In the past year, had I sought a professorship to teach print news reporting, writing, and editing, I’d be hard-pressed to find a job despite my two decades of experience and a really expensive piece of PhD parchment. A reason: Several thousand highly experienced, talented print journalists have been shitcanned by their newspapers in the past two years. But print professorships are few, making it a buyer’s market, writes Joe Strupp at Editor & Publisher.

But there’s another reason: Journalism schools, at least in terms of their job postings, may be shifting identities.

In its January 2010 edition of AEJMC News, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (colloquially known as AEJ) lists few jobs in which experience in print journalism is a must, or teaching print journalism is required.

Aside from traditional broadcast, advertising and public relations professorships, here are some jobs and or job descriptions listed:

• “new media including but not limited to Internet Technology, E-commerce, and Webpage Design”
• “Digital TV/Advertising/New Media”
• “Corporate Communications”
• “integrated marketing communications” (Disclosure: My school offers this as a graduate degree.)
• “digital communication” … “web design, social networks, search engines, new media theory, media law, media ethics, gaming, blogs, virtual worlds, databases, digital literacy, new media, online communities”
• “expertise in the use of digital media applications in the advertising and/or public relations professions (e.g., social media, Web 3.0, blogging”
• “Economic Literacy and Entrepreneurship”
• “the business of the news media, including entrepreneurship and/or management”
• “communications/ media economics/ regulation and/or innovation. Knowledge of entrepreneurship as it relates to telecommunications, information technology, digital media, and/or web-based enterprises”

It’s the same with many of AEJ’s online ads. Florida wants “two new visionary faculty members with expertise in the rapidly emerging fields of Interactive Media / Digital Arts & Science.” Boston University wants “[s]cholars utilizing diverse modes of inquiry and methodologies with an interest in any aspect of new media, including but not limited to online communication, media effects, media policy, social networking, media economics, media history, and computer-mediated communication.”

J-schools are changing. In some respects, have they become commercially oriented entities that focus on designing, formatting, presenting and selling content instead of the journalistic production of that content? Are journalism schools thinking more like schools of business about their missions and pools of potential students?

Difficult questions reside here for the press, the public, deans of journalism schools and faculty.

When (not if) media corporations find a successful business model and realize credible journalism can be a profit center, whom will they hire to produce it?

Will they hire journalism school graduates whose coursework and internship experiences left them adequately trained to use various media to present content but who were not necessarily encouraged or sufficiently trained to do the hard work of reporting to produce it? Or, more simply, will they hire iPhone journalists or future Jimmy Breslins? (Breslin on media economics: “Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.”)

In the coming decade, who will provide information — the product of rigorous reporting — in the public interest?

Readers and viewers should expect a lost decade in which they are told much more about that of little import and much less about that of great import.

Name the journalistic illness, and the decade will provide it: more one-source stories; fewer competent analyses of political, economic, and social issues; and more focus on the mundane and meaningless (i.e., celebs and pseudo-celebs) than on the meaningful (such as the true human cost on readers of the performance failures of the nation’s political and corporate elite).

Why? Simple: The newspaper business, which once had about 56,000 journalists and was understaffed at that level, lost nearly 16,000 jobs (not all newsroom) in 2008 and almost 15,000 in 2009.

Any manager faced with the need to cut people begins with the most expensive ones first — in the newspaper business, they are often the most experienced, those with decades of experience in finding out stuff others tried to hide and telling us what they learned. But newspaper executives have been lying: With each round of staff cuts, they’ve continued to say: “We’ll be a leaner, more efficient newspaper, better able to serve our readers. Our award-winning journalism will be the same as ever. And everyone can find us online.” Do they think readers really believe that?

As the new decade unfolds, who will tell the stories 315 million Americans need to hear as citizens and consumers facing overwhelming taxes, higher health-care costs, unemployment over 10 percent, and two wars (about to become three, perhaps)? They won’t be told by the experienced former journalists who lost their jobs and who are now working in public relations but not necessarily richer or happier.

In 2005 I wrote in a commentary for E&P:

Without journalists, others without a sense of the journalistic mission — such as unscrupulous advertisers and political charlatans — will be telling the stories.

Duh. Expect more stories from more sources who hide their motivations and intent. Fewer journalists are on the job. Journalism schools are training, it appears, fewer journalists. Strupp notes that newspaper majors at the University of Missouri have declined. Lee Becker’s 2008 survey of J-school enrollment notes an increase overall but a slight decline in any form of journalism as a major. Thus fewer journalists-to-be may be in the pipeline. Meanwhile, those remaining in newsrooms, if they survived because they’re inexpensive, are likely to be less experienced and will need this decade to mature.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So, predicts Rachel Sklar at The Daily Beast, bylines as brands, niches, “undernews” and Web TV will fill it. But how credible will be the content produced by the 200 million Twitterers and the 350 million Facebook users?

Do those hundreds of million of Americans trying to live out their lives with some vestige of happiness and faith that the American Dream still exists even give a damn about the economic, social, cultural, and political consequences of the media turmoil that surrounds them?

A traditional task of journalism is education. That’s why, when the Republic was founded, newspapers were given special mailing rates. School systems had not taken firm root. Teaching the public (not brainwashing or misleading it) ought to still be a part of the public-service mission of journalism.

Perhaps that’s why there’s room in journalism schools for ossified, old newsroom hacks like me. We need to teach that mission. We need to teach these iPhone-honed students that there is still a need to observe well, record faithfully, analyze intelligently, organize thoughtfully, and present compellingly. That’s the nature of communication, be it print journalism or “entrepreneurship as it relates to telecommunications, information technology, digital media, and/or web-based enterprises.”

And Sklar, who is as “new media” as you can get, walks the fine line between the old and the emerging:

Grownups, you’ve been in this business for decades, but the ground is shifting under your feet and if you don’t grab on to some smart 22-year-old, you’re screwed. Why? Because that 22-year-old grew up on the Internet while you were spending all your time working in some other quaint old-timey medium. So stop pulling rank and just say, “help me.” They will. And to you young punks who think you run this world—there actually are rules in this Wild West. Quaint old-fashioned conventions like transparency, attribution, confirmation, and accountability will matter just as much in 2010, maybe more now that the Internet is multiplying around us like Mickey’s broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And if you don’t get that reference, ask a grownup. There’s much we can teach you.

Thank you, Rachel. Well said. You’d make a terrific colleague.

Let’s see how our 22 articles of foresight are holding up, one at a time.

1: Researchers will develop either a vaccine or a cure for AIDS by 2020. However, it will be expensive enough that the disease will plague the poor long after it has become a non-issue for the rich and middle classes (although this is one case where political leaders might fund free treatment programs). The end of AIDS will trigger a sexual revolution that will compare to or exceed that of the 1960s and 1970s (unless another deadly sexually-transmitted disease evolves, which is certainly a possibility).

Too soon to tell on the cure, although I suppose it’s still possible. We have treatments that can extend the HIV victim’s life indefinitely and any number of research programs are working on the problem so let’s call this a maybe. As for part two of the prediction, that one’s looking pretty likely, isn’t it? Part three I stand by, no matter when the disease is finally cured.

2: The first quarter of the century will see the assassination of a professional athlete during a competition.

Hasn’t happened yet, but there’s no reason to think it unlikely. Fans still have unprecedented access to athletes in some sports (in most NBA arenas front-row fans might as well be sitting on the bench) and it seems to me like it’s only a matter of time.

3: By 2015 a major corporate executive will be assassinated. As a result, top executives of American companies will have to live with security precautions we once associated only with top political leaders.

Again, hasn’t happened yet, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why. Lay, Skilling, Ebbers, Madoff, Nacchio, the Rigas, Koslowski, half the bankers on Wall Street – it’s damned near unfathomable how none of these deserving pillagers have been whacked by one of the people whose lives they ruined.

In any case, put me down for “when, not if,” even if I miss my 2015 target date.

4: By the end of the 21st Century humanity’s evolution into posthumanity will be all but complete. We will be bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, and our average life span will approach (and perhaps surpass) 100, all as a result of technology’s colonization of the flesh. These changes will result from medical advances (including pharmaceuticals, genetic engineering, and gene therapy, and possibly even nanotech) and computer interface innovations designed to link our minds more closely with the boundless information resident in the Internet. We will be fundamentally different from humans born 200 years ago – CyberHumans in the year 2100 will have less in common with humanity at the turn of the Millennium than we now have with Cro-Magnon humans from 10,000 years ago.

This is a long-term, too-soon-to-tell item, but I can’t imagine that it won’t come true. The impact of technology on the human physiology and human cultures proceeds at an insane pace, with the innovation curve being nearly vertical. So let me get on record as being more confident now that I was even a decade ago.

5: Columbine-type outbursts of school violence will continue to strike large, middle-class suburban schools. Intermediate steps to increase security will turn schools into armed compounds, and will deter all but the most serious conspiracies. However, these measures will only intensify the core disease infecting these environments, and unless major steps are taken to reduce the size of these schools (and hence the anonymity factor), some student or students will eventually succeed where Harris and Klebold failed, killing hundreds of their classmates.

We haven’t had a case that surpassed Columbine (although if we broaden the scope to include universities, Virginia Tech is comparable). We’ve seen no move to address the school size issue, so on the whole I’d say that I’m on track with this one.

6: The popularity of professional baseball will continue to slip. The pace of the game, already slow by late-20th Century standards, will fail to win over younger fans, who are increasingly attuned to video-game levels of sensory stimulation, and the continuing divide between big market and small market franchises will deprive fans in all but a handful of cities of the ability to emotionally invest themselves in the hope of winning. If Major League Baseball adopts a serious salary cap and revenue sharing structure in the first decade of the century the decline of the game can be delayed. But by the year 2100 America’s Pastime will be the third or fourth most popular spectator sport in the U.S., at best.

Ratings and attendance appear to be trending downward. A lot can happen between now and 2100, of course, but for the time being this prediction looks like a strong one.

I’m not terribly happy about it, either. I’ve played a lot baseball in my day and watched a lot more, and I love the game. I hope I’m wrong and that the game thrives in the future. But there are so many obstacles. The steroid scandals hurt the credibility of the game (although baseball has bounced back from scandal before), but nothing poses quite the threat of the rich/poor gap – and I say this as a fan of the Red Sox, the second-worst offender behind the Yankees. As long as supporters of 80% of the teams know they have damned near no chance to win, the sport is going to struggle.

7: The explosion of technological innovation and development we witnessed in the 20th Century (especially during the latter half) may plateau in the second half of the 2000s. Whether the leveling off occurs sooner or later will hinge on the feasibility of nanotechnologies. If nanotech proves as viable as many researchers (and science fiction writers) currently think we could continue to see the development of technological marvels we can barely imagine, and the plateau predicted here might not occur until late in the century, or even early in the 22nd. Otherwise, the nearly vertical innovation curve we’ve seen in the past few decades should be flattening out substantially by the middle of the century.

Perhaps more than any other item on the list, this one I’m not sure about. We could see a plateau – that has been the lesson of history – but our current pace is so explosive and shows no signs of doing anything except picking up more steam, so this prediction may wind up in the Nostraslammy’s loss column when all is said and done.

8: Artificial life will evolve, although not as a result of Artificial Intelligence projects. Instead, the massive growth of computing power, coupled with the development of the global communications web, will result in a ubiquitous network of connected information, and Information Life will occur when the concentration of information reaches critical mass, in a process not unlike the spontaneous eruption of organic life billions of years ago. Two things to note: first, given the non-physical, non-organic nature of this InfoLife, humanity may well not recognize it when it happens; and second, it may not recognize humanity as a life form, either.

This hasn’t happened yet, as far as we know, but I continue to believe this the most likely path to the evolution of AI/A Life. Not everyone agrees with me, including my friend and colleague Anne Foerst, who knows a frightening amount about AI and is convinced that it must arise within an embodied context. My counter is that the path I’m theorizing is the one that’s most like the evolutionary spurts we’ve seen throughout history.

We won’t know until we know, but mark me down as still confident in this prediction.

9: Public rhetoric about the democratizing power of the information economy notwithstanding, the rich-poor gap will not close, but will instead widen. It is unlikely that anything short of a major revolution will alter the underlying structures of power and wealth, which are robustly self-perpetuating.

Damn, this prediction is looking good. Of course, this was probably the most obvious one on the list.

10: The Neo-Luddite Movement will become increasingly violent. Cultural dislocations resulting from the rapid pace of technological innovation and deployment in the next 20 years will fuel increasing levels of resistance against “progress.” The Neo-Luddites, already well established and with spiritual leaders firmly in place, will eventually feel compelled to abandon rhetoric in favor of drastic action. At first the technoresistance will focus its energies in terrorist strikes against machinery and facilities, but will eventually graduate to widespread terrorism against technologists themselves.

We have not had outbreaks of violence tied directly to any overt neo-Luddite movements, but I’d argue that a lot of the terrorist acts we’ve seen have had at their core the same reaction to technopoly that characterizes our self-identified neo-Luddites (like Kirkpatrick Sale, Mark Slouka and others). For instance, I’d file any and all terror by religious fundamentalists under this heading, including 9/11. Fundamentalisms are ultimately about the displacement of religious institutions as the final arbiter of morality and ethics in a culture (and a hefty fear of the rampaging change brought on by technical innovation). Take something like abortion (or any question of reproductive rights), for instance. Isn’t abortion a direct artifact of the world of medical technics? And what happens to our ability to intervene in affairs on the other side of the globe if we strip away our technological superiority?

I believe this neo-Luddite impulse goes even further – I think there’s a great case to be made that the violence of the Unabomber (read his manifesto) and Harris and Klebold are essentially reactions against a technological society run amok.

So I’m declaring victory on this prediction and believe that the problem is only going to get worse so long as our technology evolves more rapidly than our ethics.

11: The Red Sox and Cubs will each win a World Series.

We knocked half of this one out in just a couple of years. Can the Cubs win it all in the next 90 years? I think so. They’ve shown signs of life in the last decade and I think it’s only a matter of time before they win one despite themselves.

12: Despite the growth of the Internet and other interactive modes of entertainment, the film will survive and thrive in its current form for the foreseeable future. Prognosticators who point to the power of interactivity and suggest that traditional one-way media are doomed may be right with respect to home-based media like television, but these dynamics don’t apply to film. First, it serves as a vital locus for social interaction (it’s an ideal activity for a date, for instance); and second, our thirst for the power and mystery of storytelling is in no danger of being extinguished (the most successful videogame authors have figured this much out already).

Anybody seen Avatar? It just cleared the billion-dollar mark over the weekend. Yes, we’ve seen an explosion in gaming and home-based entertainment offerings, but the movie biz looks stronger than ever.

13: By the year 2010, major universities will notice that their graduates lack many basic skills and will begin questioning the value of computers and the Internet in higher education. Some (but not all) will conclude that educational technologies place unproductive layers of machinery between student and teacher. This will spur a renewed emphasis on traditional educational strategies and basic literacy, organizational, and critical thinking skills.

Looks like I missed this one big time, didn’t I? In fact, it seems like precisely the opposite is happening at every turn.

Which is sad, because what I describe in the prediction is much needed. Our educational complex is in the worst shape it’s ever been in, and in so many cases technology is part of the problem, not the solution.

14: The U.S. population will migrate northward during the second quarter of the century. Rising average temperatures will fuel a move to milder climes. Air conditioning will insure the comfort of indoor living, but many people place a high importance on outdoor activities, especially during the summer months.

Too soon to tell, but if our scientists are right about climate disruption (and I think they are) this looks likely.

15: During the 21st Century we may finally learn that we are not alone in the universe. If intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, which seems plausible at least, humanity should soon reach the point where our technology will either allow us to find it (the Contact scenario) or encourage it to find us (the Star Trek: First Contact scenario). Hopefully our first meeting will be more like Close Encounters of the Third Kind than Mars Attacks!, and if we get really lucky our new friends might have technologies for scrubbing the atmosphere, purifying vast bodies of water, and curing male pattern baldness.

We haven’t found alien life yet, but we have found a lot more evidence of worlds with the conditions to sustain life (like recent discoveries concerning water on Mars). It seems like we hear a new report on alien worlds that are very Earth-like every month or two. As a result, I remain bullish on item #15.

16: The U.S. will elect its first female and minority Presidents. Sadly, they will prove as corrupt as the white males they replaced.

One down, one to go.

17: American media will become more vapid and less reliable early in the century, but the long-term impact could be positive. Between corporate ownership and the drive to maximize ratings at all costs, most major news outlets will be all but useless for the purpose of informing and educating the public by 2020 (with the exception of news services covering financial markets). Ironically, this could lead to a new age of subjective journalism. With the once-mighty press institutions either gone or discredited, and the ideologies of objective journalism along with them, a new breed of reporter may arise. This new journalist will be openly committed to advocacy, and will make his or her biases clear at the outset. The advocacy reporter would intersect perfectly with local populations whose disgust with the corruption and unresponsiveness of national (and even state) politics have driven them to seek involvement closer to home. It is possible that these dynamics could usher in a new golden age of civic engagement.

This one is a mixed bag at present. The first element is a gimme – this is worst moment for journalism since the days of Pulitzer, Hearst and Twain – and while I gave the legacy J establishment until 2020 to complete it’s full meltdown, it only seems to have needed half that much time.

The rest is unsettled. We could see the rise of a responsible, ethical advocacy press movement (see my series on the rise of “subjective” journalism), but there’s been no movement so far.

18: As hard as it is to imagine, commercial radio and the corporate music industry will suck worse in the next 25 years than it did in the last 25 years. The Internet will make it possible for unknown musicians to distribute their work, but in doing so it will massively increase the clutter of a media landscape that’s already over-saturated, making it harder for any particular artist to break through into the broad public consciousness. Since people love music, and since music will continue to serve as a gravity well for cultural and sub-cultural identification and bonding, mechanisms for sifting good from bad will become even more important. A service that fills this role will emerge on the Net. It may look like one of the currently developing music Web sites, or it may be a Web-based music journalism outlet, or it could be a type of service we haven’t imagined yet, but something will fill the void once occupied by commercial radio, and probably by 2010.

Part one of the equation – it would have been hard for me to be more right, huh? The part at the end looks like a miss – we’re still seeing all kinds of attempts at providing a reliable center, but so far most of our energies have been devoted to delivery systems (and it seems like it’s only a matter of time before Spotify or something very like becomes that all-songs-available-all-the-time uber-channel for us all). The filtering problem remains. Net radio and satellite are doing a nice job in places, but the only mass national music outlets are things like godforsaken American Idol, which really is the talent show at the Fall of Rome.

19: Killer storms will increase in number and intensity. Whether set in motion by industrial pollution or resulting from natural meteorological cycle, heavy weather is getting nastier, and the trend will continue. By the midpoint of the 21st century Category 5 hurricanes will hit the U.S. fairly frequently, and the mythical F6 tornado (which almost occurred for the first time in recorded history in 1999) will become commonplace. A Category 5 will hit a major coastal urban center in the next 25 years, resulting in near-total destruction of the city’s infrastructure. During the same time frame a city in the Lower Midwest will take a direct hit from an F6 or a strong F5 and will be annihilated.

Katrina was a lot closer to that Category 5 than we like to think about, and where destructive damage is concerned let’s remember that it missed New Orleans. All that damage happened on the back side of a Cat 3.

As with item #14 above, there seems every reason to believe that this prediction will come true, although it’s too early to put it in the win column.

20: Faced with mounting damage at the hands of increasingly sophisticated hackers, corporations will begin to see “black ops” (both online and real-world) as a necessary cost of doing business. The shift from “corporate security” to all-out “Info War” footing will accelerate by 2010, when it is revealed that a major online attack against an American company was sponsored by a foreign government. The U.S. government will be strategically, tactically, and morally unprepared to deal with this crisis, and the absence of policy leadership will result in the online equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, only instead of three players there will be hundreds with the ability to spark a full-blown cyberwar. Needless to say, world stock markets will react negatively. When the dust settles, world governments and corporate interests of all sizes will work together to develop safeguards against activities that threaten the global economy. The most significant result of this accord will be to transfer most real power from public to private institutions.

This one is a mixed bag at best because there’s so much we don’t know. There is plenty of evidence that large corps have been hit in the way predicted (and an analyst like Winn Schwartau would tell you that foreign governments have provided all kinds of supports for the perpetrators). The problem lies with my prediction that this would all become public knowledge – that hasn’t happened, and in large part it’s because the companies involved have every incentive to keep it a secret. Further, if said companies (perhaps even with the help of our government) have launched black ops activities, that’s something else you’re not likely to hear about in a daily White House press briefing.

So all I can really do at this point is say that I failed to account for the need for secrecy, but at the same time I suspect most of the prediction was on the money. I may never be able to point to evidence that I was right or wrong, although I’ll be watching and listening with interest.

21: Sometime before 2075 a genuinely deserving artist will win a Grammy Award. Okay, so I’m out on a limb here…

This was mostly snark, but the underlying point is more valid than ever. The Grammys are almost as big a joke as the Rock & Roll Hall of Product Sales Fame.

22: Some form of nuclear fusion will prove technically and economically viable by 2015. If fusion and nanotech both happen by 2020, the year 2101 will bear no more resemblance to 2001 than 2001 does to 2001 B.C., and the specifics of the changes to society are nearly impossible guess at.

I have another five years before I have to admit defeat, but at this stage my chances look dim. I do believe that we’ll see widespread nanotech and commercial fusion in this century, but my timetable was too optimistic.

So there you go. A few wins, a couple of losses, some too-soon-to-tells and partial successes. On the whole Nostraslammy is doing better than the grandpappy of predictification, Nostradamus himself, and that ought to count for something, right?

See you in 2020.

Contributions to all federal candidates for House and Senate seats and the presidency from the 2000 through 2010 election cycles totaled $9.7 billion, according to an S&R analysis of records aggregated by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Contributions to candidates and committees in all 50 states, from 2000 through 2009, totaled about $14.5 billion, according to records aggregated by the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

In this decade, thanks to computerization of records and a few top-notch, non-partisan organizations, we’ve learned how to follow the money. Well, so what? Has vastly increased public visibility of political money changed the way politics operates?

The $24.2 billion spent on campaign contributions is only part of the story. Over the past decade, $23 billion has been spent by corporations, labor unions, and other special-interest entities to lobby Congress and federal agencies, according to records aggregated by the center.

More than $45 billion has been spent in the decade now ending to influence legislation and regulation at state and federal levels of government. It’s only conjecture, of course, but it’s hardly likely that the bulk of those billions of dollars was intended to improve the lot of the 99 percent of adult Americans who did not make campaign contributions or made gifts of less than $200.

Where did the $24.2 billion in campaign donations come from? Only a tiny fraction, generally in the tenths of 1 percent, of Americans over age 18 make campaign contributions of more than $200. Those who give more than $1,000 are even fewer — but the amounts given by those latter donors total significantly higher.

The bulk of the decade’s nearly $10 billion in donations to federal candidates came from special interests and individuals associated with specific special interests who gave $200 or more. According to the center, the top special-interest givers in the election cycles in this decade, generally in this order, were

the finance, insurance and real-estate industries; lawyers and lobbyists; miscellaneous business; ideological and single-issue donors; the health industries; communications and electronics; labor; agribusiness; energy and natural-resource interests; transportation; and the defense industry.

Corporations and individuals associated with these special interests donated more than $8 billion this decade to federal candidates. And the leader in campaign largesse for the decade and in each election cycle, at $1.62 billion, or more than 16 percent of all campaign contributions to federal candidates? The winner, by a wide margin, are the finance, insurance and real-estate industries.

The number of lobbyists has increased from 10,641 in 2000 to 13,426 this year. Now, that’s the number of people who have legally registered as lobbyists. There are plenty of revolving-door people (those who have left the Hill or the executive branch to become lobbyists and vice versa) who are not registered as lobbyists but are as influential. Consider the example of former Sen. Tom Daschle, who claims he’s a “resource” for his health-care industry clients and not a lobbyist.

Those interested in studying campaign finance and lobbing — who’s giving the money and who’s getting it — have two non-profit and non-partisan organizations to thank for ready, intelligible access to FEC and state election commissions data. They are the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics, which provides “free online access to public records in all 50 states, to document political donor and lobbyist contributions to policymakers.” Also helpful is Earmark Watch, a project of Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Sunlight Foundation, which helps expose what these billions of dollars can buy from legislators.

These groups have become technologically more savvy. Tracking campaign contributions and lobbying dollars can be narrowly focused on such data more easily than using the FEC’s website or state election data websites. The center and the institute now have talented staffers who frequently write analyses of donor data, especially when a particularly topic is in the news.

Congress irritated by the college football Bowl Championship Series? There’s the center’s Dave Levinthal on the Capital Eye Blog, detailing how much money the BCS, News Corp., the NCAA and major football universities are giving to whom for what purpose.

Wondering whether Congress will include legal importation of drugs from abroad (i.e., Canada) in health-care reform? There’s Levinthal again, pointing out that the pharmaceutical and health-products industries have spent nearly $200 million in 2009 to oppose it.

Want to know how much money the health-care industry has spent trying to influence state legislation and regulation? There’s the institute’s Anne Bauer, telling you “[i]n the last six years, major players in the health care industry gave $394 million to officeholders, party committees and ballot measure committees in the 50 states.”

When the short-term, high-vig payday loan industry sought to reinvigorate itself (i.e., screw the borrowers) through the ballot box, there was the institute’s Tyler Evilsizer to explain that in Arizona and Ohio, “donors from the industry gave more than $35 million to support ballot measures that would allow them to continue operating.”

Computerization of records and sophisticated staff allow an organization such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, aka CREW, to track robocall ethics complaints against Sen. John McCain, develop a list of the most corrupt members of Congress, and keep track of the revolving door moves of White House staffers and cabinet members.

Yes, the governed can quickly track donations to those who govern or seek to govern. Yes, the governed can track the money spent by individuals, corporations, PACs and unions to legally influence those who govern. Yes, the governed can easily see how easy and legal it is for big spenders to influence legislators and regulators.

So what have we gained because we can do this? Not much.

Over the decade, corrupt politicians have been imprisoned for a variety of crimes. Convicted of crimes such as fraud and bribery, they were selfish and for sale. What they did was illegal.

But what remains unabated in the American political system is legalized corruption. The heightened ability to track political money does nothing to prevent the dramatic increase in legal campaign giving and the host of ethical and moral conflicts that so much money places in front of incumbents, challengers, and regulators.

We’ve seen the amounts of money spent to legally attain and maintain political power grow to such amounts that billionaires now spend tens of millions of dollars to finance their own campaigns. Modern elections trivialize issues and maximize dependence on name recognition. That costs money, which forecloses the possibility that better-qualified candidates who are not as wealthy can prosper at the ballot box.

We’ve seen how those with money to spend and an agenda to enact gain access to the levers of power, as did players in the health-care reform debate behind closed doors in the Obama White House.

Consider the consolidation of media, its threat to competitiveness, its anti-trust implications, and its potential to maintain unreasonably high consumer prices for news and entertainment. When Comcast announced its intended $30 billion purchase of NBC Universal from General Electric, its lobbyists flooded the Hill. Through September of this year, Comcast has spent $9.1 million on lobbying. The Federal Communications Commission must approve the sale.

Comcast’s 20-member D.C. lobbying team, reports Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel, includes “former aides to Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), former Senate Majority Leader and Obama confidant Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Democratic Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps.” (Oh, look: There’s “confidant” Daschle acting as a “resource” again, “aides” notwithstanding …)

Continual increases in media consolidation by conglomerates reduce the likelihood that Americans’ monthly bills for cable, Internet, satellite, and telephone services will decrease.

Earlier this month, the House faced an impending vote on what Paul Krugman of The New York Times called “a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.” Three days earlier, wrote Krugman, “Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies” to sidestep banking reform. All Republicans and 27 Democrats voted against the measure. (Gosh, what wonderfully independent thinking from our members of Congress.)

That means it’s less likely that credit will flow readily and credibly to America’s small businesses and consumers, and that more Americans may lose their homes unfairly.

And the drug-industry lobbyists? We’ve seen how lobbyists for pharmaceutical giant Genentech have written statements that 42 members of Congress from both parties have “revised and extended” into the Congressional Record.

That means it’s likely the out-of-pocket cost (and that inherent in premiums) for prescription medications is likely to grow as a percentage of Americans’ expenditures even as their wages have remained stagnant through the past decade.

We continue to see the fruits of lobbying in which special interests reap financial reward at little cost, such as the American Jobs Recovery Act that provided no jobs but $100 billion in tax breaks for corporations.

Are Americans better off because of the ease with which they can track who gives how much money to the people who would represent them and propose and pass laws that may help or hinder Americans’ lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness? No. That’s because incumbents and challengers don’t care a whit that this system is so blatantly and transparently stacked toward the influence wrought by so much money.

We point fingers at the financially oiled, undue influence of special interests. Our legislators and regulators just shrug: “So what?”

No legislative intent lies on the horizon of the next decade that would stem the shameful influence of money on the conduct of legislators and regulators and what they do, or fail to do, in the public’s interest. There will be no sufficient, substantial changes in campaign finance laws or congressional ethics policies to end this system of legalized corruption.

No reform candidates exist on the horizon immune to the blandishments the crassly monied political system can promise or proffer.

From 2010 to 2019, expect more of the same. Another $45 billion will speak louder than you or me to those who govern us.

But, no. After a tradition of reporting on the reporters dating back to 1884, E&P is done. And that’s sad, because the careful inspection of the media industries by a longtime, experienced staff led by editor Greg Mitchell has ended. Mitchell, who took over as editor in 2002, had revived a publication that had become moribund and almost irrelevant. To much criticism, he killed E&P as a print weekly and reintroduced it as a monthly. But his master stroke was diving headlong onto the Web, where E&P has prospered, at least in terms of timely analytical coverage of the industry.

I don’t have readership or page views, but given that newspaper staffs nationwide have been cut so drastically during the years of Mitchell’s editorship, I wouldn’t be surprised if circulation of the monthly had fallen.

The impending end of E&P was, as they say, all over the ‘nets today, rising to No. 4 as Twitter topic. For the time being, it seems, the good work of longtime E&P hands like Joe Strupp, Mark Fitzgerald and Jennifer Saba is at an end. I will particularly miss the pairing of Fitz and Jen, whose stories and podcasts on the economics of the media business have been prescient and accurate.

I have been reading E&P since 1970. If you’re in the news biz, it’s been a trusted companion and professor. If it has died solely because of financial considerations, we should be saddened. Even the industry watchdog, it seems, must make budget — or was E&P just not sufficiently profitable? In days and weeks to come, perhaps we’ll learn more details.

But the loss of E&P is just another bullet to the heart of journalism as a public service. Those who love, need, or appreciate good journalism will mourn its passing.

We’re losing, people. E&P’s end is just another symptom of the continued erosion of a democracy’s ability to closely inspect and monitor itself through its adversarial relationship with the press. E&P has been more than a mirror of the newspaper industry; it has been a teacher of how to press for information from governments and industries (and unions) that would rather stay uninspected.

Perhaps an institution that believes in that public service mission (Pew? Poynter?) could offer Greg, Joe, Fitz, Jen and company a new home. E&P still performs a valuable mission. Find a way to retain it.

[Disclosure: E&P has published commentaries I have written. Greg Mitchell is a graduate of the journalism program in which I teach.]

Our take is that Murdoch’s strategy is not likely to be successful, although we think he has an interesting idea—gather funds at the search engine level rather than the site content level. Since Internet users have been notoriously cheap in the past and generally unwilling to pay for much of anything directly, this may in fact be the way to go. But we see several impediments here, a few of which might be significant.

1. To what extent is Murdoch’s vision here clouded by the fact that he happens to own one of the very few media publications that people are in fact willing to subscribe to (The Wall Street Journal)? Time will tell here. But most of Murdoch’s other publications just don’t have a similar readership. In fact, the only other general publication I can think of with comparable appeal to the WSJ would be The Financial Times. To ask this another way, how many readers of The Times (the London one) will be willing to fork over for an online subscription—especially if the owners of The Telegraph decide to leave online access free? This is really the interesting question here—it’s not likely that News Corp is going to be able to generate much in the way of online subscription or access fees from The Sun, or The New York Post or News of the World.

2. Technologically, it’s pretty easy to block access on Google. Murdoch could actually do it today, as Google has pointed out—why hasn’t he? So suddenly a bunch of News Corp stuff doesn’t show up on the Google News Page, or in Google searches. This will be like that store that’s been there for years, and suddenly it’s gone, and you see the empty storefront and can’t remember what was there. Will anyone notice? This seems to be a significant risk. Keep in mind that the New York Times experiment in charging for access was pretty much a disaster, and the NYT had to abandon it (although it was for columnists, not for news). Rather than pay to read the NYT’s sterling collection of op-ed columnists, people just stopped reading them entirely. Most print news organizations, by the way, do charge for access for older material.

3. This means there’s a real prisoner’s dilemma here for news organizations—do they follow Murdoch, or not, without knowing what the rest of the industry is going to do? My first thought is that if I’m the person running The Telegraph Web site, I’m praying like crazy that Murdoch will do this.

4. The whole enterprise now is going to be subsidized by Microsoft, which has been trying to grow Bing. So Microsoft will be paying News Corp for exclusive access to News Corp content. For how long? Bing has been gaining share, apparently, but I suspect it’s solely from the fact that it has become, for many organizations (like the one I work for), the default search engine. Personally, as soon as I realize I’m in Bing, I switch over to Google, which generally does a better job. In fact, part of the problem with Bing is that it generally sucks. Will adding dedicated content that you have to pay for make Bing suck less?

5. How does charging at the search engine level work? And if you already pay for something (like the WSJ), why would you go through Bing to get access? It’s a bit unclear here what exactly Microsoft will be paying for—just the index? Or access to The Times itself? If it’s the index, does this mean that you could still get access to The Times Web site—but just not the index? Will lots of people care about this? My guess here is that Murdoch will still want you going to The Times Web site rather than getting it through either Google or Bing.

Keep in mind that no one really knows what’s being talked about here, although we’ll get more in the coming weeks, I assume. Another, and related, point—the sudden escalation of the attacks by B Sky B (and Rupert himself, in fact) on the BBC makes sense only in the context of trying to eliminate free news sites. How successful this will be remains to be seen, but it has certainly captured attention. Would the Tories, if elected, try to make the BBC Web site something that you would have to pay for? That would be interesting, and a little transparent as payback to Murdoch for The Sun’s support–but that doesn’t mean the Tories wouldn’t throw the idea around a bit.

There’s an interesting collection of different points of view in the NYT’s Opinionator column from a few weeks back. But I have to quote Cory Doctorow (who I’m not sure is completely correct, but does have a way with words):

[H]ere’s what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he’s still having lurid fantasies inspired by the momentary insanity that caused Google to pay him for the exclusive right to index MySpace (thus momentarily rendering MySpace a visionary business-move instead of a ten-minutes-behind-the-curve cash-dump).

So what he’s hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you’ve never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year’s operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google.

He may, in fact, get a taker. And it will be a disaster. A search engine whose sole competitive advantage is “We have Rupert Murdoch’s pages!” will not attract any substantial traffic. The search engine will either go bust or fail to renew the deal. . . .

So good luck with that, Rupert. have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet, hoping that the world’s politics and economies will reform themselves to suit your fevered imaginings. This is how history will remember you.

To be continued, obviously.

That’s because paid circulation of daily newspapers nationally fell more than 10 percent from a year ago. Some papers suffered truly horrendous daily circulation losses: the San Francisco Chronicle (down 25.8 percent), The Boston Globe (down 18.5 percent) and The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger (down 22.2 percent), reports Rick Edmonds on his Poynter Biz Blog. USA Today, hit by a slump in travel, fell nearly 18 percent. The circulation of 400 daily newspapers has fallen to only 30 million readers.

This hemorrhaging of circulation — the worst ever — will have serious consequences. Expect newspaper staffs, already slashed below the minimum necessary to adequately cover their turf, to be cut further. Expect more shallow, one-source stories. Expect more stories laden with anonymous sources because the poorly paid, younger, inexperienced reporters left on staff won’t have the skill to persuade sources to speak on the record. Expect more wire-service content because local stories won’t get done. Expect corporate newspaper management to continue to stall on finding a business model that enhances the public-service mission of journalism. Expect more style than substance.

Just expect less of what good newspapers used to be. The nation’s newspapers, the constitutionally anointed watchdogs and adversaries of government, can no longer be considered as successful in those roles as they used to be.

Mr. Edmonds lists several reasons for this continuing, massive loss of paid circulation. From his Biz Blog:

• Readers continue to migrate from print to the Internet — sometimes to newspapers’ own sites, sometimes to aggregators.
• Papers, metros especially, are voluntarily trimming circulation to remote areas because they are more expensive to serve and less valuable to advertisers.
• So-called “start pressure,” the selling of new subscriptions to replace lost ones, has taken a hit from cost-cutting.
• Decisions at many papers to aggressively increase subscription and single copy prices has resulted in fewer copies being sold, though circulation revenue has increased.
• This period is the first to include the full impact of the recession, in which some consumers are dropping subscriptions and others buying the paper less frequently.
• Smaller news staffs and news space make the product weaker and less appealing.

In 2008, newspapers shed more than 9,000 jobs. This year, so far, newspapers have cut more than 14,100 jobs. How can such cuts in reporting and other capabilities not have serious social, cultural, and political consequences? Yes, various foundation-funded, non-profit, experimental approaches to independent newsgathering have emerged. Consider the well-intended efforts of ProPublica and MinnPost. (Read Alan Mutter’s excellent two-part take on non-profit news startups.)

Too little, perhaps too late. American journalism sprouted from local printers who became family owners of newspapers — local newspapers. The Founders intended the First Amendment to protect those who owned presses and printed newspapers from interference by the government. But the utility of the First Amendment has been eroded by overt corporate mismanagement and malpractice far more than covert government malfeasance.

At the local level, newspaper staffs have been reduced far below necessary levels for competent, comprehensive coverage of local government. Government didn’t cause this — but it now benefits from the ability to operate with far less inspection by journalists.

No non-profit efforts on the horizon would make up for the quantitative loss of experienced reporters nationally. Fewer reporters means fewer watchdogs.

How is that not costly to a democracy?

CNN’s ratings in the prime 25-54 demographic fell 77 percent in the last 12 months. Finger-pointers and blame-gamers abound. The Times‘ Bill Carter calls the last-place performance of CNN’s “signature host” Anderson Cooper “alarming” at the 10 p.m. slot. Charles Warner of mediacurmudgeon.com writes at HuffPo that Fox and MSNBC may have outbid CNN for favorable channel positions. Others, like Bill Gorman of tvbythenumbers.com, thinks CNN lost its substantial advantage gained from its political coverage from 2006 to 2008.

But seasoned TV pundits are missing a significant point lost in the blizzard of analyses of the cable news rating wars.

The Times‘ Carter offers a forest of numbers to paint a distressing picture for CNN (which, of course, paints an equally depressing financial picture). His Oct. 26 story provided ratings and leaders for each prime-time hour. (By the way, his story provided no source for the numbers. Mr. Warner at HuffPo says Mr. Carter received the numbers from MSNBC executives perhaps eager to stick it to the Chicken Noodle Network.) But here’s the nutshell for the evening hours:

For the month, CNN averaged 202,000 viewers, ages 25 to 54. That was far behind the dominant leader, Fox, which averaged 689,000. But it also trailed MSNBC which had 250,000 viewers in that group and HLN, which had 221,000 viewers.

For those without a calculator handy, that’s about 1.3 million viewers between 25 and 54 years old for all prime-time cable news programs. According to Neilsen, the rating service, America has about 115 million TV households. Those households have an average of 2.83 television sets.

So what the hell is everyone else watching? Or doing? Let’s subtract about 30 million people over 70 who just don’t watch TV at late hours. And another 20 million under 5 years old for the same reason. If only 1.3 million are watching the “journalism” that supposedly maintains an adversarial relationship with government (hah!), then what are about 62 million people doing between 7 and 11 p.m.?

Let’s cut another 25 million who would be watching prime-time network or cable entertainment programming. (Even “Law & Order” reruns — which draw up to 10 million viewers — dwarf CNN’s viewership.) That’s still 37 million people not watching the prime-time cable “news” programming.

No, I don’t know why. But I’ll hazard a guess or two.

The 1.3 million who do watch cable news prime-time programs have firmly held (and not always rationally adopted) political points of view. They need their daily ideological dose of Lou Dobbs or Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly. But the 62 million who don’t watch the cable prime-time offerings may have simply concluded that it’s just not news, and that the opinionated content simply has too little value.

Frankly, the cable news networks’ collective decision to bloviate instead of inform between 7 and 11 p.m. has hurt all of them. Fox may outdraw CNN by a factor of three, but given that tens of millions of Americans do not watch Fox and its opinion programming should be little comfort to Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes.

After all, many millions of those tens of millions of people who do not watch Fox or CNN or MSNBC or HLN are between 25 and 54 years old. And they have money to spend.

Cable news networks should re-examine what they do between 7 and 11 p.m. if they wish to be more profitable — and survive.

On the same day that The New York Times said (buried in its Media Decoder blog) that it would cut 100 newsroom jobs (again), Columbia University said it would not accept applications next year for its dual-degree graduate program in environmental journalism. The former is no surprise; the latter is a sad sign of the impact of newsroom job cuts on what news gets reported — or not.

In a letter to faculty, the directors of the program wrote:

As you know, media organizations across the county are in dire financial straits and thousands of journalists’ jobs have been eliminated. Science and environment beats have been particularly vulnerable. Although our graduates have done well in their careers, even those still employed are finding few opportunities to do the kind of substantive reporting for which the dual degree program has trained them, as they scramble to do their own work plus that of laid-off colleagues. [emphasis added]

Obviously, it’s a very discouraging time to be working in journalism with so many layoffs, buyouts, and closings. There are fewer staff jobs for specialized environmental reporters and fewer resources available to those who do have jobs. Tragically, this is happening at a time when environmental issues are finally getting more attention from the political and business realms. … the fate of newspapers will be the fate of science and environmental journalism at newspapers. They’re hemorrhaging jobs like mad, as so many of this journal’s readers are painfully aware, and I certainly have no idea what will staunch the bleeding. However, I can say that it’s been phenomenally impressive to watch how well print reporters have transitioned to the Web over the last few years. I really have no idea how practical it is — because there’s still no reliable business model for any kind of (web) journalism … [emphasis added]

One of those training grounds has been at Columbia. The directors of its suspended program, however, can read the tea leaves: Their graduates cannot reliably find reporting jobs at the nation’s daily newspapers. Yes, various online environmental journalism operations have sprouted. But their readership still can’t match the nearly 50 million newspapers printed daily. Though declining, that amount of paid circulation still has some muscle. But the decline in numbers of environmental journalists hurts, says the Observatory’s Brainard:

But who is watching all the municipal waste departments out there, looking over the environmental impact statements of local energy projects, or paying attention to water quality? Who will be keeping track of all environment- and energy-related stimulus money as it filters down to the lowest levels of government and out to businesses and contractors? Regional news outlets are the only ones who can reliably monitor such things. That’s exactly where we’ve lost so many of our very best journalists.

[Disclosure: I am a member of the SEJournal editorial board and its former chair.]

Still, this whole “marketplace of ideas” is a marvelous concept. Perhaps the most marvelous concept in history. Drawing on the Miltonian belief that if people are allowed to enter the agora and freely state their cases, then “the truth will out” (that is, an educated and informed citizenry will unerringly perceive the truth and that weaker ideas will be disregarded in favor of stronger ones), our nation’s founders crafted a Constitution that assured people the right to voice their opinions, free from government intrusion. Yes, the formula has its problem spots – Americans have religiously rejected the “educated and informed” part, for instance, and there have been embarrassing questions reagrding who, precisely, got to be a “citizen.” Also, the framers seemed not to foresee that we’d get to a point where governmental threats to the exercise of speech paled next to those posed by private institutions. Still, all that said, it’s hard to argue that Americans have made a lot of hay with our 1st Amendment guarantees since they were enacted, and even an imperfect marketplace of ideas beats none at all.

This week presented us with a sparkling case study of the marketplace of ideas at its best. A few days back it was announced that conservative pundit and noiser-without-peer Rush Limbaugh was part of a group seeking to buy the NFL’s St. Louis Rams. The agora fairly exploded in conversation. A number of players and the head of the NFL Players Association wanted no part of a man who’s established a reputation for … racial insensitivity? The owner of the Indianapolis Colts (a Bush/Cheney spporter, as it turns out) promised to block any bid involving Limbaugh. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell finally got around to offering that “Limbaugh’s divisiveness is not what the league needs.” Columnists, pundits and bloggers (including S&R’s own uber-cynic, Dr. Sid Bonesparkle) weighed in with a broad range of takes (mostly anti-Rush, it seems). Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton had things to say, and we’d have felt cheated if they hadn’t.

Many of these voices were informed and credible. Others were driven by prefabricated ideologies instead of facts and reason. And a boisterous debate was had by all. In the end, the brazillionaire heading the investment group, St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts, put two and two together. Realizing that Limbaugh was an 800-lb albatross hanging around the neck of his NFL aspirations, Checketts unceremoniously kicked him to the curb.

The wonderful thing about the whole episode? This is precisely how our nation’s founders envisioned our democracy working. An idea was presented. Interested parties, informed or otherwise, had their say. (Remember, the framers knew there would be irresponsible voices in the public debate – that was part of the equation.) Marvelously, it was all enabled immeasurably by the Internet, which Al Gore, love him or hate him, saw as the ultimate tool of Jeffersonian democracy. From a 1994 address:

“And the distributed intelligence of the [Global Information Infrastructure] will spread participatory democracy… I see a new Athenian Age of democracy forged in the fora the GII will create.

The entire public debate was conducted free of coercion from the government. And in the end, the marketplace decided, governed by its collective conscience, that Limbaugh’s participation was not in the best interest of the league, the ownership group or the free market. An idea was tested and found wanting. Dave Checketts made an informed decision.

In theory, we should now be able to tune in and listen as Rush, disappointed though he may be, extols the virtues of the marketplace. After all, that is his core ideological concern – that free enterprise and the marketplace of ideas be allowed to determine the value of products and propositions, right?

Part of my job as a journalism professor is to recruit students. Because I was a journalist, I’m interested in finding bright, hard-working young men and women who’d like to follow the calling of the public service mission of journalism. (I remain optimistic, perhaps foolishly.)

Parents of prospective students, of course, routinely ask: “What’s your record on job placement?” That I can tell them, based on surveys of our grads six months after matriculation. (And it’s an excellent record, too.)

But here’s the question I dread:

My daughter says she wants to be a journalist. Even if her financial aid package is half your $35,000 per year cost — and rising at 5 percent a year — and despite what parents can pay, she may end up with more than $30,000 or $40,000 in student loans. How long will it take for her on an entry-level journalist’s salary to recover her investment?

Surveys of journalism school grads from recent years say salaries in the mid-20s are customary. Entry-level print journalists earn a little less (in some cases, a lot less, as my graduates tell me); PR, advertising and some broadcast jobs earn more. That parent envisions an ROI on the family’s investment in the daughter’s education at three to five years or more. That’s at a private school; presumably, a public school grad would fare better.

If that young woman is bright, she’ll do her homework. She’ll ask me before sending in her enrollent deposit for the names of recent grads who landed daily print jobs after graduation. After getting their permission, I’ll give them to her. They’ll tell her this:

They love being journalists. They love telling a good story. But they detest working 60 or 70 hours, nights and weekends, for 40 hours’ pay. They detest the unpaid furloughs imposed by corporate managers looking to cut costs. Their raises, if profferred, lag significantly behind inflation. Because of numerous rounds of buyouts and layoffs, fewer older, experienced reporters and editors are available (and willing) to serve as mentors. Young journos are tired of seeing assignments that serve more as fluff than substance. They thought, as journalists, that they could make a difference. They are discovering that the current structure of the industry prevents that, frustrating them. Their health-care plans suck. And they’re tired of providing their own reporter’s notebooks.

That prospective student may still attend my journalism program — but if she’s keenly aware of her ROI, she may apply her time, treasure and talent to mastering the skills of a journalist only to apply them to other avenues of communication that pay more. She’ll learn to observe, record, analyze, organize and present. But she’ll do that concocting advertising and PR campaigns instead of digging up the dirt at city hall that unpaid “volunteer” amateurs and bloggers don’t do well or at all. That’s because those stories — the mundane but necessary stuff of holding government accountable — don’t drive traffic to blogs.

Yes, I paint a bleak picture. Yes, it’s overdrawn. But scratch journalists in their mid-20s, either at print jobs or small-market broadcast stations, and you’ll hear all these threads. And yes, there are a number of emerging avenues for distribution of journalists’ work operated by laid-off journos, foundations, non-profits and for-profit, online-only startups. There are places she can work as a journalist. But then there’s that ROI calculation: Making a difference vs. paying the bills and student loans.

I wonder where the journalists will come from who will be around 10 to 20 years from now to cover the financial funeral of Social Security, the continuing debate over health-care reform, the attempt by President Hillary Clinton to amend the constitution to allow her a third term and the still unfolding drama of Brett Favre’s 15th “retirement” from the Toronto Argonauts.

Thousands of journalists at daily papers have lost their jobs in just the past few years. Generally, they’ve been the older, more experienced journalists. Bean counters figure they can hire two, maybe three cub reporters for the dough they pay an experienced journo making Guild scale and excellent benefits after 25 years. And that’s if they hire at all.

Studies show that the nation’s journalism schools are cranking out about 12,000 graduates every year. But is the trend line of those who wish a journalism career with a public-service aura ascending or descending?

Where will the next generation of skilled, committed journalists come from if the perceived ROI of a journalism education is so dismal?

Managers of content-provision corporations — there’s no point any more in calling them “newspaper companies” — are desperate for revenue after enduring print ad losses. So, after 15 years of giving away the milk for free online, they’ve finally mustered up the cojones to at least talk about charging for content on their websites. They speak of this in a language the reporters they’ve fired would never use — the content provision managers talk of monetizing their sites, of incorporating paid-content strategies, of generating additional digital revenue.

And if you believe pay-content impresario Steven Brill of Journalism Online, about 1,000 publishers — er, content-provision specialists — expect to make $900 million at $8.33 a month from the 10 percent of online website visitors Mr. Brill thinks would be willing to cough of up the cash. But an American Press Institute study says only 51 percent of publishers (who voluntarily completed a survey) think they can charge successfully for online content.

But what does “successfully” mean? And who gets to define it? Easy: Cui bono?

Those at the top of many content-provision corporations believe they would benefit. Mr. Brill says he has 1,000 publications signed to non-binding agreements. Others aren’t so optimistic. Consultants for the American Press Institute, in an early study with admitted weaknesses, suggest only readers would only pay $4.64 — nearly halving Mr. Brill’s nearly $1 billion estimate.

Content-provision corporations are eager, nay, slaked with thirst for advertising revenue to replace the dollars that have fled print newspapers. Although a few large content-provision corporations have managed to hold share prices lately despite tumbling profits, managers need that pay-wall revenue to reinvigorate investors who lost a bundle on newspaper stocks over that past five years. (And let’s not forget some argue consortium-set, pay-wall prices are tantamount to collusion in pricing.)

Because sound data to predict pay-wall success, erecting that wall risks revenue flight as much as revenue restored. Respected analyst Alan Mutter (“Reflections of Newsosaur“) has written extensively in the past few months about pay walls. Mr. Mutter says:

But what, publishers rightfully wonder, will become of the other 90% of website visitors – and the $3.1 billion in advertising revenues the U.S. newspaper industry generated on the web in 2008?. … Here’s why publishers are sweating: While Brill argues that newspapers can preserve some 90% of their page views and online advertising after erecting a pay wall, publishers consistently have told me that they fear they could lose 75% or more of their traffic and banner revenue if they started to charge for content.

Readers — at least those who pay the toll to cross the pay-wall moat — get to define success. (Here’s a look at what some smaller, rural newspapers in non-competitive situations have done in terms of content behind the pay wall.) Remember that “Members Only” clothing line of the ’80s? That’s what a pay wall promises: Uniqueness. Frankly, that’s always been a good local newspaper’s strength — unique content. Local news about local people and local issues.

Erect a pay wall. Promise quality, unique, premium content. That’s the formula the content-provision corporations promise. Will they deliver in terms of what the readers accept as a fair exchange for fee paid? It’d be easy to snark here. For example, in May more than half of the 45 million visits to the online Palm Beach Post linked to the police mug shots the Post runs online. (It’s not the only online paper that does this, too. And a host of ethical issues are involved.)

Is this the quality, unique, premium content that lies behind the pay wall? No, not really. Most of that unique content will be locally generated news, features and “service” information — school lunches, entertainment listings. But will that local behind-the-wall content have quality in quantity?

If the pay walls had been erected 15 years ago — even five years ago — then the answer would be more yes than no.

In this still-dawning century, thousands of the skilled, experienced professional practitioners who produced the quality, unique, premium content no longer work for the content-provision corporations. That’s because the corporations fired the producers. To maintain profit levels to satisfy the investors to whom content-provision management sold its collective soul, it cut expenses — firing the professionals it desparately needs now to make good on the pay-wall promise.

A successful business model? Or crap shoot?

Even if content-provision companies have that $900 million fall into their laps as Mr. Brill suggests, which is more likely to happen? Stock buybacks and dividend increases? Or investment of at least tens of millions of dollars into hiring professional newsmen and newswomen to make good on the promise of quality, unique, premium content?

Yeah, right. It won’t be the latter.

Recommended reading:

Alan Mutter’s excellent series on arguments for and against pay walls:

Why aren’t we paying for news?
What stops publishers from charging for news?
How publishers can make Web content pay

Paul Farhi of the American Journalism Review, arguing for reinvigoration of the print newspaper:

Build that pay wall high

This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks – the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

To date, this story has generated 432 comments (probably more by the time this has been posted). And you can just imagine. Leaving aside the obvious questions like “The big oversized art books too?” and “The bound copies of Life magazine?”, the commentators really get at the point that’s been nagging me as well—um, why? That sort of thing. It’s a pretty lively commentary, with about 95% of the comments running along the “How dare they?” lines.

So I was pleased that the other blogger in the family had a more sensible take on this, meaning the one with the library science degree who actually knows a thing or two about this sort of issue. And she zeroes right in:

Um, yeah. So first and foremost this is obviously a desperate ploy for publicity. I wonder if they were really expecting quite the universal derision that seems to have been heaped upon them: even the techie blogs think that this is insane. I know there’s no such thing as bad publicity and all, but I find it hard to believe that any parents looking to spend $160k on their child’s high school education will be reading this press and thinking “Gee, I hadn’t heard of Cushing Academy. AND they don’t have books in their library? SCORE!” Versus other schools that offer, y’know, both books AND the internet.

Most people talking about this article are waxing eloquent about how cozy it is to curl up in an armchair and turn the pages, and that’s all well and good, but it totally misses the way that a school library is utilized. School libraries aren’t for pleasure reading. I’m sure that even at a 4th rate school like Cushing, there isn’t much time for leisure reading: between academics and sports and extracurriculars, I know that I and pretty much everyone I knew rarely read for fun while school was in session in both high school and college. School libraries are for research, even at the secondary school level. They are depositories of academic books, often from academic publishers and with a very limited print run, and hard or impossible to find in a bookstore. They contain a wide range of reference books, not only your basic set of Encyclopedia Brittanica, but also more obscure reference texts. Trained librarians are there to assist students in learning how to do research.
….

I’m not actually as horrified as most people are over this publicity stunt, because it’s just too stupid to be shocking. It’s not even shockingly stupid because, hey, at least they’re being honest. It’s a school full of jocks doing their 5th year of high school and brain dead new money kids who like the idea of a New England prep school. The teachers don’t have any interest in enforcing limits on students using the web to research, and the students are too dull and lazy to actually do research the right way. So they’re just being honest that the kids don’t care, the teachers don’t care, and most tellingly, the parents don’t care. Because what kind of parent would send their child to a school without any books, but with a $12,000 cappuccino machine? Exactly.

This strikes me as being sensible. Prep schools are in a bind these days, like universities. Like any other enterprise, they need to meet costs, and to market themselves, and this may turn out to be a really clever marketing strategy—or a hugely dumb one. This really doesn’t speak to the future of books very much, other than to observe that a second tier prep school has decided that it doesn’t need any in its library. Well, the market will decide whether this is a winning strategy or not, and it will interesting to see whether this headmaster still has a job in a couple of years. What he’ll be judged on, of course, is whether this ploy improves Cushing’s college admittance performance. For all I know, the Cushing administrators behind this decision may have a very good grasp of the marketing dynamics relevant to the Cushing applicant pool.

There are all sort of reasons why Kindles might be a good idea—they may be greener, and they can be an interesing pedagogical tool for classroom instruction (embed the homework in with the reading assignments, say, for a chemistry textbook, with various heuristics for correcting wrong answers, that sort of thing—the technology already exists for all this). Curling up with one in the dim corner of the wood-panelled library in front of a cozy fire on a winter’s afternoon somehow doesn’t have quite the same resonance. But I can’t honestly say that that was part of my secondary school experience anyway, as fond as I was of my library—I was too busy doing research for the next dumb term paper. If we’re going to create a culture with a love of books, it’s going to come from a love of reading, and a love of ideas. Libraries with real books are necessary here, but perhaps not sufficient.

The above stamp was issued in 2000 to celebrate the bicentennial of the Library of Congress, which hopefully won’t be chucking all their books any time soon.

There was a time when abuse was performed with style, wit and elegance; and it came from a clear moral stance. The ancient Greeks raised it to an art form: it had a formal structure and it took risks by offending the powerful. Jonathan Swift’s savagely ironic A Modest Proposal, which urged that the Irish poor should sell their children to the rich as food, was a masterpiece of outrage and black humour.

But “snark” – the term is borrowed from Lewis Carroll – is something different. Denby refers to a tone of voice, which has spread far and wide thanks to new media technologies, that is content to spread casual calumnies without regard to whether they possess any sense of.

Snark is “free-floating contempt in a void”: it is the unchecked innuendo that can end a career, or the clumsy and overblown destruction of easy targets. Its purveyor-in-chief is the anonymous internet blogger, who has nothing positive to contribute to civic discourse other than “low, ragging insult with a little curlicue of knowingess”.

Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker, makes his case with wit – vital to avoid the obvious charge of humourlessness. He is at pains to rebut the accusation. To take a stand against snark is not to submit to self-importance and excessive earnestness; it is merely to call for greater care in the choosing of victims and the crafting of jokes.

There’s more, and it’s generally favourable. That’s the only review I’ve seen in the UK. I’ve also seen some reviews in the US, which seem to suggest that Aspeden’s enthusiasm is a bit misplaced. In New York Magazine, Adam Sternbergh had this to say:

You have to give David Denby credit for bravery: Writing a book titled Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation is like writing a book titled Keying My Car: It’s the Wrong Thing to Do or Why Flaming Bags of Dog Poop on My Doorstep Just Aren’t Funny. You invite the transgression even as you decry it; you loose the hounds on yourself. Given Denby’s age (65) and position in the firmament (film reviewer for The New Yorker), he could have written the most concise, insightful, artfully balanced, and expertly argued book about snark and still come off like an Internet-age Andy Rooney, wagging his finger from his rocking chair at the boisterous kids on the lawn. And he has not written the most concise, insightful, artfully balanced, and expertly argued book about snark.

I’m sorry, did that sound snarky? I apologize. Denby’s book invites—even begs masochistically to receive—a snarky response, but he won’t get one here. I enjoy snark. I practice snark. And I hope herein to defend snark. But it’s too easy to stamp this book with some snarky dismissal (EPIC FAIL) and continue on one’s self-satisfied way. Denby’s book is serious, and wrong, and it deserves an appropriate response. Moreover, the book is premised on a popular meme: that so-called snark, what he calls “a nasty, knowing strain of abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation,” is both increasingly unavoidable and intrinsically corrosive. I disagree on both counts. Snark can be misused and misdirected. It can be mean, and it can be personal. It’s also not only useful as a form of public conversation but necessary, for reasons that Denby either ignores or fails to comprehend.

I thought this was a sensible, balanced and highly informed review, and it encouraged me to not read Denby’s book, unlike the sensible, balanced and highly informed Aspeden review, which made me think this book might be worth reading. Let’s see, can we get a third opinion? How about Walter Kirn in The New York Times?

In “Snark,” an earnest book-length essay of neo-Victorian public-mindedness that deplores the “nasty, knowing abuse” that the author would have us fear contaminates too much American humour lately, David Denby, a movie critic for The New Yorker, sets for himself what has to be one of the most quixotic projects that a moral reformer can undertake. He wants to correct and restrain, using scholarship and logic, perhaps the keenest, most reflexive, prehistoric and anarchic of simple human pleasures, short of eating or achieving orgasm. The act of laughter, this would be. Or, for Denby, the act of low, illicit laughter — laughter enjoyed for the wrong reasons and provoked by the wrong lines. Whether laughter for the right reasons is even possible, given humour’s subversive, corrosive history, is a difficult philosophical question, of course, but Denby feels that it is. This follows from his belief that the impulses to giggle, grin and cackle (and the various means for stimulating these impulses) can be, and ought to be, consciously aligned with civic virtues and literary standards, lest our society laugh for no just cause, at jokes that aren’t witty enough to laugh at and that may even be plain stupid and malicious.

The humour that stirs this wrongful laughter is “snark,” named for a fictional creature from the poem “The Hunting of the Snark,” by Lewis Carroll. As a species of vicious contemporary humour, it is defined by Denby in many ways — so many, in fact, that the creature never materializes as anything more than a shadow on a wall that Denby keeps shooting at yet never hits. In his opening pages he defines snark negatively — as a practice that certain famed comics are often charged with, but undeservedly and inaccurately because they actually trade in “irony” and also, one can’t help but gather from Denby’s remarks, because they’re politically virtuous in their japery, even when their words seem cruel and harsh. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are two of these unfairly maligned non-snarkers. Sarah Silverman escapes unscathed, while Penn Jillette, an avowed libertarian who entertains mostly in Las Vegas nowadays, and Sarah Palin, an avowed big-game hunter who’s safely tucked away up north somewhere, are portrayed as snarkers par excellence. So is John McCain, coincidentally, and pretty much everyone who ever tweaked Barack Obama for any reason — especially if they did so on the Internet and indulged in prejudice.

But “hate speech” isn’t snark either, Denby writes, because it aims to “incite,” not get chuckles, and because it’s “directed at groups,” not individuals. Denby finds such discourse loathsome, presumably, but he states early on that it’s no concern of his, first because it’s a constitutional right, and second, because he feels sorry for nuts who use it: “the legions of anguished, lost people on Web sites and the social networking site Facebook” who are “looking for a way to release fear.” In other words, vengeful morons can’t be snarky, only parties to bigoted violence now and then, which may be horrific and tragic but isn’t annoying. No, what really bugs Denby’s mandarin side is a much subtler species of expression: humour that celebrates “the power to ridicule” and is indulged in by semi-sophisticates who seek to sound clued-in and hip so as to soothe their feelings of “dispossession” and elevate their wounded self-esteem by sneering at folks like — get ready to be outraged! — the convicted insider trader Ivan Boesky, whose notorious taste in gaudy baubles was once satirized in the late Spy magazine.

And that, sir, is snark, society’s archenemy — making light fun of vulgar criminal robber barons who steal more in a month than Capone stole in a decade. This manner, this “snark,” and the motives he imputes to it, are treated by Denby as more ominous for our future prospects as a people than the invective of K.K.K. grand wizards. What he views as outbreaks of unacknowledged envy for the extremely wealthy and conspicuous by the comparatively poor and plain (masquerading as people of taste and virtue when, in fact, they’re merely climbers) is positively intolerable to him. And just as complicit in this grave offense (grave to Denby, but natural to the masses; see The National Enquirer and its routine photos of stars without their makeup) are the readers who laugh at such upstart snottiness. They should be bigger than that, somehow. Less petty.

Well, this is not at all helpful. It’s getting harder and harder to come up with a reason to read this book. Is there anyone in the US who liked the book? What about someone who represents everything Denby dislikes these days—Gawker, and intentionally snarky website? Well, I’m going to hazard a guess that they won’t like it. Bingo! In a review entitled Please Buy David Denby’s Book, So He Will Stop Talking, I learn that:

David Denby, the New Yorker movie critic (not the good one), continues to bait us in interview after interview so we’ll write something about his book Snark, so it will sell. Okay fine, here:

David Denby, can you present a short, clear, and meaningful definition of “snark,” that clearly delineates it from every other form of humour or criticism? Let’s see:

• “It’s not hate speech, it’s not trolling, it’s not simple insult. What I’m getting at is contempt, and a signal sent to a member of a club (which can be enormous or tiny) in which a certain kind of reference is understood, and stands in for an attitude that one wants to put down”…
• “’Snark is like a schoolyard taunt without the schoolyard,’ he writes. ‘Snark is hazing on the page.’” …
• “Denby, in a phone interview, defines snark as ‘the knowing nasty tone, the cheap shot.’” …
• “Snark is not original. It is essentially parasitic and lazy…Most people who are trying to be true use sarcasm or wit to speak the truth, but not snark”…
• “It is an adolescent tone. I think a lot of it is powerless…There are some heavy hitters of snark like Maureen Dowd, who I go after at some length, but most of it is sort of a confession of impotence and it does seem adolescent and it does seem like kids in a high school cafeteria or sitting around watching TV a lot of the time. But when older people do it, I think it’s because of the panic that’s setting in that we don’t know where journalism is going and we want to sound hip and we want young demographics and panic is not a good mood in which to write anything. You release that and it’s kind of juvenile sarcasm. It signals to readers that you’re up to date.”

No, you cannot. That’s because “snark” is not an actual, scientific term; it is a made-up word that means whatever the writer wants it to mean. Therefore your book, while perhaps eloquent (haven’t read), is, in the end, just a preposterously meaningless rant. A sort of “snark,” if you will.

Of course, Gawker is a blog, and blogs are the lowest of the low—even lower than Fox News, apparently—so there’s no point in looking at any other blogs either. They’re all going to hate it. Actually, as far as I can tell from a Google search, a lot more blogs have reviewed Snark than magazines or newspapers. I’m not sure what to make of this, and I guess I’m not sure what Denby will make of it either.

But wait—maybe I don’t have to read it. The Guardian had a whole post—no, I mean piece– by Denby, or a précis, or something, last Saturday. Denby is certainly doing his bit for book sales. So here’s the first bit.

What is snark? Abuse in a public forum of a particular kind – personal, low, teasing, rug-pulling, finger-pointing, snide, obvious, and knowing.

How does snark work? Snark is hazing on the page. It prides itself on wit, but it’s closer to a leg stuck out in a school corridor that sends some kid flying. It pretends to be all in fun, and anyone who’s annoyed by it will be greeted with the retort, “How can you take this seriously? What’s wrong with you?” – which has the doubly aggressive effect of putting the victim on the defensive. No one wants to argue with a joke, so this is shrewd as far as it goes. But some of these funsters are mean little toughs. Snark seizes on any vulnerability or weakness it can find – a slip of the tongue, a sentence not quite up to date, a bit of flab, an exposed boob, a blotch, a blemish, a wrinkle, an open fly, an open mouth, a closed mouth. It exploits – slyly, teasingly – race and gender prejudice. When there are no vulnerabilities, it makes them up. Snark razzes pomp, but it razzes certain kinds of strength, too – people who are unaffectedly serious. Snarky writers can’t bear being outclassed by anyone, and snark becomes the vehicle of their resentment and contempt.

Hmm. This does sound serious. But it also sounds really, really confused, hardly the sort of thing someone who read Great Books (twice, apparently)would write. Maybe he didn’t really read them–how else to explain the miasma above that’s supposed to pass for a paragraph? I mean, I’m as concerned with the debasement of modern discourse as the next guy. But that includes the debasement of language, and using sentences that make sense. Denby has lots of tips in the article on how snark operates—in fact, he counts the ways. But I’m not going to go into this any more–you can go read them if you want, but they read much like the quoted section.

In actuality, Denby has a point, but it’s the wrong one. It’s not that it’s easy to be snarky these days. There is, in fact, entirely too much snark around. It is all over the internet. But it’s also everywhere in the MSM, as Denby notes. It’s everywhere. But there’s a simple reason for that, and it’s not because people have become more, well, snarky. It’s because there are too many easy targets. At one time, there was a limited number of “celebrities” one could get snarky about. Now they are legion, and the success of Gawker and similar sites simply shows that they have multiplied beyond control. Ditto politics. The level of political discourse in the US has never been particularly high—snarky slurs against Washington and Jefferson were popular, and common, back then. But the political landscape now is so littered with easy targets that no one in their right mind could possibly resist being snarky, unless you’re totally devoid of any sense of humour whatsoever. Who could possibly make up the modern Republican party? People like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay would at one time simply have been interesting characters in Pogo—now you can’t turn on the television without them shouting at you. The cultural landscape? Good lord, has anyone taken a look at The New York Times best seller list? Or what people watch on television? Or go to the movies to see? Really, the amount of effort being made on someone’s behalf to place all this dreck in front of us deserves nothing but snark.

So here’s my solution. Instead of trying to elevate the level of discourse about the culture around us, as Denby seems to want (although I haven’t read the book, so I can’t be certain), how about taking seriously the notion that a culture that gets as much snark as modern American culture does actually deserves it? And if we actually made some effort to improve the culture, that would be a big step in the right direction of making snark a bit less prevalent. Make better movies. Produce better (and fewer) musicals. Write better books. Engage in more reasoned political discourse. See? That’s not so hard.

The Signal-to-Noise Journey of American Media

The 20th Century represented a Golden Age of Institutional Journalism. The Yellow Journalism wars of the late 19th Century gave way to a more responsible mode of reporting built on ethical and professional codes that encouraged fairness and “objectivity.” (Granted, these concepts, like their bastard cousin “balance,” are not wholly unproblematic. Still, they represented a far better way of conducting journalism than we had seen before.) It’s probably not idealizing too much to assert that reporting in the Cronkite Era, for instance, was characterized by a commitment to rise above partisanship and manipulation. The journalist was expected to hold him/herself to a higher standard and to serve the public interest. These professionals – and I have met a few who are more than worthy of the title – believed they had a duty to search for the facts and to present them in a fashion that was as free of bias as possible.

In other words, their careers, like that of Claude Shannon, were devoted to maximizing the signal in the system – the system here being the “marketplace of ideas.”

By now the critical reader has probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned money. Said reader might suggest that I wax a little too starry-eyed, that journalism was always about ratings, circulation and profit. The really cynical response might say – as I myself have said – that even our greatest reporters were doing nothing more than selling product. True enough.

However, the issue here is about the assumptions involved regarding the path to profit. In Cronkite World, the reporter (and editor and publisher) assumed that success had something to do with what I’m here calling signal. You attracted a larger audience and sold more soap if you did a better job investigating, digging, presenting the public with facts. When you did a better job than your competitor at providing the audience with relevant, meaningful, accurate information that helped them understand and interact with their environment, then you and your employer would be more successful.

That is, your success in the marketplace was intimately tied to your professional ability. Success was a function of signal.

Somewhere along the way that changed, though. Here’s what I think happened.

First, in Uncle Walter’s day you had three channels (networks plus local affiliates), you had a couple local newspapers and a local radio station or two. If you grew up in a place like I did (Winston-Salem, NC), you likely had no more than six sources of information available to you on a given day. If there were a major story to be discovered at the national level, the competition to break it was going to include CBS, NBC, ABC, UPI, AP, Reuters maybe, and that’s about it. If the story was local it was down to a couple local papers and the three local affiliates.

That’s a comparatively small field of competitors, and given the number of things that happen in a given week there were usually enough scoops to go around. So to a significant degree, it was possible to make a living off of signal.

What about today? How many potential sources for news are available to you? Legacy networks; national papers; cable news channels (and cable “news” channels); ubiquitous access not only to your local paper and TV affiliates, but to all local affiliates and papers; online alt.news outlets; blogs – millions and millions of blogs; advocacy group sites; and a plethora of other channels, including e-mail (and lists), newsgroups and forums, mobile (like Twitter), and on and on we go. Even if we assume that there’s 10 times as much interesting news to be scooped than their used to be, the competition for those scoops has grown at an insane pace. If you’re in the news business, you probably find that the ratio of news to competitors is dozens of times worse than it was when Cronkite sat in Katie Couric’s chair. Yes, several outlets are still trying – a couple national papers, AP, Reuters, etc. But that’s about it. Everybody else (Scholars & Rogues included) is trying to attract the attention of the public, and very few of the models in use rely on what we might see as a traditional approach to news and reporting.

So. The pursuit of signal ain’t cheap or easy. The return rate on that investment is hardly guaranteed. And even if you are doing pretty well at old-style reporting, competition for eyeballs is simply ridiculous. A news agency, therefore, that insists on the old signal-based model is fighting an uphill battle.

Welcome to the Jungle

As with the problem faced by the academy, described by Katherine Hayles in part 1, media businesses had (have, and always will have) an institutional need to make a profit. Whether there’s actually enough signal to go around is momentarily beside the point, because it’s easy to see how the perception might evolve in a corporate boardroom that the traditional approach is a losing game. (And in a market-driven society, “perception is everything” is literally true.) In this brave new world of 500 channels and seemingly infinite numbers of Internet-delivered information (and disinformation) sites, it’s harder than ever to attract necessary revenues the old-fashioned way.

The conclusion: if there’s 10,000 guys stomping all around Signal Lake, hundreds of boats jockeying for position on every square inch of surface, a million more casting off the bridge, all fighting over two or three half-assed little fish, then maybe we ought to wander over to the River of Noise. Something is always biting there.

If my theory is right, then, our media institutions are behaving the way they are out of a certain logic. Not an admirable or productive logic, but something that makes sense if you’re looking for cause and effect. To wit: at the moment, there’s a prevailing perception (likely accurate) that there’s a greater return – a massively greater return – to be had on noise generation than there is signal hunting. Putting a hard-nosed investigative reporter on the trail of an important story for a few weeks or months, that’s an iffy investment. Employing enough reporters to reliably fill up the 24/7/4ever news cycle, that’s expensive. How much easier it is to simply trot Matt Lauer and Ann Curry out there to primp and blather over the latest “development” in the Michael Jackson “story.”

The results? Well, the networks are making money, aren’t they?

So, if I can try and pull all this together:

• Once upon a time both academia and the news media were structured in a way that aligned personal and institutional success with activities that we might call signal.
• The landscape changed in ways that made it hard for the institutions (and the individuals within them) to continue succeeding using the established strategies. Specifically, these environments evolved in ways that made signal a scarce commodity at the same time the systems were expanding.
• Both environments adapted by cultivating new structures and processes that were able to survive on noise.

How Can We Return American Media to the Promised Land of Signal?

Maybe we can’t. The media genie running amok in America is a big, powerful one, and you can rest assured it ain’t going back in the bottle without the mother of all throwdowns.

Still, the damage that the Noise Media is wreaking on our society is intolerable – worse in nearly every respect than what has happened in the world of LitCrit, and I think I made clear how bad that is in part 1 – and we’d be advised to contemplate how we can at least boost our signal-to-noise ratio in the right direction. To this end, there are two things that need to happen.

First, at the risk of sounding like a broken record (because this seems to be my answer to everything), we have to dramatically increase our emphasis on education. Specifically, we need to cultivate stronger critical thinking skills. The reason is simple. An enlightened mind has a much lower tolerance for foolishness. The reason that media have been able to profit off of inane programming is because our culture has so aggressively pursued the anti-intellectual. While I’m not attempting to let the pimps who program our media outlets off the hook here, it is not untrue to suggest that their actions are a logical response to what the marketplace has become.

Second, we revive the public interest standard and make it the centerpiece for every deliberation that happens regarding media in the US. The public interest, not the corporate interest. Fowler and Brenner said, in the early ’80s, that “the public interest is what the public is interested in.” It was self-evidently stupid when they said it then, and the only thing that has changed in the intervening years is that now we have even more evidence to prove it. But thanks to their efforts on behalf of Reagan’s anti-public communications policy, we now live in a nation where “journalism” and “pandering to the lowest common denominator” mean fundamentally the same thing.

Perhaps the system has evolved in precisely the way we should have expected. But it has evolved into something that does not serve our society or its future best interest. The sooner we understand why it has spun out of control, the sooner we can begin taking action to transform it once again, this time into something worthy of a culture that regards itself as the most advanced on Earth.

CNN’s John Roberts, co-host of the cable news network’s American Morning program, continues to decide what the appropriate spin is for a story in his intros to interviews. He did it earlier this week with correspondent Christiane Amanpour, who stuck to facts instead.

This morning, Mr. Roberts did it again while introducing Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. Said Mr. Roberts:

Joining us now is New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. His article, “Tear Down This Cyber Wall” focuses on Iran and the technology war of information.

So many people are saying that this could be the very first Internet revolution. How much of a part do you think the Internet is playing in what’s going on inside Iran versus what we’re learning about what’s going on? [emphasis added]

Mr. Roberts has a penchant for advancing a premise based on the apparent testimony of a teeming slew of unidentified sources. He told Mr. Kristof: “So many people are saying that this …” Earlier this week, he used similar language while introducing Ms. Amanpour: “some people might say …” Well, says who? Who are these people to whom Mr. Roberts refers?

Mr. Kristof politely rejected Mr. Roberts’ conjecture with a tad more insight:

I wouldn’t call it an Internet revolution. I mean, fundamentally, people are protesting because they’re upset about the government, and that’s been happening for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Mr. Kristof explained, from his point of view, the role of the Internet during Iranian unrest without labeling that role as a “revolution.”

Television news, as we know, places a premium on brevity. (How ironic for a 24-hour cable news operation, eh?) Anchors and reporters need to summarize (in what print journalists might call a “nut” or background graf) salient information prior to a video report or interview.

Mr. Roberts could have done that in the same amount of time. Rather than offering an opinion masked as a leading question for his witness, he could have not said “So many people are saying that this” and just asked:

Mr. Kristof, would you tell our viewers your perceptions of the use of the Internet during the unrest in Iran?

Instead, he used a meme — Internet revolution — that places more emphasis and focus on the Internet itself rather than the actual unrest and violence it has transmitted.

Broadcast anchors used to know the difference between a fair summation of necessary background and a hurriedly contrived spin from the anchor’s point of view. (Or, perhaps, the producer’s. I do not know if Mr. Roberts’ intros are scripted by someone else.)

Then again, the ratings have not been kind to CNN in the first quarter of 2009. Perhaps that explains the increased use of conjecture by one of CNN’s principal on-air anchors.

Despite pie-in-the-sky economic theory, competitively priced, quality products do not always trump those of lesser quality in the marketplace. A variation of Sony’s Beta format video was used for decades by professionals because of its superiority to the VHS format, but this didn’t stop VHS from becoming the dominant consumer format. McDonald’s does not make food that is cheaper, more nutritious, or even better tasting than a good sandwich from a local deli, but this hasn’t stopped the burgermeister from selling untold billions of its artery-clogging offerings. The US health care system gets arguably fewer positive results per dollar spent than any other health care system in the world, but there are US consumers who will defend it as being “the best” right up to their untimely deaths.

The truth is that marketing techniques often trump product value when determining marketplace winners and losers. The growth of advertising in the late 19^th century taught marketers that they could make profitable products that had no value whatsoever. These included electrical trusses, waistbands, and other devices to improve health, universal medicines that were mostly alcohol mixed with God-knows-what, and “arctic” boots guaranteed to produce frostbitten toes for the clueless Yukon prospector. Breakthroughs in psychology in the 20^th century gave marketers powerful new tools for their arsenals. For instance, they learned that products could be sold while ignoring their real attributes by attaching them to an image. Cigarettes, a product that tastes pretty much like you would expect burning leaves to taste, could make you so sexy and alluring that people would ignore your tobacco reek. Rocks could be packaged and sold as pets. A coonskin cap could make you Davy Crockett, and becoming a fake blonde would make you irresistible to men, while having little or no effect on your intelligence (or that’s the claim, anyway).

In one sense, nothing has changed much. A brightly colored, but underpowered, computer can be sold because it’s been carefully linked to “cool,” or a lousy video game can fly off shelves because it’s based on a popular movie. There are signs, though, that the days of sizzle counting for more than steak are coming to an end, and the best current example of this may be the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 camera, a product that most traditional marketing departments would consider very difficult to sell, but that is selling so well, in fact, that it is going for up to 50% over suggested retail price at those few outlets that can manage to keep it in stock. The reason the LX3 is selling so well is that it is a superior camera for its class. The marketing issue is that it does not appear to be superior, and therein we have both the mystery and the hope for the quality of future products.

Most of us have walked through consumer electronics stores and seen the compact camera displays. Generally, there is at least one long row of small cameras, each having a little card next to it with the brand name, model name and number, price, and a few sales points. Most common among these sales points is the number of megapixels a camera’s sensor possesses. There was a time, indeed, when the number of megapixels on a sensor was a pretty fair indication of a camera’s resolution, which is one of the key factors of image quality. Early compact electronic cameras had barely enough resolution to make a decent 3×5 print, so there was a race to pack ever more pixels onto small chips to improve images.

It was true then (and now) that a three megapixel camera will almost always outperform a one megapixel one, and a six megapixel camera will make a much sharper image than a camera with only three. But once one gets above six megapixels, the issue becomes much more complex. Understanding why is a bit technical, and it’s the very complexity of the issue that has kept camera marketers trumpeting ever more megapixels — while tolerating ever-decreasing image quality at most settings — to sell their products. Simply put, consumers have come to equate megapixels with higher image quality even though it is not true, so marketers have forced camera manufacturers into degrading image quality to sell to badly informed camera buyers. Consumers also seem to like large range zooms of almost telescopic power, not realizing that these relatively slow lenses also work to degrade image quality. The LX3 bucks this trend and, contrary to expectations, consumers have rewarded it for doing so.

Some Technical Notes

Note: I’m going to go into a bit of a technical explanation here, and will try to make it as painless as possible. Those who would prefer to skip the technical part are welcome to read down below this marked section for my conclusions.

The race for ever-more megapixels has an enormous quality drawback. By their nature, electronic components produce fields that interfere with other electronic components. Pack too many pixel-sized sensors on a tiny chip, and this interference manifests itself as noise in the final image. The noise is caused when a number of pixels produce colors (often white) that are at odds with the colors they should produce. The result is a sort of static that is roughly like the grain one can see on high-speed films.

At their lowest sensitivities, when there is the least current or “gain” in the electronic sensor, small chips with very high megapixel counts can perform quite well. When the sensitivity is turned up to account for low light, however, or to allow greater depth of field by closing the aperture or faster shutter speeds to freeze motion or avoid camera shake, the noise increases. Camera-makers have fought this problem with software that identifies the noisy pixels and guesses at the correct color replacement. This software inevitably blurs the image until, in some cases, it appears to be almost a watercolor. As a result, camera manufacturers have tried to set their software to allow some noise in order to maintain sharpness. The end result is that small-sensor, compact cameras tend to produce poor image quality and/or unacceptable noise at anything above the film equivalent of ISO 400. For some cameras, even ISO 400 produces too much noise for acceptable images.

Compounding this problem is the race toward ever-more-powerful zoom lenses for these little cameras. Zoom lenses tend to be long lenses, and long lenses are a bit like looking down a cardboard tube – they are “slow” because they simply admit less light than larger, less zoomy lenses. So, a camera with a sensor and software that tend to produce poor images in low light is often equipped with a lens that lets in a half to a quarter of the light allowed by cameras with less-aggressive zooms, meaning that it will produce many, many more inferior, noisy images than the “faster” lens-equipped camera.

The obvious technical solution is to build compact cameras with larger sensors and/or fewer megapixels than is currently possible, and equip them with large, fast, wide-angle lenses of limited zoom range. All other things being equal, cameras built this way would produce superior images in more lighting conditions than cameras equipped with small, megapixel-packed sensors and slow, long-zoom lenses. They would also allow higher shutter speeds and greater control over depth of field in lower-light conditions, giving both more creative control and less possibility of hand-held camera shake.

The obvious marketing solution is to build cameras with ever more megapixels packed onto a small chip, more aggressive software to gloss over the noise, and longer and slower lenses to wow consumers with telescopic range most of them will seldom use, because these things are supposed to be what consumers want and will buy.

Can Internet Product Reviews Overcome Marketing Hype?

The LX3 uses a larger-than-normal sensor for a compact camera, limiting it to only 10.1 megapixels. It also uses a fast, 2.0 to 2.8 zoom with a rather limited 35mm camera equivalent range of 24mm to 60mm. It is also built around a high-quality, Leica lens with minimal barrel distortion for a lens this wide and this small. It also has a retro, rangefinder look and a manually removed lens cap that is dictated by its fast lens and larger-than-average sensor. None of these attributes is supposed to make buyers of the average consumer. So, why is the LX3 flying off shelves for nearly $700 in some places, when its suggested retail price is around $500?

I wish I knew for sure, but I suspect, and hope, that we are witnessing the power of the Internet. Key “Panasonic LX3 review” into google.com, and you’ll get a list of glowing reviews. Or just go here for a thorough review or here for an abbreviated review comparing the LX3 to its competition.

If one tracks the pricing history of the LX3, it’s clear that the initial pricing curve was what one would expect; discounting to around 80% ($400) of its suggested retail price within a few weeks of its introduction. Within a few months, however, large outlets such as Dell, B&H Camera, and other on-line camera stores were sold out, and prices soared. When I phoned around my metropolitan area for a camera store with the LX3 in stock, I couldn’t find a single one. They all wished they had them because they could sell as many as they could stock, but they’re sold out and had no idea when they’ll receive a new shipment.

What could explain the LX3’s phenomenal sales performance other than the power of Internet reviews? Based on its design, it appears that they were trying to produce a camera compact enough and with a high-enough quality image to appeal to professionals and serious amateurs who don’t want to haul around 30 pounds of camera equipment and a tripod everywhere they go. In other words, the camera is meant to appeal to experts or semi-experrts – not the average consumer. Panasonic must have expected the product to have limited appeal in a high-end compact market being threatened by a price drop in digital single-lens-reflex (DSLR) cameras. Instead, they can’t make enough LX3s to meet the demand.

Have we entered the beginning of an age when information, in the form of product reviews, will be so available to the masses that consumers will start to make better quality buying decisions? Will this trend force manufacturers to actually make better products instead of gimmicky devices that sell by fooling consumers? Will the promotion-oriented marketers lose power and influence to product development departments?

We can only hope.

Here are some images taken with the LX3 the day after delivery:

Editor’s Note: Space limitations prevent us from displaying these images at full size and resolution.

You will want to know what happened. You may not immediately want to know what someone else thinks or feels about what happened. That may come later. You first want someone to tell you clearly and with minimal subjectivity what happened with no opinion or impression attached.

You live in a second-hand world. You need someone to observe the world first-hand when you cannot. Who will you trust to faithfully do that for you?

Sociologist C. Wright Mills described this half a century ago in the book The Politics of Truth:

The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced, and their own experience is always indirect.

The quality of their lives is determined by meanings they have received from others. Everyone lives in a world of such meanings. No man stands alone directly confronting a world of solid facts. …

[I]n their everyday life they do not experience a world of solid fact; their experience itself is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations. Their images of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and never shall meet.

Yet for every man these images — provided by strangers and dead men — are the very basis of his life as a human being.

Your information needs may be summed up by three questions: How does the world work? Why does it work that way? What will be the impact on me?

The answers reflect the raw data of empirical observation and a neutral explanation of phenomena eventually followed by analyses laced with points of view. Those “crowds of witnesses” offer that information in many forms — books, movies, art, advertising, television, music, and the various means by which journalism and pseudo-journalism are distributed.

You first need to know what happened. But doesn’t it increasingly seem that your principal sources are also those who didn’t witness the event first-hand either? Doesn’t it seem as if your first notice of what happened comes from a second-hand source who is not a witness at all? Is that source someone using the pretense of a witness, someone who imbues that initial report with analysis laced with a point of view, pre-coloring and presaging your first impression? Which do you need first — a subjective point of view or one as objective as possible?

Reflect on your information needs. (Not your wants — that’s a different post.) What do you need to know? Why do you need to know it? Who will credibly tell you?

Mills’ analysis of understanding the human condition anticipates the digital world you live in. Your second-hand world consists of, in Mills’ words, “stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations.” From what source do you not receive pre-digested reports?

If you want information without a point of view shaping it, perhaps you need Anne. She is a Fair Witness in Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Her employer, Jubal Harshaw, is asked to demonstrate her capabilities. Harshaw points to a building and asks Anne its color. Her reply: “White on this side.” In Heinlein’s fictional world, a Fair Witness has total recall, is fully impartial, and makes no intuitive or analytical leaps beyond what she can witness (such as assuming the color on the side of the building she cannot see).

A Fair Witness is the antithesis of a Spin Doctor. Anne, the Fair Witness, is a source of unfiltered fact. You are left to divine the meaning of that fact in a context uniquely yours.

In the midst of this high-noise, low-signal digital information age one S&R writer called “Shoutworld,” no Fair Witness appears to exist. Traditionally “objective” sources of information increasingly have colorized what happened through an ideological, self-centered, or selfish lens. The numbers of those sources who minimize the predigestion of what happened declines daily.

You eventually may find that subjective witness reports are necessary to help you ascertain context, importance, and meaning. On what basis, however, do you trust their authors?

If all your information sources tell you what it means before telling you what happened, how certain are you of what, indeed, did happen?

Newspaper wages rose 2.1 percent from 2008 to 2009, reported Ms. Saba, based on the annual Newspaper Compensation Study by the Inland Press Association using data from 400 U.S. and Canadian papers.

But the folks getting the raises, up to 13 percent for “interactive producers,” are not the people producing the raw content — news stories.

Those employees associated with “new and alternative business development” have seen wages climb by 5 percent, reported Ms. Saba.

But reporters and editorial-page editors — the folks who produce the “product,” the news stories, that the “interactive producers” and experts in “new and alternative business development” are trying to sell — saw flat-line salaries from 2008 to 2009.

Journalists at daily newspapers earn a salary of about $28,000 and those at weeklies about $26,650, according to the 2007 annual survey of journalism and mass communication graduates conducted by Lee Becker at the University of Georgia. Few get rich working as journalists in print newsrooms.

This salary survey offers further evidence that the newspaper industry refuses to invest in what could save it — more and better news coverage by experienced journalists. It has divested itself of the producers of its product by the thousands — 5,900 journalists lost their jobs in 2008 — and given little financial incentive through salary increases to those who remain.

Just more wise management from newspaper corporations …

“Tiananmen” means “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” Ironic, then, that most Americans know it, if at all, as a scene of violence and bloodshed.

photo by Jeff Widener, A.P.

June 4 marks the 20th anniversary of the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on protestors who’d gathered in Tiananmen Square. The incident made headlines across the world, and the image of a lone protestor blocking a line of tanks proved especially powerful.

The protesters had camped out in the square since the April death of a pro-reform Communist Party official, Hu Yaobang. By June 4, after a great deal of international attention that embarrassed the Chinese government, tanks and troops rolled in and started cracking skulls.

Western news outlets reported yesterday and today (June 3 and 4) that no media would be allowed near Tiananmen Square on June 4th. Soldiers and uniformed and plainclothes police stood at attention everywhere in the square this morning, and visitors were being searched.

But visitors to Tiananmen Square are always searched. I was searched when my group first visited the square on Tuesday, May 26. I was searched again when I went there on my own last Sunday. The searches were similar to the same thing I went through at the airport: carry-on bags and metal items got sent through an X-ray machine, and I had to pass through a metal detector. We were allowed to keep our cameras with us.

Standing in Tiananmen Square for the first time really drove home how significant the crackdown was which the Chinese government refers to as “The June Fourth Incident”).

First of all, it’s impossible to appreciate how wide and vast Tiananmen Square is. It’s the largest public square in the world, even beating out the public courtyard at the Vatican. It can hold a million people—just as it was doing by June 3, 1989.

China’s Great Hall of the People, opposite Tiananmen Square

The square sits opposite the Great Hall of the People, roughly China’s equivalent of our Capitol Building. In essence, that made the protests a direct slap in the face of the Communist Party and central Chinese government even though the demonstrations were peaceful.

In the resulting military action, thousands were injured. The number of killed various from 241 (the Chinese government’s official number) and 2,600 (an unofficial number once given by the Red Cross).

While I certainly don’t condone the government’s decision to clear the square, I can understand it a little better than I once did. China is not, nor has it ever really been, ruled on principles anywhere close to ours. Authoritarian rule has always been the way there—for five thousand years. We forget how old and ingrained that is.

On Sunday, as I strolled the square, I saw a few extra plainclothes police near Mao’s Tomb. Nearby and just out of direct sight, soldiers were drilling in a closed-off portion of the square. I have no idea if that’s normal or not; it’s just what I saw and heard on Sunday.

I’ve also heard that the government was blocking internet access and it was blacking out CNN. It was trying very hard to be sure that no one remembered the events of June 4, 1989.

I didn’t register as a journalist before I went to China, so my dispatches have been under the radar screen I suppose. But from my own perspective, I’ve not had any trouble blogging since I got to Beijing (although I think some of my e-mail was reviewed or filtered or something). I couldn’t access YouTube, which I only tried to access because I’d heard from my students that it was off-limits. They were right. On Tuesday, students suddenly couldn’t access hotmail, either.

I actually had more trouble in Shanghai than in Beijing. In Shanghai, I couldn’t log on to LiveJournal, although I never had a problem logging into or posting at Scholars & Rogues (I suppose we at S&R need to start being even more subversive!).

In Tiananmen Square, looking south toward Mao’s Tomb

But I’ll be honest: I didn’t feel comfortable talking about Tiananmen Square in my dispatches other than to provide a description. In my post about Mao’s Tomb, I didn’t feel I could talk about just how oppressive Mao’s regime was. Maybe it was just my good manners because I didn’t want to run the risk of causing headaches for my host from the Beijing Institute of Technology—which is, of course, a government-run school.

Tiananmen is one of the “Three T’s and an F”: Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwan, and the Falon Gong (a cult-like religious group that stirs up a great deal of political controversy). Those are the taboo subjects. The government actively discourages and represses coverage of those topics, although I was able to discuss the “Three T’s and the F” openly with tour guides and people I met.

The same day we visited Tiananmen Square and the Great Hall, for instance, the president of Taiwan was in town for talks on more open relations. The few Chinese citizens I spoke to about Taiwan expressed delight that relations between the mainland and the island had thawed considerably over the past year or so.

My students, colleagues, and I had a chance
encounter with a Tibetan monk (pictured center).

That same day, our group also had a chance encounter with a Tibetan monk near the gates of the Forbidden City, just a stone’s throw away from Tiananmen. The students thought he looked cool and all wanted their photo taken with him, but I’m not sure if they realized what a rare encounter or a big deal it was. “Imagine what he must feel like,” one colleague said. “People around here must be looking at him like he’s some kind of trouble-maker.”

It’s too bad the government frowns on discussion of those controversial topics because the rest of the world doesn’t get the full story. Any P.R. person knows it to be true: Tell as much of the truth as you can because otherwise people will think you have something to hide, and their assumptions will usually be far worse than the actual situation.

I’m no expert on Tibet, for instance, but talking to ordinary Chinese folks—who are, far and away, an apolitical bunch—they see the Tibet issue much differently than Westerners do. A Chinese princess married the Tibetan emperor in 640 A.D. to unite the kingdoms, and in Chinese minds, they’ve been one kingdom since and that’s that. Their sense of history comes not from the Communist Party but from a long oral tradition, so they aren’t just spouting party propaganda.

The Chinese people aren’t exposed to the Dali Lama’s P.R. efforts—and we are. I emphasize that because we forget, in the end, that the Dali Lama is conducting a P.R. campaign. (I don’t mean to oversimplify, although I am, because I know there’s a lot more to the Tibet situation than I’ve even broached here—but that’s part of my point: there’s a lot more to the Tibet situation than we even realize.)

The silver lining is that the Chinese people find ways to talk about these things anyway. As CNN correspondent Jaime FlorCruz told us, technology provides ways around the government controls. As restrictive as the Chinese government can be with its censorship, it can only just keep up with the internet—it can’t control it. FlorCruz’s kids, for instance, can bring up YouTube on a whim by easily circumventing government blocks.

That trend will only continue as the number of online users grows (the online population in China already exceeds the entire population of the U.S.). The Chinese themselves call for more information.

“The internet is one of the most revolutionizing phenomena in China,” FlorCruz said. “The Chinese government can join it, ride it, sort of control it, but they cannot stop it or shut it down.”

These are skilled people with diverse interests and even more diverse points of view. Three are college professors. Also writing for S&R have been or are an Hispanic activist from Texas; a foreign affairs writer who specializes in nuclear deproliferation issues and civilian casualties resulting from armed conflict; a gay staff cartoonist; a management consultant specializing in organizational behavior whose clients include 20 percent of the Fortune 500; an ex-pat South African economist; three experts in popular culture; a former director of the Berkeley Stage Company and statistical demographer for the U.S. Census Bureau; a professional stage actor; two stay-at-moms; a photographer; and occasional guest columnists.

However, we all share one trait: We are volunteers. We don’t get paid. We have other lives, other responsibilities, other people dependent on us to make a living. As business models go, ours sucks. Modest ad income and passing the hat means S&R remains a labor of love. But can love be a sustaining force for the online medium in the absence of profit?

In the Beginning of Blogging, it was all so exciting. Thrilling, even. Putting up a post, watching the stats, seeing who read your work, where they were — and how many read your stuff. Generate those hits. Yeah. That was heady stuff.

Is it still?

Most individual and group blogs are dependent on volunteers. It’s rare that a Huffington Post can raise $37 million to sustain the enterprise. (Of course, HuffPo has “volunteers” too, doesn’t it?)

The print newspaper industry continues to collapse in terms of revenue, profitability, and numbers of paid, professional journalists. So the dominant use of volunteers to inaugurate and maintain sites featuring commentary and/or advocacy journalism becomes an increasingly important public-interest issue.

Most S&R writers are ideologically progressive but rarely hew to party lines. As the S&R mission statement says:

Scholars & Rogues is a diverse band of thinkers, social analysts, activists, grousers, jesters, and troublemakers. We’re different in many ways, but we share a general belief in progress, a conviction that smarter is better, and a passionate distaste for convention.

That statement mirrors the intent of many capable bloggers. Many (but perhaps not most) bloggers seek to simply make things better. We have particular issues or problems that occupy our blogging attention. We are exceedingly dependent, though, on the research of others (those paid professional journalists whose stories we link to) to support points made in our posts.

But those posts, which leaven “objective” journalism with (usually lucid) commentary, add substance to debates of public interest. Yet the majority of bloggers are not paid for their work. What will become of community blogs such as S&R as the corps of volunteers 1) lose interest, 2) lose access to reliable, verifiable information produced by journalists, 3) lose equal access to the Web as politicians favor corporate control of the Internet or 4) just need to spend more time at the day job in a bad economy to make ends meet?

Note that newspapers, in the early days of online news Web sites, had links where volunteers could post community news. Now, that didn’t work out so well, did it? Let’s hope community blogs fare better.

Volunteerism is the principle means of support for community blogs such as S&R. Many such blogs, blogs populated by smart, capable people (see our blogroll), no doubt face the same pressure the volunteers at S&R do: Keep pumpin’ out the posts. Keep the conversation going. Keep the debate fresh and focused. But it’s difficult, as a volunteer, to pump out as many posts as I’d like. (I do like to get eight hours’ sleep each night.)

At some point, as B.B. King would sing, “The thrill is gone.” I hope most of us aren’t there yet, but it’s increasingly a problem faced by those bloggers who believe in candid, civil, and common-sense conversations in the public sphere — yet have family and job responsibilities elsewhere.