This week I bought a copy of the Guardian Weekly, the digest of features and opinion pieces that’s sold as a magazine, which is probably almost the size of the newish tabloid size of the paper. It’s $4.95 in Australia. Usually I photocopy some of the articles from the newspaper collection at the Customs House public library in Sydney, or print out pages from the internet edition of the magazine. I have no great attachment to paper, but I want to be able to carry around stories and read them slowly, over the course of a week, not gulp them down in one sitting on the screen. I just don’t savor reading on the internet, but I want to. For the past few weeks I’ve had a couple of feature stories percolating. One is an update on the failure of digital reading devices to deliver a simple, ephemeral experience of reading. I had an e-mail from a friend who is an inventor of algorithms and technological devices, who said he still prints out and reads feature articles rather than reading them online. And I had a misty, sentimental yearning for great editing, to read long feature articles that have been shepherded and tightened by an expert editor. (I’m working on a celebration of the quality of writing in the Guardian blogs and features—watch this space.)

“A number of people wrote in late last year to ask what I thought of the NEA report on declining literacy, To Read Or Not To Read, in the light of my arguments in Everything Bad Is Good For You. I actually jotted down some pretty extensive notes about it, either for a blog post or an op-ed, but it was right before Christmas, and so they ended up sitting on my hard drive. But the other day, the Guardian asked me if I had anything to say about the issue, so I went back and wrote up this little essay that’s running today in the Guardian,” Steven Johnson wrote on his blog. The report showed that young readers have increasing literacy rates that drop off as they move into their teenage years. The report shows that reading of books drops off, but Steven Johnson points out that the type and style of reading being done on the internet, and the way that people are informed and engaged by what they read online isn’t measured.

The only reason the intellectual benefits are not measurable is that they haven’t been measured yet. There have been almost no studies that have looked at the potential positive impact of electronic media. Certainly there is every reason to believe that technological literacy correlates strongly with professional success in the information age.

I challenge the NEA to track the economic status of obsessive novel readers and obsessive computer programmers over the next 10 years. Which group will have more professional success in this climate? Which group is more likely to found the next Google or Facebook? Which group is more likely to go from college into a job paying $80,000 (£40,600)?

But the unmeasured skills of the “digital natives” are not just about technological proficiency. One of the few groups that has looked at these issues is the Pew Research Centre, which found in a 2004 study of politics and media use: “Relying on the internet as a source of campaign information is strongly correlated with knowledge about the candidates and the campaign. This is more the case than for other types of media, even accounting for the fact that internet users generally are better educated and more interested politically. And among young people under 30, use of the internet to learn about the campaign has a greater impact on knowledge than does level of education.”

The New York Times reports today that Mad Magazine’s next issue will feature a series of lampoons by newspaper cartoonists.

“Why George W. Bush Is in Favor of Global Warming,” a two-page spread that the magazine calls an exposé, has been illustrated by 10 Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists. They try to offer reasons why environmental apocalypse might be a good thing for President Bush, with observations like, “His worries about how future generations will remember his presidency won’t matter if there are no future generations.” Other potential upsides are that Iraq could literally be melted off the earth, and rising oceans could submerge lefty strongholds like New York, Boston and San Francisco. The artists include Mike Peters, who won the Pulitzer in 1981 for his work in The Dayton Daily News in Ohio, and Matt Davies, who won in 2004 for The Journal News of White Plains.

Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson trains his always sharp eye on the possible acquisition of Yahoo! by Microsoft. The question marks that are zinging through my mind are attached to two companies Yahoo! acquired, the photo sharing site Flickr and the bookmarking site De.licio.us. It might not be too outlandish to claim that de.licio.us is becoming the central nervous system of the internet. As blogs are co-valent bonds held together with permalinks to media stories, de.licio.us is the “glue” that holds archives together. I’m enormously inspired and stimulated by the blogs Detritus by Dana Bateman and Bldgblog by Geoff Manaugh. But I’m equally inspired by what they’re reading as well as writing and I’ve subscribed to their lists on de.licio.us.

I hadn’t really thought about de.licio.us as a search tool until I read Fred Wilson’s observations,

Before delicious was sold to Yahoo!, I really wanted to see if we could make the delicious search service a major player in the search business. It seemed to me that the best way to keep delicious free to use and free of advertising was to use the data everyone was providing to offer a “people powered” search engine.

Fred Wilson describes de.licio.us on this archive post from his blog.

By Susanna Nelson

The doyenne of DIY pop culture, Melbourne journalist and blogger Marieke Hardy recently gathered up her books and laptop and took off to Sydney to assume a post on national youth network Triple J’s breakfast show alongside two station stalwarts, like Myf Warhurst before her.

I can’t help but feel dismayed by her decision to throw herself into the often undignified maelstrom of breakfast radio.

Part of the problem is with the station itself. Though it grew out of radical, government-owned 1970s Sydney station 2JJ, it has since gone national and come under attack for its highly structured, youth-focused programming. In other words, it is renowned for flogging songs to death. What’s more, the narrow demographic it so self-consciously pursues makes anyone over the age of 20 squirm with discomfort at all the shouty youth references and the My Chemical Romance tracks on high rotation – it tries painfully hard to be ‘down with the kids’.

The other problem is the modern Australian breakfast radio format. It’s depressing to think that this was the result of comprehensive market research. One imagines it must be a very small demographic group indeed that confesses to enjoying inane patter, scripted and unfunny jokes, infomercials, celebrity gossip, Beat the Bomb competitions and the anecdotes of John from Bundoora as the first thing they hear upon waking for the daily grind.

The ratings don’t bear this out. The fact is, this formula is globally recognised as a winner. Radio is a welcome burr of background noise to many of us inhabitants of the modern world, who are so assaulted with sound and vision at every turn we actually can’t cope with silence. Being alive is to be crash-tackled by stimuli. Small wonder so many people choose to wake to the bustle of breakfast radio – start as you mean to go on, and all that.

Some stations are better than others. Community radio station PBS fm in Melbourne wakes the listener gently with an intelligent mix of new independent music chosen by charming hosts and old mates, Todd James and Lyndelle Wilkinson. It’s amazing what a difference true independence makes. Like fellow Melbourne community broadcaster RRR, PBS was a phoenix from the ashes of student radio in the 1970s, and prides itself on giving its announcers free rein.

Just this week, the summer substitute breakfast host ended his two week stint. He had never done even an intern or graveyard shift and no-one knew who he was. But he brought in his record collection and his unstoppable enthusiasm for everything from the Runaways to Chicago and let rip. It was joyous – and it would never happen on the commercial networks or Triple J, which rely on ‘personalities’, slick scripting and a rigid play list.

For those who don’t want to wake up to music, over on ABC Radio National, sole host Fran Kelly gets her teeth into the issues we should all be thinking about.

The common denominator seems to be that these shows are about something bigger than the egos of the hosts themselves – something unifying and interesting.

But there’s a certain configuration of breakfast show, hugely popular in Australia, that is impossible to abide. It’s characterised by what I call ‘the pack of comics’, and it’s actually worse than the familiar ‘Battle of the Sexes’ duo schtick – think Kyle and Jackie O – of most commercial radio. It’s safe to say that, within this format, the sole job of the crowd of hosts is to annoy you into wakefulness in the place of a blaring buzzer, and to keep you that way in the car on the way to work.

To some extent the blame must be shouldered by the Working Dog productions team and their enormously popular Channel 10 (Australia) TV show The Panel, a weekly round-up of current affairs where the premise was that a regular team of affable alpha people, all with comic or writerly credentials, sat there chewing the unscripted, knockabout fat. Often the gags were hilarious. Trouble is, when they weren’t, the laughter continued in an unabated flow of self-congratulation (or perhaps nerves) that left the viewer in the cold.

When transferred to radio this ‘pack of comics’ concept becomes intolerable. At best, it’s a scrabble of unidentified voices jostling for precedence, at worst it’s an unwelcome display of bruised egos and palpable hostility verging on workplace bullying. And there’s a formula – the strained laughter and dilution of personality seems to be directly proportional to the number of folk vying for a sound bite. It’s embarrassing to listen to.

Never was there a more apt moniker for the now defunct group of five clashing egos as the Austereo Network’s The Cage, broadcast in Brisbane and Melbourne. Forced conflict – not to mention forced laughter – and inane patter were the order of the day. At that time of the morning, who needs it?

And it’s striking how the men in these microcosms of the workplace dominate – by sheer force, not of wit, but of boorishness. Women are often forced to act as placeholders, playing it straight, or more often, playing it dumb. And time and again when ratings wane, the women on the team are blamed – when Sydney’s 2 Day FM breakfast show was altered, Peter Helliar was the last man standing in a team that included the abundantly funny and smart Judith Lucy and Kaz Cooke.

When Myf Warhurst decided to leave Triple J (where she had recently joined the breakfast team of Jay and the Doctor) and move back to Melbourne to take up a post with the Austereo Network, a Facebook group sprang up deriding her for selling out. But who can blame her for wanting to be one half of a comfortable duo, for craving the space to develop a relationship with her audience, however commercial, rather than playing odd girl out in an established gang – a gang that mocked her mercilessly for the heinous crime (on youth radio, at least) of forgetting the name of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. 

Comments on Marieke Hardy’s popular blog have made mention of the strained dynamic between the new Triple J breakfast team. She has a strong internet following, a ready wit and an iron constitution, and in the few weeks she has been on air has managed to hold her own in the face of her competitive and at times humourless co-hosts. But we’re not getting the best of her as a breakfast host.

About the writer: Susanna Nelson is a trades journalist by day and a freelance pop analyst after dark.

© Susanna Nelson 2008

Luc Sante comments on Joseph Mitchell in an interview with Believer Mag.

BLVR: One guy who really had that huge capacity for human behavior was former New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling, about whom you’ve written lovingly as a chronicler of the flotsam, riffraff, and Low Life of the New York. He’s a member of a lost breed of anthropological investigators of the city. Have those societies, tribes, castes, and languages of the Low Life of New York disappeared under the heel of gentrification, or are writers just not working hard enough these days as chroniclers?

LS: The sorts of subjects Liebling and Joseph Mitchell wrote about have indeed disappeared, and the number of suspects in the case are almost too many to enumerate—not just gentrification, but also population growth, the rise of electronic media, the disappearance of whole categories of occupation and trade, etc. At the same time, though, there are many tribes, castes, and languages out there. There are societies of Chinese fishmongers, Jamaican croupiers, Romany auto-body repairmen, Filipina nurses, and so on, that are every bit as complex as those of Mitchell’s oystermen and fortune-tellers, and there are criminal strata of all sorts and all backgrounds in the five boroughs of New York City alone, and who knows what their lore may consist of or what their slang means? For all I know there are just as many eccentric public characters on the street as there were in the 1930s, only they are little-known outside their own neighborhood or ethnic group. But it is so much more difficult now to live reasonably well on little money, so eccentrics either lose their color under the pressure of trying to stay alive, or bug out completely and wind up in the bin

.

Believer Mag.

ATTEMPTED SCAM IN HELL’S KITCHEN

The New York Times carried the story of a man whose corpse had been wheeled in an office chair to a check cashing place.

So on Tuesday afternoon, the police say, they dressed Mr. Cintron’s corpse, carried him down a flight of stairs and heaved his body into a computer chair with wheels. Outside, they rolled him over the uneven sidewalk, pulling the chair toward Pay-O-Matic, a check-cashing shop on Ninth Avenue.

But as the men turned the corner, trying to steady the floppy corpse, they ran into the law. At Empanada Mama, a restaurant next door to the Pay-O-Matic, Travis L. Rapp, a detective, had sat down to lunch.

Detective Rapp looked out the window and saw the unwieldy trio. Something about the way they struggled to balance the man in the chair caught his eye.

“At this point, when they approached closer, I saw the body and I said, ‘Well, this is a dead guy,’ ” Detective Rapp said on Wednesday in a phone briefing.

PIGEONS IN NEW YORK

From the New Yorker. December 3, 2007. Ben McGrath.

Pity the New York City pigeon. He finds a place where natural predators are few, and where bread crumbs—note that stooped woman clutching a plastic bag—are bountiful, and yet his life expectancy is just three to four years, compared with fifteen for his cousins in captivity. So life is short: he stuffs himself before he mistakes an office window for open sky. Or maybe he has the misfortune of needing to relieve himself—perhaps more than once—near a subway stop in the district of the Honorable Simcha Felder, councilman from Brooklyn. Felder steps in the guano—he calls it a “puddle” of excrement—and becomes enraged, commissioning a report from his staff: “Curbing the Pigeon Conundrum.” Soon after, Christine Quinn, the City Council Speaker, refers to pigeons as “flying rats.” Now there’s talk of implementing the report’s Recommendation No. 5: “Create Pigeon Czar.” The czar’s responsibilities would include reducing the food supply, promoting birth control (via oral contraceptives disguised as crumbs), and supervising a pilot program called “dovecoting,” which involves confiscating pigeon eggs and replacing them with decoys.

Image from a blog called Nature’s Revenge.

Leftovers and scraps from the media’s round-tables.

I’m so tired of John Edwards.

Apparently, in another act of campaign desperation, with interest in his presidential bid fading faster than a setting sun, the Edwards campaign is now blaming the media for his failures to earn primary votes. During a recent interview with MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer, Edwards campaign manager David Bonior, a former Democratic whip in the House of Representatives, turned testy when asked why Edwards wasn’t gaining more traction. His answer? It’s the 5% less media coverage Edwards has been receiving compared to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Such a claim insults the intelligence of American voters. How can anyone believe John Edwards, a former U.S. Senator and Vice-Presidential nominee, has not received ample media coverage? Bonior’s own numbers reveal the absurdity of this claim: Does any rational human believe 5% less media coverage will result is such overwhelming differences between Clinton, Obama, and Edwards in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina?

Haven’t we seen this playbook before? The Bush administration has masterfully manipulated public opinion by pointing fingers at the media instead of themselves and their policies whenever criticism has grown too harsh. Edwards, another candidate trumpeting change, seems immune from it with this new twist. Here is just one anecdote revealing Edwards’s failed strategies: Recently, while driving home from work, I listened to a NPR interview that featured three leading Hispanic thinkers commenting on the presidential primaries and the influence Hispanics would have on the elections. One commentator said the Edwards campaign was “invisible” when trying to reach out to national Hispanic organizations. 

The reasons Edwards isn’t gaining traction are simple: his campaign is poorly organized, and his messages don’t resonate with the American people. He is a millionaire lawyer with minimal experience as a legislator, no experience as an executive, and a former Vice-Presidential nominee that LOST an important presidential election. Sure, he’s attractive, smart, and energetic; however, his ideas are unattractive, and he should bow out of the race sooner than later.

Chris Justice is the Director of Expository Writing at The University of Baltimore.