Bloggasm

It’s time to flesh out your resumes. Newspapers aren’t hiring, we’re told, and when they do hire the job posting ineluctably includes that word, that half-assed nod that even the gnarled old newspaper curmudgeons have adopted as if they even know what it means: “Multimedia.”

Whenever I see that word I think of a blog post written by my friend Stephen Ward, titled, “Death of the Computer Guy.” Perhaps coming off a resume-shooting binge, Ward sheds any modicum of feigned omniscience and admits he doesn’t know everything related to his profession:

You wrote the cover letter. You submitted the resume. They knew who you were, what you could do, and why you were interested in the position before you even walked in the door. Now that you’re sitting down and talking, though, they throw you a curve ball. Can you do X? Um, no… of course you can’t do X. If you could, you would’ve said so by now! Besides, if they wanted someone who could do X, why didn’t they say that in the ad!?

If you’ve ever been on an IT job hunt, you’ve probably run into this problem before. Many potential IT employers have the mistaken notion that you’re just another “computer guy,” and that all computer guys must know X, Y, and Z. It’s just common sense, right?

I like to call this the myth of the computer guy. Far too many employers of IT personnel don’t understand IT themselves. That’s not a problem in and of itself; after all, that’s why they’re hiring. When they take their ignorance of such an expansive array of subjects and lump it under the heading of “computer stuff,” however, they do IT workers a grave disservice.

Like the employer who spouts off references to IT coding programs while conducting a job interview (you can tell I’m not knowledgeable in IT because I just used the phrase “coding programs” without even knowing if that’s the correct term), the hiring newspaper editor says the word “Youtube” as if it’s some 21st century “swordfish,” a code word that he can’t help but say in a dramatic winking tone.

Look at the opening lines of this Media Shift column:

“Multidisciplined” and “flexible” were just two of the words in a recent ad for a paid internship at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. The posting listed a whole series of multimedia skills as mandatory. There was no mention of traditional journalism attributes such as accuracy, good writing or ethics, perhaps because it goes without saying.

Does it really go without saying? At the risk of coming off as an old media curmudgeon myself — I assure you, I’m not — I think this new media movement has to some extent created this departure from realism. It’s fine that you want to embrace the multimedia landscape. I love, for instance, what the New York Times has been doing with its web presence. But you must also recognize that journalists and computer scientists are completely different people, and no matter how much you want a two-person mashup for the price of one, it’s rare you’ll find someone that is extremely good at both.

It’s the journalistic version of the myth of the computer guy. I understand that your newspaper revenues are dwindling. But don’t assume that you have to hire a guy who can throw a bunch of shit at the wall in the hope that he can make something stick. Despite Egon Spengler’s assertion in Ghost Busters, print is not dead yet.

Is the site preparing itself for life after the November election?

In a March New Yorker article meticulously detailing the depressing decline of the newspaper industry, Eric Alterman gave a nod to what he considered the newspaper of tomorrow. Skipping over choices like Slate and Salon, the journalist chose to spotlight a website that is still labeled a blog in Technorati’s Top 100: The Huffington Post.

“Almost by accident, however, the owners of the Huffington Post had discovered a formula that capitalized on the problems confronting newspapers in the Internet era, and they are convinced that they are ready to reinvent the American newspaper,” Alterman wrote.

The fact that he had targeted a publication that paid the majority of its writers with nothing but “exposure” raised a number of eyebrows; after all, a laid-off journalist won’t find much comfort with the knowledge that he has been replaced by someone willing to work for free. At least when jobs get outsourced to India, somebody is still managing to get paid a few bucks an hour.

A few media critics also noted that The Huffington Post is most widely known as a political website. Within the last year it has managed to break two of the biggest campaign stories of the season — Obama’s “bitter” comments and Bill Clinton’s outraged remarks about a journalist — and recent reports have shown that its traffic has outpaced the once-unequaled Drudge Report, a site that is supposedly read religiously by every beltway journalist.

But within the last few months we’ve seen some signs that Arianna Huffington is aggressively trying to expand above and beyond politics, announcing her plan to create a new hyperlocal news site for the Chicago metro area. And this week, the publication saw the launch of a new “Style” section similar to the style tabs you’ll find in most major dailies.

The section will be edited by Anya Strzemien, a former Life Magazine editor who signed on to The Huffington Post in April 2007. I spoke to Strzemien on the phone today, and she confirmed that the new launch is an attempt to widen the publication’s coverage.

“I think politics will always be a focus of Huffington Post,” she said. “But yeah, we’re certainly trying to branch out to other areas as any newspaper would.”

The idea for the Style section came about two months ago — she said it wasn’t difficult to get Arianna to give it the green light — and Strzemien has been developing and networking with a list of contributors since then. I asked her what kind of content she planned on running.

“I think the idea is to be very bloggy, it’s going to be very opinionated,” she replied. “I don’t think the media needs yet another how-to-communicate-better-with-your-spouse story.”

Over the past few days since the launch, the section has run a story about McCain wearing $520 black leather Ferragamo loafers and a piece by George Stephanopoulos’s wife, Alexandra Wentworth, about style in Washington circles.

I asked what kind of publications she was trying to emulate or compete against.

“I definitely don’t want to think of us as competing with other publications,” Strzemien said. “But I think the style outlets that I respect a lot are Jezebel and the New York Times style section.”

Near the end of the interview I commented that I couldn’t help but notice that many of the stories the style section had run so far happened to be focused on politics. Was it possible that the section still managed to fit into the site’s overall political theme?

“I think it’ll be a mix,” she said. “Some of the stories will have a political angle, but not even 50% of them will. But yes, we’ll certainly be paying attention to what people wear during the election.”

By the time articles about the mortgage crisis began hitting the front pages of major newspapers, the story was already old. Reporters were left playing catch-up to the current meltdown and in the process even seasoned news junkies were left confused. With the inverted pyramid style of storytelling, most journalists had a difficult time summarizing a situation that had been years in the making. News consumers were left simply with a series of buzz words — subprime mortgage, adjustable rate mortgages, housing bubble — that painted an incredibly broad picture that the economy wasn’t doing so well.

But then Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life stepped in and explained it all. In a radio documentary titled “The Giant Pool of Money,” producer Alex Blumberg and NPR’s economics correspondent Adam Davidson teamed up to create what is perhaps the most comprehensive explanation of the meltdown to date.

The two went back and created a meticulous narrative of the events leading up to the burst, interviewing dozens of sources — consumers, bankers, investors, defaulters — to allow listeners to understand the Kafkaesque logic and domino effect and how it all tied back to this “giant pool of money.” When either Blumberg or Davidson would get too ahead of himself, the other would playfully ring him back in. No stone was left unturned.

After listening to the episode, many people claimed that they had a newfound understanding of what had gone wrong. They could piece together the incredibly complex triggers of the crisis and finally comprehend the news stories they were reading and hearing. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen was one of these people

In an article published at Media Shift’s Idea Lab, Rosen said that before listening to that episode he hadn’t been a “customer” for mortgage crisis stories, preferring to skip over them rather than consuming what he didn’t understand. After hearing it, he wrote, he had a “civic mastery” that turned him into an avid consumer of such stories.

I spoke to Rosen in a phone interview today, and he talked about how reporters should take this example to generate a new kind of storytelling — what he called “explainy journalism.”

“In many instances the stories themselves do not provide the key necessary to decode them,” he said. “You cannot find in the story itself the key you need to read it. And it’s usually the people writing the story who have no idea that the key is lacking, because they already have the information necessary to decode it.”

I asked Rosen how journalists could fix this problem, but he said he hadn’t yet figured out how to implement his theory. For now, he simply recognizes that the problem exists.

This American Life’s Alex Blumberg sees this lack of context in news stories as well. I interviewed the producer earlier today, and he explained that his entire reason for creating the episode grew out of his frustration with how the media covered complicated stories.

“I feel like my constant problem with the daily news media is that either you’re always entering the story in the middle or often at the end,” he said. “And they don’t do a very good job of talking about the beginning and what got us to this point where it became news.”

The idea for the episode began culminating for him years before the bubble burst, when he read a presentation by an economist arguing that debt was rising without the necessary correlation of rising income. Eventually, he and NPR’s Adam Davidson began exchanging emails about the possibility of teaming up on a housing crisis story. Early this year the two pitched the episode to their bosses.

Blumberg said that the episode is the show’s most popular to date, beating out its nearest competitor by over 50,000 downloads. And the response has been overwhelming.

“We got more listener feedback for that show than just about any show we’ve put out,” he said. ” … It was overwhelmingly positive. People were saying things like, ‘I didn’t really understand this. It was in the news all the time but I didn’t know what they were talking about until I heard that episode.’ It was very gratifying because that’s exactly what my intent was. Because that was me; I didn’t understand it either. Fortunately I have a job where I get paid to go figure things out and report back. And that’s really what my goal was.”

I asked Blumberg whether he had seen any evidence that his story had not only affected the consumers of mortgage crisis news but also the reporters that wrote it. He responded that it was extremely difficult to tell, but he had lunch recently with a New York Times business reporter who said that many Times journalists had listened to and enjoyed the episode. He has also noticed some recent articles that seemed to give a slight nod to wording from “The Giant Pool of Money.”

“I do think that I’ve noticed sort of like phrases appearing in newspapers that seemed like maybe they were influenced by the show,” he said. “But I can’t tell for sure.”

Rosen had his own anecdote that indicated at least one instance of influence. While working on his Idea Lab piece he Twittered his readers, asking how the This American Life episode had affected them.

“There’s a young reporter that follows my feed on Twitter,” he said. “She writes for a newspaper in Lafayette, Indiana. The next day after I Twittered about the This American Life episode, she had an assignment to do a localized version of the story about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and whether local bankers were affected. It was very much a local version of that story. She found she was way more prepared for that assignment because she had gone through the transcript of this show.”

So in this instance, he said, a news consumer had been able to take a story and build upon it, using the knowledge she gathered to inform her own reporting.

“It’s not only necessary background for the future readers of news, but also the future writers. It’s an enabling narrative for both the users and the producers.”

Ever since the National Enquirer broke the story that former Senator John Edwards had visited a Beverly Hills hotel to meet with his alleged lover and love child, there has been no shortage of accusations that mainstream media outlets were ignoring the story. These criticisms were magnified after an email sent by Los Angeles Times blog editor Tony Pierce to his blogging staff leaked to the outside world.

“There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair,” Pierce wrote on July 24. “Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.”

Many took this to mean that the LA Times was actively trying to suppress the story from gaining any ground. They claimed that the email was indicative of the newspaper’s attempt to protect the former Democratic senator.

I spoke to Pierce for a few minutes on the phone today. He said the decision to send the email came after several senior editors at the Times met that day.

“The Opinion LA blog had already written about the rumors from the National Enquirer,” he explained. “We knew some of the other blogs wanted to write about it or were thinking about writing about it. And at that point we were like, ‘you know, we already have our metro desk working on a story and before we just kind of write a whole bunch of stuff about the National Enquirer article, why don’t we give our metro desk a chance to see what they can find.’ That’s when they said, ‘OK Tony, why don’t you write this letter to your bloggers.”

When I brought up the argument made by many that they were trying to bury the story, Pierce pointed out that one of the blogs had already written about it. The editors simply wanted to give the metro reporters a chance to dig into it and see if they could find any new information, he said, rather than just having the Times website create a bunch of noise.

I asked the blog editor about his relationship with his bloggers and whether they normally had to run stories by him before publication. He responded that with 43 blogs under his helm, that would be impossible.

“Most of the time they’re on their own,” he said. “Most of the time they write about what they normally write about. Sometimes what I’ll do is give them some story ideas — I’ll say something like, ‘you know, I noticed you haven’t written about this yet. Have you noticed this?’ Or if they’re not sure about a story, like some of them were with this Edwards story, they’ll come to me and say, ‘what do you think?’ With this specific story there were some blogs that don’t normally handle politics that wanted to write about it. So that’s why they pitched it to me. Instead of writing to a couple of the bloggers, I just wrote to all of them and said why don’t we just hold off, because all we have is this one source.”

I asked Pierce if the metro desk had the chance to follow up on the story, and if so, would he send out another post allowing his bloggers to write about it. He said that to his knowledge the LA Times reporters hadn’t found any additional information and expressed some skepticism of the National Enquirer story’s authenticity.

“I was really just reminding the bloggers that they write for the LA Times and they happen to be using blogging as a publishing platform,” Pierce said. “This isn’t something you would normally see in a newspaper more than once. We already wrote the one post quoting the National Enquirer and I don’t think you’d see more than that if there were no blogs and this was just a newspaper. That’s what I was just saying to them, that until we have a better source, let’s hold off on being part of the speculation.”

But near the end of our interview he interjected and said that he probably could have worded the email better.

“What I should have said is that if you find information — because these are real reporters — if you find any more information, or if there’s something that’s out there that you come across put out by a more reputable source, write it up and let’s talk about it. That’s probably one thing that I wish I could have said.”

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, in the middle of a column that tells bloggers to get off his lawn, has this to say.

But we’re finding this works better for keeping on top of daily flaps than for learning genuinely new information. Bloggers rarely pick up the phone or go interview the middle-level bureaucrats who know the good stuff. It’s a lot easier to chew over breaking stories and bash old media. Where do they get the information with which to bash? Often from, ahem, newspapers.

Go tell that to the dozens of sources I’ve conducted interviews with for this very blog within the last two weeks.

You can harm dozens of innocent bystanders but don’t lay a finger on a dog

Nearly every Batman movie, comic book, and television show includes the obligatory references to bats. Directors can be forgiven if they dwell on the flying rodents, either in a literal sense (by giving them regular appearances in caves and flashbacks) or figuratively (personifying their traits and applying them to Bruce Wayne). But in the most recent film adaptation, The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan chose to give much more screen time to another animal: Dogs.

“The Joker’s just a mad dog. I want whoever let him off the leash,” District Attorney Harvey Dent says to crime boss Salvatore Maroni. In another scene the Joker threatens to feed a mobster to his own dogs, saying, “We’ll see how loyal a hungry dog is.” There are at least two instances in which Batman does battle with Rottweilers and after Lucius Fox designs a new bat suit Wayne asks him how well it will fend off dogs. In the final scene Batman is shown fleeing with a number of police dogs in pursuit.

I didn’t connect these dots at the time, but as I was walking out of the theater, a friend of mine — who happens to own a Rottweiler — said that her least favorite parts of the movie are when Batman fights the dogs. I asked her why so.

“Because they’re totally pushing a negative stereotype about Rottweilers,” she said. “They’re reinforcing the idea that they’re these vicious creatures.”

Apparently, she’s not the only one who felt this way. Yesterday, PETA — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — posted an item on its website criticizing the movie for having its hero beat dogs. I spoke to the writer of that post, Christine Doré, in a brief phone interview today. She said that the film could have handled the scenes in a different way.

“Basically, while I personally thought it was a fantastic movie, it was a little disappointing, that part of it,” Doré said. “I think, you know, that it’s funny that this superhero genius that everyone loves, who has all these fantastic gadgets, who never uses guns, that he doesn’t have access to a tranquilizer or other deflecting device.”

I asked her to elaborate on this, but she then tried to reroute me through PETA’s official media department.

David J. Schwartz, film critic for Strange Horizons and author of Superpowers, a novel about a group of young superheros, called the dog beatings “uncool” in his blog while other reviewers argued that the animals were meant to symbolize obedience and loyalty.

Jim Henley is much more ambivalent on the issue. Henley writes about comic books for science fiction publisher Tor, and in a phone interview today he said that Batman’s combat with dogs was justified in this instance.

“Within the context of the movie, the context of the scene, it was an act of self defense,” he said. “My understanding of mainstream animal rights theory — which I’m not by any means completely hostile to — self defense is an understood concept. For instance, you’re allowed to shoot the wolf that’s about to eat your baby.”

He pointed out that the movie is murky as to whether any dogs actually die during the fights — they were typically thrown off camera, and in one instance over a railing — and that’s because directors are typically hesitant to show any graphic violence involving animals.

“Americans are very sentimental about Spot,” Henley said. ” … You’ll see horror movies where people get disemboweled, have their heads sawed off, use staple guns to stick themselves to plaster board. My experience is that you don’t see any of that happen to animals onscreen. I’m happy not to see dogs tortured, but it’s interesting that you’ll see really bad things done to people, and not really bad things done to dogs. Even in The Dark Knight, there’s a reason why it’s a little unclear what happened to the dogs that Batman was fighting. They weren’t going to show the dogs splattering on the street or anything like that.”

I asked my Rottweiler-owner friend what she would have had Batman do in those situations.

“I just really think Batman should have had a gadget that releases treats and distracts dogs,” she said.

While this would certainly be cute, I’m not sure that it would fit the dark theme Nolan was going for.

At the beginning of the year Gawker Media announced it would start paying writers based on the number of page views their posts generated. In other words, on top of their base rate writers would get an additional “bonus” that would directly correlate with how many page loads were generated for posts with their bylines. Some were skeptical when this new pay system was introduced, arguing that this would encourage the writers to engage in gimmicks that would pump up page views but would do little to improve the blog’s brand.

So now that six months have passed, has the new system resulted in increased traffic? To find this out I analyzed Site Meter statistics for 11 Gawker Media blogs (I didn’t include Io9 since it only recently launched). Overall, traffic for all Gawker blogs combined saw a 40% increase in page views. Each individual blog experienced an average increase of 49%.

Valleywag and Jezebel saw the highest percentage increases, both with 83%. Deadspin saw the lowest percentage increase with 23%.

Below are the statistics for the individual blogs:

Gawker:

Second half of 2007: 60,074,123
First half of 2008: 100,584,717
An increase of 40,510,594, or 67%

Kotaku:

Second half of 2007: 142,585,536
First half of 2008: 210,194,200
An increase of 67,608,664, or 47%

Deadspin:

Second half of 2007: 51,477,017
First half of 2008: 63,260,347
An increase of 11,783,330, or 23%

Valleywag:

Second half of 2007: 14,352,299
First half of 2008: 26,307,594
An increase of 11,955,295, or 83%

Jezebel:

Second half of 2007: 49,007,035
First half of 2008: 89,563,357
An increase of 40,556,322, or 83%

Defamer:

Second half of 2007: 26,451,631
First half of 2008: 39,393,258
An increase of 12,941,627, or 49%

Lifehacker:

Second half of 2007: 106,480,394
First half of 2008: 136,855,806
An increase of 30,375,412, or 29%

Gizmodo:

Second half of 2007: 314,144,941
First half of 2008: 408,311,543
An increase of 94,166,602, or 30%

Jalopnik:

Second half of 2007: 51,000,183
First half of 2008: 72,445,787
An increase of 21,445,604, or 42%

Consumerist:

Second half of 2007: 47,727,880
First half of 2008: 70,082,654
An increase of 22,354,774, or 47%

Fleshbot:

Second half of 2007: 84,319,857
First half of 2008: 108,755,591
An increase of 24,435,734, or 29%