Peter Krupa

Investigative journalism has never been a money-maker for newspapers. It’s good for democracy, it makes newspapers into power brokers, and it occasionally sets the national conversation, but let’s be honest, front-page stories about Tiger Woods’ hook-ups sell way more papers than 6,000-word droners about health-care lobbyists.

Newspapers were able to produce expensive, time-consuming investigative journalism because they had display and classified advertising monopolies in their markets. Now that they no longer have those monopolies and the extra cash that comes with them, subsidies for non-productive content (investigative journalism included) have been cut. As a consequence, journalists are out of work, Democracy is weaker, blah, blah blah, etc.

Or is it?

The uncommented truth of this situation is that having a lock on an advertising market gives one a huge chunk of extra change to play with. Where is that chunk now?

With Google, of course. Google controls something like three-quarters of the U.S. online advertising market. That’s about as good as any single big-city newspaper ever got. Better, because it’s for the whole country.

Of course, Google isn’t spending its extra folding money on investigative journalism, like newspapers did. Instead, it’s spending it on tech innovation, generally by ordering its employees to spend 20% of their work hours tinkering, more specifically by providing the public with awesome free products like Google Docs, YouTube, Gmail, Google Analytics, Blogger, Google Books, Google Translator, you get the idea.

You could argue, therefore, that the economic rent that comes from dominating an ad market is still being used to promote democracy, by making it extremely cheap for millions of individuals to get online and share information themselves.

This is great. Yay democracy. But it’s also putting a lot of people out of work. And I’m too old to go back and learn Python.

Dear Scientifically-Challenged Journalists Of The World:

Please stop writing that fuel cell devices are an energy source. They are not. They do not generate energy. They need input from a conventional energy source to operate, be it natural gas, electricity produced by coal-fueled power plants, or magical pixie gas from your backyard compost pile. They may be damned efficient, and that’s great, but they’re basically fancy rechargeable batteries.

Thank you.

It’s not like I needed anything else to further dash my hopes about the future, but this Atlantic article added some pretty significant fuel to the house fire. Basically, we’re screwed for a generation, although I’m lucky enough to be less screwed than recent graduates, Rust Belt families, and minorities.

Still, I get the additional fun of belonging to a profession that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. If I were to return to the States to look for a job, I’d be competing with hundreds of thousands of laid off journalists with similar or greater experience than I have. I’d probably be reduced to taking an unpaid internship that only hints coyly at the possibility of full-time employment, all the while ruthlessly exploiting the vulnerable.

Meanwhile, I’d feed my family with food stamps.

As those are pretty much my options, I’m throwing a Hail Mary and starting a news Web site. Lat/Am Daily covers what happens in Latin America, with lots of links and a wee bit of commentary. It’s silly to think I can cover an entire continent, I know, but hopefully I’ll be able to whittle the site down to a poignant nub that gets some traffic.

There is almost no chance I will ever be able to make a living off of this, but it’s more fun than not making a living for somebody else. In the meantime, maybe I’ll pick up some useful skills.

Oh, and I’m looking for interns. No pay, but it’ll look great on your résumé.

“We Are the World” remake: Helping Haiti? Absolutely. I bet a lot of Haitians breathed a sigh of relief on February 2 and said to themselves, “Boy, I feel a lot less hungry and a lot more housed now that a bunch of famous musicians got together and sang for 14 hours. All I need now is my very own pony!”

Or here’s an idea! Rather than waiting for a few dollars to trickle down thanks to this once-in-a-lifetime marketing opportunity, why don’t all you bumble-fuck celebrities just sell a couple of your houses and donate the goddamn cash to the Red Cross?

And finally, Jeff Bridges? Really? Like, the Jeff Bridges who’s up for an Oscar this year for his role as a musician, but has never, like, you know, done anything else musical in his life? You people are shameless.

I just stumbled across The Faster Times, which bids itself as “A new type of newspaper for a new type of world.” It was launched in June of last year. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it’s always nice to see people starting new things. All media is moving onto the Internet sooner or later, and the sooner that process is complete, the sooner I might actually have some sort of career ahead of me.

On the other hand, is this really a new thing? Looking at the “About us” page, I see the same line-up of under-employed New York City freelancers one would probably rub elbows with at a Media Bistro party in Midtown. For some reason this gives me the creeps.

On the homepage, they’ve got links to articles about nuclear proliferation, the stock market, baby hair-cutting myths, and an all-white basketball league. Click through and the articles are short summaries with links to other news or documents, or longer commentary pieces.

In other words, The Faster Times is basically a blog about, well, everything.

That’s OK, I guess. But it certainly isn’t as revolutionary as their manifesto on the “About us” page leads one to believe (manifestos pretty much always disappoint, don’t they?). Also, I continue to insist that in order to be successful in Internet media, you need a theme, or a motif. Dare I say a niche?

Slate is contrarian: “You thought it was this way? It’s actually the opposite!” BoingBoing is totally random, but they bring it together with short, easily-skimable posts and the slogan “A directory of wonderful things.” Gawker has an Economist-grade fanaticism about consistent editorial voice. TalkingPointsMemo has a very well-defined audience.

What’s The Faster Times’ motif? The New Newspaper? I’m not feeling it.

Rule Number One of tech journalism: Always find the iPhone angle.

In case you missed it, the New York Times has announced it will begin charging for content next year. From the press release:

The new approach, referred to as the metered model, will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number. This will enable NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream and preserve its robust advertising business. It will also provide the necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web.

This might work. On the other hand, I continue to insist that the reason online paywalls like those used by The Economist and the Wall Street Journal work is because they are protecting niche content that someone really, really needs. (Also: corporate subscriptions.) Do you really, really need another trend story about kids and the Internet?

Me neither.

Interesting bit in the New Yorker on covering earthquakes:

Upon repetition, covering earthquakes gradually became less pure. The reason is that as a newspaper correspondent, at least, one became schooled in the editor-feeding subgenres of earthquake coverage. These subgenre stories passed like months on a calendar across the twelve days that generally constitutes the entire attention span of editors, broadcast producers, and their audiences. Subgenre pearls which one can anticipate from Haiti but about which one should perhaps not be overly cynical include: The Late Miracle, approximately on day five, in which an improbable survivor is dug out by heroic search teams from a foreign country; The Interpretation of Meaning, a story to be filed on Sundays in Christian cultures and Fridays in Muslim ones, chronicling the efforts of religious leaders to explain God’s will in this instance (I recall sitting, riveted, on a press platform in Tehran, listening to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani deliver a remarkable Friday sermon about science and Allah); and Heading to the Exits, in which the laundry-less journalist forecasts a slow recovery complicated by political fallout and imperfect relief efforts, while implying that he/she will return over the ensuing months to chronicle the full course of the recovery.

Newspapers reduce most of the news to a series of formulas. They turn it into a commodity that can be easily refined, shipped and stored: The disaster, the holiday travel, the underdog, the heinous criminal, the little-guy victim, the trend, the weather. Maybe it makes their readers feel safer. Eyes glaze over, turn the page, just another disaster.

Every once in awhile I come across a piece that precisely puts its finger on something I’ve been circling and gesturing toward for years. Such a piece is Cory Doctorow’s on the implications of “Close Enough for Rock ‘n Roll” and the Internet:

… rock ‘n’ roll is cheap, experimental and fluid, and devotes most of its energy into the production of music. Orchestral music is expensive, formal and majestic, but tithes a large portion of its effort to coordination and overheads and maintenance.

If the Internet has a motif, it is rock ‘n’ roll’s Protestant Reformation thrashing against the orchestral One Church. Rock ‘n’ roll gets lots of wee kirks built in every hill and dale in which parishioners can find religion in their own ways; choral music erects majestic cathedrals that humble and amaze, but take three generations of laborers to build.

He goes on to apply this framework to media businesses:

This is the pattern: doing something x percent as well with less-than-x percent of the resources. A blog may be 10 percent as good at covering the local news as the old, local paper was, but it costs less than 1 percent of what that old local paper cost to put out. A home recording studio and self-promotion may get your album into 30 percent as many hands, but it does so at five percent of what it costs a record label to put out the same recording.

And that, more than anything I’ve read previously, describes the future of media: Messy, fragmented, rarely-perfect, always interesting and exhilarating and new, always taking risks. In short, we’re on the cusp of something wonderful.

Glee’s writers must have at some point mortgaged their souls to Satan. There is no other way to explain their ability to combine so many dark, cutting, truly funny jokes with the sweet earnestness of “Up With People.”

Seriously, how in the world, in this day and age, can you make a running joke about a deaf show choir (Ha! Get it? They’re deaf! And in a choir!) turn into a tearjerker of a lesson on tolerance that actually fucking works?

Thank goodness Fox has green-lighted season two. I hope that deal with Satan is still in effect.