Archimedes’ Hot Tub

We know the world isn’t flat, but spiky. Whether we can do things about those spikes drives U.S. domestic political debates. Do we want a society tilted towards conserving resources for those who already have them, or are we stronger if we shift resources towards liberating people from circumstances they didn’t create, but weigh them down? Can we smooth the frictions created by things like where we’re born and in what circumstances? At its core, US domestic politics is about whether helping others really helps.
One of the most difficult questions in this fundamental debate involves whether spreading resources can be made to work broadly. We know that it betters our society as a whole to pool resources for public education. Even though public education is terribly uneven, ensuring the vast majority of Americans can read, write and do math is good for our overall society. We know it betters our society to share resources to make sure there is clean water. Clean water improves everyone’s health and life expectancy, creating a more stable society. But what about sharing resources to actually lift people out of poverty?

Farah Stockman, the talented Boston Globe columnist who is also a friend, volunteered years ago in a summer camp for kids from public housing. She went back two decades later to see whether the camp she worked in had made a difference. What she found in this series of six articles was complicated. The ones who made it out seem so focused and disciplined that they might have done it anyway, though it’s clear that they benefited from the networking opportunity found in a camp that connected them with outstanding Harvard undergraduates. The ones who don’t get out show how our public policy system actually can encourage single motherhood, even for people with talent and some drive.One intriguing individual seems to succeed in her own way, but she avoids Stockman and so we’re not really sure what worked. I hope Farah’s well-deserved Pulliam Fellowship means she can continue to explore the questions she raises in this excellent series.
Don’t have time to read all six pieces? The New York Times summarized them here.

My friend Andrew Brown is such a good writer that he manages to turn a heart attack — his own – into a meditation on allusion, medical science and their intersection in a practical way. I can hear him swearing at the doctor and knowing that it meant he was all right.

At Red Herring we used to do a thing called “Fish or Cut Bait,” part restaurant review, part character assassination. We’d take some notable innovator to a fancy dinner, attempt to get them smashed and write about both (my favorite was the one with Apple legend Jean Louis Gassee, who was contemptuous and favored very nice wines). Andreas Kluth, the Economist’s Los Angeles correspondent, just had the same done to him at Zocalo Public Square.

Andreas talked about his work and his new book, Hannibal and Me, over a couple of glasses of Lateral Bordeaux. The picture wasn’t flattering, but Andreas is never dull.

The book is reviewed here and plugged here, and also given a read by the inimitable Mr. Crotchety (I confess I sometimes wonder if Mr. Crotchety is Andreas’ mouthpiece, a la Ben Franklin’s Silence Dogood or Mike Royko’s Slats Grobnik). It’s high on my list, which never seems to get any shorter, a consequence of knowing lots of good writers with valuable things to say.

A lovely interview with Rebecca Skloot, Author of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”

As my Nieman year careens towards completion, one thought that sometimes makes me anxious is ‘now what?’

“Wait,” you might say, “aren’t you still a talented and successful freelance writer? Won’t you go back to that life?”

Oh, right. I’m an award winning journalist, even. To help me remember that, I won another: Outstanding Business and Technology Article from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. I won for a piece on Warner Music Group and its effort to forge a future in the digital world, Take Us to the River. It ran in Fast Company in July of last year and was the last feature I wrote before the Nieman year started.

Kudos also to my friends Barry Yeoman and Jonathan Green. Barry won the Arlene Eisenberg Award for Writing that Makes a Difference, for School of Hard Knocks, his piece on the malign nature of some for-profit colleges. Jon’s book Murder in the High Himalaya won for General Non-fiction.

My Nieman colleague and friend Philippa Thomas has been in the news herself for the Tweet that felled a government spokesperson.  She just gave her first interview on the subject, to Brian Lehrer’s Web video site (see The BBC’s Philippa Thomas on P.J. Crowley).

Lehrer did a straight piece, not delving into the criticism she’s received, which has mostly focused on why she double-checked with the spokesperson, P.J. Crowley, whether he was on the record. The comments highlight a tension within journalism, especially news reporting in all its forms. On the one hand, we present an ‘official’ record of events, thus establishing ourselves as part of the status quo. We want people to say things on the record, as a sign of its truth-with-a-small-t. On the other hand, the record often hides that truth-with-a-small-t. It can prevent us from carrying out one of the essential functions of journalism, preventing those in power and prominence from abusing their positions.

Why would a journalist check to make sure something was on the record? Not all journalists do. But there is a sense of fairness that governs journalism and our reaction to it. Had Philippa not asked, someone would have taken her to task for ambushing this poor Crowley fellow and causing him to be fired. Snarky things would have been said about the press’s insatiable and indecent lust for something sensational, the way it callously destroys lives in pursuit of gossip. Media has power.  We see that when someone uses clandestine videotaping to entrap an NPR executive (I won’t call that activism - activism combats perceived societal ills). Some journalists, perhaps most, but by no means all, do not want to entrap people. So you identify yourself as a journalist and you may go further and warn people that you plan to report what they say. A journalist may reasonably and ethically think it important that in the context of an informal discussion, it is not enough to identify yourself as a journalist. You must also ensure that someone who has said something newsworthy recognizes that you intend to report it.

There will still be people who think it is absurd not to report the comment regardless. On the other hand, a beat reporter might actually wish that it was off the record. After all, Crowley is just a spokesperson, and almost certainly is saying what someone in actual power thinks. That story might be harder to get at now.

Of course, Philippa was not in a position where she would need to interact with Crowley again on stories, nor could she report on dissension at State. She had little incentive to protect him from himself.  I’m taking a behavioral economics course, and economists would say what she did was thus not rational. But economists and psychologists note that in the Ultimatum game, some 15 percent to 20 percent of players still contribute money in the last round of the game, exactly the opposite of behavior economists would think ‘rational.’ Please note that economists call ‘rational’ what everyone else calls ’selfish.’ (That may say more about economists than it does about the rest of the world.) Such people model a better side of human nature.

But while I take Philippa’s request as a sign that she is modeling a better side of journalistic nature, I can’t avoid the critic who accused her of being a typical media suck-up. That gets us back to the tension of journalism: to be the ‘official’ voice for a community means not getting cut out by the various groups within the community, including its government. That creates a tension of, at the least, familiarity. It does challenge journalists and news organizations. It always will, and we who practice journalism must be on guard against giving favor to the powerful and prominent in order for them to speak to us. Happily, I was earlier this year a screener for a major journalism prize, the Worth Bingham Award for investigative reporting in newspapers. In a time when newspapers are widely acknowledged to be in decline, the depth of the submissions was incredible. It was agonizing to have to winnow down the field for the final round of judging. There was no sucking-up going on in those stories. There were more than 100 submissions, most of them with multiple parts. Looks like sucking-up isn’t so typical, after all.

Modest, self-effacing and dead-on with his approach to media. That’s Adam Penenberg, who is now getting buzz for using Twitter to break a story, prompting mainstream media to pick up on it. Here’s a good run-down of why it matters, including an interview with Adam. Adam, glad to know ya!

My blog posts have become irregular, as I focus more on Twitter and its instant publishing (I’m a bad systems admin or I’d just add the Twitter feed to this blog). But Ennyman, Ed Newman’s catchy online moniker, keeps posting away, and now has become a source of interest for other bloggers. Two interviewed him just this week.  One, Who is Ennyman?, looks at his eclectic interests, especially his voluminous consumption of books. The other, The Many Faces of Ennyman, focuses on his art.

“Compulsively readable” was what the Boston Globe had to say about Shankar Vedantam’s new book, “The Hidden Brain.” I met Shankar via the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships, and I’m  not surprised. All of us who know him admire his work ethic, his clearheadedness and his extraordinary ability to make obscure things make sense. I’m looking forward to reading the book — and hoping he’ll give a reading while he’s here.

Amy Green weighs in on the dilemma of Demand Studios, which advertises via SPJ to find writers, but pays what looks to be far less than a living wage. Still, Demand has extraordinary success getting copy. (Disclosure: I am vice-chair of the SPJ’s freelance committee, which Amy chairs, and was one of the people who read Amy’s post beforehand and made suggestions.) It baffles anyone who tries to make a living at writing why people would work for wages that wouldn’t keep a kid in candy (well, diapers, anyway). Hey, you can make $15 for an article? Nobody but a blockhead would write for that, as Samuel Johnson might have said.
In truth, writers probably would make more from Demand than as playwrights. People strive to write plays, to write poetry, to write novels and non-fiction books of all sorts, almost none of which pay the bills.
I don’t disagree with Amy’s column. Demand could wreak havoc on the market for writers of service journalism, and I would probably quit writing rather than write for Demand’s wages. But I find it hard to get angry about the company. I don’t think it abuses people. It pays something to everyone who writes for it, which is more than Huffington Post can say. I didn’t get mad about Elance and other exchanges that gutted the price for certain kinds of programming gigs. I even wrote a mildly fascinated piece about Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk, which contracts out work that often pays in pennies. You might think nobody in the U.S. would do this work, but in fact they do.

Demand is a symptom of something, not a cause of it. That something looks like the demise of writing’s version of shoeing horses, run-of-the-mill, everyday how-to writing. It might also eliminate higher-end service journalism, but that remains to be seen.