The New York Times has found a new source of funding for journalism: Isaac Mizrahi-designed raingear. In a memo to the company, New York Times president Scott Heekin-Canedy called the $99 coat and umbrella combo, “a summer sensation for The Times Store,” according to the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Zachary M. Seward. The New York Times has also tried creating a wine club as a way to cure their budget woes.

It’s easy to poke fun at the Times for the coat and the wine club, but Seward writes that this kind of merchandizing is “likely to play a significant role as news organizations scramble to replace print advertising revenue.”

The efforts are “a double edged sword” according to Megan Garber of the Columbia Journalism Review. Newspapers often engage in community building, and events like wine clubs—which USA Today and The Wall Street Journal are also trying—could be seen as an extension of that. And it’s not a big deal if the New York Times sells coats, as long as they use that money to fund cutting-edge journalism. On the other hand, Garber says, “it’s unfortunate that it’s not, strictly speaking, journalism.”

Both the coats and the wine club could also be seen as a replacement for the classified sections of newspapers, a revenue source that has been gutted by free services such as Craigslist. Classified ads, like the coats, had very little to do with journalism beyond funding the newspaper.

The real problem, however, is that media outlets haven’t yet figured out a way to fund their work using journalism. According to Garber, “I don’t know that we’ve proven that people aren’t willing to pay” for news. Newspapers simply haven’t figured out how to do it effectively, so far.

Sources:  Nieman Journalism Lab ,  Columbia Journalism Review  

Image from  the New York Times store . 

A new, yet-to-be-named, local website will be forming next year to fill in the gaps left by regional newspaper shutterings in the Bay Area. The nonprofit site nabbed a hefty donation—$5 million—from San Francisco businessman F. Warren Hellman, and its expertise and manpower will come from “KQED-FM, which has a 28–person news staff, and the 120 students of the University of California, Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism,” the New York Times reports.

(Thanks, @MotherJones.)

Source: The New York Times

Will the death of journalism mean the end of democracy?  The newest issue of Mother Jones provides us with a rundown of depressing statistics about the state of media:

- 43% of Americans say it would hurt civil life “a lot” if their local newspapers closed.  Yet when asked if they’d miss their paper, 42% say “not much” or “not at all.”

- By one estimate, an entirely Web-based New York Times could generate only enough money to support about 20% of the paper’s current staff.

- The editor of the New York Times Magazine says a typical cover story costs more than $40,000 to produce—and that excludes editing, art, and fact-checking. That’s more than Mother Jones’ story budget for freelance writers for an entire issue.

- The top 10% of bloggers earn an average of $19,000 a year.  For all bloggers, the median is $200 for men, $100 for women.

Source: Mother Jones (article not yet available online)

The New York Times’ audience, erudite as they may be, can still be stumped by words like “antediluvian,” “sumptuary,” or “hagiography.” The newspaper of record recently gave reporters a glimpse into which words confuse their readers the most when they gave Nieman Journalism Lab a list of the 50 most looked-up words on their website.

A (rather annoying) feature on NYTimes.com allows readers to look up a word, simply by double clicking the text on their computers. Using data from that function, the paper released an internal memo, gently urging editors to shy away from words like “louche,” which editors managed to use 27 times so far this year.

In the memo, deputy news editor Philip Corbett reminded writers and editors that readers “probably don’t carry an unabridged dictionary along with the newspaper as they take the subway to work. And they don’t expect a news article to pose the same linguistic challenge as Finnegans Wake.”

Source: Nieman Journalism Lab

On March 17, American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling were arrested for allegedly crossing the border from China into North Korea while reporting for Al Gore’s user-generated news organization Current TV. In doing so, they became unwitting players in Kim Jong-Il’s ongoing political theatrics, aimed at the U.S. in particular. This drama came to a head today when they were sentenced to 12 years hard labor by North Korea’s highest court for committing “grave crimes” against the country.

For the past month and a half, Gore and Current TV have been mum on the situation, causing SF Gate blogger Phil Bronstein to question what’s going on with our former Vice President:

“Where is Mr. Gore, Nobel winner and formerly the second most powerful person in the world in all this? How about anything from SF-based Current TV, say maybe even just a public expression of concern? At the moment I wrote this, the big story on their web site is, ‘Top 10 Sexting Acronyms For Adults.’” (as of this writing, one of the top stories is “James Cameron Joins Heavy Metal” but alas, no mention of Lee and Ling)

One hopes that Gore’s silence has been out of concern for his reporters’ safety, given the situation’s potential volatility. Indeed, Fox News reports that the State Department “did not rule out” the possibility of Gore’s involvement in negotiations but refused to comment further.

Most journalists and North Korea watchers believe that Lee and Ling will eventually be released. Jason Zengerle over at The New Republic echoes the prevailing sentiment that Pyongyang will use the journalists as a bargaining chip for bilateral talks with the U.S.: “American diplomats will jump through whatever hoops the North Koreans set up for them; and that will be that.” And, Yonhap News predicts that Pyongyang will try to get the U.S. and UN to soften any political and financial sanctions in response to North Korea’s recent nuclear missile tests. 

Regardless of the outcome, both Bronstein and LaToya Peterson at Racialicious view this as a defining moment for Current TV’s user-generated, “democratic” mode of journalism.

Bronstein writes: “Is this what happens when information becomes more democratic? No one’s willing to step up? If you work for a viewer-supplied TV cable network, does that mean no one has your back? This does not help the argument that the value of large news organizations is dwindling to nothing in favor of small entrepreneurs. There’s no encouragement for 2.0 reporting when its practitioners can disappear into the gulag with no one to fight for them.”

Peterson writes: “As we enter a world where corporate interests often trump stories that impact every day people, Current TV’s work developing user generated content and training citizens to become journalists is rapidly emerging as a model to follow to keep citizens engaged in their communities.

But, it is like the old truism: Nothing in life comes for free. In the process of fighting for truth, we have to dig deeper and go to places we never thought we’d go, often at the risk of running afoul of authorities who would rather this information was not released.”

Sources: New York Times, SF Gate, Fox News, The New Republic, Yonhap News, Racialicious

It turns out there’s still a couple things humans can do that computers can’t—like decipher those online security checks: “squiggly, distorted letters that look like a cross between a Rorschach test and a four-year-old’s signature—a CAPTCHA, as computer scientists call them.” Computers also can’t decode scanned pages of antiquated texts with blurry, misaligned fonts, or outdated words.  So a computer scientist from Guatemala, Luis von Ahn, transformed many of those seemingly useless CAPTCHAs into a fruitful endeavor.  

The Walrus explains: “Now a growing number of websites, from e-commerce (Ticketmaster) to social networking (Facebook) to blogging (Wordpress), have implemented the precocious professor’s new tool, dubbed reCAPTCHA. If you’ve visited those sites, your squiggly-letter-reading ability has been harnessed for a massive project that aims to scan and make freely available every out-of-copyright book in the world, by deciphering words from old texts that have stumped scanning software.”

“The service is supplied free to any website that wants it, and in addition to helping decipher books scanned for the Internet Archive, reCAPTCHA has been recruited to assist in the digitization of the entire archive of the New York Times back to 1851…The pursuit of such public goods, von Ahn hopes, will deflect any resentment from his human scanners. ‘We could do other things, like digitizing cheques,’ he notes. ‘But banks already make enough money.’”

Source: The Walrus

Image by vlima.com licensed under Creative Commons   

The internet spreads information around the world, but freedom is more difficult. Believers in a coming tech-utopia have plenty of evidence to show the web’s democratizing force: The Orange Revolution in Ukraine was facilitated in part by new-media technologies, and blogging platforms have given a voice to dissenters in Burma, Iran, China, and many other places. The problem is, Evgeny Morozov writes for the Boston Review, “no dictators have been toppled via Second Life, and no real elections have been won there either; otherwise, Ron Paul would be President.”

Reports of China’s growing internet dissent can make for compelling reads in mainstream media outlets, but Morozov writes that they’re often overblown. YouTube users recently tweaked censors with videos about a “grass-mud horse,” the name of which, in Chinese, sounds a lot like a dirty sex pun. The New York Times said the videos “raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet.”

More recently, when China blocked access to YouTube, allegedly over videos showing Chinese police beating Tibetan protestors, many assumed this would backfire on the government. Writing for Time, Austin Ramzy said that blocking YouTube gives the impression that the Chinese government is afraid of the internet and that a “ shift in how people cover the Internet in China may be lost on the government.”

In fact, draconian blocking of websites is just one part of a two-pronged strategy for Chinese information control. The Chinese government is also trying to use the internet as a tool to forward their agenda. The government has trained an estimated 280,000 people to “neutralize undesirable public opinion by pushing pro-Party views” David Bandurski reports for the Far Eastern Economic Review. This group—known as the 50 Cent Party, because of the money they are rumored to be paid for each pro-government message—posts to chat rooms and web forums, and also reports dissident content.

“The goal of the government is to crank up the ‘noise’ and drown out progressive and diverse voices on China’s internet,” Chinese web entrepreneur Isaac Mao told Bandurski.

Even if political information is allowed to flow, assuming that information will lead to democracy and freedom is not necessarily true. Western journalists often focus on the blogs written in English, which tend to be more progressive and pro-Western. In other languages, the political landscape is much different. Morozov writes that “investing in new media infrastructure might also embolden the conservatives, nationalists, and extremists, posing an even greater challenge to democratization.”

Another threat may lie in the structure of the internet itself. The web may actually serve in polarizing political atmospheres, according to Cass Sunstein, both in the United States and abroad. A recent article for Harvard Magazine explores Sunstein’s idea that personalized news services like Google News, and Time Magazine’s new “Mine” service are blocking out ideas diverse opinions, allowing people to read about what they want and filter out the rest. Without an “architecture of serendipity,” where people can happen upon diverse opinions and news, the internet could lead to extremism.

None of this disregards the web’s potential for good. Sunstein calls new technologies “more opportunity than threat,” but serious work will need to be done to promote progressive voices and politics. It also means acknowledging that the techno-utopia envisioned in a free internet may not be worth the paper its printed on.

Image adapted from photo by  Nic McPhee , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Sources: Boston Review, Time, New York Times, Far Eastern Economic Review, Harvard Magazine

Barack Obama’s election is hailed as a step forward in American race relations. Now, researchers are trying to quantify the “Obama Effect” to figure out how it’s changing American culture. One study, reported by the New York Times, found that a test-taking achievement gap between black people and white people disappeared after Obama’s election. In other words, before Obama’s election, white people tended to do better on this test than black people. Now, that gap has disappeared, at least for this test.

The reason why that gap existed in the first place, Jonah Lehrer writes for the Frontal Cortex blog, may be due to a “stereotype threat.” Stereotypes can creep into the minds of test takers, making them perform worse on tests because of the threat, rather than any difference in intelligence.

An inspiring politician isn’t needed to erase that achievement gap, according to the WNYC show Radio Lab. All that’s needed is a simple change in language: When a test is referred to as an “intelligence test,” the gap remains. But if researchers refer to the exact same test as a “puzzle,” or some other word that is less loaded than “test,” the difference goes away.

“The real subtle power of a stereotype isn’t that it prevents you from the thing you want to do,” Radio Lab’s Jad Abumrad says, “it distracts you for just a beat from the thing you want to do. And that may be all the difference.”

Obama’s election could be lowering racism coming from white people, too. Tom Jacobs reports for Miller McCune that biases against black people registered significantly lower after Obama’s election in certain research. Researchers from Florida State University used Implicit Association Tests and found that the participants, 80 percent of which were white, showed no biases against black people, while previous studies showed a preference for white people. The researchers described this as a “fundamental change” in American race relations.  

The post-election test results aren’t all positive, however. Other studies have shown that white people who expressed a preference for Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008, also expressed a preference for hiring white people over black people. That same preference didn’t come up when the participants expressed a preference for John Kerry.

“The researchers conclude that endorsing Obama helps people establish their ‘moral credentials’ as non-prejudiced people,” Jacobs writes, “and thus makes them more comfortable expressing opinions that could be regarded by some as racist.”

Sources: Miller McCune, Radio Lab, Frontal Cotex, New York Times

Image by hyperscholar, licensed under Creative Commons.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and, hopefully, desperately good reporting. But when it comes to the stimulus package—the crucial tonic, we’re told, for our ailing economy—are we getting it?

I’ve been on the prowl for solid, digestible treatments of the strengths and weaknesses of the multi-billion dollar plan, because frankly, I need some help wrapping my head around it. But the stories that seem to be everywhere—those detailing the demise of Obama’s honeymoon (starts around 3:15), accounts of partisan gamesmanship, and analyses of who’s winning the spin wars—make good fodder for gossip sessions, but do little to help us understand how we got into this mess and form educated opinions about the best way out of it.

Here are a few things we found helpful (and have enjoyed) so far:

From the New York Times, lessons the U.S. can learn from Japan’s stimulus spending in the ‘90s, which included heavy infrastructure investments.

Two stories from This American Life and Morning Edition describe the Keynesian approach of the stimulus package (starts around 36:15) and evaluate its merits. TAL has also done great, compelling reporting on the housing and financial crises.

NPR’s Planet Money blog has some handy maps that act as visual guides to the stimulus plan’s expected state-by-state impact.

Marketplace’s “decoder” series translates econ-speak into language normal people can understand.

Keep it coming, people: If you’ve come across particularly good stimulus coverage, let us know about it in the comments section below.

Sources: New York Times, This American Life, Morning Edition, Planet Money, Marketplace

At just a year old, poet Elizabeth Alexander was in the crowd on the National Mall when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the country and proclaimed, “I have a dream.” This week, at age 46, Alexander will be in Washington D.C. for another historic moment—but this time with a front row seat.

Alexander, who is a professor of African-American studies at Yale, is the writer selected by President-elect Barack Obama to deliver an original poem at his swearing-in, a privilege bestowed on only three other poets in American history: Robert Frost, who read at JFK’s inauguration, and Maya Angelou and Miller Williams, who lent their voices to Bill Clinton's ceremonies.

In an interview with Newsweek, Alexander summed up the feelings of many art lovers, hailing Obama’s choice to include poetry in the inauguration as “an affirmation of the potential importance of art in day-to-day and civic discourse.”

For Alexander, joining the distinguished ranks of inaugural poets is certainly a high honor, but actually writing an occasional poem—verse composed for a specific event—with staying power can be a tricky task for a poet. “Once the function has passed,” writes Jim Fisher for Salon, “the poem loses the immediacy of its audience, and with it the power to summon meaning and emotion over time.”

But Alexander told NPR’s Melissa Block that she’s “challenged, not scared” by the assignment. And she seems to have crafted her poem with the predicament Fisher describes in mind. “[W]hat I’ve been able to do is ask myself how I serve the moment," she told the New York Times, “but hopefully in language that has value and resonance when the moment has passed.”

You can read some of Alexander's poems at her website, or listen to two recitations at NPR.org.

A new form of censorship has quietly crept over the internet. Though governments continue to pursue old-school forms of prior restraint, technology is quickly making the blackened-ink style of censorship obsolete. The new ways to restrict free speech don’t require killing information entirely, governments and private companies simply inconvenience and frustrate people away from information they want to keep under wraps.

The internet was meant to foster communication, and it still creates opportunities for vibrant free speech. At the same time, computer science professor Harry Lewis writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education that the internet’s “rapid and ubiquitous adoption has created a flexible and effective mechanism for thought control.” As people increasingly rely on the internet for their news and information, banishing something from the web means effectively striking it from the public consciousness.

Governments have already begun to influence internet usage inside of their countries to enforce social and political norms. Lewis writes that on the internet, there is already “no sex in Saudi Arabia, no Holocaust denials in Australia, no shocking images of war dead in Germany, no insults to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey.”

China sits at the vanguard of this new form of censorship. The country’s famed “Great Firewall” is one of the most advanced information blocking tools in the world. Every savvy netizen, however, knows of proxy servers, encryption services, and other ways to skirt the firewall and find information that China doesn’t want its citizens to see. “The Great Firewall of China isn't impenetrable, “Jacqui Cheng reported for Ars Technica in 2007, “it just takes a little elbow grease and high Internet traffic to squeeze a few banned terms through.” That requirement of elbow grease constitutes the cornerstone of the new censorship.

Governments don’t have to censor all the information that comes into their country anymore, either. Censorship increasingly relies on one information bottleneck: Google. Jeffrey Rosen wrote for the New York Times that Google and its subsidiaries, including YouTube, “arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.” Governments and businesses now realize that banning information from Google means effectively censoring it from a massive audience of people, and they are developing strategies accordingly.

“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” technology expert Tim Wu told the New York Times. After the Turkish government successfully lobbied YouTube to take down videos inside of Turkey that were deemed offensive, the Government tried to ban the videos worldwide to protect Turks living outside the country. These videos would all be available on websites other than YouTube, but with one website eclipsing all others for web videos, really, who would know?

In the United States, copyright laws are often invoked to frighten people into censorship. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that the McCain-Palin campaign, an unlikely advocate for internet freedom, claimed that YouTube “silenced political speech” after it took down campaign ads due to copyright violation claims.

YouTube general council Zahavah Levine responded saying, “YouTube does not possess the requisite information about the content in user-uploaded videos to make a determination as to whether a particular takedown notice includes a valid claim of infringement.” Because of that lack of information, the site often takes down videos first and examines the validity of copyright claims later. By the time videos are restored, especially in a fast-moving political campaign setting, the damage has already been done.

The website Chilling Effects documents many of these cease-and-desist letters in an attempt to combat some of the unnecessary censorship. The site was created in partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a number of universities to help people understand their First Amendment rights and protect legal online speech. But with governments and businesses exchanging and learning from each other’s censorship tactics, the strategies to restrict free speech will likely grow more sophisticated.

Amid a blizzard of headlines detailing the demise of quality journalism, there’s at least one spot of sunshine poking through the clouds: The New York Times is intensifying its environmental coverage with "a new, crack environmental reporting unit that will pull in eight specialized reporters from the Science, National, Metro, Foreign, and Business desks in a bid for richer, more prominent coverage," reports the Columbia Journalism Review.

The Times’ fortified environmental unit debuts in contrast to depleted environmental teams elsewhere. The L.A. Times significantly reduced its unit last year, and CNN went even further, axing its environment, science, and technology reporting staff altogether just over a month ago.

What kind of added depth can you expect from the Times’ new environmental all-stars? According to CJR:

One of the primary goals is to get more interesting, “big-thought” environment articles onto the front page, according to assistant managing editor Glenn Kramon, to whom [the unit’s editor, Erica] Goode will report. That means more investigative work, he added, and sifting through reporting and storytelling approaches that resonate with readers. “My goal is to make 'em angry enough to do something,” Kramon said.

Image by ReservasdeCoches.com, licensed under Creative Commons.

Last week, the New York Times announced that it would begin running ads on the front page in response to lagging revenues. A1 purists emitted a chorus of gasps, but pragmatic observers weren't as horrified. After all, plenty of newspapers around the country already print front-page ads; it’s a move that helps them stay afloat in an economy that’s been unkind to print media. James Barron, a contributor to The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages, thinks that changes to a paper's front page offer telling glimpses into larger journalistic trends. He recently talked with On the Media about shifting journalistic practices and 150 years of changes to A1.

Barron has a stockpile of interesting examples. He points to a headline from the assassination attempt on Teddy Roosevelt:

Maniac in Milwaukee Shoots Colonel Roosevelt. He Ignores Wound, Speaks an Hour, Goes to Hospital.

Besides being incredibly long, it wears its opinions on its sleeve in a way that papers now avoid. It’s difficult to imagine a reporter calling anyone a ‘maniac’ anymore.

Barron also sees the move away from obvious editorializing in the difference between reports of the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations. Lincoln’s death was described as ‘awful news,’ while Kennedy’s was related in more clinical terms.

Check out the interview to hear Barron’s take on other notable changes to the Times’ A1. In particular, there’s an interesting discussion about what an increasing focus on online journalism means for the future of the front page. 

Image courtesy of harshilshah100, licensed under Creative Commons.

Have you heard much about Iraq lately? Chances are you haven’t: Megan Garber of the Columbia Journalism Review reports that coverage of the Iraq war typically fills less than 2 percent of the news hole. That statistic alone is deplorable, but even worse, according to Garber, is the scarcity of “nuanced treatments of Iraq that would flesh out our simplistic things were bad but they’re getting better narrative into something more substantial and therefore more valuable.”

Garber describes the current attitude of the press toward the war as largely apathetic, and all too willing to report nuggets of conventional wisdom—like "the surge is working"—with little critical analysis.

Whether the quality of Iraq coverage will improve is an open question. The quantity, however, is certain to keep dwindling. ABC, CBS, and NBC have all pulled their full-time correspondents from Iraq, according to the New York Times. CNN’s former Baghdad bureau chief, Jane Arraf, told the Times, “The war has gone on longer than a lot of news organizations’ ability or appetite to cover it.”

If you were being paid big, undisclosed bucks by companies directly affected by the issues you commented on as a media personality, would that constitute a conflict of interest? Conventional wisdom says: Of course! But two men recently exposed by the New York Times for being in exactly that situation say: Well, not really.

The supremely well-reported cover story of Sunday's Times was an in-depth report on retired General Barry McCaffrey. McCaffrey is an NBC military analyst touted by the network as an independent expert, a characterization the Times calls into question by revealing his tangled web of undisclosed business ties to defense contractors. The story describes McCaffrey as a member of "an exclusive club" that "has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce." They operate in a "deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest."

Another story, published in late November, put Dr. Frederick Goodwin, host of the public radio health show The Infinite Mind, under the microscope. Here’s an example of Goodwin’s questionable ethical judgments, from the Times’ story:

… In a program broadcast on Sept. 20, 2005, he warned that children with bipolar disorder who were left untreated could suffer brain damage, a controversial view.

“But as we’ll be hearing today,” Dr. Goodwin told his audience, “modern treatments—mood stabilizers in particular—have been proven both safe and effective in bipolar children.”

That same day, GlaxoSmithKline paid Dr. Goodwin $2,500 to give a promotional lecture for its mood stabilizer drug, Lamictal, at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Fla. In all, GlaxoSmithKline paid him more than $329,000 that year for promoting Lamictal, records given to Congressional investigators show.

So, Dr. Goodwin, how exactly does that not constitute a conflict of interest? Goodwin conceded that, in that instance, he probably should have disclosed his relationship with GlaxoSmithKline. But he also told the Times that since he consults for lots of drug companies, he has no bias toward any one in particular. "These companies compete with each other and cancel each other out," he told the paper.

McCaffrey, too, has spoken up in his own defense, noting that his vocal criticism of Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t “the stuff of someone ‘shilling’ for the Pentagon.” Glenn Greenwald finds this reasoning unconvincing:

Both NBC and McCaffrey are either incapable of understanding, or are deliberately ignoring, the central point: In those instances where McCaffrey criticized Rumsfeld for his war strategy, it was to criticize him for spending insufficient amounts of money on the war, or for refusing to pursue strategies that would have directly benefited the numerous companies with which McCaffrey is associated. 

In troubling economic times, arts funding is almost always put on the chopping block. But thanks to United States Artists (USA), an arts advocacy nonprofit, at least 50 lucky artists won’t be feeling the pinch this year.

The organization, which was founded only three years ago, just announced the winners of its 2008 fellowships, worth a sweet $50,000 to each recipient. The New York Times writes that in USA’s short history it has “won recognition as one of the few new sources of artists’ grants at a time when federal financing from agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts has diminished,” particularly for individual artists.

This year’s fellows include architects, dancers, musicians, writers, visual artists, and craftsmen, among others. Here are just a few of the fellows that piqued my interest:

Andrew Okpeaha MacLean, an Alaskan filmmaker whose short film Sikumi, or On the Ice, about an Inuit hunter who witnesses a murder, is the first film made entirely in the Inupiaq language. “That was really important to me,” MacLean told the Anchorage Daily News. “Hearing Inupiaq in film and hopefully TV someday, as well, will help us re-teach ourselves the language and preserve it.”

Sweetgrass basket weaver Mary Jackson, whose craft is “the oldest art form of African origin in the United States,” according to USA.

Julie Bargmann, a landscape architect from Virginia who specializes in making Superfund and other nasty, toxic sites both beautiful and healthy again. Archinect writes that Bargmann “works to transform the waste produced by a century of manufacturing and consumption into something culturally and ecologically productive.”

Photo: Vase with Handle, 1998, sweetgrass, pine needles, and palmetto, 19" x 15". Photo courtesy of Mary Jackson.

As Jake Mohan wisely reminded us earlier this week, George Bush still has a few more months in office, which is plenty of time for him to do some serious harm to environmental protections.

Bush recently aimed his firing squad at the Endangered Species Act (and not for the first time). According to High Country News, he attempted to dismantle the act like this:

Back in August, the administration proposed tweaking the law to give federal agencies the discretion to opt out of independent biological oversight when considering new projects such as highways and electrical transmission lines. The proposal would also let the feds pass on considering individual projects' global warming impacts on species. Such changes usually take months or even years to accomplish, but by late October, the Interior Department had 15 staffers slamming through some 200,000 public comments (not including another 100,000 form letters) in a mere 32 hours…

Additionally, Bush is pushing changes that will ease pollution limits for power plants, allow factory farms to self-regulate their water pollution, reduce buffer zones around streams designed to protect them from mining waste, and open millions of acres of unspoiled public land in Utah to oil and gas exploration. On the last point, the New York Times writes:

This sort of pillage would be hard to justify even if Utah’s reserves were large enough to make a difference, which they are not… And even if those reserves were worth going after, it would still be essential to protect areas of special cultural, scenic and recreational value.

So don't forget to keep an eye on the Crawford cowboy as he rides off into the sunset, lest he plop an even bigger mess into Obama’s lap than he already has.

Americans have been warned not to expect too much from Obama’s election too soon, but that doesn’t mean people can’t speculate. The Union of Concerned Scientists believes we’ll see an aggressive approach to climate change policy once Obama takes over, and 3QuarksDaily provides a nice summary of what the federal and state elections mean for science.

Obama and the next Congress are positioned to enact a comprehensive “Green Deal,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, that could modernize our energy infrastructure while stimulating the economy. Already, Obama plans to send delegates to December’s UN climate meeting in Poland, and Cosmos wonders whether Obama can break the deadlock gripping those talks.

One question still remains: Will these actions be enough to forestall the effects of the dangerous environmental regulations (or deregulations) that the New York Times blog speculates the Bush administration is pushing through during its last days in office?

Image by Ralph Alswang, licensed by Creative Commons.

In the midst of Tuesday’s transformative election, it’s easy to forget that Barack Obama won’t actually be president for another three months. In that time, a lot could happen, much of it at the whim of a person whose name we don’t hear much these days: George W. Bush.

The transition is already in effect. In a phone call to Obama last night the 43rd president effused, “What an awesome night for you... I called to congratulate you and your good bride.” (Good bride? Weird.) He also promised a smooth transition for his successor, inviting Obama and his family “to visit the White House soon, at their convenience.”

On the eve of Election Day, Democracy Now! gained some insight into Bush’s mood from White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, who shrugged off the world’s dislike for her boss, likening the presidency to high school: “Everybody would like to be popular. You can all remember that back in high school. Everyone really wanted to be popular, and some of us just weren’t. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have principles and values that you stay true to.”

Um... okay, Dana. So Bush is the social pariah who sat by himself in the cafeteria, and got back at us preppies, jocks, and pretty girls by invading Iraq and curtailing our civil liberties? In reality, most of Bush’s decisions seemed driven precisely by political expediency rather than some internal, principled compass; he was too concerned about being popular with his base and his advisers.

With relatively little at stake politically, now is a probable time for Bush to advance his most controversial agendas, like the brazenly unconstitutional move to assign U.S. troops to U.S. soil or last-minute changes to environmental regulations. On Monday the New York Times summarized Bush’s “parting gifts” and predicted “those we fear are yet to come” before January in the realms of civil liberties, environmental protection, and abortion rights.

While we deserve a celebratory grace period in the wake of Obama’s victory and a hopeful honeymoon after he’s inaugurated, we must be especially vigilant in the last days of Bush’s presidency. The end is in sight, but it’s not here yet.

Unlike most of the electorate, some political reporters are not eager to wake up on November 5 with the longest campaign in history a good night’s sleep behind them. “It's kind of like, this is who I am now,” Andrew Romano, a Newsweek blogger, tells the New Republic. “[S]o the idea of the campaign being over and not doing a politics blog is a little bit like, who am I after this election?”

Politico’s Ben Smith shares Romano’s sentiments. “It's so built into my system, that it's going to be hard to stop,” he tells TNR. “It's really pathological.”

But the tight psychological grip campaigns hold on reporters won’t be missed by all those covering the political beat. After the last presidential campaign, CNN correspondent Candy Crowley tells TNR it took her “a good month to stop waking up in the middle of the night in a panic that I've missed something.” Matt Bai of the New York Times notes that some reporters have been on the trail for nearly a year: “There are guys who went out to the primaries in November, December, and thought they'd be done in February or March, and they just never came home.”

Reporter weariness recently caught the critical eye of the Columbia Journalism Review, who took the New York Times to task for what they deemed an instance of lazy campaign coverage. Questioning the relevance of a Times cover story, CJR warns reporters not to “take out their election fatigue on voters.” Just pen a few more good stories, guys, then you can come home and sleep. . .or just keep blogging.

The events, and often even the non-events, of the 2008 election season have spawned a growing group of die hard political junkies, whose habit for constant information about Obama, McCain, and Palin (sorry Biden) is nursed by the legions of reporters and bloggers working the 24-hour news cycle. But with less than a week remaining in the horserace, what’s actually worth reading? Here’s a brief, and by no means comprehensive, guide to political writing for the home stretch.

First, a few from the New Yorker: Particularly fit for mention on this blog is James Wood’s “Verbage” essay, detailing the Republican Party’s “deep suspicion of language.” A thorough piece on Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, is an antidote to the hyper-partisan tone that is sure to dominate the campaign’s last throes. And an essay from David Sedaris is likely the only place you’ll find the choice in this election compared to choosing between chicken or a “platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it” on an airplane.

From last Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Rich’s column may help ease the anxiety of Obama supporters worried that racism will decide this election, arguing that “white Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe.”

In the blogosphere, Politico’s Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith seem to require little sleep. Their blogs are updated almost constantly and are two of the greatest information sources for full-fledged election addicts. (They also prove that it is possible to be too informed.) But Politico does stellar reporting too. This week one piece that stuck out explained McCain’s negative media coverage with detailed and self-reflective treatment, which I haven't seen done elsewhere.

Looking back a bit, Michelle Cottle’s blog post, “Spare Me Your Reverse Snobbery,” for the New Republic remains one of my favorite rants of the season, and though it was published in late September, it's still relevant. So is the year-long perspective offered up by Alec MacGillis in a recent piece for the New Statesman, which thoughtfully chronicles the reporter’s time on the campaign trail with Obama, beginnning with the Iowa primary last fall.

If you need laughs more than thoughtfulness at this stage, Wonkette will surely deliver. They’re snarkier than Sarah Palin and refer to John McCain by the pet name Walnuts. What more could you want?

Add your suggestions to the list in the comments section below.

With less than a month to go until Election Day, Barack Obama and John McCain are pegging their hopes on two very different campaign strategies. Obama is waging a ground war to get out the vote, while McCain is lobbing grenades at his opponent’s character. Which tack wins in November will say as much about Americans as it does about the two candidates.

The two camps’ approaches have come into stark relief over the last few days. On Saturday, Greg Strimple, a top adviser to McCain, dimwittedly announced to the Washington Post that “We are looking forward to turning a page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama's aggressively liberal record and how he will be too risky for Americans.” Then the surrogates were unleashed on the Sunday talk-show circuit to stoke the fear about Obama’s association with Weather Underground cofounder Bill Ayers. Here’s a quick-and-dirty video roundup from the weekend smearfest by TPM:

Sarah Palin has beaten the same drum on the stump, saying Obama was “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” And in Bill Kristol’s column in the New York Times today, she resurrected—at the conservative shill’s prodding—the specter of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

I pointed out that Obama surely had a closer connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than to Ayers — and so, I asked, if Ayers is a legitimate issue, what about Reverend Wright?

She didn’t hesitate: “To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

And in advance of Tuesday’s debate, McCain unleashed his own vitriol. “Who is the real Barack Obama?” McCain asked a cheering crowd in Albuquerque, tipping his hand to show what will surely be the strategy from now until November 4: Scare people away from this Barack (Hussein) Obama. 

Meanwhile, on Monday, Obama’s key strategy came center stage as the deadline for registering new voters in several states hit. The Washington Post parsed the preliminary numbers, and things do not look good for McCain: 

In the past year, the rolls have expanded by about 4 million voters in a dozen key states -- 11 Obama targets that were carried by George W. Bush in 2004 (Ohio, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico) plus Pennsylvania, the largest state carried by Sen. John F. Kerry that Sen. John McCain is targeting.  

In Florida, Democratic registration gains this year are more than double those made by Republicans; in Colorado and Nevada the ratio is 4 to 1, and in North Carolina it is 6 to 1. Even in states with nonpartisan registration, the trend is clear -- of the 310,000 new voters in Virginia, a disproportionate share live in Democratic strongholds. 

(USA Today has a handy chart showing the two sides’ gains in battleground states. And to read a great account of what this effort looks like on the ground, read FiveThirtyEight’s dispatch yesterday from Tippecanoe County, Indiana.)

And so as McCain, Palin, & Co. rumble in the muck, the Obama team is still steadily hitting the pavement, reaching out to new voters in an attempt to remake the electoral map. (For an excellent dissection of Obama’s long-term strategy, read the American Prospect’s September cover story, “It’s His Party.”) 

Now, that’s not to say the Obama campaign hasn’t launched its own negative assault. Today, they unveiled their Keating Economics documentary and website. But, as Utne.com’s Jake Mohan notes, “it remains to be seen whether anyone besides the die-hard wonks will sit through a 13-minute video about the economy—and how well Obama’s attack will stick” amidst the McCain camp’s sharper jabs.

Then there’s the qualitative difference between the two negative tacks. The Keating punches are based in criticisms of policy, while McCain’s assaults are meant to question Obama’s character. If Obama wanted to take that lower road, he could, of course, run ad after ad showing Palin being blessed by a witch hunter who wants to ensure she’s elected so she can put God back into the public schools. Or, as Democratic strategist Paul Begala noted on Meet the Press, the Obama campaign could start hammering McCain for sitting on the board of the U.S. Council for World Freedom. Begala explains:

You know, you can go back, I have written a book about McCain, I had a dozen researchers go through him, I didn’t even put this in the book. But John McCain sat on the board of a very right-wing organization, it was the U.S. Council for World Freedom, it was chaired by a guy named John Singlaub, who wound up involved in the Iran contra scandal. It was an ultra conservative, right-wing group. The Anti-Defamation League, in 1981 when McCain was on the board, said this about this organization. It was affiliated with the World Anti-Communist League – the parent organization – which ADL said “has increasingly become a gathering place, a forum, a point of contact for extremists, racists and anti-Semites.”

Now, that's not John McCain, I don't think he is that. But you know, the problem is that a lot of people know John McCain’s record better than Governor Palin. And he does not want to play guilt by association or this thing could blow up in his face.

Bye, bye, Florida.

Instead, though, Obama seems focused on the ground war, a strategy that tends to make Dems fret about not swinging back hard enough (see Kerry, Swift Boat). And the nervous Nellies could prove to be right, though I can’t help but think back to 2000, when Bush’s evangelical get-out-the-vote effort stealthily won the day.

It all depends on whether American voters opt to open their hearts to seedy fear-mongering, and, if they do, whether a crop of newly franchised voters outnumber their weaker fellow citizens. In that way, this election seems more a test of Americans than of John McCain or Barack Obama.

Adapted from image by  realjameso16 , licensed under Creative Commons.

Now that Sarah Palin’s meet-and-greet with the media is almost a distant memory, McCain aides are taking their turn in the ring, and the gloves are off. In the second big McCain-media tussle of the fall campaign, McCain strategist Steve Schmidt unleashed fiery attacks against the New York Times, calling the venerable paper “a pro-Obama advocacy organization” and claiming that “it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization.”

Schmidt's fury was sparked by a story about McCain campaign manager Rick Davis’s ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Times reported that Fannie and Freddie paid Davis almost $2 million while he served as president of an advocacy group the companies formed to fight increased regulation, and that Davis held the position primarily because of his close relationship with John McCain.

Bill Keller, the Times' executive editor, responded to the campaign’s accusations in an email to Politico:

It's our job to ask hard questions, fact-check their statements and their advertising, examine their programs, positions, biographies and advisors. Candidates and their campaign operatives are not always comfortable with that level of scrutiny, but it's what our readers expect and deserve.   

According to Politico, McCain aides also held a conference call encouraging reporters to hit Obama harder. “But,” writes Ben Smith, “the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.” (Are we sensing a pattern here?)

When Politico pressed the campaign about the inaccuracies, they got this response:

One McCain aide, Michael Goldfarb, said Politico was “quibbling with ridiculously small details when the basic things are completely right.”

Another, Brian Rogers, responded more directly:

“You are in the tank,” he e-mailed.

Of course, it is a reporter's job to identify such "small" falsehoods. But, no matter, the media-bashing continues. Until next time. . .

Image by soggydan, licensed under Creative Commons.

Hillary Clinton did her duty last night. She threw her support behind Barack Obama and delivered the requisite sound bites. There was “No way. No how. No McCain.” And a favorite here in Minnesota, “It makes sense that George Bush and John McCain will be together next week in the Twin Cities, because these days, they’re awfully hard to tell apart.”

What she didn’t do was say much about Obama’s platform, leadership abilities, or vision. In a 23-minute speech, Obama the candidate (versus Obama “the Democrat who is not me”) got about 3 minutes of time—and that's a generous tally. For a speech that’s drawn most of the convention’s limelight, that’s a big void. It was evident, as the New York Times reports, that Obama’s team had little input in its writing.

We could see more of the same tonight, when Bill takes the stage. We’ll definitely hear about Hillary. But given reports of Bill’s bruised ego and his lust for recognition of his accomplishments in office, we could get not only a primaries flashback, but a ’90s flashback, too. Here’s hoping he saves some room in his speech for the nominee.

Watch Hillary’s speech:

For more of Utne.com’s ongoing coverage of the Democratic National Convention, click here.

UPDATE (8/27/2008, 5:00 p.m.): My colleague Elizabeth Ryan points me to some choice analysis by Anne Taylor Fleming at the Washington Independent:

Yes, she endorsed Obama—mentioning him at least a dozen times. But what she endorsed was the candidate — not the man. He had no flesh on him. He was the Democratic candidate, and that was enough for her.

There was no talk of Obama’s passions, his career, their shared goals and ideals. Of course, she reaffirmed the big “D” democratic values. We’re for the forgotten, the working class not the upper class. We’re for energy independence and a restitution of the respect America used to garner around the world, so squandered in the last eight years. We’re for health care and hope and change. That’s why I ran, she said—underscore “I.” She never said that’s why Barack Obama is running. It was a passionate but strangely impersonal—almost totally impersonal —endorsement.

Last week’s New York Times detailed the tragic case of Hiu Lui Ng, a New Yorker of 17 years who died a grisly death after his cancer and fractured spine went insistently undiagnosed at a detainment center in Rhode Island. This week, the paper followed up with a similar story of a detainee who crossed paths and cells with Ng; Marino De Los Santos lived to tell his tale (and file a lawsuit). The July issue of KoreAm recounts the cases of two women—one who died in custody, the other still ailing there—and their thwarted attempts to receive proper care. And in an extensive investigation back in May, the Washington Post weaved the narratives of several detainees—many who died, some who survived abysmal care—into a withering dissection of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureaucracy fatally unequipped to meet the post-9/11 demands hastily placed upon it.

In the past five years, the Post found, 83 detainees have died in custody or soon after being released. Thirty of those deaths, according to analysis and expert reviews arranged by the Post, may have been caused by the actions, or inaction, of medical staff. “The detainees have less access to lawyers than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons and some have fewer comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” the Post’s Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein wrote.

I’ve often wondered at the unwitting and anodyne adoption of the word “detainee” in the years since September 11, 2001—its easy migration from referring to “terrorists out to kill us” to aspiring immigrants and asylum seekers swept up in the bowels of a frightened, misguided bureaucratic reflex. “Detainee,” it seems, is meant to delineate someone outside the criminal justice system per se, someone whose case awaits judicial review. “It’s not like we’re throwing folks, in prison, see; they’re going to detainment centers.” The words roll of the tongue and the conscience.

But as the dismal state of medical affairs at the publicly and privately run “detainment” facilities shows, it’s time to start calling things by their right names. Perhaps if people “detained” because of paperwork glitches (which played a crucial role in Ng’s situation) or people denied proper medical care because of software errors (see Yusif Osman’s case in the Washington Post) were reported as being sent to “death houses” or “disease centers,” our linguistic faculties might be triggered into focus, and with them our moral compass.

“It’s a 9/11 thing.” 

We’re all well-accustomed to hearing this rote justification as we stuff toiletries into a tiny Ziploc bag at airport security or question the aesthetic judgment behind the makeshift, gigantic cement pylons encircling downtown buildings. But here’s an unexpected use of this most 21st-century of mantras: The response above came from an escalator company representative explaining why the firm couldn’t give a reporter from Next American City information about their products’ energy use and pricing.

The industry has good cause to be cagey. These icons of modern ease are dinosaurs when it comes to energy efficiency. As Next American City reports, “[t]he national energy use of escalators is estimated at 2.6 billion kilowatt hours per year, equivalent to powering 375,000 houses.” That’s a lot of wattage for devices that keep draining electricity even when they’re not being used (which is much of the time).

There are some attempts to green escalators. Next American City notes the efforts of J. Dunlop Inc., which has applied for a patent on a design for a plastic elevator step whose lighter weight would require less energy than the current heavy aluminum versions.

The article does not make mention of “variable-speed escalators”—those that stay still or move very slowly until someone in need of a lift climbs aboard. New York City is in the midst of transitioning a handful of subway stations to this more energy-efficient version. But, as the New York Times reports, the escalators hit a few bumps on their inaugural voyages: only 22 of the 35 escalators slated to shift to variable speed at four stations were functioning properly by showtime on Monday.

An earlier piece announcing the initiative notes that such technology hasn’t yet been approved by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. (New York City Transit had to get a work-around OK from state code enforcers for the experimental program.) The “sleep mode” or “intermittent operation” technology is used, however, in Europe, Asia, Canada, and Israel.

So perhaps that’s one greener option for stateside escalators in the future. Or, there’s always the other route: Take the stairs. As one mechanical engineer puts it to Next American City: "If you have a place like a mall, you could install an elevator for the elderly and the disabled and tell everyone else to take a walk. It’s not the kind of machine that you can make practical. Because it’s not."

Image by Jan the manson, licensed under Creative Commons.

The New York Times reports that the military is cracking down on photojournalists who take pictures they don’t approve of, in many cases booting photographers from their embeds or keeping them away from combat. “By a recent count,” the article claims, “only half a dozen Western photographers were covering a war in which 150,000 American troops are engaged.”

Chris Hondros, a photographer for Getty Images, was removed from his embed after one of his photos—a haunting image of a hysterical 5-year-old girl whose parents had just been killed by U.S. soldiers—was widely published. (We featured the photo in our May-June issue, with George Packer's essay “Kindness Amid Carnage: The Iraq We Don’t See.”) Hondros did, however, find an embed in a different city.

The military’s embed policies don’t just keep photos of wounded and dead Iraqis out of our newspapers. “After five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths,” the New York Times reports, “searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers.”

An economic downturn could be a mixed blessing for U.S. libraries. On the one hand, recession drives up library usage, as more people borrow—instead of buy—books. Libraries also provide information (and computer access) for job seekers, as well as cash-strapped citizens who are learning about a more frugal DIY ethic. Both the New York Times and National Public Radio have recently reported on this phenomenon.

Caveat lector, though. As we saw in 2003, tough economic times can also spur budget cuts, putting a strain on already-thin public and school library resources. Better-but-not-best-case-scenario, libraries will have to serve increased demand on static budgets. The FISH Bits blog, all about “creating great school and public libraries,” has some smart thoughts on how libraries can thrive during this crunch time.

It's tempting to succumb to liberal guilt when “everything from melting ice caps to parched croplands threaten an all but certain apocalypse—on our watch,” as we wrote in the March-April issue of Utne Reader, but it turns out there's less to be guilty about than we thought. Tuesday’s New York Times assures us that 10 things we worry about are no cause for concern. From defending the harmlessness of hot dogs and plastic bags to claiming BPA in plastic bottles is not harmful to humans, the list will irk many, even as it frees a few to scarf down a foot-long, take a swig from their Nalgene, and crank up their car’s AC.

A lot of ink has been spilled over recent experiments that study religious experiences using brain scanners. Brendan Mackie wrote about the experiments back in 2007 for Utne.com. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about how neuroscience will “not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.” 

Brooks’ assertion is entirely backwards, according to Kelly Bulkeley, writing for the Immanent Frame religion blog. Since religious experiences have differed drastically in the brain scans, depending on the person and the religion, Bulkeley writes that neuroscience will likely undermine people’s faith in a monotheistic God, favoring a more polytheistic view of religion. It will, however, reaffirm the importance of the Bible as “a valuable collection of teachings about history, morality, and collective meaning-making.”

Down with celebrity profiles, the steroids saga, and blow-by-blow business news. Let’s bring back good storytelling.

by Michael Rowe

Does sports journalism suck? In terms of urgency, the question is less national defense and more spilled milk, but I do feel like weeping whenever I peruse ESPN.com, fending off the bilge and looking for a piece that tackles an actual ethical or social issue. Or just tells a good story. Sportswriters don’t deny me this material outright. It’s simply the case that I have to wade through creeping sludge—predictable opinion, endless stats, finance-obsessed business news, empty profiles, and repetitive analysis—to read the kind of investigative and narrative reportage that appears sometimes in, say, Play, the New York Times’ prestige sports magazine. Nevermind that Play is a quarterly—an island in a sea of dead, beaten horses.

My complaint isn’t novel, of course. Gripes about sportswriting have sprung up from various quarters of the press. For a recent example, read the novelist Richard Ford’s crotchety screed from the Fall 2007 issue of Play. Still, few have offered a clear diagnosis. Is something wrong with the way journalists cover sports? Or, are the whiner-critics just impossible-to-please cranks? We can shrug dismissively and say it’s a little of both, but that would ignore the true culprit plaguing sportswriting: the cruddy specter of “insider knowledge.”

Start with the fantasy football syndrome. This internet-facilitated imaginary game, in which you “draft” players whose statistical achievements become points for your team, has become so popular that TV sports analysts and sportswriters routinely advise viewers and readers on which players they should or should not stock on their fake roster. In one particularly entertaining instance, an NFL Network analyst queried ex-coach Jim Mora—who piloted the Saints and Colts before retirement—about his fantasy football squad. Mora dismissed the whole caboodle with mumbles and an eye roll.

Of course Mora doesn’t get it: He used to coach in the NFL. Football coaches rely on probabilities generated by statistical analysis to inform their play-calling. And that's the central appeal of fantasy football: It mimics the act of coaching by passing off numbers—who gains more yardage against whom, who tends to choke when, and how one defense fares against a certain offense—as insight into the game. Thus we play at possessing professional knowledge, and, in the absence of the required muscles, numbers transport us inside the game as virtual shot-callers. Mora has no more interest in fantasy coaching than I have in playing a game of “fantasy infant”—been there, done that. It’s the fantasizing spectator who wants to be caught up in what he imagines are the details.

The push for the inside scoop reduces sports coverage to gossip slinging. The players who merit media scrutiny aren’t professionals, exactly; they're celebrities. Writers cover the indispensable liabilities (Barry Bonds, Michael Vick, and their misdeeds) and the singular talents (Johan Santana, Randy Moss, and their superstardom); readers gawk at their larger-than-your-life lives and want to know more. Sports Illustrated, in its 2007 NFL preview issue, broke from this tendency when it profiled, in brief, a long snapper from the Denver Broncos, emphasizing his minor but indispensable talent—hiking the ball 8 or 15 yards. By and large, however, it’s precisely these workaday pros we relegate to the background.

The untold stories of mere professionals might inform us, though. After all, many of the most successful baseball managers and football coaches were themselves unknown, unheralded, and undistinguished as players. As it turns out, they knew a thing or two anyway and were likely shrewd observers of the pro world. Nevertheless, what you read about sports concerns the superstars: who they are, how they do it, what they think.

Another, less obvious symptom of sportswriting’s blinkered perspective is the endless rehashing of the blogosphere. Online, and increasingly in print, journalists bow down at the altar of each others’ opinions, which typically concern the bureaucratic minutiae of draft choices, business rumors, and team finances. Sometimes, of course, writers rearrange the sacraments or chop the altar up, but ultimately they traffic in news and opinions about the news, nurturing the obsessive in every sports fan.

Some sportswriters readily acknowledge this trend. Robert Weintraub, who has written for Slate, Play, and the Columbia Journalism Review, says that much news-oriented sports coverage is often seen as “not opinionated enough.” In a world of judgment and pronouncement, he says, “everything is framed as an argument.” Sports journalists are insiders in the proverbial know, whatever bloated shape it takes. Accordingly, they dispense with incredible vigor their judgments against, among other things, the personal character of players and coaches and the business decisions of team franchises. For an example, read any Bill Simmons column on ESPN.com.

It’s not that this kind of writing is worthless. Reading it can teach you how the pro game is played. But writers like Simmons, who is very creative, lead their audience into the thicket without stepping back for the long view. They narrate no overarching point; they stir us to be entertained, not edified, challenged, or rocked a little out of our adoration.

“The talking head culture,” says Michael Rand, a sportswriter and blogger for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “is not necessarily the result of the internet.” The 24/7 nature of news, an evolutionary trait that’s ossified over the past 20 years, compels reporters to dig ceaselessly for novel information, rather than hone stories. Or, alternatively, writers hone a few stories (steroids, draft day) over and over, incrementally adding a bite of information here and a snatch of insight there. The end result: stories on repeat, with no takeaway but the intense fandom of all who write about sports. It’s media saturation to make wet blankets of us all.

But so what? What kinds of stories can we really expect in this echo chamber? I’m not asking for sportswriters to be allegorists, uncovering the cultural symbolism of professional athletics. On the contrary, sportswriting already belabors the symbolism of sport. For instance, ESPN.com’s recent profile of Wes Welker, wide receiver for the New England Patriots, reproduces that most common of sentimental sports narratives: Before incredible success, there was the adversity of not being quite as successful. The profile gussies up the chronology of Welker’s high school, college, and pro careers, but in the end Welker’s hard work signifies success only because he’s now famous.

Instead, let’s have more narratives like Chuck Klosterman’s recent piece in Play documenting the lives of several unremarkable NBA players whose careers were transformed when superstar Kevin Garnett became their Boston Celtics teammate. At least to a certain degree, Klosterman recounts the story of professionals, not celebrities.

Or there’s the Times’ investigation of sexual harassment at New York Jets games. Reporter David Picker found male fans congregating near a concourse in the Giants stadium. They were there, as Picker writes, to cheer “an obscenity-laced chant, demanding that the few women in the gathering expose their breasts.” If this portrait of besotted NFL fans doesn’t conjure the loony and occasionally reprehensible character of contemporary sports fandom, nothing will.

From the alternative press, which so often shuns sports coverage, there’s Sherman Alexie’s politically irate sports column, Sonics Death Watch, for Seattle’s alt-weekly the Stranger. Short and incisive, the column digs into the racial preferences of fans, the morality of pure talent, and anecdotal evidence of testosterone overload. It’s a riot.  

So why aren’t there more of these kinds of attempts at investigation and storytelling? Primarily, because literary concerns might look a little stupid in the atmosphere of contemporary sports coverage, especially given the sordid epic of steroids. As Hal Crowther, an Oxford American essayist and author most recently of Gather at the River, told me, if you’re “a sportswriter with any sense of yourself as a writer, it’s hard to ignore the 800-pound gorilla in the room.”

It’s not so much that the under-nuanced steroids saga ought to be disregarded; it’s simply the case that doping acts as a gravity well, sucking in the attention of fans and sportswriters alike. It’s easy to get your pique up over such scandals and refuse to understand the motivations compelling pharmaceutical enhancement at the cost of giving in to the 24/7 news cycle and prioritizing scandal over more sophisticated reporting. 

And that’s ultimately what I want to read: sophisticated, contemplative journalism—not footnotes to press conferences, business transactions, and player quotes. I want sportswriting to offer evidence of athletic struggle, not celebrity, evidence that “professional” sports tells me something about the cruelty, appeal, and exhilaration of playing. Fans and sportswriters, spectators all, may try to get inside sport, but few of us are on the sidelines and even fewer are on the field. Readers have been left to digest fantasy fluff and their own obsessions. If it has become increasingly difficult to admire athletes and appreciate sports, we ought to realize that their potential for narrative, for story, made them newsworthy in the first place.

Beware the passion of the hometown newspaper. It can seep from an editorial-page endorsement into news coverage, transforming campaign reporting into spin-infested idolatry. Such is the case with the New York Times, whose news pages of late have been stamped with Hillary-approved storylines and sources.

The most egregious case in point was a front-page feature on February 9 that, in essence, whined that Barack Obama had trumped up his drug use:

Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though, significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use. That could suggest he was so private about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.

Reporter Serge F. Kovaleski chooses door number three, smoking out old college and high school acquaintances who didn’t remember Obama as much of a party animal. Then he dissects Obama’s drug use (which Kovaleski acknowledges takes up 1½ pages of a 442-page book):   

Mr. Obama wrote that he would get high to help numb the confusion he felt about himself. “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man,” he penned in the memoir.

But, Kovaleski implies, there was really no such risk. Just listen to Obama’s old prep-school pal, Keith Kakugawa, who recollects: “As far as pot, booze, or coke being a prevalent part of his life, I doubt it.” (See, no chance of slipping down an ill-fated path. And what has Kakugawa been up to since those days? Well, Kovaleski reports, he “spent seven years in and out of prison for drug offenses beginning in 1996.”)

One can only imagine what the media line would have been had Obama not fessed up early in his ambitious career. Doesn’t he know he’s supposed to leave that stuff hidden, so enterprising reporters in dire need of scoops can uncover it?

The New York Times’ tack here is reminiscent of its efforts to jump on the memoir-debunking bandwagon in 2006. Inspired by the James Frey pile-on that followed revelations about the fictive liberties the author took in his one-time memoir, A Million Little Pieces, the paper’s arts section aired idiotic concerns about the importance of factual errors that were corrected in the new translation of Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night:

In the previous translation, published in 1960, the narrator tells a fellow prisoner that he is "not quite 15." But the scene takes place in 1944. Mr. Wiesel, born on Sept. 30, 1928, would have already been 15, going on 16. In the new edition, when asked his age, he replies, "15."

Gotcha!

The anti-Obama bias has seeped into other coverage as well. (Though there have been some valiant and nasty efforts among the paper’s columnists to counterbalance.) Take the lead story in the February 17 “Week in Review.” Veteran campaign-trail reporter Kate Zernike examines the perks and pitfalls of the “charismatic leader,” recruiting various historians to parse the Obama phenomenon. Eventually, she elicits this zinger:

“What is troubling about the [Obama] campaign is that it’s gone beyond hope and change to redemption . . . It’s posing as a figure who is the one person who will redeem our politics. And what I fear is, that ends up promising more from politics than politics can deliver.”

And who did Zernike tap for this scholarly assessment? Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who, she parenthetically notes, is “a longtime friend of the Clintons.” Certainly there is a scholar somewhere in this nation’s Ivory Towers who—despite not having Bill and Hillary in their Rolodex—is nevertheless capable of throwing a few swings at Obama. There’s a substantive difference between the biased view of a supporter and the biased view of a friend. Transparency does not good sourcing make.

Now, the list of errant reporting can go on. (And would start with the breathlessly pro-Clinton blogging from reporter Katharine Q. Seelye during the CNN/Univision debate in Texas). But I’ll sign off with a roundup of news outlets’ poll positions that the Columbia Journalism Review’s Campaign Desk blog assembled in the run-up to the Potomac Primaries (to illustrate a different point about the media’s wrong-headed insistence on fortune-telling):

McClatchy: McCain, Obama favored to win Virginia

Agence France-Presse: Ragged Clinton campaign braces for more vote woe

UPI: Poll: Obama, McCain favored in Va., Md.

LA Times: Obama favored in Potomac primaries

Miami Herald: McCain, Obama look strong for ‘Potomac Primary’

Pittsburgh Tribune: Obama favored to sweep next 3 primaries

Wall Street Journal: Today, Sen. Obama is favored to win the “Potomac Primary” in neighboring Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

The Hill: Potomac primary losses could spark pressure on Huckabee to withdraw

ABC News’s The Note: Clinton’s gone cold at the wrong time, and she could wake up Wednesday staring at Obama from the other side of the standings.

New York Times: With primaries on Tuesday in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, Clinton advisers were pessimistic about her chances, though some held out hope for a surprise performance in Virginia.

That “some” holding out for victory? Clinton’s campaign denizens, donors, and the New York Times.

—Hannah Lobel 

As the Olympics approach, all eyes are on Beijing—and they’re noticing that the view is pretty smoggy. Despite China’s promise of cleaner air for the Summer Games, which begin on August 8, many observers are speculating that the world’s top athletes will probably be breathing some of the world’s most noxious air.

The New York Times recently reported that many Olympic teams are “preparing for the worst” in terms of air quality. For the U.S. athletes, that means training elsewhere, delaying their arrival as long as possible, and maybe even donning filter masks until competition time, at the risk of offending their Chinese hosts.

There’s more at stake than feelings. Kathryn Minnick takes a deeper look at the environmental backdrop to the games in the Winter 2008 issue of Earth Island Journal (article not available online), noting that “the big question is whether short-term ‘face’ or long-term change will win out.”

The games “have morphed into a pageant of environmental correctness,” Minnick writes, with China making a host of green promises in order to land the coveted games. Beijing has been making real progress in some areas, for instance, changing its power generation mix, tightening car emission standards, and cleaning up some of its most polluting factories. And the Chinese have included lots of flashy, high-tech green features in high-profile Olympic venues like the “Bird’s Nest” main stadium and the “Water Cube” swimming stadium.

However, other goals appear to be overblown or perhaps unattainable, environmental observers tell Minnick, and that pesky smog problem looms. Air quality figures for the final day of a four-day August trial test went “mysteriously missing,” Minnick writes.

“China’s attempt to stage a green Olympics is a good sign,” she concludes, “even if being sustainable was a requirement for holding the Games more than it was a free choice.”

—Keith Goetzman

Photo by Peng Bo, licensed under Creative Commons.

Anyone who’s cracked open a supposedly groundbreaking graphic novel in recent years and found themselves bored silly by panel after nearly identical panel depicting an endless parade of young-adult ennui: You’ve got an ally in Ted Rall. In a recent commentary, Rall hauls Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and other darlings of the art-comics world to the woodshed in an acerbic takedown. Describing how the New York Times’ foray into art comics, The Funny Pages literary supplement to the New York Times Magazine, has been a flop, Rall summarizes Ware’s serialized work “Building Stories” thusly:

“Anticipation yielded to disappointment as Ware, in his typically mannered and obtuse style, rendered the paint-drying anti-drama of a dowdy middle-aged, one-legged . . . spinster wallowing in self-inflicted depression in a hundred thousand earth-toned squares. Unless you count phony, plot-less, generalized angst, nothing happened in ‘Building Stories.’ Ever.”

Ouch. As a syndicated editorial cartoonist himself who is unabashedly topical and political, Rall is of course wide open to the charge that he just doesn’t get it, that his hit-you-over-the-head style is itself flawed and unfunny, or that he’s simply swinging back after the art-comic tastemakers at Comics Journal called him an “utterly worthless political cartoonist.” But at its core Rall’s critique must sting because there’s a bit of truth to it. “When a reader doesn’t understand a cartoon, it isn’t because he is stupid,” he writes. “It is because the cartoonist has failed.”

Now that’s something for a comic artist to be depressed about—and to turn into a novel, of course.

—Keith Goetzman 

Image from the New York Times, by Daniel Clowes.

Just as a nerd with a makeover turns his back on old friends, the increasingly digital New York Times must say goodbye to some of its dusty analog staff. A recent casualty, on November 28, was the legendary Recording Room, which reporters could reach via telephone to dictate their stories to dutiful transcribers. But nowadays reporters can just e-mail their stories in, whether from Kansas or Kathmandu, and the Recording Room has been rendered obsolete.

John Koblin wrote about the Room’s life and times for the New York Observer, and some Times veterans have since added their own stories and goodbyes in the comment thread. Calling the Recording Room while reporting overseas was a “great comfort, something akin to talking to your mother,” wrote one commenter. Another reporter was less nostalgic:

The Recording Room sometimes misheard ordinary words, leading to embarrassment or worse for the reporter or subject of the story. One time I was reporting on the volunteer work done by a famous conductor-composer in the New York suburban community in which he lived. I wrote something like, “he gives his time effortlessly on behalf of music.” In print it became “he gives his time fruitlessly on behalf of music.” The composer was furious and demanded a correction, which he got.

And so the Recording Room goes the way of the carriage, the chimney-sweep and the record label: to the annals of obsolescence.

—Brendan Mackie

There’s good news for the icy-hearted cynics in all of us: Protests actually work! A new study shows that protests against misbehaving corporations can send a company’s stock prices tumbling—just as long as the New York Times is there to cover it.

Writing for Columbia Journalism Review’s business-media blog, Elinore Longobardi discusses a new study that analyzes how media coverage impacts protests against corporations. The paper, written by sociologists Brayden G. King and Sarah A. Soule, will appear in the next issue of Administrative Science Quarterly.

King and Soule examined New York Times coverage of protests from 1962 to 1990, and discovered that while boycotts didn’t make much difference—nor did the size of the protest—Times exposure caused the defamed company’s stock value to drop between 0.4 and 1.0 percent (on average). The effect took place within one day, and the longer the Times article, the bigger the loss.

The study cites prominent examples from the time period, including protests against Dow Chemicals over its role in the Vietnam War.

The data for this study ends in 1990, but King and Soule are moving forward with additional research through 1995, which will introduce companies like Gap and Nike into the mix.

As for only choosing the Times, King and Soule found that it was the only paper worth analyzing—the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post gave paltry space to protests by comparison.

—Eric Kelsey

For more on protest, check out the cover story from our May/June 2007 issue: Protest is Dead. Long Live Protest. 

Internet pornography featuring minors, a business reporter making secret payments, and... the New York Times? In 2005 the Times ran a front-page story exposing the hidden world of webcam porn artists. It followed one boy who, with a webcam in his bedroom, became an underage internet porn star before spiraling into a morass of drug abuse and depravity. In New York Magazine, David France uncovers the sordid story behind this story. Controversy buzzes over the question of why Kurt Eichenwald, the Times reporter who broke the story, paid Berry up to $2,000 while posing as a fan—without telling his editors. Eichenwald has since left the Times, and feels hounded both by marauding journalists and a secret, shadowy gang of electronically-connected pedophiles. Check out the whole story and its tawdry details.

—Brendan Mackie