Marcus' World

Bloggers vs. Journalists (Sigh)

A few weeks ago the New Yorker published a probing article by Eric Alterman about the fate of American newspapers. These days I can't seem to read three straight paragraphs in the New Yorker, due to juggling multiple books and various other periodicals in my absurdly ambitious collection of reading materials.  So I was rather too proud of myself for reading Alterman's entire piece.

The sentence that sticks with me is: "But Huffington (as in Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post) fails to address the parasitical relationship that virtually all Internet news sites and blog commentators enjoy with newspapers." Alterman argues that--for all the talk of "citizen media" and "grass-roots journalism" at HuffPost and elsewhere--bloggers would be nowhere without easy access to the reports that traditional journalists post online.

Alterman makes a strong point. Score one for the mainstream media.

And so things  stood, to my mind at least, until I read Ezra Klein's blog post today.  Klein points out that being a full-time writer is a privileged position, and that traditional journalists who criticize political bloggers never acknowledge that most bloggers have day jobs (and thus are not able to do original reporting.)

The sentence that strikes me is: "If you've got the gig (as a full time writer), then pat yourself on the back, shut up, outcompete your competition, and be generous to those who steal time out of their workday in order to carve out a small space in the national conversation." (Emphasis mine).

Klein is a bit punchy here, but the point holds: Blogging can never replace full-time journalism (whatever some blog proponents might proclaim), but it does open space for more voices to be heard. Sure--many blogs are uninteresting or absurd; and many good blogs aren't updated often enough to be worthwhile.  But there is cream in this crop, just like in anything else.

So score one for the bloggers.  Fortunately this isn't a zero sum game.

Good Causes, Quick Rewards, Partial Solutions

Yesterday was World Malaria Day, and sadly I didn't realize this until today. So now it appears too late to play the "Deliver the Net" game, an interactive online game in which your success results in the delivery of free bednets to fight malaria in places where it is endemic.

One game that's always available is Free Rice, a vocabulary quiz in which each successful result yields 20 grains of rice for the UN World Food Program.  That's especially important right now, when the prices of many staples like rice are shooting up.

Let's not forget the Hunger Site, where one simple click yields 1.1 cups of food a day.

These are all quick and easy ways to make a difference. It's easy to forget that this is only part of the solution, though; tackling the systemic reasons for world hunger is  much harder and can quickly seem daunting.  But as we all play Free Rice, let's keep in mind the larger issues at stake.

The Campaign Rolls On

Hillary Clinton trounced Barack Obama in Pennsylvania today. She won by 10 percentage points, and raised $1 million online in the two hours immediately after declaring victory.  My inaccurate guess beforehand was that Clinton would win by 5 points--enough to keep going for a while, but not enough to stop the Obama juggernaut. 

It's anyone's ballgame, once again. Obama's bid to shift the focus to John McCain tonight will fail, because the Democratic campaign is far from over.

As the campaign rolls on, McCain will be the prime beneficiary of the foul mood. The 6 week  long Pennsylvania slog brought out the nastiness in both Clinton and Obama--especially Clinton, who peddled images of Osama bin Laden right before the Pennsylvania primary to show that she would be tougher on national security than Obama. 

In tonight's concession speech, Obama hopefully spoke about moving beyond the "silliness and the tit-for-tat that consumes our politics."  But he never should have gone to this level in the first place, and I don't see a way out of the muck now. I don't mean to be harsh; the turn of events only goes to show that interminable campaigns wear away at anyone's sense of civility.

On a practical level, therefore, Democrats have every reason to be concerned about how things are shaping up in what should be a landslide Democratic year. But there is nothing intrinsically wrong with an epic campaign like this one.  Both Clinton and Obama are brilliant; both care about everyday Americans; and both would be good Presidents.  If our politics were less shallow, their jousting would be invigorating and informative. As it is, though, their skirmishes are only helping to ensure four more years of a Republican White House.

Stricter Comments Are Back

Sadly, my experiment in loosening up comment authentication has failed. The last two comments have been spam, and surely more of that is coming. So I've re-activated tougher comment measures.

I always love getting emails about my posts, or comments within Facebook (all blog posts show up as Facebook notes). So there are options!

Thanks for reading.

Of Stale Debates and Strange Memories

I'll fall in line with the complaints of Obama supporters that last night's ABC debate focused on shallow issues and was much tougher on Obama than Clinton.  But Clinton also had a point in her criticism that earlier NBC debates were biased against her.

Perhaps we are witnessing a titanic TV network split in preference between the two Democrats.  We all know that Fox supports McCain, and CBS News seems fairly marginal these days.

I don't really care, to be honest. This thing is taking way too long.

My favorite part of the debate was the question from a woman in Latrobe, PA about why Obama doesn't regularly wear a flag pin on his lapel.  Sure, it's a loaded question--but I thought she was sincere.

All Pennsylvania towns that begin with "L" are the same to me, it seems--her Latrobe location reminded me of Ligonier.  Way back in 1995 (deep in the pre-blog era) Bill and I dined in Ligonier one evening, as part of his visit to Carnegie Mellon.  Dinner was served right on the town square, and during the course of the meal we learned that our waitress liked pornography (or, at least, she didn't look away upon discovering certain videos that her son left in the VCR.)

What a thing to reveal to your guests during dinner!

In light of this confession--and from my gilded perch here in the elite Bay Area--I would like to amend Senator Obama's recent remarks on small town America.  Small towners don't  always bitterly cling to guns and religion. Sometimes they cling to skin.

Food and Fuel (or, Everything is Complex)

Over the last few days the question of whether government subsidies for ethanol are raising food prices--thereby causing poor people around the globe to starve--has arisen frequently.  First I heard discussion of this on the radio this weekend. Now the Times has published a good overview of the issues. 

Recently this was much less of a visible issue. Michael Pollan spoke about the ethical conundrums of ethanol when Helen and I heard him speak a few months ago. I had no idea what he was talking about at the time, but his argument that SUV drivers keep food from poor people by using corn-based gasoline stuck with me.  Not because I agreed with Pollan--to the contrary, his formulation struck me as trite and judgmental.

In essence, Pollan proclaimed the liberal orthodoxy on this issue. Allow me to paraphrase and read between the lines: those gas-guzzling SUV owners are so callous that they're willing to kill poor babies to enjoy more off-road thrills. 

As he spoke, I thought of an SUV owner at Helen's business school who is among the most socially conscientious members of the class. Her Facebook profile is ablaze with causes to support, and she participated in a socially conscious case competition earlier this year.  Given this counterexample I concluded that Pollan prefers the shortcuts of political activism: boiling complex interconnections down to ire-producing nuggets devoid of any context or substance. 

The Times story validates my viewpoint, if I do say so myself.  Yes, ethanol subsidies are a partial culprit for rising global food prices (and yes, SUVs are bad for the environment.) But so is a much higher global demand for meat (a sign of rapid incomes gains in some developing countries), as well as various droughts. Furthermore, wheat and rice prices--neither of which can be used as gasoline--have also risen rapidly. 

So it's not just corn snatched from the mouths of babes.

All this said, the rapid rise in food prices around the world is very worrisome. Thankfully the US just authorized $200 million in additional food aid--a pittance compared to the costs of the Iraq war, but $200 million more than used to be available. 

Of course this is a band-aid; more sophisticated adjustments to global food dynamics are necessary. Don't ask me what those adjustments should be.  All I know is that ethanol isn't the only culprit, and that SUV owners are too easy a punching bag.

Facebook and Connections

Scott is becoming more active on Facebook, but is unsure of what exactly it will do for him.  Meanwhile, I'll happily admit that I passed into the realm of Facebook addiction long ago (well, at least six months ago).

I'm now a fan of two libraries on Facebook, and I recently downloaded the PubMed search application.  That seems handy for sharing articles, but for a "real" PubMed search it still makes sense to go straight to PubMed.  This could change, of course, and it will be fun to keep up with how librarians utilize Facebook to build new services and reach more people. Many bloggers do this now, but I tend to dip in and out of the comment stream.

So at the moment I have no idea how librarianship will change because of Facebook.  But I do know how my personal relationships have changed, and this is why I keep going back to it.

On Facebook I can play Scrabulous (and lose)...or decide not to play Scrabulous when I get multiple requests in one day.  I can see that one friend just wrote a review of a new cafe on Yelp; I can discover that another friend going through a difficult time could really use a hug.  Or I chuckle at the funny status updates (Helen  is great at those).  Perhaps I'll find out that someone 3,000 miles away is getting a new drivers license, and I wholeheartedly empathize with what is probably an interminable wait at the DMV.

At the UCSF Library more and more people are getting Facebook accounts. Sometimes you learn things about people that they feel comfortable broadcasting on the web, but would never say in person. But because it's "out there" now, you have a new avenue of conversation and a new way to get to know your colleagues.  Or, if you're like me you announce that you're looking forward to San Francisco Restaurant Week on Facebook--and then forget that you said anything to anybody. Then, when a colleague asks where you plan to go for dinner, you have no idea how they knew your plans!

Is Facebook essential to  any of this? No; all of what I described above could easily be communicated in myriad other ways.  But--for some mysterious reason--the linking agent of Facebook makes certain information shareable that would otherwise not be shared.  Nobody would email that they're going to get their drivers license renewed, and most people would only send a text message to close friends while they are waiting at the DMV.  But in the context of Facebook such a tiny tidbit is easy to share, and easy for others to relate with. 

Concerns about people being sucked into the machine are severely overblown; online connections are a natural complement and stimulus to more meaningful in-person ties.  This is what all social networking sites (not just Facebook) have to offer.

Bait and Switch in San Francisco

I'm glad there was no violence at today's Olympic torch relay in San Francisco, but disturbed that honest protesters and torch supporters could not watch the relay or attend the closing ceremony. 

Events began like normal, until the first runner ran into a warehouse rather than along the Embarcadero. From there the route diverted away from the waterfront; thus the bait and switch began.  Instead of holding the closing ceremony at the originally scheduled location, officials whisked the flame away to San Francisco International Airport.

City officials say the scene was tense prior to the relay--protesters about Tibet and Darfur were verbally clashing with supporters of China.  I'm sympathetic to the city's plight, but the solution wasn't to alter the entire route for the relay.  This  disrespected the passion of everyone, both protesters and torch supporters.  The "lunatic fringe" proportion of protesters is very small, and SF caved in to those people today.

Some of the local reaction to the Mayor's decision has been harsh. For example, City Supervisor Aaron Peskin says Mayor Newsom "runs San Francisco the way the premier of China runs his country - secrecy, lies, misinformation, lack of transparency and manipulating the populace." 

I think the Mayor simply wanted to keep the city safe. But the symbolism of the Olympic flame being carted away without a proper farewell is troubling nevertheless.

Opinions vary. US Olympic Committee Chairman Peter Ueberroth says, "The city of San Francisco, from a global perspective, will be applauded."  That's certainly true in China, where state media reports that the relay was a great success (and makes no mention of the huge throngs of protesters.)  But anybody who knows the real story knows that San Francisco could only keep the peace by pulling a bait and switch.

More Relaxed Comment Policy

Due to concerns from a loyal reader, I've relaxed the comment restrictions I imposed two years ago after a wretched weekend of blog spam.  So it should be easier to comment now, and hopefully it's tough enough that the spammers still stay away. Comment away everyone!

Helen's Take on Tokyo

Helen finally posted about our Tokyo adventures over on Two Way Streets. Enjoy the post!