Privacy in Wonderland: We all wonder where it went

Shirley Sherrod could bring a libel suit against her tormentor.
She suffered loss of reputation. She suffered job loss. She suffered.
The African-American civil servant in the Georgia office of the U.S. Agriculture Department started a perfectly ordinary week in wonderful anonymity.
But she tumbled into the blogosphere as innocently as Alice assailed by a Mad Hatter and the madding crowd of the right wing wonderland.
Then she emerged with an apology from President Obama, a better job offer from Ag Secretary Vilsack and vilification as racist turned on its head into stoic civil-sainthood. She was never the person portrayed by a blogger.
No wonder there's talk of libel.
The whole case presents itself as a study in the politics of vilification abetted by the digital speed of the modern communication mode measured more by moments than calm reason.
Too many tick-tock white rabbits running down too many media holes.
No wonder lawyer talk is out and about.
A defamation court, however, would have to deal with the fact Ms. Sherrod fell into a Georgia privy but emerged sweet-smelling and clutching the reward of a better job offer and notoriety transformed into celebrity. Where is the damage now? A judge must ask.
How much better for her and for us if she were to bring a privacy suit for being dragged unwilling into false light.
The invasion of her right to keep to herself, do her job and control her own destiny suffered permanent harm. She forever will endure indignity as victim-symbol of quick-trigger misinformation.
Tremble, all you who enter the new world of communication. (That's all of us, if you wonder.)
FOX news and its imitators -- collectively a causative factor in the media climate raining rabid cats and mad dogs all over Shirley Sherrod -- long ago cost us any expectation of fairness and accuracy in public affairs reporting.
Truth is no longer an expectation.
The one comfort any of us might retreat into had been the expectation of privacy: If we were not a public person, "they" couldn't get to us.
The experience of a no-longer-private person in government service shows any of us could suffer the same loss of a basic right.   
"They" can get to a nameless, faceless bureaucrat. "They" can get to any of us.
And who is "they?" Anyone with an Internet connection and a story to bait media attention.
A judicial ruling to counter privacy invasion would do our New Media society far more good than libel damages, if any.
We are all Alice, tip-toeing through the  media mind-field of sinkholes leading to anguish, not tea parties. 

Excuse me! I seem to have misplaced my guillotine.

Remember the media panic when this communication revolution began?
The bloggers are coming! The bloggers are coming!
Well, it turned out to be less of a quick-hit rebellion and more of an extended Reign of Terror for conventional publishers.
Eat any cake lately, Marie?
Now the first wave of attack is fading.
Nielsen and others report a significant decline in blog traffic, according to The Economist.
Twitter and Facebook are up substantially, however. So don't harbor any wistful dreams of a return to legacy media.
Thank you BTW for coming to my own blog for this information and commentary. Better than bakery goods, I say, Your Highness!
Look here, the rebels' underlying cause remains the same: People and especially the youth demographic prefer to publish information and exchange comments at little if any expense, at a time of their own choosing and in a manner of their personal convenience such as with a cell phone.
Maybe the iPad will grandly unify the multimedia experience. More likely, we're going to experiment quite a bit more for quite a while longer.
The Economist points out the geopolitical significance of the Internet in real civil unrest such as Iran's.
There's more to going online than sex texting.
So we're not going back. The com-revolt is real. It's here to stay.
And the biggest evidence is the evolution to new forms and their globalization of ideas about freedom.
That's exactly what happens in a revolution

Our convention-al media

PEOPLE ALWAYS ASK the editor how many work in the newsroom.
Oh, about half, goes the old joke.
The Columbia Journalism Review’s Justin Peters wrote a cute send-up on the 15,000 reporters at the Democratic National Convention.
Most are wearing bad suits.
A thousand are drunk, which Peters says is as it should be.
Many don’t have credentials, can’t find the credentialing office, are complaining about lack of floor passes and are smugly criticizing others in the media who have no business crowding the place up.
Those are right.
But an exception not mentioned in CJR is Asa Eslocker with his ABC-TV camera crew. Denver police arrested Asa – roughly, it sounded like – and used language not too delicate for the reporter’s ears but not likely to be heard from the DNC podium.
Cops said the network crew was blocking a hotel’s private sidewalk.
ABC said the journalists were looking into corporate lobbyists and wealthy fat cats at the convention.
Oh, what a lovely reason to get busted. Waytago, Asa.

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MANY OF THE convention-going journalists are doing it for funsies, no doubt.
Bloggers had an extraordinary welcome.
But professional news organizations can spend $50,000 a reporter and up covering presidential campaigns. Convention town hotels and bars and restaurants and whatever else can be hidden on expense vouchers eat up a bunch.
So why do it, asks U.S. News & World Report.
Its Whispers column quotes Mark Potts, a media blogger at RecoveringJournalist.com, suggesting the media instead do community journalism – my phrase, not his.
Let Associated Press and the big syndicated news operations blow their dough, says Potts. And spend the money instead on covering city hall or local schools and the like.
Well, I’d spend the money on the presidential campaigns. But I suggest the “community” approach, because that implies relationship journalism.
Make the candidates’ health care platforms a local story. Explain what the two hot wars are doing to the home front. Tell the local economy story in Obama and McCain terms the hometown crowd can feel.
All we need to know about the conventions – except for the odd story an Asa Eslocker might get arrested for – can be seen on the television tube as it happens.
Relating politics to the local media audience — priceless, as the commercial says.

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MARK SALTER wrote books with his and boss’s John McCain’s name on them.
Now he’s writing the senator’s acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination.
His muse is Peggy Noonan, the hit speechwriter of the George H. W. Bush presidential years, according to Newsweek.
The McCain candidacy is derivative. It’s based on the ongoing war in Iraq, the tax policies of the current president Bush and the trickle down economy from as far back as Ronald Reagan’s days but as dried up for Americans as Death Valley
Two of Salter’s books with McCain – Hard Call and Faith of My Fathers – are workmanlike, readable prose. But they are not dream-inspired like the two published works of Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic opponent.
The Republican writing team will need more than the Noonan mojo and the campaign leftovers of past Republican years.

- - -

THIS IS A credentialing society.
We don’t seek education for its own sake. We earn degrees and diplomas to get our ticket punched for entering the middle class mainstream.
The odd result is bored, tired, ennui toward life instead of the genuine liberal arts and sciences joy of discovery about the universe and all that’s in it.
It’s the same with journalists who seek the political convention credential and then sit on it.
They have a nasty habit of reporting in the “here we go again” fashion slouch.
But the unfolding DNC show in Denver – and with any luck the RNC convention to follow – don’t live down to the conventional view of blah-boring.
The aroma of American renewal is in the air.
And any journalist who can’t smell those roses had just as well join the drunks spotted by the CJR observer at the convention.

The morning jitters just get worse

Too many newsroom executives are so deeply imbedded in that mechanical culture, they are slow to adapt to electronic alternatives. Some can’t or won’t adopt at all. They prefer to ride out this info-technology endgame until personal retirement or until their embrace of the dead tree industry ends in a forest denuded of everything but computer screens.

My newspaper didn’t come this morning. Am I grumpy? You bet. And so’s my labradoodle, Jack.
He and I walk out to the front porch every morning at 5. He does what he needs to do. I look for what I need – my ink and newsprint fix. A sensitive animal, Jack picks up on my moody empty-feeling when the paper is not there.
Dogs and newspaper readers have a lot in common. No, I don’t mean the puppy puddle training stage on yellowing newsprint. I mean regular, repetitive reward for behavior is what conditions us.
It’s the open secret of newspaper circulation departments.
They interrupt our training pattern at their peril.
I can if I must skip the printed edition yet still get the news and features.
My laptop is primed and ready to dispense a lot more information than the broadsheet and from far more sources.
At 5 a.m. the regional news and weather are coming on TV. CNN is already telling me what the world markets are doing and what the overnight events are. Why, wonder of wonders, that includes even those occurrences since the local editors put to bed the newspaper, the one that didn’t rise and shine anyway.
Non-delivery simply underscores the anachronism of the printed word.
But the paper remains a comfort to hold in the hand, to turn the pages, to have an outward and physical sign of the inward sense of place where it’s published.
How comforting it is to get mad at its opinions or to mentally upbraid the columnists or to disagree with the selection of news. The faux anger gets my day started.
I love a paper I can hate and still keep coming back to. As long as it keeps coming back to me!
Oh, I could call the newspaper office where someone would dispatch a replacement carried by a fawning, apologetic route manager tugging his forelock and promising to do better if I just won’t drop my subscription.
I’m hooked. I won’t drop. But it will happen again that the paper won’t show up. And again. And again in a random string of unpredictable breaks in the delivery ritual. Even now I’m surprised when the paper does arrive on time and unsurprised but still petulant when it does not.
The newspaper factory is a relic of industrial technology with an infinite number of things that can go wrong on the transmission belt that ends at Jack’s and my doorstep.
Forget all the modernization and good intentions, which are considerable.
The mechanism of newspaper production wheezes and creaks and ultimately depends on some scarcely paid, non-professional driver to open bundles in the nighttime and to wrap a rubber band around a paper (double wrapping it with plastic in bad weather) and to get it to me before I get cranky for having to wait.
Too many newsroom executives are so deeply imbedded in that mechanical culture, they are slow to adapt to electronic alternatives. Some can’t or won’t adopt at all. They prefer to ride out this info-technology endgame until personal retirement or until their embrace of the dead tree industry ends in a forest denuded of everything but computer screens.
Established readers like me encourage the old ways with memory feelings of romance. And of habit.

The love of plaintalk vs. hated editorspeak

God made copy editors. So love-hate relationships would agitate newsrooms.
Desk hounds can save your butt. They also can make you and your reader question the whole enterprise of journalism.
When I sat on a copy desk, naturally, we could do no wrong. Then I moved to reporting. I learned to insert a small error in everything I wrote. That way a copy editor could triumph over the “find” and move on instead of repeatedly reworking my story in agonizing self-justification.
“An Elegy for Copy Editors” on the editorial page of The New York Times reminds me of past ways and of the future of journalism. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/opinion/16mon4.html?ex=1371355200&en=4871a499fb7ba4b7&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
The elegist Lawrence Downes had visited the Newseum, our industry’s shrine to itself in Washington. He searched in vain for a niche of tribute to copy editors. The death rattle of the copy desk foreshadows the obituary for print journalism.
Machines and those who operate them without time to get form and content completely right are lapping the bypassed word-checkers many times over in the relay race that is news delivery. The self-correcting blogosphere doesn’t seem to mind that much about accuracy.
The NYT elegy laments the decline of newspapers and of readers. Budget cuts lop the heads off the copy editing headline writers. Those guardians of credibility in word use and fact and meaning and readability no longer provide quality control. So publishing declines more, costing it more readers in the industry’s downward spiral.
Newspapers are shrinking or eliminating “multiply redundant levels of editing that distinguish their kind of journalism,” the elegy recounts. Layers of editing no doubt applied themselves to that very article for publication on the editorial page of The Times.
Yet what a weak sentence!
The word “redundant” doesn’t need or want the modifier “multiply,” as if to say, “redundantly redundant.”
The eye stops and stares at “multiply.” Does he mean the verb “to increase?” Or does the writer mean the opposite of “singly?”
See. I told you I used to be a copy editor.
Elegiac language is not the way people speak, a goal of the popular press in every era when volume matters.
The ambiguity actually proves the thesis in The Times where a copy editor should have prevented the reader from pausing in mid-sentence. Too many pauses produce too few readers.
But the passage also reveals too much deference to editors with their arcane ways and too little attention to readers with other ways to get information.
Even bloggers know to use plainspeak.
Print writers and their copy editors violate the Hippocratic Oath by first doing harm when they make the language more austere and not more readable.
Let’s not lament old ways too much while we improve ways to communicate.
Meanwhile you may take for granted any error you read here is inserted intentionally just to see if you could catch it.

This just in: Government discovers rumor!

Can’t fool Washington. It’s just slow on the uptake.
Word-of-mouth is humankind’s oldest form of communication.
Dame Rumor flies, wrote ancient poets such as Virgil. Truth is a pedestrian.
The feds were bound to get around to investigating that hare and tortoise race.
The Securities and Exchange Commission wants Wall Street to stop spreading false information.
Lots of luck with that.
Those turkey buzzards of day trading, the short sellers, make a living from bad information and misinformation and disinformation. They borrow stock at a high price to sell low and pocket the difference.
The shorters naturally benefit if gossip hurts a company on the Exchange while they hold its paper.
Speculation flitted right behind rumor out of Pandora’s box.
Journalism could tell federal regulators all information is baseless until verified.
But fact-checking is a tedious process that suffers when a reporter is close to deadline and when the financial world is in near panic mode as it is lately.
So we shouldn’t be cynical either about editors’ stern warning to authenticate or the SEC’s crackdown on illegal trading practices.
Realism simply tells us rumor mongering is a never ending story, with us always.
The wagging tongue as way-of-life is how vast numbers of non-readers of newspapers and non-watchers of TV are getting their news these days. Much of the news actually is commentary if not downright gossip.
Abandon all hope for straight poop as you enter the blogosphere. Yes, this blog is an outpost in the vastness of cyberspace too.
That’s why you see my name, my picture, my bona fide credentials listed – the stuff of credibility, the eternal enemy of rumor.
Trusted sources: That’s what professional journalism is all about, regardless of media platform.
The government might defeat rumor in the marketplace. Not likely. But it might. The weapon would be instantly available truth, denial, explanation to counter every whisper.
But that would require government, corporations and the financial world to be quick with credibility too.
Every reporter knows those institutions trade in deception and withheld information and controlled flow of news.
So short sellers and average citizens take rumors for granted.
Credible journalism can’t. That’s why there’ll always be a market for honest reporting.
Uphill battle that it is with Dame Rumor whispering in your ear.

Me Blog Pretty One Day

You know that dream where you're naked in public? That's blogging for the first time.

But I have something to say. I have a long career to base my view on. I reinvented myself from editor to professor. Besides, I'm tired of sitting by while a million-million people fly into the blogosphere.

Look out. Here I come, naked or not.

There's a lot of company out here, all playing off each other. My title on this intro-post plays off a book by humorist David Sedaris, he of the gabby sister. I'd link to them, but some of the technique is going to have to follow along later.

I'm more into content and making my opinion known for now. I wish to be humane about it and clever when possible. Wise would be good. And informed, open to new ideas but skeptical that everything that has gone before is bad, ready for the discard pile.

I'm a contrarian. For instance I believe media were put on this earth because The People need to communicate.

So the true focus of journalism should be on the consumer of news. I observe in these difficult times for media companies, however, an introverted attitude overly emphasizes the producers.

I'm for The People. Corporate journalism will sort itself out if it takes the same view.

I agree with an advice-post on ProBlogger that less is more in word length. I'll try. God knows. Don't want to bloviate. But o-o-o-o-o-h, I've got so much on my mind!

I'll give you passion. And consistency. And a willingness to back down when wrong.

Email me at onejournalist@gmail.com even if you agree with some things I say.

And by all means add your comments to my posts, add this site to your bloglist and add it onto your blog reader.

There. I feel better now for adding all this up. I'm even dreaming like a blogger with clothes on.