Left-leaning writers should have at least as many opportunities to sell out as those from the right, which sounds flip but I'm completely serious. Conservatives don't eat their own for trying to make a living, and if we're going to regain dominance of the media we need all the help we can get.
This is a problem that people on the left have been talking about for years (include also the prevelence of unpaid internships within lefty non-profits) so how do we get there from here?
If the solution is massive fundraising drive soliciting individual contributions that's going to create a lot of grumbling. Are there potential sources of big money on the left?
I totally read "union" in 2 as "unicorn." They could use one (or several) of those, too.
Misplaced idealism is part of the problem. A lot of left/liberals have a purist idea of sacrifice and so one.'
There's also a tremendous reluctance of the big, supposedly-left donors to put money into media. I don't know why -- stupidity, purism, or what. All the money poured into the Kerry campaign left nothing permanent behind -- it was like a flock of birds passing through.
If 20% of that money had been put into media (message development, news, and outreach), Kerry would still have lost, but there'd be something lpermanent accomplished.
I also sometimes think that there are NO real left donors, and that they're all only interested in their personal sacred cows, and really don't want liberla Democrats to get anywhere.
Where's George Soros when you need him? I don't know where money comes from -- we need more politically obsessed very rich people, certainly, and I suppose more fundraising. But it's hard to picture how to fundraise for startup organizations. Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest is a fellow at The Commonweal Institute which I don't know anything about beyond Johnson's affiliation, but looks like the right sort of thing.
"... And you can't do any interesting reporting unless you can make a full time living at it."
I disagree with this. Maybe you couldn't do as much reporting as a full time reporter but there is no reason what you did do couldn't be just as interesting. You (like most people) just prefer writing many superficial posts to writing a few substantive ones.
Sorry, that was substance-less snark. (although given that it provoked the unicorn reading, I can't really be sad about it. I think the American Prospect totally needs a unicorn).
Here's a (let's hope) better point. There are really two strains in almost any idealistic politics, one that rejects compromise, and one that tries to act pragmatically. Both these attitudes have their place, but for ideologies which feel particularly alienated from the mainstream, it is often the first strain becomes so powerful that anyone who has achieves success in the world -- and this success can be influence, or mainstream acceptance, or it can simple effectiveness -- is immediately deemed suspect. This like when someone stops likeing a band just because they've become popular. And who hasn't seem that happen? Dude, it's the same band!
We are very fond, over here on the left, of our hipper-than-thou "I liked Writer X until they sold out" sort of Indie Rock Pete mentality. We would be much better off if we went ahead and embraced the possibility that maybe it's OK for someone to make a good or even great living expressing what many of us think. This is a part of the problem I had with the carping on Edwards being really rich and is, I think, one of the essential tensions of the Left: we are aware of the many ways our society takes from the low to give to the high and after years of focusing on those disparities we come to believe that any personal success is also something gained by taking something away from another. Our awareness of the corrupted motives of many makes any compromise seem like a loss.
I'm not sure that makes sense, but I"m in a hurry, so oh well.
Shit I've been baa-pwned; this is properly pronounced "boned."
Sing it.
Signed,
rejected by the American Prospect three times.
Also: the number of these jobs, human rights jobs, etc. based outside of New York and D.C.? As far as I can tell, exactly 0.
I will say, also, I am always frustrated by the extent to which if you do original reporting on weblogs, people won't read it. Granted my attempts were long, depressing, and always on the same topic but still.
To combine threads, Joan Kroc, McDonald's heiress, recently gave NPR some $200 million.
8: There's a couple of things there. First, no one would read it. People read Unfogged for god knows what reasons (have you people no lives!) but a real factor is that there's something new up pretty often. If the content here were a substantive post once every two weeks, we'd have four readers. (I could be wrong, but this is my best guess.)
Second, topicality. This is news writing. If a story takes eight hours to research properly, and another couple to write, someone working full time can get up in a day or so, while it's fresh. Someone who's putting in a half-hour a day is always going to be way behind the curve. Focussed attention just gets you different results than stealing bits and scraps of time.
(I should correct any implication in the post that I'd be a useful reporter if I were doing it full time. I don't know the first thing about reporting anything.)
13: That also works as an answer to 8. One of the things you need to publish reporting is institutional credibility. Your reporting hit with a thud and died, because most media won't quote or pay attention to information depending on the credibility of random website X. If you're not big enough to have a reputation, or attached to something that is, you're going nowhere.
There's plenty of liberal money, but almost none of it goes to media. I suspect it's because the media was more reliably liberal-ish even ten years ago, and the need wasn't so glaring. But the people who supported Howard Dean, and MoveOn, and now Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are all willing to pony up. Once again, I'll say that I think Salon should totally change its format to something more like a group blog, and instead of offering "subscriptions" (which people don't "buy," because they're not sure they'll "use" them), they should just ask for donations to support a liberal outlet.
I think I made this rant once. Pay the interns. Pay the reporters. Get over the selling out nonsense; it doesn't work on anyone over the age of 19 who isn't a rock star wannabe in a faded t-shirt, and sounds really ridiculous. People don't do things for love.
Maybe you couldn't do as much reporting as a full time reporter but there is no reason what you did do couldn't be just as interesting.
Untrue, unfortunately. Of course you can chase after facts, but generally if you want to talk to people, particularly the sort of insiders who might have something substantive to say about big issues, you need to have established your name. For journalists, reputation and affiliation are the coin of the realm, and without them most people won't take/return your phone calls. And even if an amateur journalist can do original reporting, there's the small matter of readership to consider.
Ach, pwned by Katherine and LB.
16: I'm talking about even among liberal blogs who sometimes link to that site. The posts I worked hardest on were *less* likely to get traffic, or at least no more so.
I think it's still the credibility. I wasn't blogging then, but while there are lots of people I link to happily and think highly of when they're blogging about facts with a major media source, I get very cagy about new facts showing up in a blog -- knowing someone well enough to like their politics and writing isn't knowing them well enough to trust their reporting.
I can't remember what the story was, but I linked to something exciting sometime last spring that broke somewhere informal (yeah, the memory was really vivid) and it turned out to be crap, leaving me feeling like an idiot.
15
Unfogged could have a substantive post every two weeks and all the usual crud besides. That's an advantage of a group blog.
Regarding topicality there is all kinds of reporting. Lots of stuff has a half life of more than a few hours. You were talking about positions at the Nation and the Washington Monthly for which a two week old story is fine.
Not that there was the conscious thought, "I don't trust Katherine's reporting" but I bet people read those posts, googled for some major media reporting to link to, and then wandered off and blogged something else.
24: Still with the credibility problem. You're right that I'd write more thoughtful, factual stuff if I spent more time on fewer posts, and quit commenting. But an hour a day still wouldn't make me an eighth of a full-time reporter; it'd come out to a lot less than that.
really, my political blogging comes down to "Here's an article in the NY Times/some other blog I read, and here's what I think of it."
You at least do more than me. My political blogging comes down to "Here's an article in the NY Times and I'm too lazy to come up with a thesis or add more detail. But you can all talk about it if you'd like".
Don't sell yourself short -- you've got some excellent posts there. Not even counting the Modern Love hating.
20
Once again it depends on the kind of reporting. Lots of stories are analysis which just requires pulling together a lot of facts already in the public domain.
Many people are already doing the ephemeral inside baseball stories that depend on highly placed sources. Presumedly you are looking to fill a gap. If you write interesting stories about things that are not already covered adequately you will find readers.
This thread seems to have moved from the proposition that political journalists should be paid (true) to the proposition that we need more political journalists. Surely, no one can mean that! Crusading journalists of the Radley Balko type are awesome and undersupplied, no doubt. But this isn't what 99.9% of political journalism is. Does anyone look out their window and conclude that that the world needs more professional opinion-crafters? It's like responding to the vast catastophe of American public health by increasing funding for those "Above the Influence" public service ads.
I expect you all to put your money where LB's mouth is and give the porn site I'm currently negotiating with a significant spike in traffic when/if I work out how much they're gonna pay me.
I have a chip in my shoulder, by the way, because there is an aspect of the Arar case that I have been trying to get people to notice for a year with no success at all. And I have contacts, too--one at a newspaper, one at a big daily, one indirect one with a Senate staffer, one at a magazine. And I've written it up in neat op-ed form, and it's in the news several times a week. And nothing. Even if you do this stuff for free in free time you don't have it doesn't necessarily pay even in the sense of actually getting people to read it.
Baa? I find it hard to believe that you've missed this, but we're talking about ways to grind your kind beneath our iron heel. More political journalists total? Eh, maybe not necessary. More progressives building long careers and credibility explaining and popularizing progressive ideas? Awfully useful, from my point of view. This is politics, not neutral information.
Then we're going to hire hackers to change the bandarlog's color scheme.
30: Maybe not, so here's the deal. In the interest of fairness, have the conservative/libertarian pundittanks pay for a few more progressive writers, and then the net political Spew Output won't increase.
26
Well your credibility would be improved if you blogged under your real name. I trust William Connolley on climate change more than some random reporter.
And I don't see why an hour a day wouldn't make you an eighth of a fulltime reporter (assuming equal ability and effort).
This is a classic arms race scenario. No one wants more political journalists, but we end up with short-range Garance-Rutes deployed in West Germany.
James Shearer, 8:
Reporters have to travel a lot, they have to make lots of phone calls, they have to be available to meet people in person at the other person's convenience, and so on. You can do some reporting part time, and you can do a certain amount of analysis and archive research from your terminal, but real reporters do a lot of work that bloggers don't do.
The internet has destroyed the newspaper op-ed business forever, and they've severely diminished the faceless editors who hide stories on page 16, but very few of us are able to do a reporter's work.
No, James is right about one thing: there are tremendously important stories that reporters miss because they lack the attention span, or because it's not a "scoop." You can put an amazing amount together from open sources, and it will not be in the dailies because it's not confirmed at first, and then when it's confirmed it's not new. The I.F. Stone approach:
"I tried to give information which could be documented so the reader could check it for himself. I tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible. I also sought to give the Weekly a personal flavor, to add humor, wit and good writing to the Weekly report. I felt if one were able enough and had sufficient vision one could distill meaning, truth and even beauty from the swiftly flowing debris of the week's news....The reporter assigned to specific beats lie the State Department or the Pentagon for a wire service or a big daily newspaper soon finds himself a captive. State and Pentagon have large press relations forces whose job it is to herd the press and shape the news. There are many ways to punish a reporter who gets out of line; if a big story breaks at 3 A.M., the press office may neglect to notify him while his rivals get the story. There are as many ways to flatter and take a reporter into camp--private off-the-record dinners with high officials, entertainment at the service clubs. Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him....
But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own--particularly if he is his own employer--is immune from these pressures. Washington is full of news--if one story is denied him he can always get another. The bureaucracies put out so much that they cannot help letting the truth slip from time to time. The town is open."
Still true, and much easier now. It is absolutely possible. And I don't entirely buy that credibility is the real problem. It's simple inertia. People pay attention to you, or not, because you're someone people pay attention to, or not.
37: Are you talking about me, literally, or about what someone with a full time job could do in their spare time? For me, literally, I can't, in my current job, drop the pseudonym, and I haven't got the focus to get much of anything done that I have to fit into scraps of time -- I manage to do lawyering by a whole lot of apparently unproductive musing, during which I comment on Unfogged, and occasional crazed bursts of energy.
Someone else might do better, but it's hard for anyone to do good work in a hobby, even putting to one side the practical issues about reporting that have been raised.
your credibility would be improved if you blogged under your real name
Why? The fallacy that anonymity (or pseudonymity) in and of itself makes a person unreliable is, if you think about it, not only silly, but deeply undemocratic. Ought not a reader to judge the merit of an argument or piece of reporting by its logic and evidence, rather than by the social status of its author? Pseudonymity, especially, can give you exactly the same kind of track record that named authorship can. You know LB's record: it's here, and it's publicly available. You know that she's a lawyer. Why, then, would her arguments be less reliable than those of (say) Eugene Volokh--unless you think that being well-connected somehow automatically makes an author more reliable, more intelligent, or more persuasive.
In which case, why not ask Paris Hilton what *she* thinks of global warming? After all, presumably you know who she is. Unlike, say, Jana Milford.
30: Baa, we're saying that we need more actual journalists who aren't morons, intimidated centrists, or Republican pimps. We do not need a larger absolute quantity of journalists, just fewer that agree with you.
Shearer, the point isn' that it isn't possible to do any work at all free lance, it's that full time people do the most and the best work. You're being obtuse.
We need more opinion journalists who are, literally, morons. There should be an IQ cap at 80. Think of the intelligence liberated for productive use!
Moron opinion journalists do help your side out.
42
I am not clear on why you can't drop the anonymity. According to the New York State Attorney General
"An employee who is discharged because of his participation, on his own time, in lawful political or recreational activities can bring an action against his employer for damages and equitable relief. If you believe you have been discharged because of your involvement in such legitimate pursuits, you should consult your attorney to discuss possible legal action and report the circumstances of your discharge to the Attorney General, who also has jurisdiction to seek injunctive relief and penalties against your employer."
you can do whatever you want on your own time.
Two answers: (a) they don't have to like me for it, and that's how a law firm works; (b) were you trying to snipe, or are you just slow on the uptake? You know what hours I'm commenting and posting during. If you're trying to give me a hard time about goofing off while I work, guilty as charged. (I hope you were trying to snipe. If that just hadn't occurred to you, I worry about you.)
This touches on what I think is the best point made in Kos/Armstrong's book is that we combine what 10 said (I like "hippier than though are" as a turn of phrase as well) with the impression that the psychic income of fighting the good fight is more than a substitute for actual income. I mean, I can't speak for LB, or others in similar situations, but if being a progressive opinonator/journo had anything resembling the material rewards of the legal field, I might know a lot less about insurance and/or tort law than I do now.
We make fun of "wingnut welfare," but it isn't the welfare that's the problem, it's the "wingnut." The NRO pundits are bad because NRO exists to promote bad ideas, by and large.
And in terms of framing, and "Overton windows" and the like, it's actually pretty important to have people dedicated to telling the progressive side of the story. Further, it's important that those people be amongst the best and brightest. These people have options, and after living the faux-penurious life of a grad student for a few years, material comfort is at the least very seductive, and I would argue not an unjustifiable option to take.
James Shearer: No offense, but this line of questioning grows increasingly quixotic. Can you not easily imagine 10,000 good reasons for remaining anonymous on a blog that is essentially a hobby? Of course, as I am anonymous myself, you should naturally consider the source...
Emerson: Will you consider a strategic and bi-lateral reduction in opinion journalists? I offer Kate O'Beirne as a gesture of good faith.
43
I know LB says she is a lawyer, I have no easy way to check. If someone like Eugene Volokh has a good reputation in real life it adds credibility to his blogging.
Real life reputations matter more than online reputations because if you spoil your online reputation under one handle you can always start over with a new handle. You can't do that in real life so people are more careful.
51, what does it matter? It's not like there's a shortage of lawyers here to evaluate the merits of any strictly legal argument.
I'd add that with respect to more technical subjects, (including certain areas of the law) 'credentials' for lack of a better term, are important in evaluating someone's credibility.
And the law degree really shouldn't buy me much credibility for most of my blogging -- I do the occasional post resting on legal argument, but very few, and anyone interested enough to follow it should be able to evaluate the argument on its merits.
James, you're twisting in circles. LB has an actual job such that she feels anonymity is necessary for her. There are many such jobs in the real world and there's no reason to doubt her. And because of the very same job, she also doesn't really have enough time to do much journalism.
So by raising the anonymity issue, you strengthened her point.
We're really lost in the weeds by now. The original topics:
1. Openly liberal or left journalists don't have many job opportunities compared to openly conservative journalists, fluffily silly journalists, and centrist trimmer journalists who are careful not to say the wrong (liberal) thing.
2. Liberal donors are reluctant to put money in media, message development, and getting the word out. They prefer to dump tons of money every two years on election campaigns.
3. A lot of rank and file liberals are resentful of liberal media people who hope to earn an actual living by their work.
What is the evidence for 1? Not doubting, just wondering.
This comment seemed reasonable to me.
55: I think it's just a general sense of things. But I think that "if it's worth having done, it's worth paying someone to do it" and "this is not stimulating work, but I will shut up and do it in the name of the greater good" are both sort of
Shit. Are both sort of illiberal or conservative attitudes.
This comment seemed reasonable to me.
Gah, didn't I dispose of that argument forever? The fact that journalists self-identify as liberal doesn't mean that they're practicing liberal journalism, whether hard or soft--it might even mean the opposite. Unapologetically liberal polemics and analysis are in short supply. Krugman is a rock star, precisely because not many people do what he does.
55: The guy calls objective journalism "soft liberalism" because objective journalists usually end up writing liberal things. Then he calls liberals who write non-liberal journalism liberals because they call themselves liberal (maybe they do liberal stuff outside work or something). But what's especially being talked about is overtly liberal opinion journalism in the major media of TV (especially talk shows) and the national newspapers.
There are a lot of people in the major media who call themselves liberals but don't come through. Many are just tokens. On talk show TV there aren't even many tokens. But there are tons of niches for no-talent conservatives like Jonah Goldberg, Ann Coulter, Ramesh Ponneru, Michelle Malkin, and a lot more.
42
"Someone else might do better, but it's hard for anyone to do good work in a hobby, even putting to one side the practical issues about reporting that have been raised."
Lots of people do better work in a hobby than in their real job because they like their hobby and they hate their real job.
But there are plenty of things that are done best by someone for whom it is a real job, because it requires expensive equipment, large support organizations, a lot of time when everyone is at work, or is just generally not very interesting.
But there are plenty of things that are done best by someone for whom it is a real job, because it requires expensive equipment, large support organizations, a lot of time when everyone is at work, or is just generally not very interesting.
44
"Shearer, the point isn' that it isn't possible to do any work at all free lance, it's that full time people do the most and the best work. You're being obtuse. "
LB's post said it was impossible. And full time people may produce the most work but I see no reason for it to be the best. If you aren't working for pay you don't have to worry about appealing to a mass market.
Shearer, you're starting to seem like a contrarian of the worse sort.
I don't know how many jobs are out there for ideological conservative journalists as far as sheer numbers, but honest-to-God, it seems like you can be successful with less talent. I know I'm predisposed to think that, but really. Who does the National Review have comparable to Yglesias or Ackerman?
65: K, that's sort of what I was trying to get at in 49, in that if there were progressive outlets of similar stature and pay, the Liberal pundits would destroy the conservative ones. I mean they already do, but Jonah gets to bash Yglesias in the LAT, while Ezra and MattY kick his ass in response...on their blogs and maybe in the print version of TAP.
(It also occurs to me that the vapidness of say, NRO, is a feature and not a bug, as you hire people who will say the stupidest damn thing ever, and that allows your Hagels, Specters and Snowes to sound reasonable by comparison.)
derbyshire is smart, but he's downright wacky, enough so that he's too weird for mst conservatives.
There were two points made there that I thought were reasonable.
One: that the opportunity to spend your life as a Krugman or a Krauthammer are globally quite limited. I understand that most here take it as fact that there is much greater opportunity to be a Krauthammer because it is so obvious that there are more soft spots for conservative talking heads. I confess that while there sure do seem to me to be lots of right wing think tanks, I am really not sure that's true.
Two: that if you do want to spend your life in journalism, there are far more newsrooms that have a left-of-center vibe (defined crudely as 70%+ of everyone is a Democrat) than ones that have a right wing vibe. If you think the middle of the democratic party isn't left of center, of course, than you will disagree with this.
64
My point is just that people don't have to be paid to accomplish stuff. Look at wikipedia or open source software. And isn't it reasonable for people on the left to prefer such models?
Baa, that's part of the insanity of journalism, that a lot of people who would like to be liberals end up writing shitty anti-liberal journalism. Management is not liberal.
In the Bush-Gore election Bush hardly got hit at all, while there was a swarm of silly content-free slams on Gore. Clinton impeachment, same. Runup to the Iraq war, same.
And isn't it reasonable for people on the left to prefer such models?
It is reasonable for suckers to prefer such models. Also chumps.
Shearer: you're a very very **stubborn** contrarian of the very worst sort.
I explained above that there are some things you can't do that way, for example if it means interviewing someone in London or Cairo, or making a phone call to Japan. Did that just fly past you?
Really, this is silly. Do you think that surgeons should do their work in their spare time?
It really isn't capitalism or conservativism to acknowledge that people who do a job need to be able to live and also need to have the resources to get the job done.
65: Derbyshire is smart and honest by NR standards but he's not the reporter Ackerman is or the analyst Yglesias is. Plus, wacky.
There is highbrow non-opinion journalism that doesn't pull its punches about liberalism--Jane Mayer & Sy Hersh in the New Yorker, e.g. Or Bill Moyers. But there are relatively few examples, with very small staffs, and you cannot break into them without years and years of experience elsewhere.
It really isn't capitalism or conservativism to acknowledge that people who do a job need to be able to live and also need to have the resources to get the job done.
And further, the more you pay for it, the general higher quality of work you'll receive.
75
I don't think you need to be paid to produce the kind of story "The Nation" or "The Washington Monthly" publish which is what I thought we were talking about.
77
Which is why windows is so much better than linux.
72.2: I worked in a newsroom in a very blue city in 2000. I can pretty much guarantee that the majority of the reporters identified as liberal, or at least Democratic, but they didn't practice anything that could remotely be called progressive journalism -- and the paper endorsed Bush.
I eagerly await the establishment of the James B. Shearer Fund, which will pay bills and buy groceries for enterprising journalists while they accomplish stuff without getting paid. Where do I sign up?
75: Let's take some specific stories from the Nation and Washington Monthly. I couldn't write this. You need high flying political types to return your calls to write that one, and they wouldn't. I couldn't write this, or this. or this. Not this either. They do have some op-eds, where it's a function of time, but there's plenty of things a blogger absolutely could not duplicate.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070219/ha:
Yes, look at open source software. Is there a good open-source calendaring tool? Nope. Is there good open source OCR software? Nope. Are there good original open source video games? Nope.
To the extent that open source software is of high quality, it's because it gets funded by people trying to sell computers or computer consulting services, that it's directly related to the needs of software developers or sysadmins, or that it gets used as a means for software developers to build a reputation that they can then convert into a high-paying job.
Hard to see how that works with progressive think-tankery.
83: That was probably more time than the comment deserved.
JBS, what part of "generally" was unclear? (Am I allowed to start the name calling yet?)
Shearer usually does a pretty good job of concealing the fact that he's trolling.
Oh, anyone can call names whenever they like, but is there really any need for it?
It's Fridays and I'm still at work, and it would make me feel better...
It's Fridays
Friday, even. Or is it that I work at TGIFridays?
Jake's 56-57 cannot be emphasized enough, especially this:
I think that "if it's worth having done, it's worth paying someone to do it" [is]... a sort of a illiberal or conservative attitude
The number of private foundation staff and individual donors who romanticize the glory of unpaid/low-paid nonprofit or activist staff is remarkable. Hearing someone who is paid $60K a year defend why the organization shouldn't "waste" more than $22K a year on entry-level staff...priceless.
If that's really a conservative attitute, it's one we should adopt right quick.
84
Even if you grant that paying more gets better quality in general there are some specific reasons progressive reporting may be an exception. If progressive reporting is supposed to represent the point of view of the lower classes you are going to lose something if you pay enough to make the reporter upper class.
And, if you pay more by selling the product, this will inevitably produce pressure to make the product appealing to rich people. Doen't Unfogged complain about stories in the NYT on this very ground?
I'm going to ignore the current direction of discussion and instead share my little fantasy.
In my little fantasy you get about a hundred smart, slightly experienced, but still young and hungry journalists. You set about a third of them on congress--come up with a way of dividing the senators and the congress people by geography. You set another third of them on the exectuive branch--not on the White House but the departments that actually do most of the work, proportional to budget size and responsibility, perhaps. And you set the last third of them on major industries, their governmental and international relations, their lobbyists. Half of these 100 should be in the DC area, but half of them not--a lot of this reporting requires hanging out in the constituencies and also in the local offices of various departments. Their job is to keep an eye on their charges--maybe blog a little about day to day events--butreally every month to turn out one nice feature length article about something they think is important in their beat. And the only criterion is relevance to governance--how does their story about their particular beat relate to the governance of the country, the welfare or pain of its citizens, and what are the pressure points that could change it one way or the other. So every month you have 100 feature length articles surveying the forces that run the country. As a reader you would have about 500 pages to choose from each month to get a solid handle on how the country was being run and what needed to be done about it. It wouldn't always be fabulous. But there was no way, if you had smart people to begin with, you wouldn't always end up with more useful information than you could possibly read in a month.
You pay these journalists $40,000 a year--peanuts, really, enough to cover cheap rent and health insurance and minimal loan payments and not a whole lot else. You set aside another chunk of change for the server costs, for nexis, for their flying around and phone calls. I'm thinking the whole thing would cost about 7 million. If you can get 50,000 readers to pony up $140 to say, have full and first electronic access to the archive, you're good to go.
Are there really not 50,00 people who'd be willing to pony that much up? Some way to make it happen? Wouldn't it be valuable?
/end fantasy
James, the air you breathe is wasted. You should never have been born.
89: I think that there's a smidgen of truth in the "elite liberal" smear / cliche. Some of the big liberal donors seem to like having activists the way they like having gardeners and masseuses.
90
The idea that only things the market will pay for are valuable sounds libertarian to me.
James, the air you breathe is wasted. You should never have been born.
This time you've gone too far, Shearer!! 'Libertarian' is fighting words!
Shearer, FWIW, I think you'd get a much better reception if you'd go out of your way to explicitly acknowledge the points of your opponents that you agree with as well as those you disagree with.
Oh, come on, pdf, the man's not braindamaged, he's having fun. Or if he's braindamaged, pointing out how to have a reasonable conversation is unlikely to help him.
100: My theory is that he's somewhat Aspergery or something of the like. If he's trolling, of course the advice is useless.
Eh, he strikes me as odd, which might include Aspergery if I knew more about it, but not odd enough to be genuinely confused about why it is he always seems to be in the middle of arguments.
You know who's a bad columnist? Krauthammer.
Hearing someone who is paid $60K a year defend why the organization shouldn't "waste" more than $22K a year on entry-level staff...priceless.
To piggyback, not to respond: Arguments of this sort are generally couched in terms of love, sacrifice, putting in one's time, but should be called out for what it is. Cheap class sorting. If you're taking a $22,000 job out of college, and you're genuinely talented (and could be making more in other fields) ten bucks says you didn't have loans, and your parents are helping with rent or car insurance.
Arguments against this are always couched in terms of excluding the poor liberal who might have an idea what it's like to live on welfare. It's far worse than that, in my mind, as it also cuts out most of the middle class, which is maybe a constituency that shouldn't be ignored.
Oh, that is a very, very bad column. Goddam Iraqi ingrates -- we blow parts of their country up until we're blue in the face, and this is the thanks we get?
We gave them a civil war? Why? Because we failed to prevent it? Do the police in America have on their hands the blood of the 16,000 murders they failed to prevent last year?
Oh good god of cocksucking pedophiles....
Way to show some fucking gratitude, Iraqis.
We should really lighten up. It's lines from "Ironic" modified to make them ironic. Fave:
Rain on your wedding day... to Ra, the Egyptian sun-god.
google fails me: Your search - "how to make a civil ceremony not suck" - did not match any documents.
"You know who's a bad columnist? Krauthammer."
K: "Did Britain 'give' India the Hindu-Muslim war of 1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically cleansed 12 million more? The Jewish-Arab wars in Palestine? The tribal wars of post-colonial Uganda?"
And the answer is yes!
Hey folks, what was the heyday and height of the Left? 1875-1925. Did Engels or Kautsky or Leninor Luxemburg or Gramsc or Emma Goldman or Debs do MSM-type journalism and make a good living? Do we all know those names?
Try writing and selling polemic and propaganda. Don't worry about credibility and respect from Joe Klein or Chris Matthews. Fuck em.
Works for Hewitt, Limbaugh, NRO. Try being really fucking ugly, ostentatiously obnoxious, fact-free, disrespected and proud as punch. See if you attract an audience that will put a buck in the hat.
All these bloggers trying to be the ideal New York Times. Fuck.
108: Myself, I'm fond of:
A black fly in your Chardonnay... poured to celebrate the successful fumigation of your recently purchased vineyard in southern France.
104: I think it's even worse than excluding the middle class, it excludes most people who have to work for a living, well up into legitimately rich. I imagine it also has to have fairly strong gender effects due to the relative acceptability of living off one's spouse/parents.
104, 113: We're in violent agreement.
There's also the notion that a woman executive director (for example) in the nonprofit field can afford to be paid $50K because her husband has a for-profit job. It's a three-fer: Denigrate the value of her skills, assume her husband is happy to keep working in the for-profit sector forever, and imagine there is no such thing as divorce or death.
If you're taking a $22,000 job out of college, and you're genuinely talented (and could be making more in other fields) ten bucks says you didn't have loans, and your parents are helping with rent or car insurance.
It could also mean you majored in history and everywhere else you applied turned you down.
When I get my $22,000 job Cala's $10 will make a nice dent in my loan payments.
102
I am always in the middle of arguments because I like to argue, no mystery there. However I prefer reasoned debates to flame wars. I take some steps to try and keep things civil. For example I try to avoid profanity, personal insults, quoting out of context etc. No doubt I could do more but it seems to be enough to keep things reasonably civil on other blogs. Not so much here.
I think 99 is correct that I could and should praise others more but I am not convinced that is the main problem.
Perhaps commenters on other blogs are less intelligent, on average, than commenters here, and are therefore more willing to indulge stupid arguments like "The Left should approve of people working for free." And--god I loved this one--Real life reputations matter more than online reputations because if you spoil your online reputation under one handle you can always start over with a new handle. You can't do that in real life so people are more careful.
That's a very nice theory, James. It's neither original nor particularly intelligent--it's the kind of explanation about how reputation works that I'd expect from a high school student--but it is, I have to admit, a theory. Unfortunately, you're not stating it as a theory, but as a fact: and any half intelligent person who hangs out online for more than a few months knows there's plenty of evidence that it's a crap theory.
I mean, honestly. If you want people to take you seriously, you should really try to give the impression that you actually think about things before just waving them away. Especially since you're such a genius and all.
I don't generally like sweet things, but I'm told I would like scones as they are a not-very-sweet pastry. I demand scones at this point. SCONES, dammit.
Croissants are not necessarily sweet. Nor biscuits.
Thanks, ben. But you weren't the giver I had in mind. Nonetheless, I accept. So warm; so flaky.
My concet of my own trolling is based on the ole turd-in-the-punchbowl. I don't expect warmth and gratitude, but find being ignored kinda amusing. But it shouldn't be abused, twenty to thirty unwelcome comments would ruin the effect.
I don't have pastries, do y'all like clementines?
I'm going to buy me a pain au chocolat.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/55547390@N00/295468192/
Now that's the stuff.
Unfortunately, I cannot get good croissant aux amandes anymore. They are almond croissants and sometimes there is chocolate inside too. Wonderful. I would tolerate any troll if he could bring me one right now:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/55547390@N00/269563236/
Heaven forbid that Bob should be ignored:
Engels was independently wealthy;
Kautsky (SPD), Lenin (RSDLP(B)), Luxemburg (SPD), Gramsci (PSI/PCI) and Debs (SP) were paid a salary out of the funds of the organisations they worked for. Most of them did some independent paid journalism as well. They also had time to write in jail;
Goldman was as poor as a church mouse, and it's a damn shame. That's the exception that proves the rule.
103: Will somebody roll Krauthammer off a pier already? Christ, what an asshole.
102: James, you are despised because you keep repeating your own points without responding in any way to other people's points. I actually maintained civility through several exchanges, but I shouldn't have.
What you keep saying is exactly the idea we started off calling into question. That's been the main topic. It's not satisfactory argumentation simply to repeat the idea under attack over and over again.
The anarchist organization was apparently not very effective. If the anarchists had been better organized and disciplined they could have changed history.
somewhat Aspergery
That's my impression as well.
"If the anarchists had been better organized and disciplined they could have changed history."
And had ponies.
Didn't we all see this movie when it was called the Mongol Hordes?
Iceland has more ponies per capita than any country in the world except Mongolia.
They're hurt when you call them ponies insteqd of horses, but truth is truth. They're ponies, Bjork!
119
My original assertion was that anonymity decreases credibility. I was unaware that this is controversial.
Newspapers use anonymous sources but they generally prefer named sources when available because anonymous sources reduce credibility.
For evidence see this article which discusses source anonymity and reader credibility. Reporting on a (non random) survey it says:
" Readers were asked how anonymous sources generally affected their trust in a news story. Here's how the responses broke down:
• Less likely to believe the story: 44 percent
• Makes no difference: 42 percent
• More likely to believe: 11 percent
This Readers Speak survey was sponsored by the Associated Press Managing Editors National Credibility Roundtables Project through its Reader Interactive initiative. A total of 35 news organizations helped gather 1,611 responses from 42 states. Editors at 419 news outlets responded to a parallel survey. The results are not scientific; readers were contacted because they had given their e-mail address to their local newspaper, and comments were taken only online."
See also this collection of newpaper policies discouraging use of anonymous sources. For example the Florida Orlando Sentenal says in part: "The use of anonymous sources should be avoided because it undermines the newspaper's credibility. ..." and the Kansas City Star says in part: "Credibility is The Stars greatest asset. For that reason alone, editorial employees must make every effort to fully identify the news source in a story or behind one. ...".
Finally this report (pdf) to the NYT executive editor states in part "... Dan Okrent, the public editor, told the committee that when readers complain to him, anonymous sourcing is the No. 1 killer of our credibility. ..."
Of course newpapers still use anonymous sources when they feel the added value in additional information outweighs the reduction in credibility. Similarly bloggers may rationally feel the benefits of anonymity outweigh the reduction in credibility. LB has convinced me that is the case for her. However I don't see the point in denying that there is a reduction in credibility in general even if one would wish otherwise.
The fact that anonymity reduces credibility in general does not mean that anonymous sources have no credibility at all. Clearly if someone consistently offers valuable commentary anonymously he can build a reputation for reliabilty. However if you are just starting out it is an advantage if you can start with a real life reputation. Justice Posner's blog received a headstart because of his real life reputation.
I later gave an explanation as to why anonymity reduces credibility. As you point out it is unoriginal conventional wisdom. I was unaware that it is controversial. Of course it is "only a theory" but the same could be (and is) said of the theory of evolution. In any case the empirical evidence that anonymity reduces credibility in many eyes offered above does not rely on this explanation.
134: Just because a newspaper story is seen as more reliable with named sources than with unnamed sources doesn't establish that a named blogger without a preexisting reputation would be believed more easily than a pseudonymous one. My feeling is that using your real name won't buy you much, if anything, if your real name isn't already known to your audience. This is just a guess, but I'd say that LB's real name has very little public reputational value, much less than her pseudonym here (which even still, doesn't have a whole lot of recognition).
134 is ridiculous, anonymous and pseudonymous are completely different things.
Thank you for expanding on the conventional wisdom, James. As it happens, my own academic work focuses on this very question. Not that you'll believe me, since you don't know my name. Nonetheless, as PDF and Unfogggedtarian--neither of whom, I believe, work on this stuff--demonstrate, you don't have to be a specialist to realize, after a little bit of thought, that the issue is somewhat complicated. Even if you don't already know that it's controversial because Important People have said so.
Also, just to reiterate pdf's point, a source is not an author.
And to reiterate Emerson's point, your response in no way actually considers anything I've said. Are you *capable* of considering the issue yourself, or is the only thing that matters to you knowing that Other People With Real Names have already done so?
JBS, the reason that particular point was annoying was that it came at the end of an argument about whether journalists can do better work if they work full time as journalists. You were arguing that they could do just as good work working parttime and financing themselves.
We gave various arguments against this point, one of which, perhaps by LB, was that fulltime journalists with an institutional connection are more credible and can get phone calls returned for that reason.
So then you argued (to LB, a pseudonym, IIRC) that journalists who work under their own names are more credible. This is generally true.
The problem is that the reason LB uses a pseudonym is because of her job -- she doesn't want her online personality to cause her work trouble.
Which speaks strongly against your original thesis, that journalists can work just as well part time without a job in journalism. Part of LBs anonymity and lack of credibility is because she's not a fulltime journalist.
Which I tried to tell you -- unsuccessfully, as far as I could tell.
I do have to say, though, that I've kinda come round to James's presence, troll though he be, because it gives me someone to insult without being told to stop.
137
You don't argue in a way that I find easy to respond to. For example in 119 you say:
"That's a very nice theory, James. It's neither original nor particularly intelligent--it's the kind of explanation about how reputation works that I'd expect from a high school student--but it is, I have to admit, a theory. Unfortunately, you're not stating it as a theory, but as a fact: and any half intelligent person who hangs out online for more than a few months knows there's plenty of evidence that it's a crap theory."
You just assert I am wrong (and probably not very bright) but you do not cite any of the evidence. You for example could have said something like this is a simplistic explanation proposed by T but does not account for A, B and C as shown by X, Y and Z.
Similarly for your claims of academic expertise, you could have said something like as it happens I know something about this, A is a good general survey, X, Y and Z go deeper, briefly the research shows S and T.
I am willing to consider and respond to comments like that. Generally I won't respond to comments like you are a moron go figure out why you are wrong.
135
It is not either or. You can build a reputation based on a handle. That reputation will depend on many factors. One positive factor (in my opinion at least) is a link to a real world identity. You say LB's name is probably unknown to most people and therefore doesn't matter. Her name may not mean anything but the fact that she is a member of the bar does. This shows she has some specialized expertise and would add to her credibility when blogging about legal issues. A reasonably normal real world persona would also show she is not some unstable crank like the unibomber. It would also help with dealing with sources most of whom I expect would be more likely to help someone with a known identity.
Of course if your real world indentity is undistinguished disclosing it might not help your credibility much. However if you have no real world credentials or experience at all to point to I would question why you think your views are deserving of a wide audience.
138
We are talking to cross purposes to some extent. I am not arguing that a "hobby" journalist can do everything as well as a full time paid professional. There are many types of stories. For some of them a professional has a big advantage. For others not so much. And for some stories requiring specialized knowledge an amateur with the right expertise has an advantage. Also professionals are subject to constraints that amateurs are not. A professional journalist may not get to choose his stories. He may never get enough time to do a really good job. He may be forced to conform to a certain house style. He may have become the captive of his vaunted sources unable to write anything unfavorable for fear his access will be terminated. So amateurs can do just as good work (although not as much) in some areas (but not everything). See 40 for another view on this.
Consider astronomy. Lots of astronomical work absolutely requires expensive equipment and a big budget. Amateurs would be foolish to try and compete. But other astronomical work (like discovering comets) just requires a good pair of binoculars, a good visual memory and a lot of effort. Amateurs can (and do) do good work in these areas.
Of course even if you can do good reporting as an amateur there is the problem of getting anyone to read it but that is a separate issue.
As for LB's anonymity it was a mistake for me to personalize it, I didn't understand the basis of her concern. I believe most people could blog under their real names without casing themselves work problems.
A reasonably normal real world persona would also show she is not some unstable crank like the unibomber.
Yet another reason I remain anonymous.
And seriously, to the extent that all you were saying is that some good reporting can be done by amateurs in their spare time, you're right: it's possible. But many categories of reporting aren't possible for amateurs, as lots of people have been saying, and even the reporting that is possible if you're an amateur is laborious and timeconsuming, which means both that few people with competing full time jobs are going to do it all, and the ones who do aren't going to do very much.
If you think (like I do) that there is not enough progressive writing and reporting being done, than it makes sense for you to think (again, as I do) that progressive writers getting paid is a good thing that should happen more often, because it will increase the amount of such writing.
144
Words like "can't" or "absolutely true" have a tendency to set me off when they are not literally true, a no doubt annoying quirk of mine.
I don't identify with the left so the lack of specifically left wing reporting doesn't bother me. However I do think that the big time paid media does a bad job reporting many stories for a variety of reasons. But I don't think this is due to lack of numbers so doubt adding paid big media positions will help much. I think new internet based models of reporting like blogging or wikipedia have great potential to improve reporting on many stories. In some cases I think they already have. Many established media people appear quite threatened by these new models as shown by various intemperate statements made about bloggers. I think this reflects their fear that they will be unable to compete successfully with the new forms.
I think the left (and people in general) would do better worrying about shaping these new models of reporting and information transmission rather than trying to get a few more slots in the old media. I expect these new forms are likely to incorporate large amounts of unpaid effort like wikipedia or open source software and if the left resists this for ideological reasons they are likely to fall behind.