Dana Blankenhorn

The 1898 Game

Think of this as Volume 13, Number 7 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

The cycles of American history are important because they can show us where we are, and let us know that our reactions to events are not as unique as they appear.

Our history has been marked, so far, by six generational crises from which we managed to escape, and which defined all who went through them:

1. The 1800 Crisis, about the limits of our democracy and adherence to those limits.
2. The 1828 Crisis, a new balance between sections and the myth of "the people."
3. The 1860 Crisis, about Union, slavery, and the nature of our economy.
4. The 1896 Crisis, about balancing power between business and government.
5. The 1932 Crisis, about rescuing the economy and unity.
6. The 1968 Crisis, about culture, global war, and values.

The 2008 Crisis has much in common with the 1896 and 1932 crises, in that our problems are primarily economic. But it also has much in common with 1860 and 1968, in that our people seem culturally divided. (History is viewed like a picture on Google Earth -- everything below appears compressed and one-dimensional.)

There should no longer be doubt that 2008 was important, in the same way that our other crisis years were important. The assumptions of the past era had collapsed, our problems seemed ready to bury us, and we were ready to hear a new story about ourselves.

But we are now two years past that crisis. We have reached its center, its core. We are in the middle of cultural, economic and literal war, a time that tries mens' souls and has people wondering aloud whether this path is, indeed the right one.

Now is the time for heroes.

Getting better all the time

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 50 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

For most of my life I have lived a little ahead of the curve.

I was early to the Internet, early to warning of the dot-bomb. I am a futurist by trade and inclination. Even in my mid-50s I care little for nostalgia. I'm always looking around the next corner.

The next corner looks pretty good.

(This illustration, and the one which follows, is from The New York Times' review of A Good Day, a childrens' book by the greatly-underestimated Kevin Henkes. Got a little tiny one on your Chistmas list? Amazon is open 24-7.)

While most people spent 2009 in the Great Recession, I managed to ride above the waves. My wife helped, but I found meaningful employment for the first time in a decade, with four blogs now owned by CBS, adding up to not only a tidy living but a fulfilling one that meets my strengths well.

My kids have both gotten better. One is in college in Texas right now, and I can hear the personal growth coming through the phone. She knows what she wants and what must be done to get it. My son starts college in January, a little more tentatively, living at home, but he is going to find his footing. And I can afford the bills.

While the Administration was pushing through its $800 billion stimulus plan I pushed through a more modest $150,000 plan. We added on to the house. It's now very energy efficient, and big enough so both my wife and I can work here without driving one another crazy. We're ready for what comes, even if that's a long, loving lifetime together, because the new bathroom is fitted with handicapped railings.

Argument Clinic

There are scientific arguments and there are political arguments.

They are different.

• Science proceeds from evidence. It often moves slowly. Minority views are respected, so long as they bring evidence to the party. Evidence is data. Without data there is no argument. Even after a consensus is reached, new evidence may still upset it. But without evidence the argument will not be re-opened.
• Politics proceeds from belief. It can move quickly. Minority views can be suppressed, and the smaller the minority the more possible this becomes. All is fair. You can argue based on anything you like. Consensus is rare, the majority rules. Well-organized minorities can beat loosely-organized majorities. Heat is often prized over light.

ClimateGate is politics. It is not science. It brings nothing new to the party, save for some wild charges based on a deliberate misreading of stolen e-mails. It alleges a grand "conspiracy" among the world's climate scientists, motivated by hope of financial gains, but even here its evidence is weak.

It is the big lie, meant to distract us from what must be done to save the lives of our grandchildren. It represents short-term values, which are powerful in politics.

Protection Racket

My PC is very slow.

(This is actually a drum mat, sold in the UK.)

I checked it out with my malware and anti-viral. The malware detector didn't find anything serious. The anti-viral found almost 2,000 copies of a file called sgregister.

I looked it up. Sounded dangerous. I checked message boards for advice. They suggested a "free" product. Click a link, download it, load it, let it run -- waste a few hours. Then my fear is confirmed -- you have 743 serious errors.

But my "Free" software won't fix any more than a half-dozen of those errors. If I want them fixed, I have to register and buy it. I have to pay.

The Stupidest Man in the World

The history of business is littered with the bones of men and companies that ignored progress.

Usually this ignorance appears after the founder's death. The fate of Polaroid was not sealed until years after the death of Edwin Land. Toyota did not overtake GM until decades after Alfred P. Sloan was a-moldering in his grave. 

But sometimes, in a few tragic cases, the fall comes in the lifetime of the founder. This is increasingly common in the era of Moore's Law. Thus we had the tragedies of men such as Ken Olsen, An Wang and Seymour Cray. New solutions change the game, the Great Man refuses to play, and he is crushed on the wheels of history.

This had not happened in media in quite a long time. True, the Linotype crushed many small papers under the heel of Hearst and Pulitzer. But radio did not kill the newspaper, and many TV licenses were given directly to radio companies, even newspaper magnates.

Thus the industry was completely unprepared for the Internet. I well remember an event at the Atlanta Press Club in 1995, where Cox Enterprises chairman James Cox Kennedy confidently predicted the Internet would be an enormous boon to newspapers, enabling him to "repurpose" his content and get paid multiple times for the same story. I just shook my head. The man was clueless, and history has shown that to be true.

But Kennedy was a genius next to Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch, feared as perhaps no press baron ever just a few years ago, now stands  as the Stupidest Man in the World.

The reason is on the cover of Michael Wolff's 2008 book about Murdoch. "The Man Who Owns the News."

PR in the Time of Blogging

I have been making money blogging for five years  now.

My success is based on 25 years of professional business journalism preceding my entry into the game, and 10 years of journalism education before that.

No brag. I know what I'm doing.

I still get a ton of PR pitches, but they are worse than ever before. PR people had little enough clue how to help journalists before the time of blogging. Now they are completely Clueless.

So here are some Clues.

What is a blog post? If you can visualize a news story as an inverted pyramid, and a magazine article as a circle, because you enter and exit the story at the same point, think of a blog post as being more like a horseshoe.

How big is the horseshoe? Its size is defined by the audience that reads and responds to it. Some posts, like this one, will be very small horseshoes. Others can be giant-sized. 

I have no idea, when I start in on a blog post, how big its horseshoe will be. I want it to be as big as possible. More readers and more talk about my post means more money for me. The economic model is just that simple.

The shape of a horseshoe is incomplete. The inverted pyramid tells the whole story in every paragraph, so the editor can cut it at any point without fear. The circle is also complete -- you give people a kicker reason to come in, lead them around, and give them a present at the end that delivers the meaning of the experience.

A horseshoe isn't like that. It starts, it ends, it holds readers, but it is open to interpretation. The meaning of the story is created by the feedback, by the urge to provide feedback, and pass-along readership is a form of feedback.

So don't tell me a story. Don't spin me. Tell me, in 25 words or less (preferably a lot less), why people want to hear about this post you want me to write. Why is it important, why is it worth passing on to others, why should people care? Don't tell me the lesson, but do give me a hook, something I can start with. If I'm good I'll take it from there. Sometimes I'm good, sometimes I'm not.

No PR people I know right now have this skill. They remain devoted to their clients. They don't push back, and explain to those clients the difference between a story and a blog post. Maybe because they don't know themselves.

A good blog post isn't about your client. It's about your client's take on something. The take, their contribution to some controversy of the day, may represent what the company does, the proposition they offer the market. But that's not the post, that's not the story.

The best thing a source can give me is a good quote, so if a PR person has some good quotes to offer on a topic of serious interest, sourced to the client, we may (unfortunately) not even need an interview. That's because the deadline on a blog post is now. Not later today, not a week from now, now. Right now. I'm writing right now. We're in this virtual office together, I'm on deadline right now, so you better give me something I can type as I hear it, something really useful. Or you're useless to me.

Oh, and if you've got a press release I should add to the post, give me the address where it lives on the Web. I like links. Links are vital. Be a link.

Liberal Patriotism

The recessions of the recent past could be "cured" with a variety of conservative nostrums -- lower government spending and tax cuts being among the most common.

The current one will only end with liberal solutions.

The reason can be found in employment, a lagging indicator in any recession. It's high and getting higher. Conservative policies won't bring it down.

The good news is that rising unemployment is defying real economic growth. The economy is on track to grow at a 3% annual rate this quarter and to keep growing. Productivity among all sorts of workers is enormous and growing. Few have suffered pay cuts, which helped keep the Great Recession going so long. We work hard for the money and we earn it.

The problem is a disconnect between what business needs and what the labor market can provide:

• Low-skill businesses want to pay low-end wages only "illegal aliens" can live on, because they're not raising American families but trying to create them. 
• High-skill businesses can't find the skills they need right away, at the point of demand, so they're hiring immigrants on H1-B visas as fast as they can.

The jobs are out there. They're just going to Mexican dishwashers and Indian computer technicians.

The only possible solution is policies that let Americans get these jobs. Kicking the foreigners out at this point only means the jobs don't get done.

• Dirty jobs need to pay a wage Americans will work for, and can live on. And employers can't afford a 40% tax on top of those wages for health insurance. That's a cost that needs to be shared.
• Clean jobs will go to Americans only if Americans are educated and trained to do them. We need to work with business and educators to increase the supply of qualified labor so imports can decline.

Why reporters should be heroes

I was brought up to believe that being a reporter is a pretty cool thing.

One important lesson of my career is that most people don't think so. The assumption of a reporter as hero is, generally, an American assumption.

In much of the world, especially Asia, a reporter is either a stenographer or a threat to civil order. This may be why nominal democracies there don't act the way they do here. That is, it takes an enormous effort to dump a government because the truth-telling role of journalists is assumed not to exist.

I got an unexpected taste of this at CompuTex. The Taiwanese authorities (above) held a press conference on the third day of the show. The four bureaucrats sat at their table, they read their statements, they asked for questions.

Except for me, there was silence. I asked a question, got an answer. Waited a while and asked another. I thought I was being polite. These people had gone to great trouble to speak with us. They laid out coffee, cakes, and lunch. The least I could do, I thought, was to take what they said seriously, to ask some serious questions, and follow up.

Not true. A Europe-based reporter clued me in. They were shocked to be asked real questions, he said. They expected that reporters would repeat what they said, verbatim, and leave it at that.

Self-censorship is a bad habit, but that's the habit of most reporters around the world. At least most of those who get paid for it.

Not Enough Being Right

---

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 28 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

When I was younger I thought being right was important. 

Surely it was better than being wrong.

I wonder now. 

Being right and watching the world spin in another direction is terribly painful. Take the best known example from recent history, Jimmy Carter's "Cardigan Sweater" speech. 

Republicans used that speech to reject everything Jimmy Carter believed in, validating the Nixon Thesis of Conflict and putting Ronald Reagan's smiling face on the cover of it. 

The result? War, mass death, inflation, global warming, and (in time) skyrocketing prices anyway.

Kevin Mattson's "What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President" takes apart the speech, the issues, the result, and concludes that the country was wrong to ignore Carter's concerns. The Man himself has taken being right and unpopular as a badge of honor. He has spent his life out of office popularizing all sorts of unpopular causes -- Palestinians, homelessness, Africa. He doesn't mind being ignored, even vilified. He just keeps moving forward. His reward is in heaven. 

That's a great Christian attitude, and perhaps in that position the only thing you can do, but it's small consolation, as I've found in my own life.

If the newspaper business is gonna drown put a hose in their mouth

Newspapers have reached the desperate stage of their death spiral, the point where they're looking for government bail-outs.

In the case of the financial industry there was a case to be made that letting AIG and Citigroup fail would cost more than propping them up. In the case of the auto industry there's a case to be made that we'll at least get the money back.

There is no such case to be made for newspapers.

What they're looking for is a "tweak" to the copyright laws that would bar linking to copyrighted material without consent.  What they're seeking is the destruction of the Internet.

The same argument holds for the idea that content should be exclusive to its source for 24 hours. If you can't link to it, content does not exist. I'm amazed people like Connie Schultz manage to breathe they're so stupid.  

The Internet is based on links. Content you can't Google does not exist. We have learned this before with the news industry when it tried to hide its content behind paid firewalls and registration systems. 

It didn't work.

The industry now knows it needs links. It just wants to extract monopoly rents  for them. Hey, I want a pony. 

Any Senator or Congressman who stands up for this nonsense needs to be slapped down, hard. Can you imagine the cost of this to schools, to libraries, to universities? Can you imagine the bureaucratic cost of tracking this free money? And I guarantee it will go only to a few politically-connected news barons, people like Rupert Murdoch and Carlos Slim.