Results tagged “nytimes”

I've had the privilege of being quoted or mentioned in a lot of newspapers and magazines over the years, but as an minor-league word nerd, this one ranks as among the most gratifying: This week's "On Language" column in the Sunday New York Times magazine quotes from my post "The End of Fail":

The fail phenomenon has its naysayers, most prominently Anil Dash, an influential tech-culture blogger, who wrote a strongly worded post titled “The End of Fail.” For Dash, politicized fail has not moved far from its snarky roots. “ ‘FAIL’ isn’t advocacy; it’s the tool of those who don’t know how to be advocates, who don’t know how to persuade,” Dash argues. “It puts the ego of the complainers ahead of the cause they’re trying to advocate.”

In reviewing the etymology of "fail", Ben Zimmer makes a few really interesting observations, most notably that the term has forked a bit, reflecting both the mindless non-critiques I railed against, as well as the harmless, even charming, use of "fail" on sites like Fail Dogs. Zimmer also elides any mention of ubiquitous meme-starter 4chan playing a role in the development of "fail", which is probably just as well.

I'm actually so pleased with this one I'll probably run out and grab a print copy of the magazine shortly after I post this.

People who are into journalism and newspapers and the web and the death of print have been all a-twitter over the NY Times story today about the triCityNews, a little alt-weekly in Monmouth County, New Jersey.

I spent a good bit of time in Monmouth County years ago, when I was a consultant and had a client there, but unfortunately my tenure in the area predates the triCityNews' era of journalistic service to the community. So I was interested to see what was so notable about this little paper.

The Times bemusedly profiles the little alt because, it claims, the triCity "shuns" the web. They quote Dan Jacobson, owner and publisher of the paper, at some length in the piece. I've concatenated all of Jacobson's quotes in the article together here.

Why would I put anything on the Web? I don’t understand how putting content on the Web would do anything but help destroy our paper. Why should we give our readers any incentive whatsoever to not look at our content along with our advertisements, a large number of which are beautiful and cheap full-page ads? [W]e want people to think of Asbury Park as the center of the universe.

I don’t allow our name to be used on any kind of content on the Web — not bulletin boards or listings or anything. I don’t want anybody to connect The TriCityNews and the Internet. I don’t want anything that detracts from the paper and the presence of those big, beautiful full-page ads.

There may come a time when the Web is all there is, and we will try to adapt, and if we don’t, well, hey, we had a great run. But right now, the Web makes no business sense for us.I just get on the Web site [of other newspapers], I look at what I need to and I never look at the ads.

Right after we started, the dot-com bust happened and we have been running scared ever since. We live off the land and run it very lean. There is no debt, our office in downtown Asbury Park is very small, and we have never raised our rates, so people tend to stick with us regardless of what is happening in the economic cycle. All of us are pretty happy with our lifestyles — I was able to quit practicing law quite a few years ago — and are thankful that we seem to have secure jobs and what seems to be a good future in a pretty tough industry.

In all of his quotes about the web and his business model and other newspapers and his big, beautiful full-page ads, Dan Jacobson never once mentions serving his community, researching a story, publishing information of any utility or value to his audience, or actually committing any act of journalism.

That's not to say Jacobson doesn't value journalism. It's just that it's absolutely clear that his priority is his advertisers. Thus, I submit that the triCityNews, while certainly a paper, is likely not a newspaper. I would ask for clarification or rebuttal, or seek evidence to dispute this conclusion by looking in the paper itself, but that's not possible for those of us not physically located in its distribution area. I would invite Mr. Jacobson to respond in person here to this assertion, but I don't want him to compromise his apparent belief that the audience he serves doesn't not seek clarification of information through the web.

I do, however, invite David Carr to explain his belief that this constitutes a "ray of light in [his] e-mail [sic] inbox". I won't hold him accountable for the headline on the story; we all know to blame the editors for that. But even a lighthearted story should have at least its fundamental assertions somewhat resemble the truth.

And, as a minor side note to Mr. Jacobson, whom I suspect may read the response on the web despite his contempt for our medium: The word "plog" is currently the subject of a trademark application by Amazon.com. They are an online concern that has apparently found a way to make money merchandising products online, even when they aren't making use of big, beautiful full-page ads. Just as someone will succeed in doing in Asbury Park, someday soon.

Related: I've rambled on about alt-weeklies and incuriosity in the past. Considering how well-known alts are for being politically liberal, it's interesting how culturally conservative many of them are.

I started blogging when I was 25, and it was a much smaller blogosphere back in 2000. I was able to make my mistakes in oversharing, overexposure, and unmitigated egotism in a smaller pond, without the entire New York media world and Jimmy Kimmel staring at me. In some ways, blogging and I grew up together, so by the time I was doing national television, I'd already had lots of media training ... a luxury Emily Gould didn't seem to have. I also developed some personal boundaries before I had thousands of daily readers, a luxury Emily Gould also didn't have.

Ariel Meadow Stallings, on Emily Gould's recent NY Times Magazine cover story.

I'd forgotten to mention it yesterday, but as a number of people have asked, I had a nice little quote in the New York Times yesterday, talking about Wal-Mart (and large companies in general) embracing blogging.

Though it unfortunately is pretty accurate in quoting the clipped, self-interrupting way that I actually speak, I think the point still comes across:

Anil Dash, a blogger at Six Apart, which makes blogging software, said the evolution in Wal-Mart's thinking about blogs was typical. "You start with this total lockdown, suits read everything, one post a month model," he said. "Then you evolve. A year later, you get one that is more open. A year after that, they start to do something that is far more authentic."

Mr. Dash said Wal-Mart's decision to let buyers do the blogging reflected a growing recognition that "trying to control who can speak and what they can say does not work."

I've been obsessing lately over what it takes to make change happen, in both culture an technology. And the answer to me seems to increasingly be the embrace of iteration. I never imagined that I'd spend five straight years of my life advocating blogs, long after the novelty factor had worn off, but that's where I'm at now. And It's been enough time to see, for example, Wal-Mart start with a site that used Movable Type, but was barely a blog in any other sense, and then iterate their way into a site so human that it can easily have an individual post taken out of context by the New York Times.

There's a little quiet victory for myself in the story, too. When Michael Barbaro asked me how I'd like to be credited for the story, I just said I was happy being described as a blogger.

From this New York Times story on proper use of a semicolon in subway signage:

David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver. (Mr. Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an even longer sentence.)

Part of me thinks Sam Roberts wrote the entire story just to get that last line in. I know I would.

So, I'm in the New York Times today, as part of the story called Loosing Google's Lock on the Past. I'm not a huge fan of how the story turned out, mostly because my quotes are almost incoherent. What I was trying to say is that the expectation for a lot of people is that, when they meet a new person, they'll be able to Google them up and find out all about them, just like you would do if you were researching a company.

And, if you know people are going to be looking you up, then you should have a place (like, say, a blog) that is a definitive source of information about yourself, instead of leaving it to chance. This is something I wrote about in Privacy Through Identity Control a few years ago.

Of course, the hook for the story is that the writer didn't like the picture of herself that came up if you searched for her name. Fortunately for me, the picture of me that accompanies the story will offer plenty of amusement for anybody who's familiar with Internet culture. (All those links are work-safe, but the things linked on those pages most definitely are not.)

Jim Wilson, who took the picture, was a really nice guy, and Stepanie Rosenbloom, who wrote the story, was really professional, so I was a bit reluctant to throw in an easter egg for all my web friends. But now that there's a giant picture in the Times, I'm finding it pretty entertaining.

Update: This post (and picture) got a pretty strong response -- a year later I described some of the reactions that it inspired.