Sad Day – Tom Mangan retires Print the Chaff

Tom Mangan is a copy editor (I think — correct me if I'm wrong anyone who might know) at the San Jose Mercury News and ran one of the best blogs for folks who worked in a print newsroom. It was called “Print The Chaff” and it was funny, informative, and even inspirational. Some of the stuff Tom put up at his blog was sure to make you a better writer which, if you ask me, is the uber-mission of all great editors. [Check out Tom's collection of cliches that all writers should strive to avoid lest they get decidedly mixed reviews for their reportage, something that is my single biggest fear each and every day I go to work 🙂 ]
But today, Tom shut it all down.
“I don't want to do this anymore. It's taking too much time away from people and other stuff I care more about. And besides, the place I'm moving to has only dialup access, and daily blogging at 33k is madness.
I'd rather do this right or not at all — that is, post every day and give the topic the time it deserves, rather than let it whither or fade into irrelevance. Burnout vs. rust, as Neil Young would put it.”
Tom, who I've never met but will be happy to buy beer for the day we do meet, will still be running his own blog. Good luck with that, Tom, at 33K, and thanks for Print the Chaff.

Credibility, Blogs, and How Newspapers Work

One of the problems with mining the Internet for sources and info, of course, is verifying the identify of authors of what looks like interesting material. Such is the case here with an alternatingly funny/cynical/misguided/spot-on blog entry by a fellow named Steve Gilliard. I have no idea what Gilliard is or does. He appears to be anti-Bush and may be a Democrat (mind you, he may just be an Independent) but, beyond that, I'm stumped. He provides no active links at his blog to identify himself.
Which is a shame, really, because he just put up a post titled How To Read a Newspaper Story in which he tries to explain to his readers what a print reporter's day is like —

….they check what is knows [sic] as an assignment desk to see what the editors expect. Some days, they'll have to cover a conference or a meeting, some days they'll have to work their sources. Which means pester them.”

— then goes on to explain the difference between a copy editor and a reporter —

Daily newspaper journalism is divided into reporters and copy editors. Usually being on then [sic] desk is a quicker route to promotion, while being a reporter is the route to some public fame and book contracts.”

After quickly defining and describing how newspaper work is produced, he then dissects a Washington Post story about the selection of the new Iraq PM.
There's a ton of spelling errors in the post which hurts his credibility but his credibility is boosted, I think, by getting quite a few things right (if you've ever worked in a newsroom, you'll quickly spot the right from the wrong).
But again, his credibility would be stronger if he let us know about his own background and/or his own qualifications or experience to be the media critic it seems clear he wants to be.

The Rebirth of the New York Review of Books

One of my favourite periodicals is the New York Review of Books. Scott Sherman has a piece that looks at the rebirth of this publication in a recent issue of The Nation. It's a good article and I didn't realize until I was reading Sherman's assessment of the NYRB that I agreed with most of it. (I first became a subscriber in 1984 while at the University of Guelph.)
“Let it be said that the editors met the challenges of the post-9/11 era in a way that most other leading American publications did not, and that The New York Review of Books–which turned forty last fall–was there when we needed it most,” Sherman writes.
Sherman keys in one on contributor as sign of its re-birth: Tony Judt. Judt's essay “Israel: The Alternative” is a great example of the kind of provocative writing the NYRB is running these days:
“The problem with Israel,” Judt wrote, “is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”

Broadband beats the newsstand

Several items this morning suggesting that the future of newspapers is pretty dim.
The Heartland Institute (a U.S.-based education reform activist group, so far as I can tell) reports on a study, jointly authored by the Columbia School of Journalism and the Pew Foundation that looks at newspaper readership in the U.S. In Who Will Read Newspapers?. the Heartland Institute concludes that while newspaper readership was often linked to higher levels of education, readership levels among university-educated Americans is now decling.
“Newspaper reporters continue to produce thought-provoking and substantive stories. However, recent reports raise concerns as to whether newspapers will continue to have readers in tomorrow's America,” the report says. “”The share of the U.S. population that reads newspapers has been shrinking for more than two generations, but population growth once masked the trend. Now circulation is decreasing in absolute terms.”
The Heartland Institute suggests declining levels of literacy at all levels means fewer potential newspaper readers.
The guy who covers politics for U.S. music video channel, though, says young people are looking elsewhere for news and information.
Young people are also turning to the Web for advice on movies. As an article in the Christian Science Monitor notes, people who are between 18 and 24 would rather go to online movie sites than take film-going advice from a critic who works for a mainstream media outlet like Time.
Trying to respond to declining levels of readership, many newspapers try to move downmarket, publishing shorter articles with a heavy focus on entertainment news. I think that's a short-term fix, if it's a fix at all. Newspapers are for readers. Even if there are fewer readers, you need to publish something that's a satisfying reading experience. That means intelligent language and articles that are as long as they need to be to tell an interesting and compelling story. I realize that's pretty vague, but it's a better goal to shoot for than some of the formulas would-be newspaper saviours come up with for “brighter, tighter” news-you-can-use solutions.

Blog searching

Librarian Christina Pikas has some advice for those who need to search blogs. “Blogs are everywhere,” she writes, “and it is important to either be able to search them or to make sure you’re not searching them when you are looking for authoritative, accurate, and unbiased information. As blogs and RSS feeds either continue to explode across the net or start to go out of style, the search engines will adapt. Next time you are shopping for a new technology product try searching in a blog search engine to see what people are saying. Use Waypath to find related blogs. If you need to do a very precise search, use Feedster; but, if you want a little of everything, stay with the big general search engines (like the one that starts with G).”
Pikas does not assess Technorati, which is usually my first engine when I need to search the blogosphere.

Obsessive Compulsive Blogging

The New York Times has a story tomorrow on Technology > Circuits > For Some, the Blogging Never Stops” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/technology/circuits/27blog.html?ex=1086235200&en=687ed8fbb3b711bb&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE”>obsessive bloggers.

Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession. Such bloggers often feel compelled to write several times daily and feel anxious if they don't keep up.

Tip 'of the hat to: [Micro Persuasion]

Canada is lone G8 offshore outsourcing destination

Paul Kedrosky points to a new study which looks at the top destinations for offshore outsourcing. India is number one and Canada is ninth. From Kedrosky's blog:

Infectious Greed: Offshoring to Canada:
“Interestingly, there is only one G8 country in the list: Canada. I'm not convinced that is anything to write home about.”

Look for a piece by Kedrosky, incidentally, in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review. “It is about some business strategy/structure implications of syndication (i.e., RSS, Atom, etc.),” Kedrosky writes. ” The article is mostly concerned with the broad idea of freeing up “dark matter” in organizations, although I do touch on some more tactical syndication-related issues, like news distribution and the like. “

Less of Lessig or Manes?

A Forbes columnist who is normally asked for his opinions on the best big screen TV to buy or what you should look for in a digital camera has been frantically trying to convince the world that Stanford University law professor Larry Lessig's ideas are for the birds. Recently, though, Stephen Manes sunk to a new low . He called Lessig a moron — no, really, that's what passes for intelligent debate nowadays in the land of Thomas Jefferson — and his headline writer decided that we needed less of Lessig (and presumably , more of Manes.) [Read Lessig's reply to Manes]
Now it's true that calling for less of something is often a good idea. I think we can all agree that we need less war. I could use less weight and my family wishes I would spend less time at work. But I don't think anyone — particularly writers and those engaged in discussion and debate — would ever call for less writers and debaters. More is always better, no matter what opinions are expressed. In fact, it's very often when somebody says, “Right, that's it, less debate and discussion” that we often get more war — which we are agreed that we want less of.
But if Forbes is forcing me to choose between less Manes or less Lessig, I'm sorry to say Forbes should ditch Manes and hire Lessig. He's a better writer, a better thinker, and he almost never calls people morons. And anyhow, I'm probably more interested in Lessig's recommendations for big screen TVs and digital cameras.