By Edward Wasserman
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

Penelope Trunk delivered career advice on Yahoo Finance until two weeks ago, when Yahoo dropped her Brazen Careerist column. Trunk says Yahoo decided the column didn’t draw enough traffic to warrant the premium rates advertisers pay to be in its financial news package. So out she went.

Now, I have sympathy for a career columnist with career problems, but my concern here isn’t with whether she was handled fairly but with what her experience suggests about the direction that online journalism is heading.

That direction seems to be toward handing over tighter and much more precise influence over editorial content to the outside people who write the checks. If she’s right about the reasons for her dismissal, Trunk has become an early casualty of the new order of online news—calibrated journalism.

Under the new rules, the commercial value of specific editorial offerings is estimated with precision, rewards and punishments doled out accordingly, and coverage cut to fit.

Of course, we’re used to seeing well-loved offerings on commercial media dumped if they don’t pull enough people—or enough of the right people—to keep advertisers satisfied. That’s how network TV works.

Still, although network executives re-jigger their Tuesday prime time lineup to please advertisers, editors aren’t supposed to redraw their Tuesday front page for the same reason. The journalism business has been different. Although news and commentary offer a setting both for public discourse and sales pitches, traditional ad-supported journalism has worked despite that disharmony, as long as editorial content is passably free of corruption.

But now? Suppose certain coverage pays—that is, pays in a direct way: It racks up the page-views, attracting audiences through search engines and enabling publishers to charge advertisers more.

Jack D. Lail, multimedia chief for The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel, writes: “Print media writers look askance at how ratings affect TV news, but in the digital economy, they face the prospect of eventually being tied to their advertising generating power, the almighty CPM, or advertising cost per thousand impressions.”

So if a reporter or commentator produces work that is read, linked to and passed along by lots of people—to the benefit of advertisers—why shouldn’t he or she benefit?

Already, Gawker Media, with a network of 15 online publications, has created a bonus plan for its bloggers based on page-views.

News organizations benefit too, the logic goes. “This data should be shared, widely, throughout the newsroom,” Yoni Greenbaum writes on his Editor on the Verge Web site. “I think it’s important for desk editors and reporters to understand the habits of their online readers. Desk editors should know what stories play best online; this is not to say that you don’t report some stories, but editors should understand what plays best and where.”

Isn’t that all for the better? Why not direct journalists toward coverage people find interesting? That’s a point Michael Hirschorn, a magazine industry veteran (and ex-colleague) who’s head of original programming at VH1, examines in an Atlantic magazine column. Taking a week’s worth of three top newspapers, Hirschorn compares their most e-mailed articles with the ones that ran on their front pages—the stories readers liked most versus the stories editors liked most.

The two realms overlapped less than one-quarter of the time, he found. He admonishes editors, “Stop being important and start being interesting.”

Who could disagree? But chasing what’s interesting has always been a lot easier, and a lot more bankable, than pursuing what’s important. Big-city tabloids have done it for generations. So has local TV news: fast-paced, personality-driven, human-scale—and hollow to the core, a civic blight.

The problem with online Popularity Pay is it that it mistakes journalism for a consumer product, and conflates value with sales volume. Journalists don’t peddle goods, they offer a professional service, a relationship. The news audience renews that relationship to get information and insight on matters it trusts journalists to alert it to, even though the news may be disquieting or hard to grasp.

What’s more, the public routinely benefits mightily from stories that few people bother reading. Such is the power of exposure.

News can indeed be recast successfully as a menu of competing distractions. The question is whether we can afford the price of such success.

___

ABOUT THE WRITER
Edward Wasserman is Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University.

—Edward Wasserman

Lumps of Coal in John Howard’s Christmas Stocking

“The refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol will almost certainly, in time, be remembered as the greatest failure of the Howard government—Tampa, detention camps and Iraq notwithstanding.” This quote was pulled from Tim Flannery’s 2005 essay, Beautiful Lies, and printed on the book’s back cover. The essay concluded: “It was a visiting American, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known to literature as Mark Twain, who said that Australian history reads like the most beautiful lies. I think that Clemens felt that way because the histories he was given to read were indeed filled with romantic falsehood. From now on—for the next little while at least—the history we create must be more mundane. It should tell the story of a small country that did the best it possibly could for the people and the environment of the world.”

Tim Flannery has spent 2007 as “The Australian of the Year”. It’s a symbolic role bestowed on a figure nominated by ordinary Australians. Late last year the former Prime Minister, a climate change skeptic, announced a $10 billion plan to save the Murray Darling River region, which produces around 40% of Australia’s food. “With splendid serendipity the popular environmentalist Tim Flannery was named Australian of the Year,” journalist Mungo Maccallum writes in Poll Dancing, his book on the 2007 Australian election. “A week earlier this would have been an embarrassment to Howard: Flannery had been a constant critic of the government for its lack of action on global warming, and indeed warned that he would continue to be so. But in the circumstances, the front-page snaps of Howard and Flannery shaking hands seemed to presage a new dawn of environmental concern. You wanted the big picture? They don’t come much bigger than this. The $10 billion figure itself was more than somewhat suspect; it turned out that neither the Treasury nor the Department of Finance had been involved in its preparation. Indeed, neither had done any significant work on the problems associated with global warming and the consequent water shortages. It quickly became obvious that the figure had simply been plucked out of the air; after all, it was a nice big round number, eminently suitable for a tabloid headline.”

John Howard is being assessed as a man who understood the immediate usefulness of tabloid headlines and failed to grasp the long-term symbolic power of government. “If you have any doubt that the election of a Rudd Labor government has changed the country, consider this: a year ago, did you imagine that the Prime Minister would be sending an openly gay woman of Chinese ancestry to Bali, to ratify the Kyoto protocol on Australia’s behalf?” Mungo Maccallum wrote in the online journal Crikey on December 3. “Because that’s exactly what Climate Change Minister Penny Wong will be doing ... Kyoto, of course, has been one of the great symbolic differences between Labor and the [Liberal - National Party] coalition; another is WorkChoices, and Julia Gillard is already busy putting that to sleep so she can concentrate on what she rightly sees as her main job, implementing Rudd’s education revolution. And the third major symbol will be the long overdue apology to the stolen generation, now being prepared, as it should be, not just by the government, but in consultation with Aboriginal leaders.”

Some of John Howard’s harshest critics have been former Prime Ministers and State Premiers, some from within his own Liberal party, who were steadily critical of his leadership in the opinion pages of the nation’s newspapers throughout his rule. Two days before the November 24 election that John Howard resoundingly lost, becoming only the second Prime Minister in Australia’s history to lose his own seat, Paul Keating, the Labor Prime Minister he’d defeated in 1996, wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald:

He has turned out to be the most divisive prime minister in our history. Not simply a conservative maintaining the status quo, but a militant reactionary bent upon turning the clock back. Turning it back against social inclusion, cooperation at the workplace, the alignment of our foreign policies towards Asia, providing a truthful and honourable basis for our reconciliation, accepting the notion that all prime ministers since Menzies had: Holt, Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and me: that our ethnic diversity had made us better and stronger and the nation’s leitmotif was tolerance. Howard has trodden those values into the ground.... Nations get a chance to change course every now and then. When things become errant, a wise country adjusts its direction. It understands that it is being granted an appointment with history. On this coming Saturday, this country should take that opportunity by driving a stake through the dark heart of Howard’s reactionary government.

Two days after the election, writing again in The Sydney Morning Herald, Paul Keating expressed relief that John Howard had been defeated:

Saturday night’s victory was not just a victory for the Labor Party, it was also a victory for those Liberals such as Malcolm Fraser, Petro Georgiou and Judi Moylan, who stood against the pernicious erosion of decent standards in our public affairs. The Liberal Party of John Howard, Philip Ruddock, Alexander Downer and Peter Costello is now a party of privilege and punishments. One that lacks that most basic of wellsprings: charity. The French philosophers had it pretty right with the Enlightenment catchcry of liberty, equality and fraternity. There was not much liberty for the boat people or fraternity for the Aborigines or the Muslims or equality for the trade unionists who believed in nothing more revolutionary than the simple right to collectively bargain.

Tim Flannery wrote that the greatest lie that Australian history perpetuates is that it was an empty country when the first European settlers arrived. Former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser (1975- 1983) accepted refugees from the Vietnam War and was harshly critical of John Howard’s coldness towards refugees. Fraser has also been a great advocate for the rights of indigenous Australians believing that a formal apology from the Federal Government “ would help to rebuild trust and establish partnership. It is not the words that matter, so much as the acceptance of responsibility to put right the damage done.”

Malcolm Fraser controversially came to power after being instrumental in having former Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (1972 - 1975) removed from office by Australia’s Governor General. (Australia is not a republic and ultimate power still rests with the Queen of England through the Governor General.) Yet a couple of weeks before the last federal election Fraser and Whitlam collaborated on a letter protesting the erosion of privacy and the weakening of Australia’s freedom of information laws under Prime Minister Howard.

In the last two decades the constitutional principle that ministers should be held accountable for the failings of their policies or administration has been seriously undermined. No matter how grave their failings may be, ministers no longer resign. This principle is the bedrock of responsible government. In its absence, the capacity of the parliament and the people to hold a government to account for its actions is substantially weakened.

It is 31 years since the last official inquiry regarding the principles of ministerial accountability at a federal level. That inquiry framed the doctrine for simpler times. It could not anticipate the major changes in governance that have occurred since then. These include an enormous growth in the powers of the executive, the now pivotal role of ministerial advisers, the outsourcing of many crucial governmental functions and the expanding influence of the lobbying industry. The Freedom of Information Act, an important safeguard introduced in 1982, has also been undermined significantly by the practices of recent governments and restrictive interpretation by the courts.

Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam. November 12, 2007.

The Australian Financial Review reports in its Christmas Bumper Edition that John Howard, at additional expense to Australian taxpayers, became the only Prime Minister in history to choose to live in the Government owned Kirribilli House in Sydney, the capital of New South Wales, rather than at the Lodge in Australia’s political capital, Canberra. He also ran up a $10 million flight bill on Australia’s Air Force one, choosing to fly on the more luxurious plane between Sydney and Canberra, rather than a cheaper aircraft that had been intended for the Prime Minister’s domestic travel. During most of the time that he was Prime Minister the Premier of New South Wales was Bob Carr, of the Labor Party. In this weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald Carr becomes the latest former leader to criticise John Howard’s legacy. 

To the Brits it may have had a touch of Little Britain. On March 28, Sir Nicholas Stern and his secretary were in a corridor of Parliament House. Suddenly Alexander Downer descended to enunciate: “So you’re the economist who is telling us we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.” Stern had just spent a week with the Indonesian President and his cabinet. He had been treated seriously and with respect. He shouldn’t have been surprised by the dismissive approach in Canberra. It was an approach that I witnessed first hand. ... In September last year when Al Gore visited Australia, Howard showed the kind of rudeness that was to inspire his foreign minister’s curt treatment of Stern. The two-term vice-president was “alarmist”: no meeting. Today I witness Australia’s decisive moves to international co-operation over climate change with pride, but with sadness at the lost years.

Bob Carr. Sydney Morning Herald. December 22, 2007

The Australian states have made gains in combating global warming that the Federal Government didn’t capitalize on. Carr writes that in New South Wales he introduced one of the world’s first carbon trading schemes, halted deforestation in some areas by preventing the removal of native trees, and required new buildings to be energy efficient and meet greenhouse standards. “When Howard and his ministers dismissed global warming they saw it as a battle in the culture wars, not a crisis in humankind’s relation to nature that towers above any left-right divide.Now we scramble to catch up.”

The Week in Review Section of The New York Times this weekend has a report on previous American Presidents commenting on their successors, starting with an attack Herbert Hoover made on Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940.

“I do not suggest that Mr. Roosevelt aspires to be a dictator,” Mr. Hoover said in Columbus. “It is however understatement to say that he has builded personal power to a dangerous point in this republic.” He went on to compare the “sinister” and “insidious” accumulation of power in the administration to “the rise of every dictator in Europe.”

... By a mile, American presidents are not men of small egos. A wallflower could not survive the nomination process and the general election, especially its current 22-month incarnation. But as partisanship intensified in the 20th century, and politics became increasingly defined by the personalities of party leaders, presidents and ex-presidents have found it hard to remain offstage, silently watching their successors, or would-be successors, grapple with the job — especially during campaigns.

The stakes may have proved too enormous for presidents to remain silent. If they could no longer be the nominees, then they would be pundits of the first order — men with credibility on Oval Office matters by dint of once sitting in the chair themselves.

Patrick Healy. “As I Was Saying Before I Left Office.” The New York Times. December 23, 2007

Bill Leak Draws Kevin Rudd’s Head With a Compass

“March 2, 1996 marked the start of 10 long years of struggle for the nation’s cartoonists,” wrote Bill Leak on the tenth anniversary of John Howard’s reign as Prime Minister last year. “John Howard’s ordinariness is one of his most effective electoral attributes, but it is almost impossible to capture. It’s a bit like having to draw something that’s not there. As someone once said of British politician Gordon Brown, ‘when he leaves a room the lights go on.’ Howard seemed to us like that — or, as Paul Keating put it, ‘like a lizard on a rock — alive but looking dead.’ “

What we need is a feature to exaggerate to the point of absurdity, something — anything — to get a grip on … but, please, not ordinariness.

Journalists as well as cartoonists found it difficult to get a handle on Howard when he first rose to prominence in Malcolm Fraser’s ministry in 1977. Fraser himself, with his half-closed eyes lurking somewhere behind the hanging gardens of his eyebrows and his jaw, the length of which was restricted only by the amount of drawing space available, was a gift from God. But his Treasurer [John Howard] was a different matter.

Howard was mired in the 1950s, a man who came over all misty eyed when recalling those glory days when Australia was still hanging on firmly to Mother England’s apron strings, nice people lived in suburban houses on a quarter acre, a wild night was when someone broke free from singing songs around the piano and danced the hokey-pokey, and modern art was a foreign pestilence successfully quarantined from our shores. Cartoonists and journalists alike portrayed him as a man living in the past, defined by a series of tired clichés.

Bill Leak. New Matilda. March 1, 2006

“It’s a cruel business drawing caricatures. You have to be a bit of a sadist to get into it in the first place. There’s no denying the joy you get from ridiculing people’s physical features and knowing the hapless victims will have to see what you’ve done to them in the next day’s paper,” Bill Leak wrote in The Australian on May 21 this year. “What’s the first thing you look for when you start drawing a caricature of someone? The answer is shape. For instance, does this person have a big, square block of a head like Mark Latham’s, a soccer ball-shaped head like Kevin Rudd’s, or a Steeden football-shaped head like Petro Georgiou’s? Nick Greiner was one of those rare people whose head was like a horizontal football, the view you’d get if it was laying on a shelf. The things you look for next are the things that stick out: funny noses especially bulbous ones like Peter Costello’s; weird ears (thanks again Costello); whopping great chins like Peter Garrett’s; silly little chins like Mark Vaile’s which looks more like a lump in his neck; jowls like a frigate bird’s throat like Peter Reith’s, or bottom lips that poke out so far you wonder how their owners don’t drown when it rains.”

In The Australian yesterday Bill Leak wrote that he failed to grasp how important Kevin Rudd was going to be when he was named leader of the Labor Party in December last year because his appearance was so unassuming. The former diplomat’s mild manner reminded him of the earnest Belgian boy reporter Tintin, who overcame his opponents with brains, not brawn, and he began drawing him as Tintin, accompanied by a fox terrier who was a dead ringer for Snowy. “Rudd looks like the little bloke who is taking on the big adventure and who just might prevail in the end,” Leak explained [in a story reprinted by The Forbidden Planet] “All I did was add a bit of a chin to him. And sometimes a little bit of a firmness to the mouth.”

Moulinsart SA, which publishes the Tintin books owned by the Herge estate initially protested but reached a settlement with Leak that allows him to depict Rudd editorially as Tintin, but not sell copies of the cartoons. But, Leak wrote yesterday, when it seemed certain that Rudd would become Prime Minister he realized that the Tintin analogy had a “use-by date” and he’d have to start depicting him as his own man. The shape of Rudd’s head doesn’t give him much inspiration and he noted that he’s the only figure he’s drawn whose head is best drawn with a compass. Brendan Nelson, the new leader of the Liberal Party that John Howard left in tatters, inspires him however. His ascendancy to the leadership of the Liberal Party is a gift to cartoonists, Leak wrote, noting that Nelson has a head that’s a figure eight, and all that’s needed to bring him to life is a tuft of hair, like that of a toilet brush. Leak suggested that the Liberal Party might also be in need of tenaciousness and intelligence and drew Nelson as Tintin.

—Jillian Burt

Time Flies ... Backwards ... Seriously

When The New York Times ceased its subscription service Times Select earlier this year Maira Kalman’s illustrated column, “The Principles of Uncertainty”, was one of the treasures that became freely available to all readers. What was less noticeable in the moment was that The New York Times archive had also been shorn free of its payment system and stories going back decades had been given permalinks. The New York Times became a time machine, showing us how events and people were perceived in their own time.

A review of Disney’s 2003 television adaptation of Kay Thompson’s smart, sly children’s book Eloise shows how we can be misled if we don’t grasp how something relates to its own time.

In 1955, the year ‘’Eloise’’ came out, Lee Ann Meriwether was crowned Miss America, and the top-rated television show was ‘’The $64,000 Question’’ on CBS. Eisenhower was president, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was tarnished but still in office. That year, the Brooklyn Dodgers finally beat the New York Yankees in the World Series, the Soviet Union coaxed seven East European nations into the Warsaw Pact and Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus.

‘’Eloise’’ was part of a different 1955. Hers was the year that Nabokov published ‘’Lolita,’’ that ‘’Marty’’ won the Oscar for Best Picture and Cole Porter’s musical ‘’Silk Stockings’’ opened at the Imperial Theater in New York.

Thompson’s book was on best-seller lists along with Graham Greene’s ‘’Quiet American’’ but its irreverence and frivolity echoed the songs of Tom Lehrer, whose first album came out in 1953; the funny-macabre illustrations of Edward Gorey; and even the cruel wit of Kingsley Amis’s ‘’Lucky Jim.’’

In 1989, as he was finishing the Civil War documentary that would establish a new style of building documentary films around vintage still images, Ken Burns reviewed a retrospective of the documentaries of the journalist Bill Moyers. “At one point in ‘’Cowboys,’’ a documentary produced in 1976 (as part of ‘’Bill Moyers’s Journal’’) about the difficult but rewarding life of cowboys in northwestern Colorado, one of the subjects says, ‘’All we can know is our own time,” “wrote Burns. “For Bill Moyers, one of the most celebrated and at times controversial producers of documentary films, it is a key phrase: ‘’That is what compels me as a journalist, to know as much as I can of my own time.’’ “

In 1988 Moyers had a stupendous hit with his public television series The Power of Myth, built around conversations with Joseph Campbell, who’d devoted his life to finding connections between mythologies across cultures and through time. George Lucas was an admirer of Campbell’s and drew from his books for the spiritual dimension of the Star Wars movies. Five of the conversations were recorded at his Skywalker studios and another at the Museum of Natural History in New York not long before Campbell died in 1987. It was “the sleeper of sleepers” that “no-one wanted to show” wrote Burns, but audiences were galvanized. “Viewers saw a strange and wonderful sight: There, in prime time, was a mesmerizing look at the question of the soul’s survival.”

Reviewer John Corry wrote in May 1988: “Talk about old fashioned! ‘’Moyers: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth’’ is Stone Age television: six hours in which Bill Moyers and Mr. Campbell talk to each other and hardly ever get out of their chairs. Is this boring? Sometimes it is; most of the time it is not.” He concluded: “Mr. Moyers is doing something special.” John J. O’Connor wrote in The New York Times in May of 1988: “When pressed to define American television at its best, I find myself frequently mentioning the name of Bill Moyers. The point is, at bottom, a matter of the medium taking itself seriously rather than merely going for the obvious. Mr. Moyers takes himself and the rest of us very seriously.”

In a 1995 New York Times interview with Jon Pareles Leonard Cohen explained the attraction of seriousness: “How do we produce work that touches the heart? We don’t want to live a frivolous life, we don’t want to live a superficial life. We want to be serious with each other, with our friends, with our work. That doesn’t necessarily mean gloomy or grim, but seriousness has a kind of voluptuous aspect to it. It is something that we are deeply hungry for, to take ourselves seriously and to be able to enjoy the nourishment of seriousness, that gravity, that weight.”

Joseph Campbell’s premise is that mythology is the weight that anchors us in our search for a meaningful existence. Ancient stories can guide us through the stages in own lives and the works of artists and spiritual figures who give these timeless messages a new context in our time in their own works link us to our societies. Mythology gives us a deep sense of the continuity of life and without that realization we’re buffetted around on the surface of the concerns of the day that we read in newspapers.

Bill Moyers: What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?

Joseph Campbell: What we’ve got on our hands. If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read The New York Times.

Bill Moyers: And you’d find?

Joseph Campbell: The news of the day, including destructive acts by young people who don’t know how to behave in a civilized society.

The Power of Myth.

As our media has moved online we’ve been distracted by fast moving images and dumbed-down analyses and the past has been erased or placed out of our reach as searches turn up broken links and we’re led to ghost sites trapped within superseded technological formats. The powerful stories and technological developments in the media in 2007 were serious and gave us ways to connect to the past and see the big picture, often symbolically. 

The Sydney Morning Herald

Back in May Australia’s drought had become so severe that the major cities were beginning to calculate how many months of drinking water was left and it was announced there would be little to no water available to farmers along the Murray-Darling Rivers for irrigation from July. Former Prime Minister John Howard was yet to opportunistically evolve from a climate change skeptic to a climate change “realist”.

Australians were bereft of government leadership on climate change issues but The Sydney Morning Herald did something remarkable. It used the occasion of the publication of a new cookbook by Margaret Fulton to address the concerns of Australians about the future of their food and water supplies by allowing public figures who are actively protective of the quality of Australia’s food and the environment to speak directly to the readers.

Margaret Fulton is now in her eighties and has taught generations of Australians a respect for fresh food and its preparation and the rituals of dining. She’d emerged from an era when housewives baked pretty cakes and opened cans of food they’d been persuaded to buy from television commercials. She’d been the food editor for a womens magazine and a presenter on television, shilling for kitchen wares. The Sydney Morning Herald asked who she’d like to have lunch with and she suggested Dr. Tim Flannery, an environmental scientist, zoologist, explorer. His book The Future Eaters is an ecological history of Australia, first published in 1990’s, and was an early alarm call about the onset of catastrophic environmental changes. They ate lunch at Justin North’s Sydney restaurant Becasse.

The story had a brilliant conceptual clarity and simplicity. It was mostly a transcript of an undirected conversation and is as engaging as Bill Moyers’s conversations with Joseph Campbell. It also worked equally well as a traditional newspaper story and in an unforced multi-media package with audio and photographs on the Sydney Morning Herald’s website.

Justin North talked about our shared environmental responsibilities:

“When I opened the first Becasse in Surry Hills it was all about trying to get good produce at a reasonable price. Where it came from didn’t really matter. But you wake up over time and I realised that I have a responsibility to do my part. I still want to be cooking in 10 years’ time and with really good produce. But if I go about things in a haphazard way and don’t care for the environment with my purchases, there will be produce that I won’t be able to get. As you mature as a chef these things become more important to your own philosophy and in a commercial sense as well. People are putting more demands on us: they do want organic and sustainable produce.”

In August in The Sydney Morning Herald Wendy Frew drew attention to a report that calculated the effect Australian consumers are having on their environment.

New data shows the electricity and water used to produce everything people buy - from food and clothing to CDs and electrical appliances - far outweighs any efforts to save water and power in the home, according to an extensive analysis by the Australian Conservation Foundation and the University of Sydney.

Wealthy families in suburbs such as Woollahra, North Sydney, Mosman and Ku-ring-gai, who can afford to install solar power and large water tanks, still have the biggest ecological footprint because of the goods and services they buy.

At lunch Tim Flannery mentioned Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which he was reviewing for The New York Review of Books. Pollan has a new book, In Defense of Food, about to be released. And in last Sunday’s New York Times wrote an essay on sustainability.

We’re asking a lot of our bees. We’re asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up — when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines — the system can be ingenious in finding “solutions,” whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year’s solutions have a way of becoming next year’s problems. That is to say, they aren’t “sustainable.”

From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.

Michael Pollan. ”Our Decrepit Food Factories.” December 16, 2007. The New York Times

MediaStorm

The moving image is the alpha-predator of the online world and it’s obscured the power of the still image. Advertisements shimmy and shake around the edges of our e-mail and zip across articles on newspaper websites. Blogs are increasingly studded with YouTube video segments. But MediaStorm has done a great deal to restore the symbolic power of photojournalism to distill and crystallise complex stories that range over a long time period, in the language of multi-media. It creates multi-media packages with big media organizations (the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times among them) but also curious, abstract pieces that stand alone on its own website as something like independent movies.

Twenty one years ago the world’s worst nuclear accident occurred at Chernobyl, in the Ukraine. Paul Fusco’s images of the children who have been disfigured and destroyed by their poisoned environment are a new kind of elegy, a mourning for the living dead, for children who will never be wholly alive. On the MediaStorm website are images from the book Chernobyl Legacy with a spoken commentary and backed by a solo cello musical track.

Wherever there is radiation, people live with it. They eat it in their food. They drink it in their water.

The kids at Novinki who are troubled, diagnosed, they are categorized… A, B, C, D.

Well D, hopeless, they are never going be real human beings. They will never obtain much. They all go to Novinki.

And, once they get there, if they survive and live they will be sent to the main asylum.

It was like a different race was being farmed because they look human but they were all troubled in very obvious ways.

In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, which begins as a series of nuclear explosions destroys the environment, a father goes on a journey with his son, who was born a few days after the explosions. The child intuits compassion, joy, loyalty, and a system of ethics from his father’s acts of self-sacrifice. The father continually asks himself whether it was wrong and selfish to have brought a child into such a world. In spite of everything there is hope threaded through the book. The child sees another little boy somewhere on their travels.

I’m scared that he was lost.

I think he’s all right.

But who will find him if he’s lost? Who will find the little boy?

Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.

Cormac McCarthy. The Road.

We may not be able to restore the ruined world to a paradise, McCarthy suggests, but we can repair our own souls. In spite of everything we are still able to love. Paul Fusco’s photograph of a father tenderly cradling a baby with a tumor that’s bigger than its whole head tells the story of McCarthy’s book in one image. In the big stories of our times what’s small and quiet becomes powerful and enduring: A photograph showing a father’s love for his disfigured child. ... Ceremonial silence while the names of dead soldiers scroll across a television screen at the end of a news bulletin. ... 

—Jillian Burt

The Hip Gift of the Year

I live on the dividing line between two worlds in Sydney: Kings Cross with its tawdry burlesque joints and sex shops (with window displays of risque Santa Suits), fast food joints, weird buskers, hookers and drug addicts on the streets and the affluent Potts Point with its luxury apartments, gourmet deli’s and gift shops with ironic, infantile toys for adults, fashionably impractical homewares, and books as decorating details. I’m mulling over the idea of what to give the people I’ll be spending Christmas with, and I’m leaning towards liquid gifts: coffee beans, tea leaves, vodka. Everyday luxuries, not something smartly useless wrapped up in shiny paper. But just to keep my options open I wandered into a few stores when I went out for coffee this morning. Princess Pink and Baby Blue are the colours of the season and the couple of shops I went into seemed to be stacking up gifts for a baby shower: fluffy pink bedroom slippers ($50), Prada soaps in a dusty pink box ($70), and the hip blue object of the moment is Greg and Lucy Malouf’s new cookbook, Turquoise. Its bright turqoise cover so prettily accents the other baby blue gift-giving opportunities arrayed around it.

Greg Malouf is an Australian chef of Lebanese heritage who has celebrated and adapted Middle Eastern food for Australians. His cookbooks and spice mixes are indispensible tools for chefs and home cooks. Lucy Malouf, his ex-wife, is a writer and editor. Eating at Greg’s restaurant Mo Mo, in Melbourne, gave me the understanding of how food in restaurants relates to home cooking. How the grace and courtesy that I’d experienced as a guest at the homes of Lebanese and Iranian friends in Los Angeles and the ceremonial charm of the traditional food is preserved but turned into artistry. The cuisine has been adapted for a new world with the skill and inspiration of an accomplished chef without diminishing or commercializing the generosity of spirit that’s at the base of these refined ancient cultures. I was with my musician friend, Kelly Salloum, who was visiting from Los Angeles. Her family is originally from Lebanon and she grew up in Canada and Kelly steeped herself in the traditions her family brought from the Middle East. She has the soul and well-crafted musicianship of a Bill Evans era jazz musician, but for the last decade has explored and documented the traditional music of cultures from around the world. She learned Sanskrit for her ethnomusicology degree and sings in Arabic, her jazz album is dedicated to the great Egyptian singer Oum Khalsoum. But Kelly is also a gracious and generous hostess well-known for the parties she hosts with tables laden with the food she learned to make growing up, from the same kind of family recipes handed down to Greg Malouf.

Kelly wanted to eat at Mo Mo because Saha, Greg and Lucy Malouf’s previous book based on their travels through Syria and Lebanon, matched the itinerary for her own travels. When I was flipping through her copy of the book it was the writing that caught me. The dazzling photography and design of Greg and Lucy Malouf’s books might make them a merchandiser’s dream, but the text in Saha is equally engaging. The stories the Malouf’s tell are a lament for a threatened civilisation. They visited Beirut as the period of peace that followed its civil war was coming to an end, and they quote articles by Robert Fisk, the Middle Eastern correspondent for the English newspaper The Independent, who genuinely loves and admires the people he’s lived among for the last quarter century. Fisk catches the threads of a world unravelling and the complexities and contradictions of wars fought over ancient beliefs and rivalries from the point of view of the individuals who are caught up in it. A couple of weeks ago he wrote about people moving out of their homes in Beirut.

So where do we go from here? I am talking into blackness because there is no electricity in Beirut. And everyone, of course, is frightened. A president was supposed to be elected today. He was not elected. The corniche outside my home is empty. No one wants to walk beside the sea.

When I went to get my usual breakfast cheese manouche there were no other guests in the café. We are all afraid. My driver, Abed, who has loyally travelled with me across all the war zones of Lebanon, is frightened to drive by night. I was supposed to go to Rome yesterday. I spared him the journey to the airport.

It’s difficult to describe what it’s like to be in a country that sits on plate glass. It is impossible to be certain if the glass will break. When a constitution breaks – as it is beginning to break in Lebanon – you never know when the glass will give way.

People are moving out of their homes, just as they have moved out of their homes in Baghdad. I may not be frightened, because I’m a foreigner. But the Lebanese are frightened. I was not in Lebanon in 1975 when the civil war began, but I was in Lebanon in 1976 when it was under way. I see many young Lebanese who want to invest their lives in this country, who are frightened, and they are right to frightened. What can we do?

Robert Fisk. The Independent. November 24, 2007

Taking Lessons from Justin North

So what can and should chefs not just in Australia but around the world do to help ease the food crisis, and to protect our land and produce? We must consider sustainability.

My restaurant’s menu takes into consideration particular farming practices and how they affect the environment. We understand more about our produce: where it is from, how it is farmed, raised or caught. Rather than buying from aquaculture farms that dredge their scallops from the ocean floor, for instance, I buy from ones where divers collect the scallops by hand.

Thinking this way is vital if chefs want to avoid a future where all of the best and most interesting produce are protected species. This means changing our practices and demanding that our suppliers change as well.

Justin North. Op-Ed piece. The New York Times. July 29, 2007.

Justin North concluded his New York Times story by saying that Australia’s then Prime Minister John Howard had told farmers facing irrigation shortages to pray for rain. “The Murray cod deserves better than that, and so do all Australian food lovers,” he wrote. Political change is swift in Australia. There was an election one Saturday a few weeks ago and by Monday a new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was at work and his first act was to ratify the Kyoto protocol. In his second week as Prime Minister he was one of leaders from 190 nations attending the United Nations conference in Bali to assess what must be done now to arrest the ravages of climate change. On December 3 The New York Times carried an Editorial on the importance having the huge developing economies of India and China as part of the negotiations.

Whatever happens, China and India have to be part of the equation. Along with other developing countries, both were exempted from making any commitments to reduce emissions at Kyoto on grounds that the industrialized countries bore the heaviest historical responsibility. Given the extraordinary growth in both countries, that argument is no longer sustainable. But it will be much easier to get China, India and others to adopt aggressive policies if the United States is also on board.

The story at the top of the “Most E-Mailed” list today on The New York Times concerns fish being farmed in toxic waters in China.

“For 50 years,” said Wang Wu, a professor at Shanghai Fisheries University, “we’ve blindly emphasized economic growth. The only pursuit has been G.D.P., and now we can see that the water turns dirty and the seafood gets dangerous. Every year, there are food safety and environmental pollution accidents.”

Environmental problems plaguing seafood would appear to be a bad omen for the industry. But with fish stocks in the oceans steadily declining and global demand for seafood soaring, farmed seafood, or aquaculture, is the future. And no country does more of it than China, which produced about 115 billion pounds of seafood last year.

China produces about 70 percent of the farmed fish in the world, harvested at thousands of giant factory-style farms that extend along the entire eastern seaboard of the country. Farmers mass-produce seafood just offshore, but mostly on land, and in lakes, ponds, rivers and reservoirs, or in huge rectangular fish ponds dug into the earth.

David Barboza. The New York Times. December 15, 2007.

Justin North’s first cookbook centred on the farmers and purveyors who provide the produce he uses at his Sydney restaurant Becasse. But alongside the deep beauty of his food and his enthusiasm for the quality of the produce he uses ran a quiet and warmly intelligent call to action on the problems facing farmers in Australia today: the cleanliness and sustainability of our oceans, the role of scientific innovation in food production, the lack of water, wild and unrealiable changes in weather patterns affecting crops and creeping salinity in the land. His new cookbook, French Lessons, (edited by Lucy Malouf) is a guide to the techniques of French cooking, adapted, he writes, for the modern taste for “lighter, more delicate and intensely flavoured foods”. It has no shortcuts. “It’s important to realise that good food takes a level of care.”

Prime Minister Rudd and his agriculture Minister, Tony Burke, have both been visiting rural areas and talking about the hardships climate change is causing for farmers. On ABC radio the Prime Minister quoted an Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics paper which has projected the effects of climate change on agriculture. “By 2030, we face the possibility of a 10 per cent decline in agricultural production. By 2050, the possibility of a 20 per cent decline in agricultural production against a no-change basis. Then, up to a 63 per cent decline in Australian rural exports by 2030, and up to a 79 per cent decline by 2050.”

In the same radio report Chris Ulhmann asked the agriculture minister to comment on the paper.

CHRIS UHLMANN: The report points out that Australia’s agricultural sector has adjusted an adapted continuously to changes in the natural resource base, including climate variability. In future, it says, Australia will need crops that are water efficient, and that have high tolerance to pests, diseases and salinity. And that presents another problem for Tony Burke because those crops are likely to be genetically modified. He says he will be consulting farmers about it.

TONY BURKE: There’s no doubt there’s some science out there which says some of the climate change issues we’re dealing with, GM, will provide part of the puzzle in dealing with that. It’s still the case, particularly in Western Australia and Tasmania, there’s some particular concerns from farmers there that they want to preserve a competitive market advantage that they see by not endorsing GM. And that’s why the consultation that we’re going through is real.

Australia’s second largest supermarket chain, Coles, has just been acquired by Wesfarmers, a century old company that began as a Western Australian farmers co-operative that’s now a conglomerate that includes home building supplies and electronics stores, fertiliser manufacturers, coal mining operations and an insurance business that includes rural financing. It has brought in an advisor from Britain who applied WalMart methods to lifting the fortunes of an English supermarket chain. ABC news reported that a representative from Wesfarmers talked to the Western Australian Farmers Federation about bringing more meat produced in Western Australia into supermarkets there. Wesfarmers would like to increase local meat supplies, which make up 40% of the current supplies, but claim that they’re unable to acquire the volume of meat they need locally. “It would be very nice to be able to say that 100 per cent of meat in Coles stores in Western Australia came from Western Australia ... but I doubt that that’s ever going to be achievable because of the issues of supply and demand and price and quality,” Keith Kessell told the ABC.

Justin North writes that among the lessons we can learn from the French is their approach to purchasing produce directly from regional farmers, not supermarkets.

Another of my goals in French Lessons is to encourage you, the reader and home cook, to develop a similar approach to food and to cooking to what you find in France. That is, to focus far more on quality and freshness than on convenience when it comes to selecting your produce. In many Fench towns, people shop for food on a daily basis, and fresh produce markets rather than giant supermarkets are still the preferred option, wherever possible. While I understand that not many people have the time or opportunity to shop daily, I do really encourage you to spend more time shopping at markets and greengrocers, to support your local butchers and fishmongers, to spend the extra dollar on organic and free-range rather than mass produced foodstuffs. Not only will your dinner taste better, but you will also be doing your part to keep alive the dream of the small, local and passionate producers who so greatly need your support.

Justin North. Introduction. French Lessons.

—Jillian Burt

The Words of the Year.

The December issue of FEED, the journal of the Union of Concerned Scientists that’s devoted to ethically challenging aspects of food production and agriculture, noted that “locavore”—a person who seeks out locally produced foods, generally from within a hundred mile radius of his or her home—is the New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year. Reuters has reported that The Society of the German Language has chosen “klimakatastrophe” as the word that it feels “has captured the spirit or dominated the headlines and public discussion of the year.”

In the science section of The New York Times Andrew Revkin wrote about scientists groping for potent new words to draw attention to climate change. He took up the story again in a post he titled “Are Words Worthless in The Climate Fight” on his Times blog, Dot.Earth. He writes about people being so overwhelmed by the immensity of the looming disasters that they’re stunned into inaction and denial. He quotes an e-mail he received from Tom Lowe, a researcher with the Centre for Risk and Community Safety in Melbourne, Australia:

“A common reaction to this stand-off is for risk communicators to shout louder, to try and shake some sense into people. This is what I see happening with the climate change message. The public are on the receiving end of an increasingly distraught alarm call. The methods used to grab attention are so striking that people are reaching a state of denial. This is partly because the problem is perceived as being so big that people feel unable to do anything about it, partly because the changes associated with impact reduction are unacceptable and/or unviable to many people and partly because this ‘overselling’ of climate change attracts strong criticism from a vocal and disproportionately publicized few.

“Meanwhile, the public holds the story of climate change in its mind in much the same way as folklore, fairy tales or historical events are retained in the memory. When asked about climate change (research has found), people describe an apocalypse, devastating scenes of flood, disease and drought in a far and distant land. Are they concerned? Hell yes! Is there anything they can do about it? Definitely. Are the going to do something about it? Maybe.

“It is this dislocation that concerns me; as long as the language of chaos continues, it seems the public are faced with a threat which looms so large that it is beyond our focus.”

The Enduring Value of Fine Details

Today Al Gore and the UNIPCC receive their Nobel Peace Prizes at an Awards Ceremony in Oslo. Gore then travels to Bali where world leaders are meeting in this week’s sessions of a United Nations hosted conference aimed at finding solutions to halting the damaging effects of climate change. He’s suggested the levying of taxes on CO2 emissions and the creation of a global emissions trading market. “The problem is CO2 is completely invisible to the economy. The economists call it an externality which means ‘forget about it’ and yet what we’re forgetting about is posing a great unprecedented threat to the future of our civilization. More money is allocated by markets in one hour than by all governments in the world in one year.”

He’s joined the San Francisco venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which made early investments in Google and Amazon.com and Netscape, to become involved with their investments in clean tech and alternative energy. But he believes that the great gains are being made at a much smaller scale. Reuters reported yesterday that Gore “was optimistic that a growing “people-power” movement would push the world’s leaders to take action to stop global warming.The former U.S. vice president likened the campaign to the ban-the-bomb movement of past decades....Gore pointed to an international grassroots nuclear-freeze movement which helped push U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to sign arms controls deals in the late 1980s, and said the climate campaign was even broader.”

The telling of the people’s stories alongside the accounts of the glamorously urgent meetings and deals being struck between world leaders, and the chronicles of catastrophes is crucial. New Yorker correspondent Adam Gopnik wrote Paris to the Moon, an account of the last five years of the twentieth century as viewed from Paris, where he lived with his wife and their two small children. “Princesses died and prime ministers fell and intellectuals argued, gravely about genuinely grave questions, but I have left most of that writing out of this book,” he wrote. “...I looked for the large in the small, the macro in the micro, the figure in the carpet, and if some big truths passed by, I hope some significant small ones got caught. If there is a fault in reporting, after all, it is not that it is too ephemeral but that it is not ephemeral enough, too quickly concerned with what seems big at the time to see what is small and more likely to linger.”

The lingering power of observations of everyday life is noted in a New York Times story on the re-opening of the galleries of 19th century European painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The story starts with Ingres, and with one look at his portraits you understand the appeal of 19th-century art to modern eyes. This isn’t an art about kings and saints, salvation and damnation. It’s about ordinary comforts and secular exultations, and about people whom, even when they are different from us, we could imagine being.

Jacques-Louis Leblanc and his wife Françoise, seen in paired 1823 Ingres portraits, had aristocratic connections without being nobles themselves. They had money, at least some of it new. He is dressed in what could be a business suit. Her attire is more elaborate, but not excessively so. Neither handsome nor homely, they offer us confident but noncommital smiles. Their glamour is strictly haut-bourgeois, developed and earned, not a birthright. In an upscale but unglitzy Manhattan restaurant they would blend right in.

Holland Cotter. The New York Times. December 7, 2007.

Award Winning Environmental Journalist, Sarah Lewis

“I have become increasingly concerned about climate change and sustainability over the years,” says John Bristow, a selfemployed psychologist who lives on the Brighton and Hove border. “Particularly in the last five years, and it’s a kind of hell. It leads to despair. What can I do? There is such a sense of powerlessness.”

With ever-increasing references in the media to climate chaos, catastrophic tipping points and irreversible climate change, who can blame him?

The language of climate change is not just that of unusual weather patterns, it is a glimpse into the future, not 100 years from now but a much more immediate time when, worryingly, we might actually be here to see it. As the language we use becomes ever more doom-laden and panic stricken, so too our hopes begin to fade.

And it was from this feeling of powerlessness that John discovered the Transition Town project. “I thought, ‘my goodness, this is exactly what is needed,’” he says.

Transition Towns are a rapidly growing network of places – towns, cities, villages, even a forest in one instance – which have decided they cannot wait for governments to take action on peak oil – the moment oil production peaks and goes into irreversible decline – or climate change, but nor can people do it alone.

The idea is that through workshops, meetings and education, the whole community can be gathered together to work towards a gradual reduction in fossil fuel dependence, based on a 12-step programme developed by permaculture and sustainability teacher Rob Hopkins.

Sarah Lewis. “What Future Brighton?” Rocks Magazine. August 13, 2007

Sarah Lewis won the EDF Energy London and South Environmental Journalist of the Year award. She writes the Going Green column for the Argus in Brighton and Hove in the UK and publishes her own magazine, Rocks, in both print and online formats. She writes about life itself, with a wry comic sensibility and a great eye for detail. Some of those details happen to be ‘green’. Much environmental writing in newspapers and magazines is self-consciously and self-referentially ‘green’, as if greenness were the main subject rather than life. There may be occasionally cuteness but little fully developed joy and wit in this writing. Sarah Lewis writes, in traditional newspaper columns and a quirky local magazine, fully-developed social portraits where ‘greenness’ is just another aspect of life, in proportion with life itself.

She catches the significantly small truths that Adam Gopnik writes about, that are more likely to linger than the sensational headlines. And she anchors her subjects in their world so that a vivid picture of the community of Brighton and Hove begins to form as you read the stories. The broad spectrum of life is included. In a recent column for the Argus she touches on the thorny issue of popluation growth. “The current global population of 6.6 billion people is predicted to rocket to a staggering 9.7 billion in the next 40 years, putting an unprecedented stress on our natural resources. Yet while we are all busy changing our light bulbs and campaigning to ban plastic bags, there is a conspicuous silence hanging around the topic of sustainable family planning.” Rocks magazine profiles a famous local drag queen, a spiritual ‘university’ that includes courses for men to help them get in touch with their inner eco-ist, and the problem of accumulating rubbish.

—Jillian Burt

Richard Prince. The Art of the Copy.

Since the late 1970s, when Richard Prince became known as a pioneer of appropriation art — photographing other photographs, usually from magazine ads, then enlarging and exhibiting them in galleries — the question has always hovered just outside the frames: What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?

Randy Kennedy. The New York Times. December 6, 2007.

In a New York Times article this week about the Richard Prince retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, Randy Kennedy talked to Jim Krantz, whose image for a Marlboro Man ad had been appropriated by Prince into an artwork and is featured on the Guggenheim’s poster. “When I left, I didn’t know if I should be proud, or if I looked like an idiot,” Krantz said. Prince told Randy Kennedy that he was trying for an effect he couldn’t achieve by creating his own images. “He once compared the effect to the funny way that ‘certain records sound better when someone on the radio station plays them, than when we’re home alone and play the same records ourselves,’ “ wrote Kennedy.

With Prince’s artworks selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the issue of authorship of the images has become thorny. “Mr. Krantz said he considered his ad work distinctive, not simply the kind of anonymous commercial imagery that he feels Mr. Prince considers it to be,” wrote Kennedy. “People hire me to do big American brands to help elevate their images to these kinds of iconic images,” Krantz told him. And Krantz asked, rhetorically, if he italicized Moby Dick, would it become his own artwork?

I’ve quoted and paraphrased almost all of Randy Kennedy’s article. There’s more to it, though. It’s worth clicking the link through to the story itself and to view more images that The New York Times ran with the story. As a media reviewer I quote extensively, rather than paraphrasing, to allow the writer’s own voices to speak, and to retain the context of the pieces. But fair use, homage, copyright, and art statements are thorny issues on the Internet. I use many images from Flickr, always attributed to the photographer, and mostly only if they have a “creative commons” tag, which allows their use if it isn’t for commercial gain. When a photographer sends the mixed message of having an “all rights reserved” tag and a “blog this” button on the image itself, I may e-mail them to ask permission to run the photograph.

The Creative Commons

Michael Almereyda set Hamlet in New York at the turn of the twenty-first century. Hamlet’s father had been CEO of the Denmark Corporation and Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet searched for his identity amid advertising images—Sam Shepard as Hamlet’s father’s ghost materializes out of a soda vending machine, for instance. Almereyda was criticised for the movie being larded with product placements but he paid the companies to display their products.

There’s still a class system in the world and in America, people who have things and people who don’t, and people who have things tend to make sure they keep having them and controlling them, and that’s aligned with corporate power, which is such an overarching power that you can’t even attack it without becoming part of it. It simply absorbs any kind of criticism. I don’t know that that’s the most profound aspect of the film but it seemed like a natural way of talking about contemporary power, and it’s aligned with consumer culture, people telling us that the more we buy, or if we buy the right things or wear the right things, we’ll be happy. I don’t think that’s completely divorced from what Shakespeare was talking about, because he was drawing lines between private experience and public experience, and authentic being and inauthentic being, all still a problem, if you’re awake and alive. So, Hamlet sparks a lot of these questions, and we’re just kind of scribbling in the margins sometimes, but I hope the film does also directly address some of those themes, and ideas that are spoken about in the soliloquies.

Michael Almereyda, interviewed by Pop Matters.

Hamlet anticipated the current prevalence of urban surveillance technologies—blogs and web cams as well as security cameras—and the way that they’ve made our lives open to being observed by the world. “A lot of the play is about people spying on each other and being watched and playing parts and being aware of themselves playing parts,” Almereyda told Pop Matters. “And that corresponds to contemporary reality where cameras are on the present and images within images are on the present, at least in the city. So that seemed like a natural way of mirroring things that were going on in Shakespeare’s text.”

These are the issues that Lawrence Lessig has been thinking about too, which drove him to create the Creative Commons licence. He’s commented on how difficult it is for young filmmakers to work in New York, where advertising images and iconic buildings and displays are considered copyright, and filmmakers must pay to use them in their works. Where should the product end and the city begin? he’s wondered. His system is a code of ethics for bloggers and independent artists to refer to and quote each other’s work. His 2004 book Free Culture is avalailable as a PDF download.

All creative works—books, movies, records, software, and so on—are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is possible—technologically and legally.  For more than two hundred years, laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs.  The original term of copyright set by the First Congress in 1790 was 14 years, renewable once. Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an essential government role.  What did he know that we’ve forgotten?

Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can’t do with culture. As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What’s at stake is our freedom—freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.

Jacket Copy from the Free Culture website.

My Blogs are Mangy Old Fleabag Mutts

Almost as soon as I made my first posts on my blogs hosted for free on Wordpress, their content was “scraped” by what seemed to be an offshore, perhaps Spanish based, company that used my content to wrap Google word-assocation ads around. I feel like my blogs are mangy old mutts that every passing parasite hitches a ride from. The media focuses on individuals re-mixing magazine articles, advertising and movie images and music in their blogs, or the piracy of whole artworks, but there’s a whole black market based on shadowy companies creating crafty ways to steal content from individuals that appears on their blogs. It’s entirely mechanical based around algorithms, keyword searches and re-directing the flow of RSS feeds.

There is a growing and real concern that site and blog feeds are being used to totally replace any original content. Some crafty website owners are using multiple feeds to pull information from other sites into their own, making it look like the site has an interesting and original collection of content, when it is actually stolen without permission from other sites.

In general, the rise in the use of feeds on websites and blogs seems to be permissible, if only headlines or excerpts are used and not the full post or article content. The issue of content theft arises when this is done without your knowledge or permission using the full content.

from the blog Lorelle.wordpress.com

The Spanish company in question is named Bitacle The blog Plagiarism Today explained in September of last year how Bitacle’s service operated.

When you first visit the Bitacle home page, it appears to be nothing more than another personal home page, much along the same lines as Netvibes and Pageflakes.

Much like those sites, it contains a built in search engine for sorting through blogs, Web sites and more. One of the tabs on the search feature points to a search feature called “Aggregates”. A search there pulls results from blog entries, much like the regular blog search, but the results don’t lead to the original site, but to cached copies on the Bitacle server.

It’s those cached copies that have generated the bulk of the controversy. Originally, the cached copies offered the content under a Creative Commons License that permitted commercial use, offered no clear attribution to the author, no permanent link back to the original piece and were surrounded by ads. Though the ads remain and no clear attribution has been offered, the CC license has been removed and a link to the original work has been added. There is even a comment form on each piece to let the reader discuss the entry without visiting the original site.

Plagiarism Today

Plagiarism Today pressured Google on how its adsense program was being abused, and an update on Plagiarism Today a month after the post I’ve quoted attributed the disappearance of ads from the Bitacle site as proof that the pressure was successful. I haven’t kept up with the permutations of content scraping, comment spam, the gaming of links and referrals to artificially boost the popularity of sites, or copyright infringements. I consider my blogs as portfolio’s and I believe that Wordpress itself tries hard to screen out content spam and how difficult it is for them to keep several technological steps ahead of the pirates. I consider perhaps only as little as 2% of the traffic driven to my sites are genuine readers or seekers. The rest are probably scavengers and parasites.

Reference or Robbery? Google’s Searchable Database of Books

This image was used by Geoff Manaugh on the post The Future Warehouse of Unwanted Books on his Bldgblog. He quotes from a Guardian article about the construction of a book warehouse.

“The warehouse is extraordinary,” the Guardian writes, “because, unlike all those monstrous Tesco and Amazon depositories that litter the fringes of the motorways of the Midlands, it is being meticulously constructed to house things that no one wants.” Those “fringes” are outside London.
“When it is complete next year, this warehouse will be state-of-the-art, containing 262 linear kilometres of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen environment. It will house books, journals and magazines that many of us have forgotten about or have never heard of in the first place.”

Bldgblog.

This warehouse is necessary because the copyright laws in England demand the office to keep copies of everything that’s been granted copyright for a certain amount of years. These books have been deemed “low use”. Few readers, if any, want to refer to or read them, but the law demands that they must be kept.

I’m tempted to say that we need an injection of Buddhism – or, at least, the doctrine of non-attachment – into the field of library science. But I’m not a Buddhist, so I’m not going to say that. (Interesting, though, that religious beliefs could affect both the shape and the very existence of libraries).
In any case, last month Anthony Grafton took a long look at the future of the library, gazing upon the history of textual accumulation from the Library at Alexandria to Google’s new book-scanning project.

BldgBlog.

This reminded me that there have been objections to the Google plan to digitize entire works from entire libraries and make them freely available online because it may allow the content to be scraped and misdirected for commercial gain in the way that content scraping has bitten into blogs.

Google Print, an enterprise in which Google is scanning books from five major research libraries, along with submissions of publishers, to create a searchable database of the written word. In September, the Author’s Guild, a trade group representing writers, sued Google, claiming “massive copyright infringement.” The Association of American Publishers has also sued Google over its project, which just resumed after being suspended for a few months while the company re-examined the issues. Last month, a competitive group, the Open Content Alliance (which includes Yahoo and Microsoft), announced plans to scan collections of other libraries, while trying to accommodate the objections made to Google.

Edward Rothstein. November 14, 2005. The New York Times.

—Jillian Burt