Dana Blankenhorn

Newswriting in the 21st Century

I was taught two ways to write a story in the 1970s. (That's me in 1981.)

First was the inverted pyramid. Describe the story in a sentence. Then summarize the most important point. Keep going, in order or importance, so an editor can snip the story, from the bottom, and always have the gist of it.

Second was a circle. Grab the reader in your first paragraph. Then walk around the story until it’s told. Deliver a sting ending, a thank you for reading. This was my specialty. It worked great in magazines.

In 2021, the Internet has two different ways of delivering the news.

The first is what I call the “oh no.” This has replaced the inverted pyramid. If it’s good news, say “yeah, but” in the first paragraph, then describe how things are likely to go bad. If it’s bad news, scream “oh noes” and describe how things can only get worse.

The second is what I call “hide the pickle.” This has replaced the circle. Promise you’re going to say something important in the headline. Then don’t say it. Lead the reader on for paragraph after paragraph, page after page, filling their eyes with ads, until you finally get to some point (always less than was promised).

What If Steve Jobs Were Evil?

If Steve Jobs were evil, he would be Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg was born in 1984, the year the Apple Macintosh was introduced. He founded Facebook in 2004. He launched Facebook’s program to build cloud data centers in 2011. His fortune was estimated October 5 at $117 billion, but that underestimates him. That’s because he controls the voting stock of Facebook, now worth $913 billion, so his power is greater than his money.

Facebook isn’t its eponymous service. It’s not Instagram. It’s not WhatsApp. Facebook is its 16 data centers, the thousands of miles of fiber cables connecting them with local centers, and with the world. About 1.6 billion people use Facebook services every day, according to its most recent quarterly report. Americans can take or leave Facebook, but people in the “Global South” depend upon it.

Open Source Explains It All

Back in 2005 I was asked to take over a new “open source” beat for ZDNet.

It turns out to have been the most important story of my life. And yours.

Open source is software based on the radical idea that the more eyes you get on code, the better it will be. Without getting too deep into the weeds here, it works.

The benefits of open source, however, flow mainly to its users. In the old proprietary model, they flowed to developers. Microsoft and (especially) Oracle fought it so fiercely. They saw the “little guys” as ganging up to steal their competitive advantage. Microsoft finally surrendered, building a network of cloud data centers that has made it the second most-valuable company in the world. Oracle is worth barely one-tenth as much.

All of America’s biggest companies are now built on the open source idea. Apple built its cloud on open source. So did Google, and Amazon, and Facebook. Facebook extended this into hardware with its Open Compute Project. Netflix extended it into networking with Open Connect.

But open source relates to more than software, hardware, or technology.

Eternal White Majority

When my Irish ancestors came to America, this is how they were portrayed.

The whole point of the Scorsese movie Gangs of New York was to illustrate the contempt with which the Anglo-American majority treated Irish immigrants. They saw them as black.

The same thing happened later, with the Italians. Then with the Russians. But today you wouldn’t see Bruce Springsteen or Jerry Seinfeld portrayed as anything but white. Like Alec Baldwin. Like me.

When people write that America will soon be “majority non-white” this is what they’re ignoring. People can easily be made “white” when it’s convenient. By being made “white,” these same people can then look down upon other people, darker people.

Open Source is Business

Open source was born at a time of high tech unemployment.

In the wake of the dot-com bubble bursting, early this century, the ideas found in Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar found salience. The more eyes you could get on the code, the higher you could build the stack. This created competition for proprietary software. Anyone could build off the common framework.

Open source built the cloud, and the 5 Cloud Czars came to dominate it. They all use open source, but in a proprietary way. They support only the projects they’re using or those they’re seeking access to. In the 2010s developers all found jobs, often at 6-figure salaries, often dripping with stock options and grants. The idea of sharing with others went out of fashion.

Open core was one way to get around the open source idea. The center of the stack was shared, but everything the sponsor built above it was theirs. While small companies that did this ran into criticism, the fact is that if a stack has a commercial sponsor, the software is open core. The sponsor is building proprietary tools on an open source stack and calling it support.

Today, most contributions to open source have financial motives. Companies are trying to get access to the full stack, connecting their own stuff to the stack, and the core of the stack is enhanced mainly by its commercial sponsors. Programmer time is expensive. No one works for free. Young programmers may start their careers contributing to an open source program, but they’re quickly snapped up and go to work making money.

Thus the decision by LiveCode to “abandon” open source, putting their old code in an archive and building proprietary above it, drew headlines but it’s not really a story.

Because everyone is doing it.

It’s All Biden’s Fault

I have a friend who is mad as hell at Joe Biden right now.

There’s a job waiting for him overseas. He’s fully vaccinated. But he can’t prove it to his new employer’s satisfaction. Even if the host country lets him in, he’ll have to be in quarantine for 2 weeks, at great expense, before he can start work.

How can this be, he asks? Why hasn’t the President mandated vaccine passports?

We all overestimate what a President can do. The media treats him as magic, the final authority, the one person responsible for everything.

But the President’s powers are severely circumscribed. Especially in this case.

There is no national medical database. There’s no federal control over health insurance. Under the McCarran-Ferguson Act , passed in 1945, health insurance is a state function. Even the decision upholding the Affordable Care Act held that states didn’t have to take its Medicaid expansion. Many still don’t.

The Dictator’s Internet Advantage

“Credibility is the coin of the realm.”

That’s what Northwestern’s Medill School taught me, when I was getting my Master’s in Journalism back in 1978. (That's also when this picture was taken.)

This was reinforced during our school trip from Chicago to the media capital of New York. I literally sat at the feet of William Shawn, then still editor of The New Yorker. We were paraded through the offices of Time. We sat for a spell at the Top of the Week, a bar on top of Newsweek’s headquarters building. The lesson was that someday all this would be ours if we were just loyal to our employers.

I’m the last member of my graduating class still be working a beat because I didn’t believe a word of it. Credibility is a personal value, I argued. It’s not something that can be granted, like a knighthood.

But American media companies remain wedded to the idea of credibility as a corporate value. It’s why so few are international in scope. That’s because credibility, in media, is mediated. It’s a continuing negotiation among media companies, their audience, and government. It’s a balancing act.

Impunity

Impunity is the essence of fascism.

Impunity is the idea that you can do anything, and never face consequences, because you’re the victim.

With impunity, all things are possible. War is possible. Lynching is possible. The Holocaust is possible.

It’s impunity that Republicans are deploying now in their fight to take back the country.

Impunity is displayed in many ways. It’s displayed individually, in groups, by mobs. When it’s deployed by cops it’s especially dangerous. Police impunity gives others the confidence they need to act out in the same way.

Impunity cares nothing about danger. It’s different from courage. Courage is conquering your own fear. Impunity is believing fear is a weapon that only you can be allowed to wield.  

Obligations of Capitalism

Capitalism isn’t a free ride. As described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, wealth carries obligations to the common good.

This isn’t a new concept. The whole story of Buddhism is of a man in mid-life who renounces the pursuit of wealth in favor of spirituality. Even Mohammed was a trader before he was a prophet. The idea is that you spend the first half of your life building wealth, recognize how shallow that is, and spend the back end doing for others.

Against that we have Nietzsche, for whom self-interest was the whole of the law. Against that we have Nietzsche’s acolyte, Ayn Rand, who brought him to America with badly-written novels that were thinly-disguised political screeds telling the poor to fuck off.

Tech’s Stock Problem

In today’s technology age, wealth is defined by stock.

This is causing a big problem for those who believe in capitalism.

To exercise their vision and keep companies out of the hands of Wall Street, entrepreneurs need a controlling stake. If their vision succeeds, this can create fortunes of unimaginable size. Of the 8 “centi-billionaires” listed by Forbes on May 19, 5 were American tech executives. 

They’re not the responsible, prudent men they were in the good old days. Jeff Bezos is living out the wildest fantasies of in-your-face wealth, buying giant mansions and super-yachts with his girlfriend – he divorced his wife last year. Bill Gates has been “outed” as a hound, a sexual predator, as he goes through a messy divorce. Elon Musk is just being an asshole, manipulating crypto-currency markets with his tweets. Larry Ellison buys islands and moves thousands of people around the country if you dare try to tax him. Mark Zuckerberg, not yet 40, seems the most responsible of the bunch.

It’s not just the ultra-rich giving wealth a bad name. The merely insanely rich are also being shown to be grade-a assholes. As I explained in my recent SPAC piece, these people create companies out of cash, buy operating tech companies, win even if they lose, and turn other people into billionaires before they’ve really accomplished anything.

Austin Russell, for instance, is 26. His company, Luminar, is just one of several trying to build Lidar systems that will help make cars autonomous, self-driving.  So why is he worth $2.2 billion?  It’s because a SPAC took Luminar public, and investors have yet to catch on that sales of $5.3 million in three months, don’t justify a $7 billion market cap.