspaper--the Star-Ledger--because all of its archives are behind a pay wall.

Posted by: JennyD at January 17, 2006 2:58 PM | Permalink

I appear, like the Ancient Mariner, cursed...yea, cursed, I say, to repeat my tale forever:

I think it's great you have local advertisers. But I don't see affiliate advertising. If you've got an affiliate program, terrific. If not, it's perfect for a smaller, loyal readership--and a good way to grow it. Tell them what the weekend sales are at Overstock, and what coupons are available at Tabletools. Preach the virtues of Zappos upgraded shipping and free returns. Make sure everyone knows you can get 5 magazines for $30 at Netmagazines. There's a million sites out there, and most of them have affiliate programs. You've got a readership who wants to reward you for your great work and also, presumably, wants to hear about good products and great deals. Let your readers support you with their purchases.

I'm the owner/operator of The Perfect World, a general discussion site that generated well over $125K in product purchases just last year--not counting travel reservations, ebay, netflix and other places that pay fees instead of commissions. I'm in the top 20% of Overstock's affiliates. My readership is somewhere between 750-1000. I don't advertise for my site, don't have postcards or balloons, and webhosting is my only expense. And I don't even have to produce content--my members do that for me.

I really don't understand the blogger obsession with CPM advertising. So Debra et al, if you aren't trying it yet, you should start in this new year.

Phew. Curse is lifted temporarily, so let me just pick up this albatross and I'll be on my way.

Posted by: Cal at January 17, 2006 4:13 PM | Permalink

Whoops. I return, but for a moment:

When I say "preach the virtues of" Zappos, Overstock, and so on, I'm not saying that you yourself have to recommend them, but rather that you post the ads (free) that tell your readers about it. I just realized that might be a point of confusion.

The beauty of affiliate advertising is that the money comes from performance, and you can have as many affiliates as you want. So you can affiliate with Zappos, 6pm, Shoebuy, and Softmoc, as well as Overstock, Buy.com, Best Buy, and Circuit City--and any other merchant. You don't have to pick favorites or bias your selections in any way.

Posted by: Cal at January 17, 2006 4:21 PM | Permalink

I guess what really interested me was the local Whole Foods manager running ads on Barista. I have 64 questions about it, and what it means.

But it's the image of the grocery store ads, once the bread and butter of the big daily newspaper's revenue flow, fragmenting, and getting picked up by the truly local newsblog.

Debra, how did that happen and how does it work?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 17, 2006 4:57 PM | Permalink

Oh, I can think of a few newspapers still getting ads from Whole Foods. And they're alot easier to get from the local managers, I can tell you.

But, back to Deb's site --which is the best of its kind I've seen. It's perfect for implementing a FSBO spin-off 'a la Madison. Better do it now, Deb, before you have so many real estate advertisers you can't afford to do it.

Posted by: Roxanne at January 17, 2006 5:28 PM | Permalink

Liz, my comment about it meaning nothing (or little) to me was a compliment, not a dig. Baristanet serves its customers. As a (literally) gap-toothed redneck in the reddest of red states, I'm not one of Debra's customers. If she put things in there that would serve my interest, it would have to be at the expense of things of interest to the people who live there.

A similarly-constructed site that served my interests would be boring, and sometimes offensive, to Debra's customers. I doubt they're interested in the price of hay, and gossip about who bought whose cattle would go right past them, zing!

This is not to say that a drop-in from outside the proper orbit would find nothing whatever of interest. Debra is an excellent writer, and you never really know what strangers want or will find interesting. The point is that what's needed is focus and background, and she's got both.

Posted by: Ric Locke at January 17, 2006 8:18 PM | Permalink

Debra,

Great article and you all have an impressive looking and entertaining Website.

But I do wonder what a future world would be like if blogs like yours - devoted to small communities - were multiplied ad infinitum all over the Web. With the technology today that allows anyone to snap pictures on their cell phones and throw them up on the web...there's a certain loss of privacy. While this kind of "surveillance" isn't coming from the government there's still the danger of a Big Brotherish quality to it.

Thoughts?

Posted by: Ron Brynaert at January 17, 2006 11:49 PM | Permalink

Tim Porter, ex-newspaper man, had a reaction:

Galant, a former non-staff columnist for the New York Times, writes about the joy of local journalism, of news writ small but smack-full of personality. To me, her words brought to mind my first newspaper days, which I spent reporting and photographing on a small daily in Carson City, Nev. Journalism was personal then - for me because I brimmed with idealism and intensity (the latter survives), for the community because nothing was too "small" not to be news, and for the newspaper staff because we all lived among the people we wrote about. We heard about what they liked and we heard about what they didn't - often in person, either in the office, at the local saloon or sometimes while getting a hair cut.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 17, 2006 11:52 PM | Permalink

Heh. The Times cherrypicks 50 strikes out of thousands. Then Human rights watch cherrypicks four out of those 50 and says the US could have avoided a number of civilian casualties if we had taken precautions.

Tell me-if we were so lousy at targeting, then how was most of the Iraqi army rendered irrelevant to the fight?

Why were Iraqi decisions so bad? How did the US get so far into their OODA-loop?

Frankly, you miss the point entirely. You're like the science beat reporter who never heard of germ theory. The mere threat of an attack on a command node in itself has power, because you force the enemy to take precautions which degrade his ability to direct the fight.

Yes, you might hit an empty building from time to time. Or you might hit one he just left. It still works.

My "institutional biases," as you call them, are also known as 13 years of commissioned service and 17 years of study. In other words, unlike the Times reporter and unlike the morons at HRW (you don't think they have an agenda of their own?), I know what the hell I'm talking about.

When a reporter writes an article specifically about the targeting of critical vulnerabilities (say, command and control nodes for an army with a highly centralized command structure such as Iraq's, and does so in a way that totally ignores MWT, all that reporter does is establish himself to be an uninformed chowderhead.

Lawyers routinely say the same thing about reporters who write stupidly about the law, and scientists say the same thing about science beat reporters who write stupidly about science.

But I look specifically at military reporting, and it's too often incompetent.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 18, 2006 1:15 AM | Permalink

And what do you want PressThink and its participants to do about it? Argue with you so you can feel more knowledgeable than they? A little "admit the problem" action? (That's the most common answer: "Well, you could admit the problem instead of telling me I'm...") A guilty-as-charged post or two from someone who is in charge? Manhattan elites prove how out of touch they are with life beyond Prada by going toe-to-toe with Mr. Military?

I mean: what's the agenda here, Jason? Should we be asking you for ways to improve ourselves? Apologizing to you for our cluelessness? Deference to your awesome authority?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 18, 2006 8:30 AM | Permalink

Deb....

I'd like to congratulate you on the excellent reporting you've done on drone attack on the HQ of the striking Glen Ridge lifeguards. Your account of how many speedos and whistles were destroyed --- and its impact on the effectiveness of the rebel lifeguards, will doubtless be considered Pulitzer material.

Posted by: ami at January 18, 2006 8:32 AM | Permalink

Jay,

If you feel Press Think has any significant influence on innovations in the journalistic process, perhaps you could spearhead the problem in this space? This is a genuine suggestion. Of course, you may not prioritize the issue as a problem as highly as Jason does.

Regards,

Posted by: Shawn in Tokyo at January 18, 2006 8:41 AM | Permalink

Jason doesn't want reporting; he wants PR.

"This reporter reported on something that I think I know something about. And he got it wrong. Either that, or I got it wrong. Could that be?

"Nahhhhhh."

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at January 18, 2006 9:06 AM | Permalink

Jara Heuston of Fresno Famous, another successful Barista-style site (quite interesting too) writes at her blog about this discussion:

With Famous, our first offline marketing efforts included 5,000 postcards and hundreds of 1-inch buttons. We’ve also developed some good partnerships with other media in the community: the local progressive monthly prints our event listings; the local NBC affiliate has partnered with us for their entertainment reporting (if we give them a heads up on a story, they send viewers to Fresno Famous for more info); we have a cross promotional agreement with the college radio station; we’re working with the Fresno Arts Council and local public television to promote a monthly art event. We also sponsor different events around town- film festivals, rock shows- with free advertising. I’m involved in lots of civic organizations, which keeps me plugged in and plugging the site.
But the biggest driver of traffic, at least in the beginning, was the voice of the site. Like Baristanet, Famous had a snarktastic tone that wrote about local events with a little flavor. People came to laugh about what was going on in their community, but in a positive way. We’ve never been negative; when we poke fun we also talk about solutions.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 18, 2006 9:47 AM | Permalink

Oh, don't be silly, Jay. The problem is fairly straightforward. A commitment to newsroom diversity - REAL diversity of intellectual and cultural outlook - not just 'bean-counter' diversity - would go a long way toward improving the way military affairs are reported.

In order to make a gem out of a rock, you have to cut it from more than one direction.

The problem is that newsrooms have been empirically demonstrated many times over to be intellectually and culturally one-sided. The newsroom, in its current makeup, is intellectually incapable of cutting the rock from enough different directions to create a gem.

All they can do is cut off part of the rock. (And a lot of times, such as with the maneuver warfare theory example I brought up, that's a pretty damn important part of understanding the rock.)

You've got that diversity here on this forum, in a small way, in that I'm bringing a perspective that is unusual in your world.

It's not unusual at all in mine, though.

I'm pointing my laser at the rock from a different direction than you're accustomed to seeing.

I wonder why it is the mere presence of my point of view drives you so batty? I'm arguing from specifics, and advocating solutions, and you and Lovelady keep trying to turn this into something personal about me. (i.e., Lovelady's inane "he doesn't want reporting. He wants P.R" quip.)

No. I want reporting, but I want INFORMED reporting, from people who understand their beats. Democracy doesn't just rely on a free press. It relies on an accurate press. It's how the republic makes decisions.

Uninformed reporting leads to irrational decisions, such as efforts to ban white phosphorus from the battlefield when the doctrinal use of WP saves lives on the battlefield. It also leads to the misallocation of resources. The health care world is a good example.

I'm sorry if you find my arguments so difficult to deal with. But I think you've become uncoupled from the basics somewhere along the way:

1.) Learn the beat.
2.) Verify the facts, as you understand them.
3.) Look at the facts from a variety of frames.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 18, 2006 10:07 AM | Permalink

On the other hand, it's reassuring to find someone who knows everything.

Or, as Jason puts it:

"Unlike the Times reporter and unlike the morons at Human Rights Watch (you don't think they have an agenda of their own?), I know what the hell I'm talking about."

We've finally found someone who knows what the hell he's talking about ! (Unlike the rest of us peasants, I guess.)

It's also a relief to be able to dismiss the NYT and the HRW out of hand, because ... hmmm. Because why ?

Well, because Jason said so!

Good riddance to those bozos, I say. So much of their information is just confusing -- filled as it is with nuance and qualifiers and all that other stuff that is just irritating as hell to every wannabe commando-in-waiting.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at January 18, 2006 10:10 AM | Permalink

It doesn't seem all that complicated to me. I recognize that in war and in reporting, even the simplest things can be extremely difficult to do. But I think too many here spend way too much time making excuses why we shouldn't expect even that much from journos.
Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 18, 2006 10:07 AM | Permalink
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One would think that Lovelady, McLemore, and Rosen would also want this, but apparently they would prefer to launch snark missiles from their cocoons, or in Jay's case, from a "bubble".

Posted by: Walter Duranty in the House at January 18, 2006 10:47 AM | Permalink

Jason:

You seem to be suggesting that being a military veteran necessarily leads one to have your perspective on military issues, that the diversity hiring program you propose would lead to more reporters and editors who see things your way. But military service -- even military service in the same branch or MOS -- doesn't mean that two people will come out with the same perspective. I think using White Phosphorous as a weapon is a mistake (Tim, by the way, disagrees). And no way does military service lead people to unmistakable conclusions -- about war, about politics, about the military. The moderators at Dragoon Base had to put a moritorium on discussions of Bush in 2004 because the vets who go there were so divided on the man, the war. They reflected the country, not some essence of "cavalry-ness."

It bugs me when AP moves cutlines that refer to armored personnel carriers as tanks, and occasionally