Hoping for better Web civility in 2015

In looking through some collected links from the last year, I found that this one, dating back from February and posted on the Harvard Kennedy public policy journal website, sums up so much of what I’ve been thinking lately about the digital world.

Australian graduate psychology student Claire Lehmann bemoans the culture of easy outrage on the Web, and how this supposedly ideal collaborative realm has become a forum to deepen already sharp ideological differences:

“In an era in which social media provides the fuel for partisanship, online platforms are monetizing the flames. But they are also burning the bridges between us. We seem to have fewer shared goals. Our most pressing moral challenges are ones which require creative, long-term solutions of cooperation and commitment. Globally and locally, we face environmental calamities, rising economic inequality, and ageing populations. The need for bipartisan solutions has never been stronger.

“Reinforcing bitterness between groups of people by invoking indignant outrage may be a good business strategy for online news outlets, but it is terrible for encouraging the social cohesion required to address problems facing our society . To foster cross-pollination of ideas, we need both to be aware and to listen. We should endeavor to avoid joining online digital mobs where we might throw verbal stones at anyone who may disagree with us. Ideally, we would consume a balance of information that both comforts us by adhering to our world-view and challenges us by expanding it.”

This is not a new concern, but I haven’t read a better expression of what for many, myself included, have found to be a frustrating, dispiriting development.

After nearly seven years of actively using social media, I dropped off significantly in my participation in the past year. The ability to quickly connect, converse and share information with people I find interesting and engaging was diminished by others seeking to demonize those with differing points of view, or who link to the “wrong” thing.

Perhaps I need to alter whom I follow — there are far too many people I follow who post frequently, and at times nastily, about politics. That’s not why I follow them, even if I may agree with them. It’s cable news come to my timeline, and it’s an unwanted intrusion.

Depending on the issue — and especially if it involves race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion and political philosophy — one is essentially drummed into silence if the social media mobs declare a certain view to be incorrect. The cultural topics that help define who we are as humans have become bristling ideological and political vehicles, instead of entry points for understanding through respectful argument.

One of the pleasures of adopting to digital media has been the ease of hashing out points on which we may not agree. I’ve been a guest on the sports-and-culture podcast of writer Michael Tillery, whose program is housed on the RAPStation website. I don’t care for rap at all and Michael and I disagree on some of the things we talk about, and Tweet at one another. But I appreciate the chance to think out loud and not be flogged out of reflex.

There’s nothing like a vigorous, but civil debate. While social media, especially Twitter, isn’t perfect for this, some enlightening discussion has been possible. I’ve enjoyed it, in spite of its limitations.

But if mobsters want to disrupt that dialogue — and it’s troubling how many of them call themselves journalists, writers, artists, academics and intellectuals — it’s far easier to do that, and rudely troll someone they don’t follow, or who doesn’t follow them.

So whenever big news came down — a Supreme Court ruling, the Ferguson demonstrations, a mass shooting or allegations of a gang rape — I logged out. I suspect I wasn’t alone.

It’s just not worth it to engage in any kind of meaningful discussion of hot-button issues, at least openly on social media. I’m not afraid of having my own views challenged; if anything I want to learn what I don’t know, or what my blind spots are.

But it’s best doing so in other venues, including blogs and podcasts and offline conversation. Despite its many positives, social media is no match for old-fashioned face-to-face talk, or a phone call, or a thorough vetting through the written word.

Besides, I’m not any good at responding to the mobs. I don’t have the jugular for it. I admire those who do, such as blogger extraordinaire Andrew Sullivan. He recently pegged a fierce defense of his tenure as editor of The New Republic, and its contrarianism that offends many liberals, following an attack from leading black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.

While Coates seems eager to banish even discourse about views he doesn’t like, Sullivan loves the free-range, interactive exchange of ideas that the Web makes possible. On his blog, The Dish, he exemplifies it like few others: 

“The role of journalism is not to police the culture but to engage in it.”

Sullivan’s Enlightenment-oriented desire to let all views be aired, and then see where the debate goes, is being eclipsed by an authoritarian sensibility that’s getting stronger in the digital world, and on social media in particular.

This growing force of the culture police wants nothing to do with engagement. They are on the left and the right, and this leaves the rest of us feeling as we do about politics — left out of the conversation, browbeaten into withholding our views. Especially if they are more nuanced and complicated than the mob can handle.

Like Lehmann, I fret that the mainstream media will continue to traffick in such divisive fare, and that the onslaught will be far more overwhelming than anything we saw in 2014. That’s saying something.

Crying Wolff about the state of digital media

It’s not news that Michael Wolff is sour on digital media, and has been for quite a while, and this recent Q and A with Digiday makes it clear his mood is as dour as it’s ever been:

“TV was the wasteland. Now digital media is the wasteland. There’s nothing there. A deluge of crap. TV has gone in the other direction and produced these things everybody watches and talks about and become important signposts of the culture. So TV is upscale, and digital is downscale media.”

What’s more, he says that what successful web plays like Vice are really angling for is some kind of TV gig. But he’s off the mark in claiming that “digital media has killed music, has killed newspapers.” No, those industries cemented their own demise long before Napster and Matt Drudge, et al, came along. Not that Wolff cares about being right, even after being reminded that he once predicted the end of BuzzFeed. Classic reply:

“What the hell, that’s karma.”

20 years of audio on the Web, more or less

The Knight Lab worked up this very cool timeline of audio developments on the Web. It’s an unpredictable arc, ranging from the now-shuttered Napster to the seemingly invincible iTunes, but the real bullishness here is the present and future of the podcast.

Included in the timeline is a link to a story from The Washington Post in September about the growing profitability of podcasting, but of course it’s relative to the kind of topics and the entrepreneurial verve (if any) behind them.

With all the buzz lately about the addictive podcast “The Serial” (from the creators of NPR’s “This American Life”), it’s worth watching what it may inspire, whether we’re in a “golden age” of podcasting or not.

As Cecilia Kang of The Post notes:

“Radio is still far more popular and lucrative than the fledgling world of podcasts. The industry has withstood the disruption that the Internet wrought on newspapers and TV, partly thanks to an enormous audience of commuters trapped in cars. But podcast enthusiasts believe preferences are beginning to change.”

Marketing guru Seth Godin blogged not long ago that the business of local radio is on very shaky ground:

“Just as newspapers fell off a cliff, radio is about to follow. It’s going to happen faster than anyone expects. And of course, it will be replaced by a new thing, a long tail of audio that’s similar (but completely different) from what we were looking for from radio all along. And that audience is just waiting for you to create something worth listening to.”

Public radio’s response to the demand for personalization of Web audio was the introduction this summer of the NPR One app. Users can devour a mix of NPR and affiliate content curated on their preferences.

News economics consultant Ken Doctor calls the app first and foremost a “listening hub” (his italics), and says it’s aimed at casual, rather than addictive, public radio audiences. Kelly McBride at The Poynter Institute dubs it the Pandora of public radio.

Godin is the recent guest of Krista Tippett, host of one of my favorite podcasts, “On Being,” where long-tail radio has found a comfortable place. The topic of this episode is “The Art of Noticing, and Then Creating.”

‘Giving credit where credit is due’

Richard Bradley, the former George editor who first raised doubts about Rolling Stone‘s story about gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house, has been a house of fire since the magazine backed down from its reporting.

His blog, Shots in the Dark, is loaded with links and commentary stemming from that story as well as the saga of The New Republic. Duped by the infamous plagiarizer Stephen Glass, Bradley has a b.s. meter that has been in overdrive on the topics of “rape culture” and media ethics.

While hand-wringing in too much of the mainstream press wants to scold “us” to remember rape victims, Bradley is calmly, methodically urging the media to stick to what it’s supposed to be upholding above all else — a sobering quest to find out what happened, if that’s even possible now:

“We all need to step back and take it down a notch. Of course we should search for the truth, but in a deliberate and cautious manner, remembering that there are real human beings involved, most of whom are young people.”

On the Rolling Stone debacle

The cautionary tale of the Duke lacrosse scandal has been routinely dismissed by far too many media outlets, and in increasingly alarming fashion, since it first unfolded eight years ago.

The scandal there, as I have written elsewhere, was the duplicity of the media — and not just any old media but the likes of The New York Times — in falling for an irresistible narrative.

But even after the rape accuser’s story proved to be a complete hoax, and a district attorney was disbarred for prosecuting based on the narrative, the hysteria over “rape culture” in America has reached a fever pitch.

So the admission on Friday by the editor of Rolling Stone magazine that key parts of its bombshell gang rape allegation piece, entitled “A Rape on Campus,” don’t add up shouldn’t be terribly surprising.

What’s deeply troubling is the admission by the freelance writer of the piece, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, that she chose not to contact the accused fraternity members at the request of the accuser.

Erdely unfurled a 9,000-word narrative based on the story of a single female accuser with no corroborating reporting, and her editors let it sail through to publication. The power of narrative, indeed.

Even more troubling is another admission by Erdely, that she scoured a number of elite college campuses looking to find the perfect case study for this continuing narrative of rape epidemic on campuses. The UVa fraternity culture has gained an especially notorious reputation over the years, and even as her story was unraveling, Erdely tried to make the case that it was that broader issue that was the subject of her investigation.

So the details don’t matter?

This is a cardinal sin of journalism, and yet as in the Duke lacrosse story, it’s a sin that’s committed far too frequently when it comes to reporting about sexual violence, especially in American college life.

The narrative of this story — based on claims by a UVa student named “Jackie” that she was repeatedly assaulted on a bed of broken glass by a series of men for several hours — was just too good to be true.

And so it may be.

And now certain feminists who insist that the woman should ALWAYS be believed are upset because Erdely not only believed the woman, but incorporated that premise into the heart of her work.

As Amanda Taub wrote at Vox, the failure to check the stories of rape accusers doesn’t protect them, but makes them even more vulnerable.

Yes, this backtracking by Rolling Stone will make things more difficult for rape victims to speak up, and that’s difficult enough. Hanna Rosin of Slate, whose podcast interview with Erdely raised some serious questions about this story early on, wondered late Friday if “maybe we’ve reached a point where we hold stories about rape to a lower standard.”

Well, yes. Who doesn’t want to believe a rape accuser? Who wanted to believe something so terrible as what Jackie claims could be made up? Or Crystal Mangum, the Duke lacrosse accuser, who said she was gang raped at a team party where had been hired to perform?

In the eight years since Duke, mainstream media outlets have not only ignored those journalistic blunders (and the fact that Mangum is now in prison for murdering her boyfriend), they’ve happily jumped on the “rape culture” bandwagon, especially when the claims involve athletes, and football players in particular. As the Obama Administration is demanding tougher crackdowns on alleged sex assault on campuses, there’s an uncritical willingness to believe statistics about college rape that are hardly empirical.

The full story about what may have happened to Jackie at UVa still hasn’t been revealed, and Rolling Stone wasn’t clear about what the “discrepancies” are that it is still investigating. So whether this is a hoax or not can’t be determined at this time. We just don’t know what, if anything, transpired, or if it happened the way Jackie told Erdely.

The Washington Post did its own reporting that details some of the apparent inconsistencies, but what triggered the inquiry was an outside party. Former George editor Richard Bradley, who once worked with the disgraced Stephen Glass, wondered on his personal blog if the story was true.

He was roundly vilified for raising such a question, including the predictable snarky comeback from Jezebel. “A giant ball of shit” is how a Columbia j-school grad described his claim. So classy.

Brooklyn College professor K.C. Johnson got the same treatment for his work questioning the story in the Duke case, even as his Durham in Wonderland blog was regularly revealing the media and academic dishonesty that kept perpetuating a dubious narrative.

Bradley and Johnson are in a sense proxy ombudsmen for mainstream media institutions that are falling hard for catnip narratives. In his summation post on Saturday, Bradley concluded that “Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s story does not establish any larger truths about the University of Virginia.”

Perhaps this will become the cautionary tale that will be finally heeded:

” ‘A Rape on Campus’ is an irresponsible patchwork of personal politics, sloppy reporting and preconceived conclusions by a writer who lamented that the University of Virginia has no ‘radical feminist culture seeking to upend the patriarchy’—and took it upon herself to do just that.”

More good insight from smart female commentators here: Megan McArdle, Judith Levine and Cathy Young. This embodies what feminist opinion-writing can be, once raw emotion is ditched in favor of intellectual and journalistic rigor.

A post-mortem for The New Republic

Thursday could be called the Day of the Long Knives at The New Republic, where editor Franklin Foer and longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier are out amid a stunning upheaval that includes remaking the entity into what owner Chris Hughes calls a “vertically integrated digital media company.”

TNR also will be based in New York, moving from its longtime digs in Washington, and will cut the number of print issues from 20 a year to 10. The changes were feared, as Hughes and his new CEO, Guy Vidra, have thought to be chasing web clicks to better compete with Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and other successful digital media outlets.

On Friday morning, 28 editors and writers resigned en masse, including nine of the 12 senior editors. The names are some of the most venerable in established opinion writing and cultural criticism: Anne Applebaum, Paul Berman, Robert Kagan, John Judis, Adam Kirsch, Ryan Lizza, Jeffrey Rosen, Noam Schreiber, Judith Shulevitz, Helen Vendler and Sean Wilentz.

Angry, mournful eulogies poured in for the generally liberal magazine, which recently marked its 100th anniversary with a swanky D.C. bash: former senior editor Jon Chait, longtime subscriber Alan Jacobs and former editor Andrew Sullivan, who called the changes “corporate manslaughter:”

“But the economic forces of new media are very powerful, and few multi-millionaires seem willing any more to lose their shirts in order to keep them at bay. That noblesse oblige in defense of the highbrow and traditional is now no more. And when I witness the death of these magazines and their culture – one of the great achievements of post-war American life – and I witness the new, fissiparous models emerging, it is hard not to feel a little despair. The new business models are anti-magazines, in a way. What matters online is not the fellowship of writers in a joint enterprise, but the shareability of links, the success of single posts in social media, and the merging of advertising with editorial that blends all forms of journalism into the same corporate, indistinguishable, marketing mush.”

For some truly incredible reading, here’s Lloyd Grove’s backstory about how Thursday’s bloodletting came to pass:

“For Foer, Wieseltier and others at the magazine, the brutal shakeup by Vidra, 40, who was hired in September, and his 30-year-old patron, Hughes–who purchased TNR two-and-a-half years ago for an undisclosed sum from a consortium that included longtime owner Martin Peretz–didn’t come as a surprise. Tensions have been building since the summer. According to multiple sources, Hughes came to think of his writers and editors as ‘spoiled brats,’ and especially disliked the flamboyant, feud-prone, white-maned Wieseltier, who was more than twice his age. Much of Hughes’s distaste was telegraphed in his body language; he strikes many TNR staffers as passive-aggressive and averse to confrontation.”

Senior editor Julia Ioffre, one of those who stepped down Friday, anticipated the reaction to the staff protests:

“The narrative you’re going to see Chris and Guy put out there is that I and the rest of my colleagues who quit today were dinosaurs, who think that the Internet is scary and that Buzzfeed is a slur. Don’t believe them. The staff at TNR has always been faithful to the magazine’s founding mission to experiment, and nowhere have I been so encouraged to do so. There was no opposition in the editorial ranks to expanding TNR’s web presence, to innovating digitally. Many were even board for going monthly. We’re not afraid of change. We have always embraced it.”

“As for the health of long-form journalism, well, the pieces that often did the best online were the deeply reported, carefully edited and fact-checked, and beautifully written. Those were the pieces that got the most clicks.”

What’s being mourned here is the demise of the old-school, Washington-based magazine of opinion on politics, public policy and cultural affairs. The Atlantic has retooled itself over the last decade, moving from Boston to Washington and pushing a lot of web content (some in clickbaitish fashion) and last year got embroiled in a sponsored content flap involving the Church of Scientology.

At Vox, Ezra Klein explained that the challenges of TNR are no different than that of Washington Monthly and The American Prospect, which also are shells of their former selves. The rise of lively wonky websites (including Vox) and blogs have given readers more plentiful, specialized and immediate choices than what the often staid print stalwarts of the genre have offered:

“Behind this fight is a deeper tension in digital journalism: the pressure for convergence is strong. We feel it at Vox, and sometimes give into it. It’s easy to see which stories are resonating with readers. It’s obvious that John Oliver videos do big numbers. And that’s fine. Right now, almost all successful digital publications are partially built on internet best practices and partially built on that publication’s particular obsessions, ideas, and attitude. Digital publications need to be smart about their mix of what everyone else does and what no one else does.

“But what made The New Republic and its peer policy magazines so great was how restlessly, relentlessly idiosyncratic they were — that’s how they drove new ideologies and new ideas to the fore. They were worse at covering policy than their digital successors, but probably better at thinking. Part of this was because they simply cared less what the audience thought — they saw their role as telling their audience what to think, and they expected a readership in the low six or high five figures, not the mid-eight figures.”

I’ll wrap this up with Sullivan’s follow-up this morning. It’s equal parts scathing and pessimistic about what can be recreated on the web to match what TNR attempted for a century.

Explaining a long hiatus

Ink-Drained Kvetch is back, with a new look and feel and what I hope is a fresh outlook as I resume posting about journalism, media and digital trends and how mid-career types like me are adapting to them.

My absence here was far too long and not intended, but I found out the hard way what many bloggers discover — these things are easy to start and hard to maintain.

My last post was a few months after I had begun working as a local editor at AOL’s Patch community news initiative, and what happened after that became the most consuming job I’ve ever had. I loved it in so many ways, but it was unlike any job I’ve ever had.

That position was eliminated in January, quite a few months ago, but I also encountered another common blogging experience: Not feeling like you have anything worthy to say.

One of the reasons I posted less and less often here was that I preferred doing the news rather than writing about doing it. There are so many sharp, perceptive people out there commenting about these matters, people whose insights have been invaluable to me.

But I’ve learned, as I skimmed through old posts, that writing here did help me in my work, and in my understanding of what was happening in news and media innovation.

So I want to revive this blog as I embark on yet another phase of my journalism and media career. I’ve got several options I’m exploring and know that coming back to these topics here will be helpful in these prospective endeavors.

Ink-Drained Kvetch also was the first blog I ever started, launching shortly after I left The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2008. So much has happened in my profession and industry since then, and I remain as energized about these challenges as I’ve ever been.

So I decided to give the blog a face lift with a new design, and I’m updating my links and blogroll to reflect what’s transpired in these six years. WordPress.com has gotten so much better too, with snappy themes like the Twenty Thirteen look here, and improved dashboard features that make blogging simpler and more enjoyable.

I was up all night — until 5 a.m.! — retooling this site, and I’m not quite finished. I haven’t done an all-nighter like that in years but I was so happily immersed in the process. You know the feeling when you’re perfectly in your element: You forget to eat and bring in the cat. I’m paying for it today, but I feel like I’m starting over again, and in many ways I am.

It remains hard as hell to continue doing a living in a business that you love, and especially a business that has been brutal to so many practitioners who have loved it even more. What I learned from my last job was how to become resilient in truly profound ways. The Patch experience also rekindled a love for local news, and I saw the possibilities to revive community journalism and civic engagement — and that is best done in independent fashion.

Indeed, it was a pleasant surprise to rediscover the joys of the work I did at the start of my career,  when my perspective was that this was a stepping stone to bigger and supposedly better things.

I’ll be writing about all of that very soon.