GigaOm has published an opinion piece I wrote at the suggestion of Om Malik about the poor prospects for the present digital advertising model. I went off on a screed in my first draft against the protests of the Internet Advertising Bureau who have been attacking people like me who turn on ad-blocking software and turn off third-party tracking cookies.
http://gigaom.com/2013/08/18/blaming-the-blockers-whats-the-future-of-online-advertising/
I’ll let the column speak for itself.
The recently departed Al Neuharth — the man who gave the world McJournalism when he created USA Today in 1982 — was famous in my mind for two things (no, make that three, because this is a post in part about the magic powers of “three”):
People love lists. Decades ago there was a bestseller entitled “The Book of Lists,” a classic toilet-side tome in many a household. There are management books about the power of to-do lists. I must have at least three or four list apps on my phones and tablets and PC. Most horrible is the tendency of the lower life forms in online journalism and especially digital marketing/SEO/Content marketing bloggers to use lists as linkbait. There are so many headlines about “Three Ways to Increase ROI” and “Four Ways Content Marketing Can Engage and Delight Your Customers” that I have to wonder what’s driving this obsession with numerical sequence. I know that if I click through to actually read the stuff I’m going to read some airhead social media/digital marketing “guru’s” rehashed airheaded jargon twisted bloviations.
Working off off my feeds this morning I found this actual set of … oh hell, let’s just call them “ListLines™“, e.g. headlines promoting lists:
The king of the numbered ListLine has to be the Content Marketing Institute, which on its home page has the following headlines, and all save one has a numeral in it:
McKinsey, the organization that lives on PowerPoint, had an unofficial Rule of Threes during my short stint– as in no slide should have more than three bullet points on it because that was all the typical audience member could hold in their head during the time it took the expensive consultant to present the slide. McKinsey was into numerology in general and the place should have had the Pareto Principle inscribed over the door as its motto (the “80/20” rule). I admit I stick to the Rule of Threes to this day.
My theory about the abuse of the numbered list in online headlines is the corruption of editorial good sense by the scuzzy underworld of Search Engine Optimization and the Tyranny of Metrics. Let’s turn to the experts at the Content Marketing Institute, enter in the search term “lists” and what do you know? In a post entitled “Content Strategy: 9 Secrets for Awesome Blog Post Titles“, Tracy Gold writes in item number 5:
“We all groan about numbered lists in blog posts. But the truth is, they work. In our research, titles that began with a number performed 45 percent better than the average.
“Another approach is to start with a keyword and include a number later in the title. Take “Content Marketing Checklist: 22 To-dos for SlideShare Success,” for example. We tested both title types, and when the headline started with a keyword, it actually performed slightly better.
“While one approach to this method is to work more numbered lists into your blog content strategy up front, you can also use a numbered list in a post after it’s written. Is the post split up into sections? Can those sections be numbered? Boom. But again, don’t mislead your readers — make sure a numbered list format actually fits the content of your post.”
Now we know the secrets of the masters. My theory is by announcing ahead of time how many pieces of b.s. the reader will have to digest, they figure they aren’t in for a reading of Procopius History of the Early Church and can snack on the info before their Adderall buzzing brain clicks them away.
Before closing, let me digress back to USA Today and my indoctrination into the art of the list.
I worked at a newspaper — The Lawrence Eagle-Tribune — that rented its color presses to print the New England edition USA Today at night, receiving the pages via satellite and then churning out the colorful McPaper so familiar to residents of the Marriott Courtyard Suites. This close relationship unfortunately colored the judgment of Eagle-Tribune editor-in-chief Dan Warner, who decided that Al Neuharth was a visionary genius and that the Tribune’s staff would learn to write lists instead of stories and develop “infographics” about Why We Love Ice Cream,” complete with a cartoon of a melting ice cream cone, a gushing thermometer and some made up statistic about what flavors “We” preferred.
This was strictly enforced to the point that every story opened with a classic lead (my favorite lead of all time, courtesy of Edna Buchanan, the legendary police reporter of the Miami Herald is cited below*), a standard second paragraph, and then an inevitable list of bulleted items before the jump to an inside page. I would pile into the newsroom after a scintillating evening covering the Salem, New Hampshire board of selectmen and pound out some lifeless copy (“This ain’t a short story about your dead grandma bub, so get over it” my editor, Al White, told me after taking a machete to my first story about a sewer bond hearing) that always had a bullet list up high where Dan Warner would be sure to see it. Hence:
“In other actions, the board voted to:
At first the mandate to use bullet lists offended my delicate Strunk & White sensibilities about prose composition. One of the joys of great writing is a well-written list, contained in a single flowing sentence, ordered just so to delight the ear and paint a picture in the mind’s eye, but alas the world has become addicted to the staccato stack of one-liners preceded by the bold typographical dot and so I have given up all hope of resistance.
But I know in my heart of hearts that William Faulkner never wrote a bullet list in his life or worried about SEO.
*: Calvin Trillin, profiling Buchanan in the New Yorker: “In the newsroom of the Miami Herald, there is some disagreement about which of Edna Buchanan’s first paragraphs stands as the classic Edna lead. I line up with the fried-chicken faction. The fried-chicken story was about a rowdy ex-con named Gary Robinson, who late one Sunday night lurched drunkenly into a Church’s outlet, shoved his way to the front of the line, and ordered a three-piece box of fried chicken. Persuaded to wait his turn, he reached the counter again five or ten minutes later, only to be told that Church’s had run out of fried chicken. The young woman at the counter suggested that he might like chicken nuggets instead. Robinson responded to the suggestion by slugging her in the head. That set off a chain of events that ended with Robinson’s being shot dead by a security guard. Edna Buchanan covered the murder for the Herald—there are policemen in Miami who say that it wouldn’t be a murder without her—and her story began with what the fried-chicken faction still regards as the classic Edna lead: “Gary Robinson died hungry.”
The Cape Cod Times and its sister weekly, The Barnstable Patriot, are for sale. News Corp has put them on the block, after picking them up as part of the deal that saw the company acquire the Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft Family and Dow Jones.
I started my journalism career at the Cape Cod Times as a “special writer” the summer after graduating from college in 1980, a sad summer spent sorting out my father’s affairs after he died the March before in a car accident. The Times was a refuge for me, an incredibly rich world of facts and deadlines and mordant wit that proved to be just the antidote for a grieving 22-year old. I will always be indebted to Bill Briesky, Milton Moore, Peggy Eastman and Don Brichta for their patience and good humor in teaching me the rudiments of reporting.
A few weeks ago, while speaking to the Cape Cod Technology Council, someone asked me about the Times now that it was for sale. That was news to me. I hadn’t heard, but yes, it is true and ever since I heard the news I’ve occasionally thought what I would do if I owned a local paper in this parlous time of upheaval and transformation in the media world, one I suppose started the summer I worked at the Times when it was only a few months away from moving off of typewriters, scissors and rubber cement to one of the first computerized editorial systems. I take huge pride in having seen the very end of the analog era, of having literally performed “cut-and-paste”, and then hung on as the momentum began building towards the place where papers stand today, devoid of advertisers and readers, their staffs fleeing for shelter.
I believe a strong civil society needs a newspaper in some form: paper or digital or whatever. I am an idealist who clings to those Jeffersonian ideals of an independent fourth estate that informs the electorate, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. I don’t believe in journalism schools and I don’t regard journalism as a profession but see it more as a craft. I applaud a world where anyone with the ambition can try to become a citizen journalist. I pay for good news. I can’t imagine living in a community without a definitive source of news. Without one the world will quickly become a darker, more ignorant place.
If I owned the Cape Cod Times I would do the following things:
And how would I pay for it all? Well, if wishes were fishes and all that ….
That’s it. Who knows if it would succeed, but I am convinced an emphasis on local news/sports, digital radio and video, and a big commitment to SMB digital marketing services could carry the Times forward until the next big unforeseen disruption. What do I think will happen? Some private equity-backed community newspaper roll-up will probably buy the Times for a song and gut it on the altar of efficiency and centralized management.
When the President of the United States tells the press in a nationally televised address that it needs to get its act together, you know the Fourth Estate is in very, very bad shape.
“In this age of instant reporting and tweets and blogs, there’s a temptation to latch on to any bit of information, sometimes to jump to conclusions. But when a tragedy like this happens, with public safety at risk and the stakes so high, it’s important that we do this right. That’s why we have investigations. That’s why we relentlessly gather the facts.”
David Carr, my favorite media critic and the most perceptive reporter covering the transformation of the news business, moved from his customary home on the lefthand column of the New York Times’ Monday business page to a position of unmistakable prominence in the center of the page, leaving no doubt in my mind that today’s column is one of the more important ones he’ll ever write.
“The pressure to produce is ratcheted up accordingly. Editors and producers begin leaning on their reporters, and they, in turn, end up in the business of wish fulfillment, working hard to satisfy their audience, and meeting the expectations of their bosses. It creates a system in which bad reporting can thrive and dominoes can quickly fall the wrong way.”
Throughout last week’s blur of news and news about the news, was a constant theme of how social media had transformed the news for ever, how citizen journalists with their shaky cell phone video, crowd-sourced forensic vigilantes on Reddit and 4Chan, and a torrent of tweets from law enforcement, reporters, and excited observers were killing the news beast and replacing it with something new and raw and immediate.
Then everything broke and I’m not talking about breaking news.
Alexis Madrigal, one of the smartest voices writing about technology as senior editor of The Atlantic, wrote a scathing indictment of the fools who pinned the crime on a missing Brown student, tormenting his already panicked family with a self-fulfilling series of tweets that spilled from one misinformed source to more credible ones. The New York Post put, on their front page, the pictures of two innocent men circled by the crowd at 4Chan as likely suspects, leading one to turn himself into the authorities to plead his innocence.
As Carr writes in the Times, the biggest blunder, the most inexcusable, was committed by CNN on Wednesday, when John King erroneously reported a suspect was in custody. As Carr painfully reminds us, CNN is the source we’re supposed to turn to during times of crisis, the journalistic institution that defined the new 24-hour, constant news cycle. Instead, it was painful to watch, to watch and hear talking heads trying to fill the tyranny of dead air with babble, conjecture, recap and opinion. One look at Al Sharpton and I was done with MSNBC. Fox never came on once. I avoided the television and stuck to a stream of WBUR the national public radio affiliate in Boston and of course, Twitter.
On Friday evening, as the Governor declared an all-clear and let the people of Watertown out of their lockdown to stretch their legs, my wife and I switched on CNN to laugh at the network’s cluelessness and discomfort. I jeered the rugged looking reporter standing on a sidewalk behind the Arsenal Mall, laughed at how he kept trying to tame his wind-blown haircut, and told my wife, “These guys have just been making it up all week and they’re getting pounded for it.”
Then the reporter stopped talking, removed his ear piece and cocked his head like a dog hearing another dog bark in the distance.
“Do you hear that?” he asked. I laughed. CNN was delivering the drama as expected.
“I think I heard gun fire.”
The irony is that he had heard gunfire, the shots as the police converged on the shrink-wrapped boat in a nearby backyard. He performed the single act of pure reportage I saw all week from the media, he heard something first-hand and he reported it.
In the end, it wasn’t the Globe or the Herald or CNN that gave the world the news that it was all over. That was a tweet courtesy of the Boston Police Department.
My point — as an ex-reporter who worked in a city newsroom well before the Internet, back when newspapers were still healthy and secure; as a former hack who ducked under yellow police tape and stood around asking questions of cops and bystanders with a camera around his neck and a spiral reporter’s notebook in his hands — is the old journalistic craft of knocking on doors and asking questions, of checking facts and verifying sources, of biding one’s time until one had the story nailed. of risking the loss of a scoop in the interest of accuracy was underscored last week by those reporters and editors who sat on rumors despite the pressure of the moment, who took the time to confirm before speaking.
The moment of the blasts was first reported on Twitter, and the news-dinosaur haters crowed that it meant a new era in news because the Times and the Associated Press and the “mainstream” media took another 15 to 30 minutes to get the news out. Well, the reason is simple. When they did report it they had confirmation, not speculation to go on.
There have been some big, unforgettable moments in post-Internet journalism, mostly catastrophes that grabbed everyone’s attention,and held it for hours if not days. The last pre-Internet news moment, I argue, was the first Gulf War, when CNN came into its own. The first Internet news moment was the explosion of TWA Flight 800 south of Long Island, the first time the audience could get news on demand and not wait for the trucks to deliver it. 9/11 …. a whole other story. During all of those events the press rose to the occasion and used the new medium to good effect. But Boston was a study in failure all the way around.
Every trend, fad and meme has its day and “branded content” is having its moment now that the New York Time’s Monday business section has discovered the phenomenon of publishers further blurring the lines between journalism and marketing in its piece on 4.8.13 by Tanzina Vega: “Sponsors Now Pay for Online Articles, Not Just Ads.” The usual publications are cited: Forbes.com and it’s “BrandVoice” (“Connecting marketers to the Forbes audience”), the Atlantic Monthly, Business Insider, Mashable just to name a few. I think a bigger trend is being ignored: and that’s marketers going direct to readers and building their own audiences, cutting publishers out entirely except to rent their traffic and push clicks to their own media.
Forbes has taken its share of criticism for being one of the first old-school publishers to open up its digital pages to advertorial, but Chief Product Office Lewis D’Vorkin isn’t apologetic. His e-book on the Forbes.com editorial/advertising model is a convincing argument against the old church/state Chinese wall model of advertising-supported but segregated-independent-objctive journalism. In his treatise, D’Vorkin goes right after the old-school editorial purists and essentially wishes them good luck as they slowly starve to death while the old interruption model of advertising further withers under the impact of AdBlocker and Tivo-ad skipper technologies.
The Times article cites one dissenter, Andrew Sullivan, the former editor of the New Republic: “I am aghast at this…Your average reader isn’t interested in that. They don’t realize they are being fed corporate propaganda.”
Average reader? At least they’re reading and not rotting their brains with a diet of Bravo staged-reality shows about Real Wives and Hoarders. Getting into the sanctimonious mosh pit of editorial objectivity and journalism ethics is to enter into a surreal religious war on a pointless par with the dyophysite controversies of the fifth century: no one cared except the patriarchs and metropolitans but nevertheless wars were waged and people died.
The Internet Advertising Bureau and the Magazine Publishers Association have long been setting down the rules for making it clear to readers what is pure and impure. Putting tinted boxes around marketing content, sticking the word “Advertisement” atop the headline …. I ran into this issue as early as 1996 when Forbes.com sold daily content sponsorships and gave the advertisers a tall vertical unit we invented called the “Skyscraper.” The smarter sponsors used the space to run a story as opposed to an animated Punch-The-Monkey ad, and before long we had to revise our terms and conditions to ghettoize the more egregious offenders with the scarlet letter of “Advertising.” Digital advertising models have long looked for the online equivalent of the little word “Advertorial” that magazines used to segregate special sections bought by the Economic Development Commission of Mississippi (“A State To Grow In!”) away from the serious, independent stuff. Now even Google News is trying to keep the sponsored stuff out of its pages.
I think the Times missed the bigger trend: marketers going direct to their prospective buyers by becoming their own publishers, producing their own media and using professional editorial placements only to rent names, just as marketers have been renting circulation lists for decades to drive their direct mail campaigns. Here’s some early manifestations and enablers of the Marketer-As-Publisher trend:
Corporate-in-house produced newsrooms: Ever since corporate websites became de rigeur in the 90s, corporate communications has always carved out a loney section of the brand’s main website to post press releases, executive bios, and the usual investor relations information. Now some are going right into the business of publishing stories – not the usual releases for the press, but content for the customers – under the rubric of corporate newsrooms. Best example I can think of is what Intel has been doing for years with its newsroom at newsroom.intel.com. Cisco also has a newsroom. These are being used as white paper libraries, curated collections of relevant industry news links, and original daily news and commentary, all backed up by some form of community/social participation function.
Branded partner produced content: these are sites produced in partnership with a media company. Intel is in a partnership with Vice.com called The Creators Project. Red Bull is also into it this sort of advertainment.
Online “magazines”: these are the digital evolution of the type of print product that companies such as IBM or the Four Seasons Hotel chain would hire Forbes Custom Publishing to produce and distribute to their customers. Now the digital version of “vanity” magazines live under their own domain identity (vs. being an extension of the core brand’s domain like the Intel newsroom) Now they produce them with their own editorial staff. A great example is Adobe/Omniture’s CMO.com:
Enablers
Talent: A lot of inexpensive and talented business and B2B editorial talent displaced by the digital disruption in the their former newsrooms is available with some prominent tech talent crossing over to corporate gigs – and not in the usual PR/flak capacity but as corporate staff writers and editors. From the highest end of the mastheads with people like Fortune’s Rik Kirkland going to McKinsey a few years ago to edit the McKinsey Quarterly and oversee the firm’s editorial strategy to Steve Hamm, formerly of Businessweek, going to IBM to become a communications strategist, or Dan Lyons leaving Read, Write Web, Forbes, and the Daily Beast to join Cambridge digital marketing startup HubSpot…. the talent is out there looking for some relief from the churn and chaos of the traditional press and the sweatshop conditions of the blog networks.
Cheap tools: web development used to involve a lot of enterprise software licenses for content management, analytics, etc. Say goodbye to Vignette and Interwoven and hello to WordPress and Drupal. If the tools are good enough for AllThingsD and The Economist, then they are good enough to a corporate content marketing site. And they have the added appeal of being cloud/SAAS based so the more daring marketers can side-step the corporate web mafia and the CIO’s office with their brown-suited procurement standards and office of project management and start publishing immediately.
Drivers: in closing, what’s driving chief marketing officers, heads of corporate communications, and digital marketers to launch their own editorial efforts?
First – developing an audience of loyal readers is no different that developing and attracting the attention of prospective customers and building loyalty among existing ones. Corporate content is about going direct to the right audience and cutting out the editorial middle-man.
Second – digital marketing is all about the content that a marketer pushes through the distribution channels available. YouTube for corporate video. Tweets, Facebook pages … this stuff demands a steady supply of fresh content and getting that content from an agency or third-party is like trying to perform surgery in a haz mat suit with robotic arms. Why depend on a third party when you can own the capability internally.
Third – agility. Corporate publishing is about reacting, not just to opportunities like tweeting about random blackouts during the Superbowl, but to crisis communications when every second counts. When your offshore oil platform catches on fire, the world isn’t going to the New York Times for your mea culpa and updates, it’s hammering on BP.com. (I’ll get into “dark site” production in a future post.)
So what? I think the immediate impact of corporate content isn’t journalistic ethics but the challenge it places on the professional service firms that feed clients with editorial services. Namely the PR firms writing releases, CEO speeches, white papers, etc. and the digital agencies that build custom microsites and other digital initiatives for marketers unstaffed to handle the challenge of staying technically adept. And finally– the traditional and not-so-traditional “objective” press. They will either produce the content as a service to the corporate advertiser or see their former editors and reporters get hired away to do it under the more stable umbrella of a big organization with deep pockets. That the press is now selling the opportunity to publish corporate content next to their own reporting is a foregone conclusion. Hand wringing and saying one is ethically “aghast” is the personification of the cliché, “pride goeth before the fall.”
I’ve been digging into the market for custom publishing services for digital marketers, and hence have been focused on content management systems, distribution models, and other production tools to rapidly build and nuture a custom “magazine.”
Introducing my testbed for Flipboard’s new publishing tool: The Monthly Meconium (the name is a long story involving my penchant for weird words, one of which was turned back on me in 1981 when I was a bartender and given the nickname of “Mec” after sharing the definition of “meconium” with the day shift), a fitting title for a first effort at something that is destined to be flushed away.
The tool is a clipping service. One drags a “Flip It” applet into the Chrome toolbar and when you’re on some content worth sharing, you hit the little “+ flip it” button, add a little commentary, and it’s added to your personal FlipBoard magazine.
Flipboard, if you’ve been sleeping under a rock, is the amazing graphical, touch-friendly feed aggregator that takes all of your social feeds — Twitter, Facebook, Google +, YouTube, and Flipboard specific titles from publishers like GigaOm and AllThingsD — and brings them together in what has quickly become my favorite browsing app on my smartphone and my tablet.
There’s a bit of a Tumblr/Pinterest feeling to the whole experience. This isn’t a content creation tool as much as a curation took. Sort of a cooler updated version of a paper.li custom newspaper for a swiping, touch enabled experience.
I have no idea how to subscribe to The Monthly Meconium. I’ve been messing around with Flipboard trying to find my freshly launched effort, but nothing brings it up. I’m assuming it needs to be crawled, indexed, reviewed, and then listed by the Flipboard crew.
This should be standard fare for any reporter trying to build traffic to their stuff or for any digital marketing trying to build an audience to their brand’s content.
When I actually figure out how to subscribe I’ll up this post. In the meantime I’ll try to get more adept at the techniques and actually use it to share stuff of interest.
Update: Flipboard 2.0 is only available for Apple’s iOS – an Android version is coming, so I can’t even read my own creation. Nice to see Paid Content agrees with my opinion that this should cause a severe case of incontinence for publishers.
Bob Page emailed me a link to this Harvard Business Review blog post about how advertisers need to act more like newsrooms.
Written by Newsweek/Daily Beast CEO Baba Shetty and Wharton Professor Jerry Wind, the post cites some marketing trends where companies are:
Nice sentiments, but in my experience, the reality of putting such sentiments into action is a lot more frustrating. Getting big organizations to be faster and more open is always going to be an exercise in frustration and patience. Bob wrote: “This “marketers as newsrooms” stuff from Intel, Red Bull, Liberty Mutual looks an awful lot like the kind of team you got started at Lenovo.”
I’ll take the compliment for trying to push the company to be more agile on its communications and media, but the frustrations occurred when two traditional conservative corporate communications edicts were invoked: risk and quality.
Risk is what a corporate communications department is designed to minimize. They plan the message, craft it, practice it, push it across the organization and limit the points where the media can engage. Rank and file employees can’t, and shouldn’t, talk to the press or randomly respond to social media. Even the CEO is given a speech written for him, carefully crafted down to every ad hoc joke and quip. External PR agencies and internal staff work together across product introductions, corporate messaging and investor relations, focused on cutting down the risk of leaks, illegal financial disclosure and embarrassing moments.
Risk aversion in corporate communications means slowing things down, stone walling, taking time to consider responses and reactions before blurting out something that isn’t signed off. This doesn’t work when a lynch party is forming over Christmas shipping delays and the CEO’s home phone number is being shared along with form letters for submission to the Better Business Bureau. The realities of modern crisis communications is that minutes, not hours, are crucial, and when a customer service team needs to wait 24 hours for corporate communications to reply with a sanitized, bland statement opportunities are lost and tempers inflamed.
Quality is what gets invoked when a digital marketing team tries to get a video onto the company’s YouTube channel. Suddenly the brand team and the advertising creative people turn into critics, and cry foul when a cell-phone video of an engineer explaining how he revved up boot times for a new PC is put out there on the same day of a product announcement claiming the new laptops are faster to start up than the competitions. The official announcement may make the claim, but the customers want to know how and why, so pointing a video camera at the engineer and putting up a 60 second answer suddenly makes the purists invoke HD quality standards.
Here’s a video I challenged the team to shoot and post in a single day when I felt a product announcement lacked any substance or answers. This bummed some people out because of its low quality, but 80,000 views later, I’d declare it a success. It simply Kevin Beck interview Howard Locker on what he did to rev up boot times.
I maintain that if you’re in a complex business and have opened the doors to questions through corporate blogs, customer service forums, Facebook pages, etc.. you better be prepared to get something up in a matter of hours, not days.
One thing will never change and that is that corporate content is ultimately advertorial and as such, inferior to independently/ objectively produced journalism.
I’m going to take credit for coining the term “corporate journalism” back in 2000 when I was at McKinsey working on the firm’s knowledge management system. My friend and colleague Rob O’Regan and I realized our purpose in life was to leverage our experience as business and technology reporters in prying out of taciturn consultants conditioned to maintain client confidentiality some meaningful insights that could be developed into “content” for the benefit of other consultants and their clients.
The act of interviewing — not media training where a PR person coaches a senior executive on how to spin a story — but actually probing an expert in the reporter’s equivalent of the Socratic method, produced some strong results: it forced the experts to clarify their jargon, realize when their points were obtuse, and understand what they considered interesting or important wasn’t necessarily so. But the public result of this process — a story in the McKinsey Quarterly, or a video series for client development — is still content with an inherent proprietary bias.
Yes, brands need to be more agile, corporate communications needs to be faster and more authentic, and old strictures of spinning messages and planning ad campaigns deserve to die. But beware of flaks bearing the next new thing, it usually turns out to be unbearably bogus and contrived and designed to serve the best interests of the organization and its shareholders, not the public and its customers.
The Cape Cod Times — where I started my career in journalism in 1980 covering the waterfront and county politics — issued a public apology yesterday after discovering one of its longtime reporters had faked names in three dozen stories over the years.
One of those fictional characters was an imaginary 88-year old Cotuit resident named Johnson Coggins, fabricated in a 2011 story about the Cotuit Fourth of July Parade and introduced as the “patriarch of the family” and a “longtime Cotuit summer resident.” I note this because I remember reading the story and wondering who the f%^k this mysterious codger was and did he live in the pines somewhere in an alternative Cotuit universe I had never heard of. I also remember thinking, “damn, Cotuit is really changing and getting invaded with new faces when I don’t recognize the names of “longtime summer residents.”
Now I feel a little irked at the deception. Irked, not angry, just mentally tweaked at the memory of trying to put a face to a name and feeling mystified because, well, I was supposed to feel mystified. As a reporter I know the temptation of phoning something in, of fudging an age, a middle initial, but then it clicks that if I don’t the middle initial or the person’s age, if I didn’t take the time to get the little things right, well, the whole credibility began to crumble. It’s one thing to make an error and issue a correction. It’s another thing to deceive and have to deliver an apology.
The writer, Karen Jeffrey, used her imagination when populating the usual human interest stories about weather, parades, etc., inventing bystanders, observers, and participants. She got caught last month when she made up the names of some tourists surprised by a Veteran’s Day ceremony and the Times went deep into the morgue to discover that indeed, such chimeras as the fabled Mister Coggins didn’t exist.
Such a shame when a reporter goes down in flames. The news business has enough problems as it is, and trust shouldn’t be one of them.
I have fond memories of the Times. I was there the last year they used typewriters, and learned the reporter’s craft from some good reporters and editors like Don Brichta, Bill Briesky, Peggy Eastman, and Milton Moore. I learned how to properly use a reporter’s notebook, take a snapshot of a ribbon cutting and check passing ceremony, where to sit during a public meeting, and the true physical meaning of the term “cut-and-paste.” They have since become a Murdoch paper, their local news seems to shrink a bit every year (I rely on their sister weekly, the Barnstable Patriot for more hyperlocal coverage of town affairs), and they seem to be content with the usual light blend of car accidents, arrests, weather and features with no deep dives into Cape civic life. They took a pasting during the Wind Farm debates when a pair of critics wrote a book tarring their ethics for opposing the windmills are ardently as they did — but editorial pages are for taking a stand and they did.
If I were to make any request it would be to throw a little money at the local side — online can handle the page counts so the ad-edit ratio shouldn’t be an issue. The Cape needs the coverage which is now piece-meal between the one and only daily and a handful of weeklies. I know local news is expensive, but someone has to step up to the challenge and Patch is not it.
Some good stuff passed before my eyes in the last few days but there is never enough time to read it all.
Sanctuary
Starting with an obscure journal only available to members of the Massachusetts Audubon Society — Sanctuary — is the spring edition devoted in its entirety to the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the book credited with kicking off the eco-movement, banning DDT, and leading to the restoration of avian species such as the Osprey (which, come to think of it, must be ready to return to Cotuit Bay any day now).
Carson took on the chemical industry and government regulators with a bleak ringing of the alarm that pesticides and rampant pollution were trashing the environment. A resident of Duxbury on Massachusetts’ South Shore, her insights were local ones and led to massive reforms, and a lot of personal attacks.
Mass Audubon is a quintessential Massachusetts non-profit, founded in the early 20th century to stop the devastation of the tern population by the fashion industry which keyed in on the particularly stupid notion that sticking a bird’s wing in a ladie’s hat was a good thing. Sanctuary is not available online and is one of those member only things. I have been a long time member because Mass Audubon owns Sampson’s Island/Dead Neck in Cotuit, manages it as an Arctic Tern rookery, and have rangers who come around checking for membership cards if they find you lounging on the sand.
The Atlantic
The April issue is a strong mix of sweet and sour. On the sweet side is a piece by Blackhawk Down author Mark Bowden on the man who broke the banks of several Atlantic City casinos without resorting to card counting or other tricks. Don Johnson is a veteran gambling industry manager who took advantage of the economy’s effect on the Casino’s policy to discount a gambler’s losses from 10 percent to 20%. I was unaware that the heavy hitting gamblers, aka “whales” can negotiate a break on their losses or a stack of free chips to get them to the high roller tables. Johnson knew the casinos were greedy, wasn’t known as a particularly successful gambler and therefore wasn’t regarded as dangerous to the bottom line, and then just swooped in and played smart blackjack and took them down on the order of $10 million.
On the sour side: a lengthy cover profile of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke with the provocative teaser “Ben Bernanke saved the global economy. So why does everyone hate him?” Big macro economic policy pieces are rough going for me. I don’t have an appetite for the dismal science, but Roger Lowenstein is the master of making financial matters palatable and even exciting. The former WSJ writer’s biography of Warren Buffett remains one of my favorite business books. Anyway, if you want to get smart on the state of economy, Bernanke, and how he pisses off both sides of the aisle with the Fed monetary policy, this story is for you.
Finally, a look at Rahm Emanuel’s first year as Mayor of Chicago. I thought he brought a lot of intelligent f-bomb dropping testosterone to the Obama White House during the dark days of 2009 and this piece presents a hyper, hands on, technocrat in action in the City That Works.
The New Yorker
I’ve only found the time to read John Seabrook’s story [behind the paywall, sorry] in the March 26 issue about hit making song writers and 
producers and how they churn out number one “smashes” with great precision for big name artists like Rihanna. The process is fascinating, involves a Blackberry and a “box” running ProTools, and a strange process of mumbling out phrases to hooks and rhythms. Somehow, at the end of the conveyor belt, a song emerges.
End note: ever wonder why magazine dates are so far in the future? The dates aren’t for the readers as much as they are the day newsstand vendors are supposed to take their copies off the rack and replace them with the next edition. Hence I am reading a March 26 New Yorker on March 19. On March 26 the news vendors pull this issue and replace it. Now you know.
New York Times:
I like David Carr’s column this Monday morning on how reporting by people with an agenda used to be called propaganda. He tackles the Foxconn/Apple manufacturing abuse one-man-show fiasco at NPR perpetrated by monologist Mike Daisey who prevaricated and committed many calumnies in his quest for entertainment. Hey, the issue isn’t whether or not Chinese electronics factory workers are abused or work too much for too little so we can dote on our shiny Apple toys: it’s about Daisey fibbing and blowing it at the expense of good journalists like the Time’s Charles Duhigg who actually reported and sourced the same story, albeit without the drama that makes for good theater and podcasts. Carr deftly co-indicts the poor guy who made the Kony 2012 “documentary” and then folded under the attention and scrutiny to the point where he had to take off his clothes and dance naked in a sidewalk while committing felonious mopery.