Hubris. Hamas (and Hentoff).
The Israelis have kicked off the New year with a literal big bang. The much-threatened ground invasion of the Gaza strip is now fully underway.
After eight days of massive airstrikes against a sealed-off, cooped-up and densely packed Palestinian population, Israel is now moving in with heavy armor and thousands of troops in what government officials say will be a "lengthy" conflict.
No doubt. What's another month or two, or even a couple of years, when the conflict has already been raging for four full decades (or six if you prefer)?
Israel has taken full advantage of lame-brained and lame duck American administration more concerned in its final days in burnishing its horrific legacy of war, torture and economic depression rather than avoiding a regional conflagration in the tinderbox Middle East. The Democrats, meanwhile, are running for cover praying to Jesus, Allah and the corpse of Tip O'Neill that this whole bloody affair somehow gets over by January 20th.
As we have repeatedly heard from the the IDF and from the American media, not to be too terribly redundany, no country can sit back and do nothing when its getting rockets lobbed across its border. Undoubtedly true. Just as we can affirm that no people with any sense of dignity can sit back and do nothing after as they experience 40 years of foreign occupation. And, finally, who can be surprised that after repeated failure to end that occupation that same people might turn to a fanatical, extremist group for political leadership?
We've been hearing, predictably enough, that Israel is using razor-sharp precision in striking only at Hamas-related targets. Fair enough, with one asterisk. Hamas, like it or not, is the democratically elected government of Gaza and that means everything there -- from police stations, to power plants, to schools, post offices, and dog pounds-- is associated with Hamas.
Dresden, I suppose, was a Nazi-related target in quite the same way.
The outcome of this invasion is unpredictable, except for one incontrovertible fact. As authentic experts in region argue (as opposed to cable TV chowder heads), the only long-time winner in this action can be the most extreme elements in the region: Syria, Hizbollah, Iran and on the Israeli side the unseemly likes of BeBe Netinyahu. How about, then, another 10-15 years of bloody brinksmanship in the region? That's the best case scenario. The worst is an Israeli follow-up attack on Iran as the possible starting gun for WWIII.
P.S. it's not just the Israelis who have picked this lull in the world calendar to make their move. Much, much tinier fish (and I do mean tiny little guppies), the managers of Village Voice Media (nee New Times), the largest chain of alternative weeklies in America, picked yesterday's Dead News Friday to pick off and fire iconic columnist and writer Nat Hentoff. The 83 year old award-winning journo, critic and author has put in a full 50 years at the Voice, writing consistently crisp copy since the paper was founded. Nat has remained as cantankerous as ever, a dazzling jazz critic, a fierce First Amendment absolutist, he railed equally against the Patriot Act and the American Library Association who failed to defend dissidents in Cuba. He has been a mainstay of critical American dissident political thought and, frankly, the greatly diminished and basically irrelevant Voice -- eviscerated by New Times management-- didn't deserve him.
Hentoff's big problem is that he cost too much money. He earned a real salary and that sort of stuff is no longer much tolerated by the New Times group -- the same happy crew that pushed me (and just about everyone else) out of the L.A. Weekly. I'm glad Hentoff outlasted me by a couple of months. It would have been just PLAIN WRONG to have outlived him as a New Times employee. I would have writhed with survivor's guilt.
At the time of my own departure from the Weekly two months ago, I promised readers a full accounting oy my views on the demise of the American alt weekly world at the hands of the New Times group. To be honest, I actually wrote the 4,000 word piece exactly a week ago but didn't post it. I showed it to a couple of former colleagues who said, well, yeah, OK, but who gives a damn?
It's a great question, one I haven't been able to answer yet -- so the post is still sitting in draft form and may --or may not-- see the light of day. Haven't decided yet. Here in L.A., I sorta think it would be the job of an "objective" L.A. Times to write about the butchering of the city's number two paper and the chain to which it belongs. It would make much more credible reading than the musings of a disgruntled ex-employee (present company included). But to date, the media writers over at the Times are far too distracted by their ongoing wallowing in self-pity.
Anyway, Nat Hentoff needs the Village Voice like he needs a third pinkie. It's strictly their loss, not his. And his removal from the scene probably makes it even less relevant to write about a newspaper chain that cares so little about itself it is, indeed, hard to imagine that anyone else really could or should give a hoot. Here's a hug, Nat.
January 3rd, 2009 at 7:38 pm
That really stinks about Hentoff. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised, though. New Times really does look like a horrible operation. Their publicaion in the Bay Area is dreadful.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Read what an Israeli Arab has to say about the Gaza operation.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1051949.html
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:24 pm
PS I realize the article is sarcastic. The point is the situation is complex.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:45 pm
That excuse falls flat. Israel ended its occupation of Gaza several years ago, allowing the Palestinians the freedom to make their own choices. They did -choosing a group whose stated goal is to destroy Israel and whose favorite method is terrorism.
With the removal of the Israeli settlements and the IDF, the Gazans lost all excuses for their already inexcusable terrorism.
January 3rd, 2009 at 10:59 pm
There’s little point in reading LA weekly any more. It always was a test of willpower to get past the ads, but now that most of the content sucks too…
The precise nature of the suckage in the political content seems to be an emphasis on disconnected, shallow-focus stories of small-time political shenanigans and/or eyeball-attracting curiousities. (Rats swarm in Palisades house while authorities do nothing!)
Some of the politics stories are still worthy, like the continuing coverage of the billboard ripoff.
It’d be interesting to understand the editorial tug of war there. But, I admit, diminished interest… ;-(
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:15 pm
One thing the toxic Israel haters will have trouble with is why, in contrast to Gaza, there has been such remarkable quiet on the West Bank since Abbas has become president, and especially since the civil war in Gaza. After all, there are still checkpoints, settlers, and harassement on the west bank. There are none of these in Gaza.
So maybe it’s not inevitable that Palestinians turn to lethal violence, even after forty years of occupation.
It will be interesting to see the intellectual contortions people will go through to explain this (assuming anyone bothers).
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:48 pm
http://www.newsweek.com/id/177716?from=rss
Here’s an intelligent article on how to pressure Israel. Let them win against the terrorists. Then twist their arm at the negotiating table, particularly on settlements.
Now I’ll stop.
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:53 pm
POST THIS
http://sabbah.blip.tv/#1642223
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:55 pm
The above is Israel hitting a “military” market
January 4th, 2009 at 9:07 am
International law defines the end of an occupation as when the occupying power relinquishes effective power over the occupied territory.
Effective control is defined as both military and administrative control.
Relinquishing military control is pretty easy to distinguish, it’s when the occupying power withdraws its military.
Administrative control is more difficult. When an occupying power allows the government of an occupied territory to actually perform the duties of government, which includes the day to day functions we are all familiar with, but it also includes the control of the borders of the occupied territory. A government which does not have control over its borders doesn’t have full administrative control over the country it governs.
In the case at hand, Israel withdrew its military from Gaza but has not, to this day, relinquished control over Gaza’s borders which it does not share. Israel may control its border with Gaza but may not control any Gaza border which is not contiguous with Israel, such as Gaza’s border on the Mediterranean Sea. Since Israel has blockaded Gaza’s Mediterranean border, it has not surrendered administrative control to the government of Gaza, and thus it is still an occupying power, subject to the international laws pertaining to an occupation.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:49 am
I started reading Hentoff around ’62 or ’63 in a paperback collection of early pieces from the Voice, his essays in the anarcho-pacifist magazine “Liberation” where he was drawn by his hero, A.J. Muste (whose biographer he would become) and perhaps most importantly on the backs of numerous album covers.
If there were no other reason, and there are many, I would personally keep Hentoff around just because he was a good friend (and sometime producer) of Charlie Mingus. Anyone who could maintain a close friendship with the volatile Mr. Mingus obviously has a temperment and perspective one could learn a lot from.
There were very few men, ever – and perhaps one other man alive – with an equal trove of reminiscences and observations of the “golden era” of modern jazz. (Orin Keepknews, who must be at least as old as Hentoff – I recently saw him at a Randy Newman concert, no less.)
Hentoff undoubtedly committed more first-hand jazz education in his lifetime simply via his liner notes, books and reviews than most university music departments, although his taste in great music hardly stopped with classic jazz.
In recent decades I’ve disagreed with Hentoff on a couple of key issues as much as I’ve agreed with him on a host of others, but at 83 Hentoff still embodies what was once valuable in the old Voice. The current publishers own a masthead.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Uh, sorry that “other guy” who still carries a ringside history of modern jazz around in his head would be Orrin Keepnews, not the bashed spelling above.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:11 am
In reference to a good portion of the posts regarding Gaza, I don’t think you have the even an elementary grasp of what is taking place. My suggestion is you broaden your horizons by listening to more than corporate media.
January 4th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
V: why don’t you enlighten us? How about news from kibbutzniks who feel they are living in a “sea of hate” meaning their own countrymen.
January 4th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
hey marc, i’ll put my vote in: i’d like to read your piece on the LA WEEKLY… you might not think it matters, but you have a unique perspective of seeing the change over time. and i imagine the WEEKLY’s death has a lot of parallels with poor management decisions in other quarters, notably the LA TIMES.
January 4th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
John Moore — your comment ignores the fact that the occupation of Gaza continued in the guise of the economic blockade that prevented passage of almost anything or anyone into and out of Gaza. The Egyptian-brokered cease fire lasted for several months, with absolutely no movement by Israel toward ending the blockade.
Regarding Hentoff, I recall how much the pomo left hated him in the eighties and nineties because he was pro-life.
I mainly enjoy his album liner notes, but he also founded a really cool record label, Candid Records, that recorded a lot of great stuff.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Cynthia Cotts, Jim Ridgeway, Robert Christgau and now Nat Hentoff. The next time I pick up the Voice will be when I get a parrot.
Marc, I can see a lot in common with you and Hentoff, especially i terms of soe of your heterodox positions.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
The demise of the Alt Weekly MATTERS. It FUCKING matters.
The first alt weekly I read was the OC Weekly while I was in college. It was a fine paper, more tabloid than the LA Weekly but man they took the piss out of the OC elite. It was a masterpiece for a few years and had a great staff. Covered lots of good music and made OC feel less like the OC but also got a lot of young people in the habit of reading at least a weekly if not soon a daily.
I soon graduated to the LA Weekly. Again, the LA Weekly had a really great few years from the end o the 90′s until the demise began. I gave up subscribing to The Nation because the Weekly had so many fine writers covering national affairs.
The reporting on the going ones in the City of LA was also great, especially the LAPD. The paper also covered some things that the Times (also a fine paper at one point) was not on (yes, LA has that much important news!). In particular I remember the issue they had on the terrible air quality (only matched by the Times series on the conditions of our oceans).
I don’t buy the whole internet thing. As someone that has been involved with internet market and more specifically understands metrics, I simply do not see the Net as a platform to replace print media. I am also not sure why people are not reading paper media anymore but given that I work in the media and the interest in the product I sell (music) has long been in decline (no, it is not just illegal downloading it is a disinterest in the product), I suspect that the cultural change we are in the midst of is beyond our grasp.
I for one believe that some things should operate on a 10% profit margin. That is simply not enough? Not for the hucksters that now own the media.
I do not want to sound alarmist but to me it seems that we are more in the Brave New World zone right now. Book stores are not closing because people are reading more online. They are closing because people are not reading much at all, at least people my age. One of my younger co-workers is 24 and managed to get through highschool and college without finishing a book. She just finished her first EVER. I hear this over and over with young people; they just don’t seem to consume literature, journalism, or art.
I do not want to argue that we have a generation of philistines taking over but in reality, it is the digital generation. The video game and you tube generation. The generation that does not sit still and read but rather is obsessed with communication (with each other). We simply cannot grasp what is going on right now but if we have not outlets that support investigative journalism and our news is reduced to blogs and short entries on web sites, we really are up shit creek. We really will become less democratic simply out of necessity. If most of the public can play the WII really well but cannot read books, journalism, or more important research… who will lead?
One thing that struck me most about Palin was that one of her former aides said that she didn’t read reports she got but rather just wanted bullet points. If we have to reduce complex information to bullet points, if we have to simplify every story for the camera, and if we have to make every piece of art as simple as possible… well, I just don’t know where we are headed.
January 5th, 2009 at 12:54 am
On Gaza: Obama’s silence is complicity with Israel’s war crimes.
http://michael-balter.blogspot.com/2009/01/obamas-silence-on-gaza-is-complicity.html
January 5th, 2009 at 3:58 am
Turns out, there’s no free lunch in the journalism business either.
Free newspapers were bound to bear the brunt of the Internet transformation, since they have no subscription revenue and a weaker sales proposition to advertisers.
That is happening now, across the board. It’s ludicrous to suggest that it’s because the newspapers are incompetently managed.
If the New Times people are incompetent, how did they roll up and buy so many weekly papers? Fraud? Magic?
At some point, that have to have successfully managed some newspapers to have been able to convince investors to bet money on them managing even more. They’ve been at it for a long time, so there’s a lot of self-evidence that they know what they’re doing.
It’s a pity that anyone has to lose the job and, yes, talented writers like Marc and Nat are rare and important treasures.
Still, it is obvious that something has to give. Ad revenues are cratering, so costs must be cut or the only rational expectation is bankruptcy.
Hentoff may have been something akin to Shakespeare — though I never saw that in him, — but such assessments are irrelevant.
I’m guessing he pulled down a salary sufficient to keep 2 or 3 younger, more productive staff writers on board. I suspect it was not an easy call for New Times to make, but the rather obvious fact is that they had to make a call: the 2 or 3 staff writers or editors, or Hentoff.
(Go ahead and call me a philistine or worse, but I think the world will do just fine with a bit less rhapsodizing about jazz. Listen to all day and night if it’s what you like, but it’s just so boring to read more than a few lines about it.)
GM Hoakster, perhaps unwittingly, does make a valid point that the problems afflicting journalism are driven more by the shifting tastes of readers, than by poor management. Of course, there is a chicken-egg issue there, so both factors play a role.
If big dailies like the Times and/or “hip” weeklies like L.A.’s were more engaging, they’d win more new readers and do better at inculcating a culture of reading.
Still, the bottom line is, the only way for a journalism enterprise to survive is to attract readers.
If the Old Boys of Journalism being ousted from the Voice and the Weekly know so much, why aren’t they starting their own Web based journalism enterprises?
Actually, many have — Bob Scheer comes to mind — and seem to be making a go of it. This is actually an exciting time for readers, precisely because great talents are being liberated from the velvet coffins of major mainstream daily newspaper journalism.
I know my reading is now far and away wider, deeper and more efficient than it was back when I had to rely on a few magazine subscriptions, a daily newspaper, freeklies and trips to the library a few times a week. I suspect I’m not alone in that.
January 5th, 2009 at 4:05 am
GMH writes:
“I for one believe that some things should operate on a 10% profit margin.”
What’s wrong with just breaking even?
January 5th, 2009 at 4:21 am
Hoakster – so much of this is anecdotal, I won’t argue that “your wrong!” I’ll just add my perspective. First of all, television already ruined our brains decades before the internet, TV killed literacy, etc. etc. Everybody knows that. I’m only half-kidding. If you want to add at least 10 points to your IQ and drastically reduce the useless shit rattling around in your head, get rid of your TV – or at least the cable/broadcast piece of it and stick to Netflix.
Second, almost every newspaper ever published has sucked. Here I’m not kidding at all. And of the rare ones that didn’t, nearly all of them do now. Only a handful of the largest US cities and maybe a couple of very lucky, flukish smaller towns have ever had truly decent newspapers and I think the number may now be down to one. Local coverage has varied more, but I don’t ever remember feeling well-served by local newspaper coverage, even in the days when there were several papers competing in major cities and the business model was strong.
The best local print coverage I’ve seen when ink-on-paper journalism flourished has generally been provided by the errant reporter or columnist, not by any editorial consistency or publisher’s intent. This is probably where the local independent weeklies had their biggest impact for a time. I’m not convinced that blogging cranks and obsessives – every locale has a few and I mean that in “a good way” – aren’t providing as effective local watchdog service as most major newspapers have in the past. More often than not local papers have been PR flaks for the folks who were ruining your town and fleecing the populace while you slept. Simple fact.
The only time I’ve ever felt that I had a crew of journalists who were doing a decent job of covering local stories was when San Francisco’s PBS channel had a daily round-table news show that focused mostly on local stuff, with one old codger who analyzed national and foreign affairs using rips from the wire. (He was good at it.) Of course, the show started out using print journalists during a long Bay Area newspaper strike. It went off the air when the station manager became infatuated with cooking shows. So, in my experience, electronic media displacing print actually made me feel better informed for a decade or so (long, long ago.)
In fairness to print, I never feel so dumb – or more likely, offended because I’m not as dumb as they seem to think – as when I watch cable news (or Sunday morning blather.) I have to include Liberal Saints Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow in that, because while they pander to my biases, their schtick – even Sweet, Wholesome Rachel’s – generally validates the old McCluhan chestnut that “the medium is the message.” I’ve had a stronger dose of bottled personality than news after their respective hours and, if I’ve spent a bit of time on the internet before I watch them I don’t think I’ve ever learned anything I didn’t already know. The only daily TV journalism worth spit is the anti-journalism of Stewart and Colbert. It’s a good sign if younger folks are watching Stewart as their primary TV news consumption. Gives them the perspective they need.
As for the internet, I’ve never felt as well informed as I have since I started following a couple of key blogs that then link to “real news” at the global level. I think that Josh Marshall’s site may be the best example of a new emerging news/opinion model that extends blogging into something genuinely journalistcally innovative. Marshall also “marshalled” his readers to help shape stories during the AG scandals before Marc and HuffPo started their Off The Bus model. That’s a promising direction. Of course, even a relative internet “empire” like Marshall’s requires “real” news operations to flourish. Also, although Huffington Post may be the craziest “news” quilt ever stitched together, after a couple of essentials like the Times and the Guardian, it is a remarkably useful source of links to real news. (Assuming you don’t have attention deficit disorder and get lost in the crazy stuff – Mea culpa.)
I’m not sure how this all ultimately works in practice, i.e. business models, but I think we’ll see something workable evolve because it has to – probably with the biggest operations consolidating as “gold-plated” national/international news sources and more innovative stuff emerging from the bottom that challenges the news elites so they don’t stagnate as frequently as they have in the past. (It’s hard to imagine a new mediocrity like David Broder getting quite the same ridiculous veneration as when there was a sychophantic brotherhood steeped purely in it’s own bullshit mythologies.) “The middle” segments, represented by already mostly dispensable local newspapers, will disappear as we know them or become a smaller piece of something more useful to news “consumers” that’s internet based. Not sure how you pay for this, but somebody will figure it out.
In recent years the only reason I paid for a daily paper was out of a sense of obligation. I finally quit subscribing – not because reading it was so dispiriting, although it was, or because they often went straight to the recycle, which they did – but because they extended my subscription on my credit card without contacting me. Seemed like a bad sign so I severed the relationship, which had become one of pity on my part. I’d rather donate to a website that I actually read.
I used to read the morning paper, the afternoon paper and often grab the Times (NY, of course) and I was far less well-informed than I am now using the internet as my primary news platform. Best example of why I’m sold on the “new” news models is that anyone who used the internet platform critically during the run-up to the Iraq war should have at the very least suspected the case being made was pure bullshit. The political models pioneered by Dean and perfected by Obama are also testament to the internet’s democratizing reality (no longer just “potential.”)
Also, as another anecdotal aside I see an awful lot of people reading books on the train. Maybe they belong to the Church of Oprah. Who knows ? I also see, of course, a lot of iPods. Thank god for the iPods – so I don’t have to listen to inane shit like I did periodically during the Great Boombox Scare. (Now if you want to discuss music, the world is in fact coming to an end and we are all doomed. Kids today are morons based on their musical taste, etc. etc., and get off of my lawn!) In any event, I think we are and will be significantly better off with the evolving news models – even though papers of all sorts are struggling to survive or consolidating as the most hideously banal rags. Somehow, despite it all, as a “news consumer” I’ve never felt better served in my life.
Having said all of this, I’m not dismissive of the “MSM” in the glib way that many are, particularly on the nutcase right. There are journalistic professionals who I have enormous respect for and I believe that the education and gainful employment of professional journalists is very important. But the landscape in which they will work is inevitably changing and from my perch as someone who appreciates more diverse access to news, it’s all been for the better.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:02 am
marc, i’d sure like to read the 4000-word piece you wrote. i spent 20 yrs in the alt press, at east bay express, sf weekly (pre-new times) and sf bay guardian. those papers were wonderful places to be during those years. at this moment it’s possible to use the net as a fabulous daily paper, but what happens as organizations underwriting original reporting slip beneath the surface? it matters that so many dailies once had bureaus all over the place and no longer support them. i have seen the blogs that aggregate and comment on the news – and i depend on them. but they get their info from somewhere. what happens when their sources run dry? i worry about that, a lot…
January 5th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Here’s something interesting – The Washington Post has just hired Greg Sargent away from Talking Points Memo for a new web-based project. May be a sign of intelligent editorial life at that old warhorse.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:43 am
The New Times crew are cultural vandals, boorish midmarket hirelings who fear and loathe the frank vibrancy of New York and Los Angeles. Their investment bankers beat up Voice Media’s investment bankers fair and square, I suppose, at least in the context of the mid-oughts’ lax antitrust environment, but of course even the then-healthy revenues of the L.A. Weekly weren’t enough to subsidize what have to be punishing loan-service costs – if the Weekly and the Voice are reeling, one can only imagine what’s happening at marginal papers like the Pitch Weekly, the Seattle Weekly and the Nashville Scene.
In a way, you can’t even blame Mike Lacey – his tragic flaw is the need to rule the world that has traditionally haunted press barons. He at least has the idea that he wants to do great journalism, although the concept of great advocacy journalism in L.A. and NYC is quite a bit subtler than it tends to be in corrupt right-wing municipalities like Phoenix and Dallas. (Please – somebody tell Jill Stewart.) But the culture he fostered is toxic, rewarding company loyalists over great and popular journalists like Hentoff, Christgau, Cooper, Alan Middlestadt, C. Carr, Ed Park, Joe Donnelly, Rob Nelson and down the long, long line. It is the combination of investment-banker rapacity and Lacey’s dreadful army of shadow editors that has reduced once-great papers like the Voice into wafer-thin tabloids with all the bite of neutered pomeranians, encumbered by websites – in every case far worse than what they replaced – noted more for sloppy design and broken links than for their content.
The bigger alt-weeklies have been historically been fairly recession-resistant, but it is hard to see how any of the former Voice papers will be able to turn the corner when things pick up.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Marc, Another vote here for your L.A. Weekly Demise piece.
I’m a longtime LA Weekly fan from early 80s (plus the Reader, SF Guardian, et al).
Whither journalism…
January 5th, 2009 at 10:45 am
I wrote for the Weekly during the 1980s when Jay Levin was owner/editor, and crazy as Jay was the paper broke lots of big stories (I broke a few myself) and was highly relevant reading. Those were the days, or at least better days.
Yes, Marc, let us see that thing.
January 5th, 2009 at 10:59 am
I wanna’ see it too, Marc!
January 5th, 2009 at 11:23 am
The demise of the alt-weeklies is a measure of their success in all of the ways that had nothing to do with their inception. They were usually started by cranks of one sort or another (mostly loveable if you didn’t work for them) and because of their overt eccentricities, arts/entertainment coverage and classifieds became valuable properties. The original owners could rarely pass the opportunity for a payday after the original inspired incarnation reached its zenith and the stuff that made them unique mattered less and less as each successive management squeezed them for green. (The Bay Guardian is still independent after four decades, but it’s been such a monotone for so long that I don’t pay attention anymore. That’s the danger of the founding crank NOT selling out. These things probably also have a natural life cycle.)
When the Voice started it was more like a bunch of semi-weird bloggers than whatever the hell it is today. Whatever that is, it’s worthless and, despite the persistence of a few leftovers like Hentoff, it has been close to worthless for a long time. I don’t generally follow NYC local stuff but when I’m there if I want a flavor of that I’ll pay for the Observer before I’ll soil my hands with the Voice. The Good News is that it’s easier and cheaper today for a bunch of misfits to launch a website than it was for Mailer, Dan Wolf, et al to start the Voice as a print operation, assuming they have a talented, entertaining circle of friends.
My assumption is that in its first years the Voice paid pittances and no sane investor would touch it. (SInce Norman Mailer was one of its investors, I feel comfortable with that judgment.) But it was great, innovative, etc. etc. The more its success could be measured in terms that an accountant might understand, the less it mattered to anyone who had ever really cared.
January 5th, 2009 at 11:38 am
I’d like to see the LA Times actually cover what’s going on in LA than spend their time covering other papers.
Say what you want about the Weekly but it’s the only major media source in LA outside of some talkradio that’s at least exposing the truth on the vast kleptocracy that runs Los Angeles. If the Times wasn’t so personally invested in the status quo and protecting the kleptocracy – and did some objective journalism – MAYBE some would read it.
Jill Stewart, Patrick McDonald and others at the Weekly are at least covering the destruction of Los Angeles by our elected officials, most of which is unknown by the average latte-sipping, bike path jogging Angeleno.
January 5th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Hentoff became a reactionary in his later years. He defended Clarence Thomas. In at least several instances, I remember him writing things that were false. I have no sympathy for him.
January 5th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
“the then-healthy revenues of the L.A. Weekly weren’t enough to subsidize what have to be punishing loan-service costs.”
Firstly, revenue won’t due for paying debt. You need profit for that, i.e. you’ve got to “service” loans with money left over after cutting those paychecks to Hentoff, Cooper, the printer and so on. If LAW’s profit were “healthy” it wouldn’t have to cut costs.
And Condi, if the New Times crew is so “mid-market” etc., why have they been able to buy and run so many papers?
You seem to know a bit of the inside dope on this, so maybe you can answer the big, fat question: Who IS capable of properly running the L.A. Weekly and what’s stopped them over lo these many years from doing so and/or starting and running a competing paper and/or Web site?
Any analysis that ignores that question is beside the point.
January 5th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Hey everybody, long time no post. Happy new year ’09. Nice to see this place has gotten pretty much back to normal after last fall’s, er… high-spiritedness.
It’s also nice to see some things just don’t change. I’d bet most of you will be especially impressed by Reg’s legion posts when you learn he types most of them from one of these.
Now if you want to discuss music, the world is in fact coming to an end and we are all doomed. Kids today are morons based on their musical taste, etc. etc., and get off of my lawn!
Nowway loooser! Katy Perry rulez!!!1!
January 5th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
I read blogs like the rest of them. But nobody can really tell me how investigative journalism will survive in the new model.
It won’t. The internet is actually something that Behavioral Economists will take up in due time. It has to do with the information being free. People seem to make more sound economic choices if they have relatively comparable choices. The Hershey kiss example applies. Give someone a choice between a truffle for 25 cents and a Hershey’s Kiss for 5 cents and most will pay the extra for the better product. Make the kiss free and more will choose the kiss even if you vastly lower the price of the truffle.
My point is that when you have so much “news” for free on the web many are likely to take what they get. But the idea that the best blogs (take one I read daily, The Huffington Post) don’t even remotely compare to the LA Times of 5 years ago. You will never find a 5 part investigation on King Drew or the conditions of our Seas on the Huffington Post. And if you did try and sell premium content like Salon did, consumers will quickly start reading another blog that is free.
What it comes down to is that this stage of capitalism has comodified everything to such a degree that the human race cannot accurately judge value anymore. Sure people will pay fuckloads for luxury cars, mcmanshions, or diamonds, but that reinforces my point: those items are for status not need.
We NEED good art. We need good literature. We need, really really really need good journalism for democracy to function. The situation is more profound and potentially more perilous than many of us are willing to admit. Part of that is also due to modern capitalism, you have to be a cheerleader of anything and everything NEW (especially technology) or you become a crank, archaic, an alarmist, or worst of all OLD. You can only have one Kunstler. If you are not a cheerleader of the new way, you will not get tenured at the Annenberg School of Communication. Capitalism has to constantly reinvent itself and in the process do away with many things that function A OK. Thus we actually have silly items like electric can openers.
Thus art and journalism, let alone knowledge as a whole has become another devalued commodity and it is ok to take whatever you get for free. Read whatever makes you feel right, whatever reinforces your opinion? Buy your knowledge instead of relying on editors that try and balance the needs of the community as a whole. This is all another shift away from community and towards the reinforcement of one’s own self and self interests. I can’t imagine the results will be anything but disastrous.
January 5th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
GM Hoakster, I strongly agree with both your posts.
Of course most of the readers of this blog will be dead in 10 years when fascism resurfaces to “meet the need” of a society shifted away from community and things that work.
Until then, stay healthy.
January 6th, 2009 at 2:08 am
How will investigative journalism survive the internet ?
Ask Josh Marshall who pushed the AG scandal, with the help of his readers, harder than any other news source and broke much of it. I’m certain the LA Times would never, at the very peak of its business model, have done any investigative journalism as significant and politically risky on the national level.
January 6th, 2009 at 2:12 am
The notion that hack, stagnant, establishment institutions like the LA Times have served “community” is bizarre. As for political retards who are always sniffing for the onset of “fascism”, ask the Japanese-Americans about the LA Times.
January 6th, 2009 at 3:56 am
The biggest barrier to investigative journalism in America isn’t that it’s too paltry or rare or suppressed, but that it fails to draw enough readers.
Unfortunately, the most likely cause of renewed appetite for muckraking would be more severe, sustained decline in our economy, geopolitics and public institutions.
On the whole, I much prefer to live among people who can’t be bothered to learn the details of how every single thing might give them cancer, etc. than to live in a time and place where people feel a strong need to keep one eye looking over their shoulder on a day-to-day basis.
Another relevant reality is that in many cases, readers feel justified in ignoring scandals and corruption out of ideological convenience.
A solid 30 percent of Americans don’t really care whether or not Bush lied about WMD, private contractors are up to their ears in a pigs trough of war profiteering and our own constitution has been ignored. To them, “investigating” the war is just an assualt on their personal belief system. They don’t want it and actively avoid it.
January 6th, 2009 at 8:54 am
A solid 40 percent of Americans don’t really trust journalists to tell them the truth.
Journalists over the years in general have proven themselves to be biased, lacking objectivity, political and untrustworthy to report the news accurately. Their popularity among the people lies somewhere below Bush’s.
This is the bigger reason I think the internet is used to gather the news. You will get news reporting you won’t find in most newspapers, and you can get more than one persons view of those that are.
The internet is the most competitive and democratic media to get the complete story.
January 6th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Jim – talking about “the internet” is like talking about “the printing press.”
The issue (leaving aside your ridiculous smearing of journalists with a broad brush) is what the models of new journalism might be. “The internet” can’t produce news without journalists – and most of them are going to have to be professional and paid. I think that the concerns about the decline of local newspapers (which won’t disappear so much as be transformed IMHO) are valid. What I take issue with is the assumption that new models supporting diverse journalistic projects that are financially viable won’t develop on the internet and that, after a painful transition (creative destruction ?) we aren’t going to be better off. Journalists aren’t the enemy – frankly the corporate publishing model hasn’t served journalists well and is the primary reason for most of the problems attributed to “journalists.”
The internet is weakening the corporate publishing model (and it’s really a fluke in the context of late capitalism that the intenet is, for all intents and purposes, “free” – thanks, of course, to “big government” and those liberal universities.) And it’s providing space for folks to counter it. But the best information on the internet is coming from folks who are professional journalists, like Josh Marshall’s TPM and bloggers who are paid, like Ezra Klein. The blunderbuss rightwing critique of “journalists” is mostly hogwash.
January 6th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Sergio. I am not implying that National Socialism is on the horizon.
This is how technophiles respond to my kind of argument. We are ALWAYS moving in the right direction. EVERYTHING ALWAYS will be ok if we just trust that the net will fix things. Why are these changes immune from criticism?
It really shows how unthinking humanity can be in regards to technology. We have a duty to try and understand technology, the good and bad. We cannot just blindly allow these transformations to occur without due criticism.
January 6th, 2009 at 11:36 am
The internet is not weakening any corporate models. When the dust clears the net will be under corporate control. Who is going to advertise on these blogs and thus support this revolution? Corporate America. The net is actually far more commercialized than traditional publishing. But those under the spell of the jibber jabber coming out of the folks at Wired will buy into the hype. The lines are far more blurred on the net and it is far more difficult to distinguish between news, entertainment, or corporate propaganda.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
GMH: Pay close attention to where you’re typing. Look up to your left, then click on the Paypal button, and smile, you’ve just subverted “corporate” journalism.
The problem with conventional journalism is that it isn’t “commercialized” enough — thus the massive layoffs at newspapers and magazines from LAW to LAT to public radio. A little more commercialization would have saved those jobs. A lot more would generate the cash to fund investigative work.
Instead, the dominant model is to subsidize journalism via advertising and/or corporate largesse, perpetuating the myth that reporting, writing and editing are easy enough tasks not really worth paying for.
The Internet’s greater commercialization, i.e. the ability for pretty much anyone to create a blog and ask readers to pay up directly to read it, is exactly what is empowering the most talented journalists.
Along with cutting out the middleman, leaving more for the journalist herself, the new model also redefines success by taking the guesswork out of who’s reading what. Newspapers have lived and died by their ability to draw readers, now journalists will.
Once we can accurately measure what people are actually reading, realtime, we can get rid of the stuff people are ignoring, further empowering the more talented, effective journalists.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Bunkerbuster. As I have stated above, it is a matter of psychology. I never see a possibility of people paying for information. Radiohead tried this with the new album and it did not turn out all that well. Salon failed. When newspapers tried to create exclusivity they fail. People just move to another site that is free.
The problem with conventional print is profit margin. 10% let along 20% is not enough of a margin for a public company on the NYSE. Nor are many rich folks cool with that. Nor have papers met the necessary growth projections needed to maintain a rising stock price. Thus papers simply do not seem to fit into the economic system. They fit into the older model where a local family owns the paper. The decentralized brand of capitalism is OVER. Dead and gone and will never come back.
The net fits into the global epoch that we have moved into. But do not for a minute think that it can sustain expensive investigative journalism. The public NO LONGER has a sense of the value of this product and thus is willing to take what they get for free and spend money on video games or just try and cover rent.
Again, the promises of the net are nothing more than hype like everything else on the net. Most sites are trading a 2, 3, 4, 5 times their value. The net is driven purely by speculation and the idea that the revolution is coming. The metrics of online impressions are totally suspect as well. The net is a big, giant, terrible bubble. People pay to have access to the net and maybe to buy something on Amazon that they cannot easily find in a store, but they will not pay for news.
January 6th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
“We are ALWAYS moving in the right direction.”
No, but we are always, or at least periodically, moving. Lamenting the fact doesn’t put things “right” anymore than mindlessly celebrating technology. But folks like Josh Marshall – and Marc with his “Off the Bus” project – ARE moving in the right direction and old institutions like the LA Times, that haven’t really served their readers and communities very well over the decades if the truth be known, so much as been PR machines for elites, are going to wither if not die unless they transform themselves. Given the ownership model of something like the LA Times, that’s very unlikely.
More than anything, I see the internet giving rise to some non-corporate journalism models (non-profits, reader supported and “Lone Ranger” IF Stonish enterprises) that would have been much harder to sustain in print. Also, the interactive aspect – and the efforts of amateur watchdogs like the early Atrios – keeps the whole landscape more honest. This absolute despair at what’s happening to newspapers – most of which would have happened WITHOUT the internet – is pointless. The existence of the internet should be seen as an opportunity for more and better journalism far more than a reason for predicting the demise of journalism. The truth is that traditional models for journalism have been long on the skids – outside of New York even the largest towns weren’t supporting more than one newspaper and most of those were turning into shells of what nostalgics liked to remember.
It’s useful to remember that in the run-up to the Iraq war the best reporting was done by a news service that most “sophisticates” had never heard of – then Knight-Ridder, now McCaltchey. It’s the national news service for a conglomeration of smaller city papers owned by the parent company. The LA Times, the WaPO, the Chicago Tribune and the NYTimes didn’t do shit in their pre-Iraq reporting compared to a couple of obscure Knight-Ridder reporters. McClatchey stock is currently in the toilet, co-incidental to their debt to buy Knight -Ridder, so there’s no perfect tale here. Just a reminder that the journalistic models of the big-city papers are as prone to fail miserably AS JOURNALISM when the chips are down as any other.
My own fantasy projection – If I were going to develop a new model for news it would be something on the order of a web-based conglomerate of smaller citiy news operations that focused on a combination of entertaining and locally-oriented “good government” journalism, with lots of opportunities for reader input, combined with a national-international bureau that didn’t try to compete directly with the major news services but supplemented them with innovative, off-beat reporting. Maybe at least initially incorporate a free print visibility piece in each locale to grab max eyeballs and advertising. My bet is that a George Soros type with a big bankroll in front and a talented crew could pull some such scheme off and make it more sustainable than than that Zell mess or the post-KnightRidder McClatchey. The best model for an operation like this would be to incorporate as a public trust that attempted to be profitable over time and pay professionals, but not to make the kind of profit that publicly traded companies demand.
Don’t mourn…innovate!
January 6th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
“The net is far more commercialized than traditional publishing”
That’s why any crank can have a blog and, with a bit of creativity and a bit of luck, reach far more people than he could dream of by standing on a corner handing out xeroxed leaflets. Josh Marshall graduated from blogging at Starbucks to running an important source of news and commentary by simple perserverance and talent. Go to some amateur operation like DCWatch, which completely fucked with a mayoral election, or other “watchdog” sites in various cities and tell me that they could succeed with as much impact under a “traditional publishing” model before the internet.
January 6th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
One more point – operations like American Prospect, Washington Monthly, The Nation and, yes the cranks and crazies at National Review have much more political impact and far wider readership since they’ve become web-based in addition to their weekly or monthly product. “Political Animal” has given the shoe-string, relatively obscure Washington Monthly a broader audience for it’s longer form journalism and an immediacy that editor Glastris and his predecessors couldn’t have dreamed of prior to the web. I also believe that most of these magazines have actually improved at least a bit in content because they aren’t as geared to an insider audience as they once were.
January 6th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
The Internet is a gift that keeps on giving, and not just by empowering the positive voices in society. It’s even more salutary as a kind of honey-trap for permanently exposing bigots, paranoids and the very worst of demagogues.
We owe a huge debt to Pajamas Media and fellow wingnutosphere legions for helping create and maintain the new center-left majority in America.
Back when a half-dozen talkradio clowns were the dominant channels for shitting the more outré RNC talking points into the mainstream media tent by osmosis, there were at least some leaks in the feedback loop of ignorance and irrationality, given that the talkradio hosts tended to respond, even if only selectively, to what was reported in the mainstream media.
As such, there was a path for using “conservative” rhetoric to persuade swing voters and, even, perhaps, moderate the views of some liberals.
Thanks to the ease with which wingnuts can now fully expose and promote their paranoia and insatiable resentments online, the feedback loop within the rightwing noise machine is all positive, all the time, with any former openings to reality sealed off.
The wingnutosphere now responds only to its own hallucinations, locking the American right into an irrational conversation with itself, a perpetually collapsing black hole of reason where no light may enter or escape. Almost all these Web sites exist to push committed conservatives toward the far-right fringe, not to lure wavering liberals over to mainstream conservatism.
Nowhere is this pattern clearer than in the wingnutosphere’s role in helping elect Barack Obama. The Republican M.O. has always been to keep the slimy stuff at arm’s length and to let the candidate take the high road, e.g. let Rush Limbaugh play “Magic Negro” tunes and rant about Obama the communist Muslim terrorist, while McCain himself need only refer in oblique, heavily coded language to the smears.
That didn’t work this time because so much of the right was consumed with sending around chain e-mails to their centrist friends, telling them that, for sure, Obama is the anti-Christ with secret connections to Muslim terrorists and a plot to take over America and soil every white virgin. By volume alone, this was crowding out more sensible conservative critiques of Obama and, in effect, defining the conservative position.
The bigger Obama’s lead in polls became, the higher this bonfire of strawmen raged. It has got to be one of the sweetest ironies in all politics that what the wingnuts succeeded in doing by sheer volume and redundant consistency was “lowering” the expectations of swing voters for Obama. Then, whenever the candidate debated McCain, or responded to events like the credit meltdown or Russia’s Georgian misadventure, reality totally obliterated the wingnut’s credibility and, with it, the arguments of even mainstream conservatives.
Granted, all the while the conservative side was battling a massive headwind of reality on the collapsing financial system and two unwon wars in the Middle East. But they’ve faced down and won in that kind of environment before: things were really not at all peachy in 2004 when Bush stomped Kerry by, in no small part, relying on talkradio to hound Kerry’s image with all manner of myths about clothing choices, “inventing” the Internet and, lest we forget, faking injuries in Vietnam. The key is that Bush was able to use the Swift Boating stuff without that becoming the central theme of his campaign, leaving space to win over swing voters likely to be offended by the smear.
January 6th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Good piece on the history of newspapers and the internet, especially the latter half:
http://www.slate.com/id/2207912/
January 6th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Um, the “inventing the Internet” stuff is about Gore, of course, in 2000, not Kerry in 2004.
January 6th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
I am not really concerned about opinion journals like the Nation or the Prospect. Blogs are all opinion.
Again. We sometimes need to be handed things that we do not want. We need a degree of paternalism. Daily’s and Weekly’s had the function because they had they had to balance the needs of a diverse readership.
This is NOT THE CASE with blogs. Blogs try to appeal to niche audiences. They can do this because the can draw readers from all over the world.
I am involved in online marketing and I understand most online metrics to be nothing short of bullshit. Even with sites like Facebook. People are spending less and less time on one site. This is not like reading the daily paper over breakfast and coming onto a story that you would not seek out like pollution in a neighboring community or some sort of unsexy news.
Blogs rely on sensationalism to draw in readers. Sure daily’s did this as well but the net does not have the code of professionalism and thus can push the boundaries. The net is real time and thus the potential for nefarious information being reported as fact is a bigger reality than ever before.
January 6th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Bunkerbuster. I think we are very far from declaring a “center-left” majority in America and I do not even know what the “left” even means anymore. I am not concerned with bloggers building a tepid “progressive” majority. I am more interested in reading important investigative journalism that can lead to real changes.
January 6th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
“most online metrics to be nothing short of bullshit.”
Whereas, say, the Bay Guardian’s or the L.A. Times “circulation” figures are, what, solid gold?
Whatever shortcomings online metrics might have, they are 1,000 percent better than any tools available for measuring offline newspaper readership.
January 6th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
I don’t buy the “paternalism” argument. Not going to go into a long critique, but I think that’s the key to disagreements.
January 6th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
“I am more interested in reading important investigative journalism that can lead to real changes.”
And the dailies did that with any consistency ? Hell, IF Stone did more of that than any major daily in his era and he was just one guy with a postage meter.
January 8th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
no country can sit back and do nothing when its getting rockets lobbed across its border. Undoubtedly true.
Actually, considering three deaths from rockets in seven years, it’s undoubtedly false. But if Israel did want to do something to curtail rocket fire, it could have stopped starving the people of Gaza.
One thing the toxic Israel haters …
A great way to start a dialog and a sure sign that you’re a rational thinker capable of unbiased analysis.
January 8th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Um, the “inventing the Internet” stuff is about Gore, of course, in 2000, not Kerry in 2004.
The media, with the collusion of Republicans (yes, that’s the right order), created a myth of “Gore the liar” based on his claims that he created the internet, worked on a farm, and was the inspiration for the character in Love Story. They didn’t let the fact that all three are true get in their way.
March 5th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Blogs like this is waht we blog addicts are looking for, will visit often.