“Snowboard Videos: Send Us Your Tricks”

“How dare The Times stoop to such pandering to an unseemly demographic,” I harrumphed. Snowboard tricks? In The Times? How could my principal source of serious news by serious people about serious issues and events sink to pandering to the fans of fakie? This is unthinkable.

Beginning Feb. 12, The Times will open a website to host these videos. But why on earth (or snow) would The Times want snowboard videos? I mean, gee whiz, this could amount to amateur night among the heathens. The Times does things right — you know, professionally done photography, video, graphics and other illustrations. What gives with wanting videos likely to be of goofy-footers eatin’ snow?

The Times needs money. That’s what gives.

Two and a half years ago, The Times had neared what some wags termed financial collapse. According to analyst Henry Blodget, in the short term The Times owed almost a half billion dollars more than it had in assets. A few months later, The Times decided to borrow $225 million against its interest in its brand-new headquarters. Those were tough “times.”

Today The Times reported that its fourth-quarter earnings more than tripled over a year ago. That does not mean, however, that New York Times Co., which owns its namesake paper, The Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune and 15 other daily newspapers, is making fat profits.

During that fourth quarter, The Times cut 8 percent of its newsroom staff. That, of course, saved money. Its advertising revenue saw its smallest decline — 14.7 percent — in a year, but that’s still a decline. According to the AP story: “Overall revenue fell 11.5 percent to $681 million, better than the $653 million expected by analysts.” But revenue — despite whacking personnel, a slightly improving economy and lower pension costs — continues to decline despite gains in online ad revenue. The Times continues to falter financially.

The Times over the past decade has removed so much talent from its newsroom, as have so many other American newspapers. It’s added responsibilities to those who remain — getting content on the website as well as managing content for mobile devices, for example.

These days, I read The Times mostly on my Blackberry. (And boy, does that surprise me.) But online and on mobile, each day I see evidence of erosion of the quality of The Times — editing errors, writing errors, failure to follow up on points made by sources, over-reliance on “official” sources, and so forth.

I love The Times. I have read it my entire life. Despite its increasing flaws, I still regard it as the best daily newspaper in America. But The Times no longer loves me. At 64 years old, I am no longer the demographic it desires to sell to advertisers. It you’ve seen The Times‘ television ads for its “weekender” subscription, it should be clear that the demographic The Times wants is far younger, with perhaps more disposable income, than me. (Fun link: See the parody ad.)

I keep waiting for the online edition of The Times to ask for videos of lawn bowling and shuffleboard, but I guess I’ll just have to keep dreaming.

Now, let’s go look at those shredder vids, eh, kids?

After the CRU emails were released in November, 2009, there was widespread accusations of misconduct against most of the scientists mentioned in the emails. Today, the Penn State University (PSU) inquiry committee investigating accusations made against Dr. Michael Mann publicly released its findings. The committee found that, with respect to the most serious three accusations out of four, “there exists no credible evidence” that Mann had committed research misconduct. The inquiry committee empaneled an investigation committee to look into the last accusation – that Mann had “seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community” – because they could make a determination about this and because

Only with such a review will the academic community and other interested parties likely feel that Penn State has discharged its responsibility on this matter.

According to the report, neither the inquiry committee nor the University received any formal allegations of research misconduct before or during the inquiry, so the committee generated four allegations after “[reducing] to allegation form the many different accusations that were received from parties outside of the University.” The accusations were reduced down to the following four:

• Did [Mann] engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to suppress or falsify data?
• Did [Mann] engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data, related to AR4, as suggested by Phil Jones?
• Did [Mann] engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any misuse of privileged or confidential information available to [him] in [his] capacity as an academic scholar?
• Did [Mann] engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities?

After reviewing all the CRU emails that Mann sent, received, or even discussed Mann’s work, and after the inquiry committee researched other relevant information from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), science journal articles, OP-ED columns, and even internet blogs, the committee interviewed Mann. Several days after that interview, the committee also interviewed Dr. Gerald North, the lead author of the NAS paper that exonerated Mann’s research and the so-called hockey stick temperature graph in 2006, as well as the former editor of Mann’s Science Magazine associated science article. And the outcome of all the research and interviews was that there was no substance to the first three allegations above.

The inquiry committee specifically pointed out that the “trick” email that has drawn a lot of attention used the word “trick”

to describe a mathematical insight that solves the problem. For example, see in a classic text on quantum mechanics by David Parks: “The foregoing explanation of the velocity paradox involves no new assumptions; the basic trick, the representation of a modulated wave as the superposition of two (or more) unmodulated ones, has already been used to explain interference phenomena…”

This is a point that has been made repeatedly ever since the CRU emails were released last November.

The fourth and final allegation will be reviewed by an investigation committee because the inquiry committee wanted a group of professors (the inquiry committee was composed of administrators) to determine if Mann’s private emails cast doubt on his professionalism and because of the risks to PSU’s public reputation. In addition, the administrators didn’t feel that they could judge what qualified as “accepted practice” for Mann and his field of climatology when accepted practice can vary from one scientific discipline to another.

Overall, however, the PSU inquiry committee found that the three allegations of research misconduct were all without merit and that they were unqualified to determine whether the final allegation had merit or not.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the news of Mann’s exoneration on three of the four accusations has been met with spin from partisan media, accusations of bias, and even claims of conspiracy.

While there’s been a number of media sites that spun this story in a fashion that focused exclusively on the investigation while downplaying the fact that the three most serious allegations were all found to be without merit, this Washington Examiner piece went a bit too far with their spin. They wrote that PSU officials were investigating “at least one charge of professional misconduct.” Given that the inquiry report found exactly one potential problem, the “at least one” is unjustified and represents blatant spin.

Update: World Net Daily commits as great a sin of spin as the Washington Examiner does, claiming that “[e]ven colleagues want ‘warming’ scientist investigated” and “[a] panel of fellow faculty members at Penn State University has recommended further investigation….” Make that University administrators, not fellow faculty. There’s also no mention of the fact that Mann was exonerated on three of four allegations, an attempt to show that Mann is out of step with mainstream scientists by comparing him to the thoroughly debunked OISM Petition Project, and pointing to the biased and flawed work of Icecap’s Joe D’Aleo.

Paul Chesser at the American Spectator blog has forgone the spin and flat-out accused the University of bias. Chesser says that the PSU committee’s reference to the CRU emails as “stolen” casts doubt on the committee’s objectivity, that the administrators can’t be objective given the fact that Mann’s reputation reflects on theirs, and he accuses PSU of committing a “whitewash.” Tobacco and Big Oil shill Steve Milloy also accused PSU of bias in a press release that accuses the committee of not being thorough and essentially calls them liars with respect to whether or not Mann deleted emails under an FOI request from the UK. And here’s another example, from Pajamas Media, where the common “whitewash” and “greywash” memes of Milloy and American Spectator are again repeated.

Update: More accusations of supposed “whitewash” by Green Hell, and Andrew Bolt (with grand conspiracy claims in the comments).

But the posts get really interesting at blogs like Michelle Malkin’s and Big Government, where the commentators claim outright that this is an example of a leftist/socialist/statist plot, or that PSU is beholden to the money that Mann has brought into the university, or that Mann is guilty of fraud and deserves to be imprisoned. James Delingpole at the Telegraph is perhaps the most extreme, claiming that “Michael Mann is as innocent as OJ” and repeating false claims about Mann’s work on the pre-industrial temperature record.

And, given the history between Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit and Mann, as well as the climate disruption denial stoked by both McIntyre and Anthony Watts of Wattsupwiththat, it’s not surprising that both blogs illustrate spin, bias, and paranoid conspiracies.

Thankfully, Mann has his defenders as well, among them Kevin Grandia of DeSmogBlog and the Huffington Post, Pete Altman at the NRDC Switchboard blog, climatologist and science blogger Eli Rabett, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, to name just a few.

And there are a number of other observers of this investigation who view it as a partial exoneration because they take the PSU inquiry committee at their word barring proof of misconduct by the committee itself. In fact, most of the traditional media falls into this category, such as James Broder of the NYTimes, The Canadian Press, The Seattle Times, even Ars Technica.

Update: Some more examples of good reporting on the PSU finding include The LA Times, the Catallaxy Files blog, and The Great Beyond blog at Nature.

This story isn’t over. Mann said as much in his statement:

Three of the four allegations have been dismissed completely. Even though no evidence to substantiate the fourth allegation was found, the University administrators thought it best to convene a separate committee of distinguished scientists to resolve any remaining questions about academic procedures.

This particular chapter in the Climategate saga won’t be closed until after the five faculty investigation committee completes their investigation into the last allegation sometime in the next 120 days. And if the response of the denialosphere to this partial exoneration is any indication, the Mann saga won’t be over even then. What will probably happen with respect to Mann is what has happened repeatedly with respect to climate disruption science over the last decade or more – self-described skeptics and climate disruption deniers will claim that this time it’s the end of climate disruption.

No, this time.

No, this time….

Disclosure: I attended PSU for my BSEE back in the 1990s.

Thanks to Kevin Grandia of DeSmogBlog for posting this over at HuffPo, where I initially came across it.

Back in 2007, Working Group 2 (WG2) of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) put together a large list of what climate disruption was likely to impact around the world. One of the impacts was reduced availability of fresh water due to rapidly melting glaciers around the world, and especially in the Himalayas. One of the specific claims was that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, an amazingly and likely unrealistically fast rate of melting. After an Indian government minister questioned this claim, scientists looked into it and found that the date was incorrect and that internal procedures for vetting references weren’t followed in this particular case. As as result, the IPCC has issued a formal statement of apology for the error.

And if this were about any other topic except climate disruption, that would be the end of it.

But given the denial echo chamber, that’s not the end of it. Instead, we have Patrick J. Michaels. We have conservative columnist Lorne Gunter of the National Post essentially claiming that the IPCC has failed utterly due to this single error. We have Peter Foster, also of the National Post, claiming that this “is further evidence that the entire IPCC process has been corrupt from the start,” even as he acknowledges that the error represents a mere 300 words in a 3000 page document. Rick Moran of the libertarian blog American Thinker says this is “simply one more indication that the proponents of AGW don’t care about the science and are promoting a political agenda.” And that from a blog that starts with a complaint that climate activists want “to use this information to steal trillions from the world’s most productive nations.” Pot, meet kettle.

I’d like to see anyone write 3000 pages of scientific data and technical detail without messing up a few times. That this relatively minor point is being proclaimed loudly around the land as the a death blow to the IPCC’s AR4 conclusions means that all the other supposed death blows since 2007 have failed to take. Ben Webster of the Times Online makes a very good point when he says

Climate sceptics around the world have spent two years scrutinizing every claim made by the panel. So far they have identified one serious error; it seems unlikely that they will find many more.

So yes, the IPCC made an error here. But the general conclusion that glaciers are melting hasn’t moved a micrometer as a result. Tibet’s glaciers have still melted so much that scientists can’t detect the radiation from US and Soviet nuclear tests in the 1950s. Glaciers around Juneau, Alaska have still melted so much that the land is rebounding amazingly quickly. Glaciers in Switzerland are still melting fast enough that previously stored organic pollutants like DDT are being re-released into the environment at dangerously high concentrations.

This contrived scandal is fated to go the way of all the other climate scandals that have been created out of the ether – it’ll become just another “fatal blow” to anthropogenic climate disruption that is steamrollered by actual climate science and data. Soon, this too will become a “scandal” only in the minds of the truly reality-challenged climate disruption deniers.

However, today it appeared that Judicial Watch and number of large climate denier blogs didn’t get the memo. Judicial watch issued a press release that claimed

“This email traffic ought to be embarrassing for NASA. Given the recent Climategate scandal, NASA has an obligation to be completely transparent with its handling of temperature data. Instead of insulting those who point out their mistakes, NASA scientists should engage the public in an open, professional and honest manner,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

Apparently, neither Anthony Watts of Wattsupwiththat.com nor the aforementioned Steve McIntyre were aware that the emails had been released, since both deniers put up fresh posts repeating the Judicial Watch press release in the last couple of days. Furthermore, Telegraph blogger (and one of the more vocal Climategate pundits) James Delingpole also got caught by the press release, even going so far as to ask

Has Climategate moved to the US? Looks like it from this story at Watts Up With That.

After reading the emails myself, it’s clear to me that Delingpole must have come unmoored if he seriously thinks that these emails show anything even remotely like another climate non-scandal. And while neither Watts nor McIntyre have made the same claim that Delingpole made, both men did link to the Judicial Watch press release and both have been content to permit the comment threads to claim “scandal!” on their behalf.

Put simply, the emails show the GISS scientists acting professionally and in and open and transparent manner with reporters and McIntyre himself. To illustrate, let’s read some of the emails ourselves.

Gavin Schmidt wrote, in reference to responding to McIntyre:

I would suggest being more specific about what was assumed and what you will do now. The stats you had for the number of stations which had positive and negative offsets would be appropriate. You might also want to thank him for bringing this to our attention. The first because he’ll ask you anyway or work it out himself, the second since it doesn’t hurt to be gracious.

Reto Ruedy, in his email response to McIntyre:

..and I’d like to thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Ruedy also contacted the National Geographic Society to make sure that they updated their maps:

I checked what this correction does to your map and it does change the colors somewhat over parts of the US; the rest of the world is unaffected. Even the change over the US is way within the maring of error (0.5 C). So there is little need to make any changes.

Ruedy wrote several emails to Leticia Sorg of Redacao Epoca which show him patiently explaining how McIntyre’s overblown claims about the US have no impact on global climate (a point I made myself back in 2007). Sorg asked “Considering [the 1934/1998 ranking change], would it be possible to say that the planet is becoming hotter and hotter?” to which Ruedy replied

To answer your question, given the existing sampling error (.1-.2C): No – we cannot draw any conclusion about our planet from the US data (much less from the rankings you show below)

In other words, the emails show the scientists discussing their work, politely explaining things to journalists and to McIntyre, and generally being normal people.

McIntyre, however, doesn’t exactly come off nearly as well as the GISS scientists in these emails. McIntyre asked on August 4, 2007,

In addition, could you provide me with any documentaiton (additional to already published material) providing information on the calculation of GISS raw and adjusted series from USHCN versions, including relevant source code.

Ruedy points out that, as of McIntyre’s request, all the source code is already publicly available:

The software we spend close to 100% of our time in developing and which is the real basis or [sic] our work (in addition to general physics and chemistry), is openly available (giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE) to anybody.

And yet McIntyre, in a later email on August 8, 2007 (four days after his initial request and a day after Ruedy pointed out that the source code was publicly available), asks again for source code:

I would like to assess the impact of these modifications on the US and global averages for myself. I would appreciate a copy of the source code used for these calculations.

Reto Ruedy, responding to a request from a NASA press officer about McIntyre:

The blog [Climate Audit] you attached is a prime example of what gives bloggers a really bad name….

[McIntyre] omits that the global mean time series (which is generally considered the standard measure for global warming) is unaffected [by the small errors in the US record that McIntyre discovered].

He concentrates on US time series which (US covering less than 2% of the world) is so noisy and has such a large margin of error that no conclusions can be drawn from it at this point; showing the plot of annual means before and after the correction would have made the whole article a joke since the differences are barely visible.

He had to use the device of ranking the years rather than showing the plots to make any point at all. The problem with rankings is that there are large clumps of years which are equal within the margin of error and rankings within these clumps are purely accidental.

He finds it astounding that years 1934 and 1998 reversed ranks, not remembering that the corrections only affected years 2000-2006, hence that there is no possible connection there.

And McIntyre had been using a ‘bot to download every bit of data from GISS and complained when his IP was blocked (a point that McIntyre made today in the comments at climateaudit.org). Schmidt wrote on August 16, 2007

Reto and Rob Schmunk have the details. [McIntyre] was using a robot to automatically download pages that robots weren’t allowed to (because of the server demands of interactive scripts) and Rob blocked the IP. After a couple of emails back and forth, he was allowed to continue on weekends/evenings.

The webmaster’s account of McIntyre’s actions goes like this:

On about May 16, around 10:30 or 11:00 p.m., as I was getting ready to leave GISS for the night, I belatedly checked the error logs on the two web servers and discovered that there were several thousand errors in the log on Web2. On a normal day there would be about 500…..

Further investigation revealed that someone had been firing off requests to Web2 since about 2:00 that afternoon for the station data and by the time I looked into the situation, there had been at least 16,000 requests. Perhaps half of these had gone to addresses in the CGI directory, which means that activating CGI scripts to extract data, etc….

Plainly this activity was from an “automated” agent, which in rough parlance is usually called a “robot”….

As the robot on may 16 came from a generic ISP address rather than, say, an academic address and further because it’s “user-agent” tag provided no further information about who was running it, and _also_ because the GISS websites have “robots.txt” files which instruct all well-behaved web robots to stay out of the CGI directories, I cut off access to the ISP in question to the websites on Web2.

The next day I received e-mail from McIntyre asking what was up. He did not identify himself or on whose behalf he was acting….

All I know is that my first contact with him came because he was blasting umpteen thousand requests at the webservers.

I have no idea how much traffic McIntyre’s website gets, and I don’t know that I havve ever even looked at it. His tone in his e-mail was on the arrogant side, so I had no desire to prolong communication with him any longer than was necessary.

In other words, McIntyre created a ‘bot to scrape all the GISS data up and download it and did so in a way that a) interfered with the operation of GISS’ server, b) ignored instructions that the GISS webmaster had put in place to prevent overloading the servers, and c) he got annoyed when he was shut down. If that had been me (and I’ve managed websites from time to time), I’d have suspected an attack and done exactly what the webmaster did.

Columnist Mark Steyn doesn’t come off very well either, given the actual email responses McIntyre got. A Steyn column is quoted at length in a GISS email dated August 13, 2007, from Stephen Volz. The quote says in part:

So why is 1998 no longer America’s record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow called Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.com labored long and hard to prove that there was a bug in NASA’s handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible, and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an “oversight” that would be corrected in the next “data refresh.” The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings. (emphasis mine)

All in all, the emails show McIntyre being a jerk, the GISS scientists responding politely even to repeated, unreasonable requests from McIntyre, and the GISS scientists managing quite well under the stress of a media circus based on statistically insignificant differences that had no bearing on the actual error that McIntyre corrected.

So this isn’t Climategate 2.0 (Climategate 1.0 wasn’t Climategate either, for that matter), even though Judicial Watch and James Delingpole both seem to think so. And while Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre aren’t personally claiming that this a new Climategate, they’ve done nothing as of the writing of this post to correct the record at their websites, making any misperceptions of a scandal by readers Watts’ and McIntyre’s responsibility.

Furthermore, the content of the actual emails shows that the GISS scientists did engage McIntyre and reporters in an open and professional manner. GISS also openly and transparently permitted McIntyre to continue scraping all the data off the site after getting him to agree to do it on off-hours so as not to overload the GISS servers. Amazingly enough, GISS acted in 2007 just as Judicial Watch’s president, Tom Fitton, demanded last week.

Thanks to Eli Rabett for pointing this out, albeit indirectly.

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.

Happy holidays!

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.]

This first picture is of one of my friends shooting pool.  Look for the words: Light, Shadow, Rob, Shirt, Cueball, Cue, Table and Background.

This second shot is another done from the “Dia de los Muertos” art outing we went to, thus the phrase inspiration for this piece.

Reference photo shot on the phone and all work done “in phone” using “Type Drawing”.  Yeah baby….

So, for years, I have been throwing stuffed animals at Lou instead of beer bottles. But now I need throw them no more. Lou no longer haunts my 7 p.m. viewing. He quit his CNN program in a multi-syllabic huff this week. CNN’s venerable, respected chief national political correspondent, John King, will take over in January. I’m sure I won’t have to throw stuffed animals at Mr. King.

But I once considered Lou venerable and respected. He’s a Harvard grad, y’know, a self-touted intellectual giant in matters of finance and economics. That’s why I began watching him years ago. I learned from him things I did not know. But for the past few years, Lou has only taught me the face of intellectual arrogance, bigotry, and unexceptional reporting masquerading as “advocacy.”

Lou, he of the annual salary variously estimated between $5 million and $10 million, has come to fancy himself as a champion of the middle class. Mr. King, as host of CNN’s “State of the Union,” has traveled each week to a different state — 44 so far — to sit down with the middle class in their diner, pubs, and livingrooms. Can you remember — or imagine — Lou doing the same? Aside from his carefully staged, perfectly lit, orchestrated “town hall” meetings at which the middle class had to meet Lou on his turf, not theirs?

When he quit, he lamented the “partisanship and ideology” permeating national politics. He did not or could not view his own brand of divisive opinionating as just another form of partisanship.

CNN, I suspect, is glad to see Lou depart despite 27 years’ of mostly worthy service. CNN’s president, Jonathan Klein, larded the cable network’s own news story with bombastic paeans for Lou:

For decades, Lou fearlessly and tirelessly pursued some of the most important and complex stories of our time, often well ahead of the pack. … With characteristic forthrightness, Lou has now decided to carry the banner of advocacy journalism elsewhere.

So why’d Lou leave? Was it “extremely amicable,” as Mr. Klein said? Or was his ill-reported “advocacy journalism” wearing thin on a network that had begun to position itself as centrist, parked between MSNBC on the left and Fox News Channel on the right? Or, more bluntly, did Lou not pull in sufficient ad revenues to offset his high salary? (And he complained about Wall Street salaries? Sheesh.) By June, Lou’s ratings had shrunk to unacceptable levels. His TV program had been drawing only 650,000 viewers, and only about 180,000 were from that advertiser-favored, 25-to-54 demographic.

Lou has championed the movement opposing illegal immigration. That’s his signature issue following his self-admitted radicalization following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. When he did not appear in any way, shape or form on CNN’s “Latino in America,” it became clear he was a goner at the network.

Lou says he’s leaving because

some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to … engage in constructive problem-solving, as well as to contribute positively to a better understanding of the great issues of our day. And to continue to do so in the most honest and direct language possible.

Right. But how? Some pundits conjecture he’ll seek public office. Senator Lou? Hardly. Can you imagine Lou, who is wealthy and self-righteous, hitting the campaign trail and pressing the flesh of that middle class with whom he rarely mingles? Can you imagine him dialing for dollars — raising the money to run for office? He’d find that demeaning and beneath him. And he’s hardly likely to self-finance.

Lou won’t be entering politics. He does not like being held accountable by any one, whether individual, corporate, or political, for what he says and does. He wants freedom to act without consequence. Nor does he have the temperament to make the deals and compromises all politicians must.

Will he move on to Fox? Doubtful. Would he view his brand of intellectually arrogant elitism an ill fit for the likes of a network that many argue is anything but intellectual? Probably. And he certainly won’t bury himself in a conservative think tank. He’d have to submerge his ego.

Lou likes money. Lou likes fame. Lou likes being the center of a self-created universe. Note that his own website touts him as “Mr. Independent.” He likes that tag.

Perhaps Lou wants to be Rush. Lou has a nationally syndicated radio program, “The Lou Dobbs Show,” launched a year and a half ago by United Stations Radio Networks. It’s carried on 400 stations and reaches about 5 million listeners.

But conservative talker Rush Limbaugh has the top-rated talk show, reaching more than 14 million listeners. Lou is eighth in national radio ratings, behind mostly conservative rabble rousers I’ll bet he considers his intellectual inferiors. Then there’s the money: In 2006, Rush signed an eight-year contract grossing $400 million, about $50 million a year. Don’t forget his $100 million signing bonus.

Do you think Lou might find that kind of money attractive? Sure, but Lou has also seen the attention centered on Rush. By politicians. By presidents. By pundits. By the powerful. By the proletariat.

That’s Rush’s world. Lou wants to shoulder him aside. But his CNN gig was not going to get him there.

Bye, bye, Lou. And thanks: I can now buy a new TV.

Cass of the Dead

Dan of the Dead

Crystal as “Heaven”

Tilt-shifted Raver Yeti

Eddie Van Gogh

El Noro

Mar as Jesus on a Dinosaur (reference link)

Matt of the Dead

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.

Here are two very different, but simultaneously very effective, examples of climate messaging. First, the negative.

And now the positive.

Which works (better) for you, and why?

Here is my next entry in the “Phone Artwork” series.  Again, the theme here is that everything from start to finish (including taking the original picture) was done on a mobile device.  And by mobile device I mean the device you use, amongst other things,  as a telephone.