"I frickin hate gum" by Dave77459 (CC-BY-NC-SA)

When I first heard the kerfuffle about the “Ground Zero Mosque,” I figured it would blow right over. Lower Manhattan is a big place, and there are plenty of establishments within a half dozen stone’s throws from Ground Zero. But American intolerance for Islam always does seem to sneak up on me. The story just keeps grabbing headlines as more and more politicians pipe up about it, including Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama, who outlined support for freedom of religion in development. The Politico’s Roger Simon even typed up a piece diagnosing Obama’s freedom of religion principle-based reaction as a sign that Obama just doesn’t get it. His assertion that Obama might “pull a Palin” and bow out before the end of the term was tongue-completely-in-cheek, Simon’s main accusation was serious:

The problem for Obama is that he appears to have taken seriously all the “change” stuff he promised during his campaign. And he has been unable to make the transition from candidate to president

What a cynical point! That voters who elected a “hope and change” president who promised to stand on principles won’t actually support him if he does it? It’s worth noting that Democrats could lose ground in 2010 without their 2008 voters actively opposing them; they can lose just by failing to bring in the huge level of less engaged citizens they depended on in their last victory. It doesn’t surprise me to see people making Roger Simon’s calculation though, even though my diagnosis would point in the opposite direction. When you have a candidate who promises to change the game, he can be judged both by how the game is played and by how others would like it to be played. Maybe this makes it twice as hard for Obama. Until he actually changes the game, the old rules still apply, and I agree Obama has not been very effective in changing the game. (Perhaps it’s not surprising that Obama is judged by the standard Capitol Hill rulebook, because as the NYT noted this week, he has framed himself as a president defined by legislative success or failure.)

Democrats are going to have a hard time of it this November, though I can’t speculate on 2012 yet. In 2008, they rode a surge of grassroots desperation for change and won big, even in districts not traditionally Democrat. In 2010 they would need at least as much effort to hang on to what they achieved, and I don’t see the grassroots organizational structure coming together. Sure, many progressives are concerned about what Republican gains would mean, but from the perspective of those waiting for a change in the game, the Democrats have done little to show they’re worth the “change” votes, and that cuts enthusiasm right out from under a public. From Obama’s investment bank-infused economic advisory team to the continuation of defense secretary Robert Gates’s tenure to a health care plan that owed a lot to the Republican alternatives offered in the 90′s to the failure to close Guantanamo and end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Obama has articulated few strong principles that illustrate he can bring the change people got enthusiastic about in 2008.

So it’s not surprising to see commentary where Obama is judged by the rules of the game he promised to instate. On the Daily Beast, Peter Beinart calls out the Democrats for lack of balls, asking:

After all, what did Obama promise liberals when he ran against Hillary Clinton? He promised that if he won, Democrats would no longer consult polls to decide what they believed.

The Democrats put themselves in a tough position, to be judged according to two standards at once. There’s no way to be positively judged from both Simon’s and Beinart’s perspective. Elections from 2006-2008 have been about Democrats, from Pelosi to Obama, promising that with a few more legislative seats they could bring real change and then not delivering after getting a few more seats. Democrats have huge majorities in the House and Senate and don’t have a strong legislative program record. It’s true Republican opposition and cohesion have increased with each gain the Democrats made, but at some point voter confidence that another Democratic seat is going to make the difference will falter. 2010 will see the same Democratic promises from the last two election years, but I don’t see it as enough to increase voter enthusiasm yet again this year.

What troubles me about the model we are operating under is that the economy is not healthy without growth. In fact, as Hayes notes, even slow growth counts as unhealthy:

right now we face a joblessness crisis that threatens to pitch us into a long, ugly period of low growth, the kind of lost decade that will cause tremendous misery, degrade the nation’s human capital, undermine an entire cohort of young workers for years and blow a hole in the government’s bank sheet.

Now if you ask the question abstractly, “can an economy grow forever?” I don’t think it is possible to answer in the positive. It is the opposite of sustainable, and this fact is completely ignored, even as people are worried about how the environment can support so many billions of people. Nowhere in the article, or in the Democrats’ ideal platform as this liberal commentator imagines it, is there room for sustainability, even as the concept is in vogue in the hearts of those on the Left. (It only shows up in policy as vague suggestions to devote more resources to developing “green energy” from wind, solar, etc.)

Growth is the primary metric for evaluating the economy, far more important than the fluctuations of the Dow. This is because the money supply comes as the principal of a loan from the Federal Reserve. That principal must be paid back with interest, so in order to achieve economic health, the system must grow faster than the interest rate on the loans. If it grows too slowly, some people are able to pay back their loans, and others fall under the bus. I think this is the mechanism that creates an unsustainable economy.

I think that Democrats will have a lot more trouble motivating their “base” to get out to the polls this November and in 2012 than they had in 2008, when they could run on a platform of “Change.” Now that they’ve been in power, it’s becoming clear that their economic strategy is really just a smidge different than the people they replaced, as critics of the Summers/Geithner team have been saying all along. Most people on the Left, like Christopher Hayes here, think the Democrats can be successful if only they execute the growth strategy better then the Republicans, who depended on tax cuts for the rich as their economic driver. I agree with Hayes that succumbing to anti-deficit pressure on stimulus spending would hurt Democrats’ chances to propel growth, but I wish they had a 50-year plan on the table instead, because then they would be forced to think about long-term sustainability.

Their answers to a question about what the governor’s role in climate change left me wondering: Several candidates’ main response to the global warming issue was in support of “energy independence” for the U.S. A couple candidates, including Bill Sizemore, announced disbelief  in global warming altogether, and a couple others stated they didn’t believe that it was human-caused. Leading Republican candidate Chris Dudley said he wasn’t sure of the cause, but jumped straight to energy independence. William Ames Cartwright emphasized that “harassing” big government’s environmental regulations main affect is to restrict business and kill jobs. If he were elected governor, he would “help” the loggers and the fishermen.

And to cap it off, Bill Sizemore used his 30-sec rebuttal at the end of the round to say he believed that ”if we lose our freedoms in this country, it’s going to be because of the environmental movement. The environmental movement is a tool that the government uses to actually increase its power and its control over the economy.”

I wonder if there isn’t room in the Oregon Republican party for somebody who wants to preserve Oregon’s environment and recognizes that environmental regulation isn’t accomplished very well by businesses sharing a resource, one who crafts policy in light of the tragedy of the commons effect. Why isn’t there somebody on the Republican side who can challenge the Democrats to refine Oregon’s vision of a sustainable future? Sustainability was a word left out of the KATU debate. I would think that in Oregon, a republican who treats sustainability as a goal would be welcome. Are the Republicans willing to leave all the voters interested in sustainable economics and environmental practices to the Democrats?

Theoretically competition would encourage private insurers to reduce their profit margins (to spend more of their premiums on health care coverage), but you have to be careful to analyze why their profit margins are around 20%… and what mechanisms of competition you would introduce with a “public option”… Insurance companies try to assure those profits now by recission and cherrypicking customers to avoid those with highest risk and by preventing those who buy insurance independently from buying into group pools. (There’s also the issue of insurance companies getting huge discounts on medical bills from hospitals– read this for one account of how they game the system: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/134353/fainting_in_this_country_can_carry_a_$10,000_price_tag/ )

For example, the way the “public option” is set up in some of the bills right now, people who get insurance through their employer would not be able to choose it, and in fact many uninsured people wouldn’t be able to choose it either. Here’s a flowchart explaining who would be eligible: http://www.donkeylicious.com/2009/08/flowchart.html

The effects of the changes the insurance industry will be able to force into the bill may make it so that the only people eligible for the public option are generally “high risk” customers, while the mandate in the bill that everybody must buy insurance forces most of the uninsured with low risk (generally young people) to buy private insurance that they are unlikely to use fully. The effect of a public option that gets only the most expensive customers will be to create huge cost overruns on the public side and greater profits on the private side. Then the private guys can say “look! the government can’t run health care! see what we’ve been saying?!?!?!” when the reality is that the program was just set up to fail.

Another change in regulation that has been proposed by some is to allow people to buy insurance across state lines to get a better deal. This seems like it would increase competition, but consider: a company currently offering insurance in many states could then offer it only in states with the weakest consumer protection laws, so the policy may be cheaper, but there may be changes that affect the available quality.

Another element is that medical insurance companies are exempt from federal antitrust laws (Peter DiFazio is trying to change this, but not getting listened to.) Only this industry and professional baseball are exempted. This exemption exists despite evidence of real collusion between the companies to establish this 20% profit margin. This is another factor to consider when trying to analyze the effects of the “free market” in health care, because idealized free market models rely on competition, not collusion.

So some reforms may introduce competition, but you have to be careful to look at what the competitive mechanism is and what might undermine the effect. You have to analyze how the “free market” would be competitive or uncompetitive in this instance… whether it would actually be a free market or not, in effect. I would argue that health care is not a very free market, and that is the reason behind the 20% profit margins. Reforms that further cartelize the industry would not be effective, but reforms that introduce real meaningful competition might reduce that 20% figure and improve quality. But the proposed legislation doesn’t exactly address the real mechanisms of why it is uncompetitive, and the “public option” as figured, doesn’t do a very good job of competing on a “free market model”, because few people can actually choose it.

So while it may “seem” like a “free market” could manage this system most efficiently, you have to look at why the current system is so inefficient and decide whether it is “free” or not, and then look at proposed reforms to see what the actual effects will be. They cannot be generalized to “increasing regulation” as a single linear variable, and their effects will not be something as simple as “drives prices up.”

Eric Odom, founder of American Liberty Alliance (ALA), the group that launched and organized the tea party movement across the country, announced Friday what he calls a movement-minded news portal and his answer to the the Huffington Post.
Read more at Dawn Teo’s blog on the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dawn-teo/tea-party-founder-announc_b_300347.html

Essentially, Odom feels that the Huffington Post displays a liberal bias and performs a role as a one-stop aggregator of news content for liberal-minded consumption. He says,

“I mean, I despise a lot of what is written at Huffington Post. But the reality is… they’re good at it. They cover very wide ranges of topics and they cover them well. On our side you need to visit a good ten sites in the morning to get the full web digest. On their side you just go to Huffington Post and you know about everything that’s happening.”

Teo takes exception to his assertion, citing aHuffPo’s open editorial policy, where bloggers may post whatever content they like, as long as it is accurate. But, what if we assume that Odom is right, that this process, or even the self-selection of bloggers who apply to post under the Huffington Post masthead, does introduce a liberal bias to the content? Does this undermine HuffPo’s credibility, or would creating an outlet emphasizing opposing viewpoints be the proper response?

I’ll get back to this question in a minute.

Transparency vs. Objectivity

I have been thinking about transparency vs. objectivity in recent months, after reading two articles:
Putting Man Before Decartes by John Lukacs and Transparency is the New Objectivity by David Weinberger

They both describe a shift in the value of the role of a publishing journalist (for example), from an objective mediator of news content to a reliable curator. The consumer of news then takes up the responsibility for arbitration, the decisions about which facts are true and which arguments are persuasive after evaluating multiple perspectives. Lukacs and Weinberger claim that transparency rather than objectivity represents a more authentic role in what Weinberger calls the “ecology of knowledge.” The traditional assumption of objectivity, he feels, is an aspiration that is impossible to truly achieve.

Claims of objectivity are always open to question. They are often refuted, so when you accept a source’s evaluation, you still must cite the evidence that underlies the argument. This means that an objectivity claim must be evaluated by the reader in any case, so it may be better to drop the pretense and leave it up to the reader to decide in the first place. Weinberger suggests that “transparency” is an alternative goal that replaces some of the function of objectivity, recognizing that the perspective offered by a blogger or journalist no longer can be a “stopping point for knowledge.” Instead, journalists must build their credibility on transparency, which exists where a reader “can literally see the connections between the final draft’s claims and the ideas that informed it.” The reader can follow the logic and assess the validity of the conclusion. It isn’t necessary to rely on a claim of objectivity to believe. Over time, credible sources establish their reliability; you become familiar with their premises, and maybe even their biases. But they don’t establish objectivity, and they don’t need to, because their goal in a linked knowledge system is not to establish stopping points.

Understanding

Instead of attempting to be objective, Lukacs suggests that a historian could aim for a different goal, understanding. He says, “The ideal of objectivity is the antiseptic separation of the knower from the known. Understanding involves an approach to bring the two closer” and adds, “All knowledge is personal.” A reader’s goal in the pursuit of knowledge is to bring it closer to oneself. When reading news of distant events, the account of an observer who promises objectivity and delivers a story “balanced” with quotes from a couple opposing perspectives fails to make the best understanding of the issues at hand possible for the reader. Side A says, “…” Side B says, “…” End of story? This type of journalism is a stopping point.

There are dangers to pursuing “objectivity” by “balance.” J. Bradford DeLong posts an example about Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald. He cites Michael Massing, writing for the New York Review of Books, who with one hand praises Greenwald’s abandonment of “balance” in his columns and with the other criticises the “polemical excesses,” which prevent Greenwald from coming up with a practical argument. But it is precisely the fact that Greenwald holds to strong principles without equivocation that allows his readers to get something of value from his arguments. It may be that a politician could legitimately believe that there are some “practical considerations” that justify a program of interrogation-by-torture in some instances, but it is not Glenn Greenwald’s role to dilute his every article with that concession. A reader can see through his posts to the principles he holds, and when readers feels there is an exception to one of those principles, they can add the perspectives of others justifying the exception to their understanding. As DeLong notes, Massing fails to reference the “persuasive” arguments against Greenwald anyway. This is one of the “stop sign” moves that doesn’t work in the ecology of linked information. It is a claim of objectivity, that (I think) fails to counter Greenwald’s transparency.

Transparency does not undermine the authority of a source; it may actually enhance credibility. Furthermore, lack of transparency can undermine a claim of authority. If Massing had linked to the President’s supporters who had persuasively countered Greenwald, his assertion could be upheld.

Curation

I see the role of a news aggregator, such as the Huffington Post and Eric Odom’s proposed right-wing news portal, as a curator of content. These sites organize and present a particular take on the relevant news and commentary of the day. Odom notes that the Huffington post has become a very successful news curator for people sharing a liberal perspective, meaning that liberal readers go there and get a personally satisfying dose of news content. He believes that HuffPo’s curation leans toward perspectives that embody a particular bias, and he wants to counter it with an alternative of his own that leans in another direction. It looks like he is accepting that a transparently partisan curator is a necessary player in the news ecology, that transparency supersedes objectivity.

The important point here to me is that HuffPo’s curation of content has created a one-stop-shop of value for liberal news readers. Curation of content is one of the primary roles of a publishing Web citizen. In his presentation at the 2009 Open Education Conference in Vancouver BC, Gardner Campbell identifies it among three “recursive practices” that students engage in on the Internet. I think they can be adapted to how any web-publishing individual behaves. Each of the three are critical to how information spreads through the “knowledge ecology” of the modern world, and the Huffington Post embodies each. The first role is “Narrating,” being willing to think aloud, telling the story of the process of learning. Curating is the second, meaning “arranging… stuff for yourself and people who come to see it.” The third is Sharing. About Sharing, Jon Mott says, “Meaning happens when the two people connect.” I think Lukacs’ concept “understanding”, which is personal could be substituted for “meaning.” The sharing of content connects people and builds understanding. The Huffington Post is a place for narrating (blogs), curation (organized links to news stories and reporting) and sharing (comments and social networking features). It may be because of its fulfillment of these three roles that it has grown to be such a popular location in the news space.

Danger

There is a potential danger embedded in a news ecology where individual readers rely on the perspectives served up by a curator that does not aim for objectivity. That is the possibility that reading only perspectives that arise from one’s chosen premises could lead readers into an echo chamber that would be dominated by “groupthink.” Groupthink is ‘a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ striving for unanimity overrides their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action’ (Janis, 1972). Social networks where users self-select “friends” based on common interest or belief are susceptible to this kind of concentration of agreeing opinion, where alternative perspectives are shut out. Twitter, a network where users choose to “follow” only those who they want to regularly read might be particularly susceptible to this weakness. Commentators note this weakness and sometimes also caution readers to actively try to avoid groupthink by paying attention to their consumption and sometimes even encourage them to actively follow thinkers they tend to disagree with. So we can see that it isn’t exactly the transparent bias of the members of the selected group that tends to cause groupthink, but the tendency not to step outside the space of comfortable arguments one probably already agrees with.

The availability of alternative perspectives makes it possible to counter this tendency, and an informed media consumer should try to read articles from a variety of perspectives and maintain an awareness of the ideological slants of their reading material. Where journalists and other commentators pursue objectivity over transparency, however, it diminishes a reader’s attempt to perform this ideological sorting. It can produce a false sense of security when news users feel they have achieved an adequate survey of available positions after merely hearing several selected quotations from different sides of an issue. The selection of particular quotations included in an “objective” article may actually omit the views of outsiders to the traditional debates. (Frequently, journalists seem to seek comment from one Democrat and one Republican and call it a day). A news reader must question an “objective” article’s choice of embedded perspectives as part of analyzing its objectivity, and this step could easily be missed. A “transparent” commentator bares his or her premises and argument so that it may be more easily evaluated. I think it is these perspectives that will be ultimately more valuable for the news consumer.

Knowledge is a Process

The image of an “ecology of information” entails that the development of understanding is a process, not an end product. Understanding develops and is refreshed in successive generations. There are no stopping points. Instead, there are jumping-off points for continued discussion and growth of understanding. I think a partisan curator of content could thrive in this environment, but it will only lead to the development of better understanding when the transparency of premises allows the critique of those premises. Dawn Teo is right to be worried about the quality of Odom’s new news venture if it may only post articles when “the editorial team approves [bloggers'] posts. In other words, bloggers will get paid only when their articles are in agreement with the site’s founder” if this process means that the premises of the right-leaning arguments are not up for discussion. If that is the case with Odom’s news site, the needed critique of those principles will still happen, but outside the space Odom is creating. If conservative readers rely only on Odom’s project for their news consumption, this could be a recipe for destructive groupthink. In the new ecology of information, curators have to build and constantly justify trust. It’s harder to be endowed with trust, but it can be earned.

Specifically: “Until the idea of the public option came along, a significant faction within the party rejected anything short of true single-payer, Medicare-for-all reform, viewing anything less as perpetuating the flaws of our current system. The public option, which would force insurance companies to prove their usefulness or fade away, settled some of those qualms.”

Without introducing any real competition to insurers yet enforcing an individual mandate to buy insurance, how can somebody who wants real reform support the Democrats on health care? (My position: I think they were elected to end the wars and provide justice, transparency and real health care reform–which sums to “change the way Washington works”–and they haven’t done it.)

The public option as figured before it was killed was a weak competitor to insurance, crippled in its ability to negotiate lower prices for drugs, etc.

Specifically Krugman says:
“Until the idea of the public option came along, a significant faction within the party rejected anything short of true single-payer, Medicare-for-all reform, viewing anything less as perpetuating the flaws of our current system. The public option, which would force insurance companies to prove their usefulness or fade away, settled some of those qualms.”
Without introducing any real competition to insurers yet enforcing an individual mandate to buy insurance, how can somebody who wants real reform support the Democrats on health care? My position: I think they were elected to end the wars and provide justice, transparency and real health care reform–which sums to “change the way Washington works”–and they haven’t done it yet.

The public option as figured before it was killed was already a weak competitor to insurance, crippled in its ability to negotiate lower prices for drugs, etc. It was pretty much only introduced this spring as a kinda lame alternative to fundamental reform because there “just weren’t the votes” to make a real change to health care. I think the public at least needs an option that is a strong nonprofit to compete with the insurance companies. (The insurance providers 20% overheads for profit and admin. costs are killing us)

“It’s unfair competition with unjust enrichment,” Marburger says. It’s also a downward spiral toward extinction. “If the copyright law doesn’t open the way for originators of news to stop the free riding, newspapers will die,” he said.  “No exceptions.”

The Marburgers propose a change in federal law that would allow originators of news to exploit the commercial value of their product. Ideally, news originators’ stories would be available on only their Web sites for the first 24 hours.

Shultz’s column is posted at: http://www.cleveland.com/schultz/index.ssf/2009/06/tighter_copyright_law_could_sa.html (though it is worth noting that I read it first through an “aggregator” run by Daryl Cagle here.)

This plan is hogwash. I’m sorry I have to be so harsh, but here is yet another newspaper person who doesn’t understand why newspapers are failing, and doesn’t understand the consequences of what she proposes to “fix” them (by actually not fixing them at all and diminishing the people’s rights of free speech). Freedom of speech is the issue here, particularly that increasingly important facet of freedom called “fair use”. The public’s fair use right is a “defense” against an accusation of copyright infringement, that covers limited uses of copyrighted material for legitimate purposes, such as academic use or “review” of content. (See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use ). It involves a “balancing test” to determine whether or not unauthorized use is “fair.” As part of this balancing, an Internet “aggregator” (a type of site that I cannot meaningfully distinguish from a mere “blog”) is more likely to prevail with a fair use claim if they merely quote a snippet of an article like Google News does, than if they republish the entire article.

Now here’s what Ms. Schultz doesn’t understand: In print, when an author such as a newspaper writer uses somebody else’s words without authorization, we call it “quoting.” Quotes are attributed to sources, and are an essential part of almost every news story. They are usually the meatiest part of the story. Some quotes are sourced directly by a reporter, through investigation, but others are copied from other people’s interviews or press conferences. We would not dream of forcing reporters to only use quotes that they sourced themselves or otherwise paid to use. Newspapers have never been held to this standard. Costs would soar, and newspapers would die if they were. Ms. Schultz suggests that we force Internet reporters to pay for the quotes they find in order to report the news, when it just so happens that the person they are quoting is a newspaper reporter.

Now to her “solution”. The two points of “remedy” that are prescribed are a wishlist, not actual changes you can make to the law. In order to effect a change to copyright law that would force Internet reporters to turn over their revenue to the sources for their quotes, this would have to be codified against those reporters’ fair use rights, greatly diminishing those essential freedoms. I don’t see how that could be done fairly without applying the same standard to newspaper reporters as well. (Feel free to try to argue this distinction. I don’t see it.) The right to “quote” a reasonable amount of text from whoever you want for newsworthy “reveiw” purposes, I feel, is an essential part of our First Amendment rights.

If the First Amendment lawyer your newspaper hired (David Marburger) doesn’t understand this, you’ve been paying a lot of money to a fool, right? Isn’t that your newspaper’s problem, not the fact that an aggregator might scrape a few dollars of income? I’m sorry Craigslist is better than newspapers for posting what used to be called “classifieds”… while being free. Nobody is going to make much from those anymore; the world has changed. I’m sorry your paper can’t make enough money from local subcriptions, but isn’t that your fault too? If you can’t offer a product people will pay for, please don’t change the law to diminish my free speech rights in order to avoid the rest of the collapse of your failed business model.

(An aside:A big part of the problem is that almost all this country’s wealth is in the hands of just a few bigwigs.. making the bigwigs the only ones who are able to pay for anything is not a recipe for healthy institutions that rely on broad-based subscription models.  If you want to save your media, use it to correct this inequality. If you figure out how to do that, you will be indispensible. If we don’t have jobs, we can’t afford to subsidize yours. And we REFUSE to subsidize your job with our free speech rights.)

The business model that newspapers rely on exploits a monopoly over information to extract revenue from information’s scarcity. This works in a world where information is naturally scarce, but the Internet destroys that world. Information is plentiful now. Linking is possible, and doesn’t require going to the library to dig up a paper copy of somebody else’s newspaper anymore. People expect their overall news-reading experience to be better than newspapers are offering it now. The in-depth investigative stories are great and important, but the quick-glance-overview is necessary too, and newspapers can’t provide the up-to-the-minute

When Ms. Schultz said, “I heard (Plain Dealer Editor) Susan Goldberg talking about how revenue from online advertising is pathetically low and newspapers can’t recoup their investment. As soon as she said it, the wheels started turning…”, she didn’t realize when her editor said this that it works both ways; there isn’t really much money to be “stolen” by the aggregators anyway. (Here are 236 aggregated articles about this that I found with a 5-second search..  http://news.google.com/news/more?cf=all&ncl=dy4Xzvb2XWsTf6MWLGrE6qDOaRgBM If I wanted to read one, I could select from the snippets provided and read whatever reporter’s contribution looks best. Efficient competition in action. Beautiful, eh?) Butchering the people’s fair use right (an essential part of free speech utilized every day by newspaper reporters and news aggregators alike) in order to grab a mere single day’s worth of ad revenue is heinous. I love my fair use right more than newspapers, honestly. It makes conversation possible. Not to mention the massive bookkeeping expenses that would be incurred to anybody who wanted to run an aggregator. Can you imagine how complicated it would be to break down $10 in advertising among the 30 different stories and news sources that a medium-size blog might link to in a day? In the beginning of this paragraph, I fairly quoted Ms. Schultz, and I am going to post this on my blog without authorization or payment, asserting my essential fair use right to engage with the ideas that are floating around on the Web today. I’m also going to make diddly from advertising revenue. Nothing worth sharing back with you, even if I had ads posted on my blog (“aggregator” of news content I want my readers to see).

It is my absolute right to engage with Ms. Schultz’s article in agreement or disagreement. Newspaper people have trouble understanding that Internet reporters have the same rights to talk about (and “quote” and “link to”) any news story they want the exact same way that she has the right to do in her printed columns… except that you can’t click a link in a paper newspaper to see where this conversation came from like you would be able to on the Internet. The Internet does quoting and attribution better than newspapers do. These are important facets of journalism, and if newspapers can’t catch up to the Internet, they are going to be left behind, and should be.

Ms. Schultz thinks excerpting stories is unfair because most people won’t bother clicking through to read the whole story on most of the snippets they look at. Nobody owns the actual news that is reported. The actual events are uncopyrightable. The excerpts that aggregators or blogs may quote from news stories are taken under fair use. Ms. Shultz quotes her laywer saying that “these parasitic aggregators are capturing the heart of the stories so that readers have no need to visit the site of the original story,” but doesn’t realize that this is a good thing for news readers. When I look at news in the morning, I don’t want to spend hours on it, but I want to be broadly informed. A couple key sentences quoted by an intelligent aggregator (“blogger”) are all I want to read of 90% of the stories I see every day. I don’t want to waste my time reading a bunch of stuff I’m not interested in–I’d rather click through only to the 10% of stories that really capture my interest… And trust me, I do click through and read tons of stories. As I write this, I’ve got about a dozen stories open in background tabs in Firefox (that I clicked on from an aggregator) that I wanted to read today. I skimmed over hundreds of summaries and picked out exactly what I wanted. This is just like reading the front page of a newspaper with the first half-column of each story, and then flipping through to page C6 for the couple stories I wanted to read, EXCEPT that I can do this faster from an online aggregator, the news is more up-to-the-minute, and I can cover so much more ground it’s not even funny. Within minutes, I am connected to the best reporting from all around the country after just looking at a few aggregators. This is why the Internet is beating newspapers. The goal of Ms. Scultz’s plan is that “ideally, news originators’ stories would be available on only their Web sites for the first 24 hours” would kill the up-to-the-minute scannability of the “newsscape” via aggregators that the makes reading Internet news such a valuable experience. Nobody wants to read yesterday’s news today.

The future of newspapers looks more like an “aggregator” than a traditional newspaper, and if you are a newspaper that doesn’t get this, you are going to fail. Internet “aggregators” are better for the reader, cheaper to operate, can contain a wider breadth of news (by just excerpting and linking to the best of the work of others, wherever they have published it), and still let users link right to the exact full stories they want to read. If a publication saves money on getting a wide range of national/international stories, it can spend its resources paying people to write the great in-depth stories that are the best of what reporters can offer. These will be quoted and linked to by bloggers and aggregators. If you want your story about corruption to spread, let it be quoted and talked about. So do what newspapers do best; write the good stories. Then excerpt/link to the good stories that others have written. We’ll read the good stories when they percolate into view on our aggregators. We’ll use the excerpts we see to filter out the chaff.

It seems like Obama won’t let them control the framing though… This week also saw the release of another key part of Bush’s legacy, the Justice Department memos (in part by John Yoo) that justified a number of “enhanced interrogation techniques”… otherwise known as torture. I won’t get into many of the specifics because they are soul-wrenching. Link: Bush torture memos released

One detail of this story, is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. (March 2003). The Bush legacy will firmly include these atrocities in my mind, no matter what the “history” that Bush thinks will someday vindicate him decides. Now we will watch to see what the Bush farm team comes up with for spin, but I don’t think the tricks that got us into Iraq are going to work again.