Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Lots of places claim Edgar Allan Poe. He was born in Boston in 1809, was orphaned and brought up by a wealthy family in Richmond, effectively his foster parents, the Allans. After He lived at various points in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, and he was on a trip home to New York in 1849 when he died, in Baltimore. He’s probably the most famous drop out from the University of Virginia (but it was rare to attend college or even high school in the early 1800s).

  Richmond is the place where he spent the most time, about a third of his life. The Edgar Allan Poe museum there gives a great overview of his brief life and his work. I was fortunate to tour it, not least because I was in Richmond in 2013 for a Society of Professional Journalists’ training, and the museum’s curator graciously opened the museum for my group after hours. (I originally wrote these notes up in Evernote on a trip to Panama more than a year ago, but Evernote lost them and I didn’t get around to re-writing them until now).

The Poe Museum has the twin bed he slept in when he lived with the Allans, a staircase from his house, and the half-chair he used at his first job, as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, based at 15th and Main in Richmond (the building is still there). The publisher of the magazine believed that chairs with full backs made for lazy writers. You can see it, along with his desk, at the picture to the right, taken from the Museum’s web site.Despite his famously sallow face in the picture most of us know, taken not long before his death, he was a popular young man, average height, a good athlete who set a record in a Richmond swimming event that may never have been broken. He could swim, but he apparently could not hold a drink, ever, having apparently a near-allergic reaction to even small amounts of alcohol, a problem at a time when many people drank beer instead of water, because the beer was purified.

He had a kind of ramshackle life, often in love, usually disappointed. His financial affairs were as bad as his romantic ones, maybe worse, a preview of the life of most professional writers (Poe was one of the first Americans, perhaps the first, to try to make a living solely from writing). His death remains a mystery, which while seemingly fitting for a writer of creepy horror stories, would have angered him as a critic and a writer. He expected, and strived for, as I learned, works that led unerringly to a specific point or truth. This biographical essay from the Poetry Foundation gives more on his gifts, the controversy created by his petulance and provocative style, and his analytical approach to writing, one that underpins modern fiction and criticism.

The museum contains a first edition of his first book of short stories, many of his letters and journals, and a good representation of his work. The scope of his work impressed me. I thought of Poe as a pioneer of Gothic fiction, horror stories and as a decent poet. All true, but he really was a founder of the modern short story, more or less invented detective fiction and wrote some of the first science fiction, including stories with cyborgs, space travel and flying machines. He also may have been the first to propose something akin to the Big Bang (here’s a nice little piece on Poe’s Big Bang and cosmological ideas that I wish I had pitched). He was an important literary critic, and also was a Southern writer before there was a Southern school of writing. In his literary criticism he poked at the literary establishment of his day, which was largely based around Concord, Mass.

I loved that the Poe Museum has a garden with all the trees and flowers he mentioned in his writings. In daylight, and in season, it would have been fun to look at them and try to match them with the stories and poems. A love poem, “To One in Paradise,” hangs on one of the walls at the museum, describing the “dream too bright to last” of one his youthful affairs. His sorrowful status seems to inspire emotions in modern readers, as you can see from the bust below, which sits in the garden:

In What Reporters Need to Know About Covering Net Neutrality, I highlight some of the arguments around how reporters in any medium should cover hard topics with multiple angles.

As in almost all stories, things were cut from this. One point lost for space involved how the most pointed media coverage was against Net neutrality in 2010. That’s according to research from Zack Stiegler, an associate professor of communications media at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and editor of the book Regulating the Web. He and a colleague examined 16 mainstream media sources in print, radio and broadcast, and coverage was either neutral or characterized Net neutrality as government overreach.

What I didn’t get into much is whether reporters should be advocates. I cite, briefly, a Berkman Center media cloud showing who influenced what when it came to Net Neutrality. Not surprisingly, John Oliver’s now famous (or infamous) takedown of the cable business was the single most influential content produced on Net neutrality last year. He had impact most journalists wish they could have.

For all his influence, I was surprised to see Oliver’s YouTube clip received only 198 links. That seems like a tiny amount for something millions of people watched on YouTube. He had a lot of shares: 21,720 Tweets [see pages 24 and 26 of the report, Score Another One for the Internet]. Oliver’s video had the most links, but was only the fifth most Tweeted item.

Tweets have a lot more scale than links. Only four posts received 100 or more links. The top 10 Tweets all surpassed 10,000 shares. As an aside, I wonder what that suggests about Google’s PageRank algorithm; it doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of linking to work with.

For journalists, the link economy was the only place traditional media stories held their own with advocates and humorists. For tweets and other social media, balanced media stories were not as popular as advocacy journalism like that of The Verge or as the advocacy groups themselves. Official sources like the FCC and the White House were also popular on social media.

But journalism of any sort struggled to be noticed compared to Oliver and his ilk. Notable was The Verge, which had several of the top stories when measured by tweet shares. Then again, The Verge reads like it’s trying to be the Jon Stewart of tech news (or, to be higher-minded, like Lincoln Steffens, the great muckraker who openly provoked readers to advocate against government corruption).

As the report notes,

Parody and satire played a particularly strong role in communicating the issues, in promoting awareness, and in generating interest in a complex and highly technical issue. John Oliver, The Oatmeal, Funny or Die and College Humor were all popular touch points in the outreach campaign.

Must we all become purveyors of faux news to get people to pay attention to us? I’ll be convinced we must if John Oliver is able to make his latest campaign work. This time, he’s out to get people to overturn portions of The Patriot Act. Oliver even goes to Moscow to interview Edward Snowden, in an effort to try to get people to reach out against the renewal of the Patriot Act (things get really interesting around the 29 minute mark). If Oliver can do this, we traditional journalists may have to start working on our stand-up acts.