How books come and go

I found the contrast of these articles interesting. On the one hand, you Rachel Donadio pointing out that we have more books being published than ever before:

In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work. The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals). And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”

Then on the other hand, you have a meditation on how books -- yes, they do, after all, remain pesky material objects, Amazon Kindles notwithstanding -- actually end up becoming dust.

Some burned, some pulped, some simply forgotten. Some stillborn in our minds, some dead of neglect, some strangled in their cradles by a critic’s contempt. We don’t mourn for books, or the life that passed into them during their creation, because we rarely know about their loss. Those that die usually do so without ceremony, like the wordless exhalations that take place each day in nursing homes, public hospitals, or prison wards, where death is an act of forgetting and a problem of remains.

I've often wondered how vanity press books will skew future historians' interpretation of our era. Then again, I guess the books that were (and were not) published have always given a skewed snapshot of any era's cultural thoughts.

A newsroom morgue

A photographer at the San Jose Mercury News took these stirring shots of the newsroom following the most recent round of layoffs. (via San Francisco Peninsula Press Club) I think they blocked image copying on Flickr, so I can't mirror a sample image for you here. But the pictures are worth the jump.

The thing that scares me is that every empty desk represents two or three stories per week that won't get reported, and at least one per week in which someone will swindle, rip-off, injure or abuse someone else and the wrongdoer won't be exposed.

Not to mention all the stories of the good things that happen day in and day out in Silicon Valley that also won't get their proper notoriety.

Meanwhile, a former teacher of mine got feisty about the whole to-do:

Just last week I was privileged to briefly visit the newsroom at the San Jose Mercury News, a paper that has embraced the buyout mania even more than the Washington Post or New York Times. The newsroom staff has been reduced by half in the past few years, and everyone agrees it's been an enormous benefit. The paper no longer worries about covering lots of pesky stories that once seemed to take endless time and energy and threatened its readers with information overload. Gone, too, is the anxiety year after year of trying to make the Top 10 list of great American newspapers. And no more over-editing! The enhanced oxygen supply in a half-empty newsroom, the spaciousness and the blessed silence reminded me of the peace and tranquility I found in abandoned villages in Kurdistan in 1991 after the Iraqi army had passed through during its own special buy-out program.

Must we crush each other? Really?

BusinessWeek has a bit about the success of the Financial Times. The odd thing to me that jumps out of this article is the notion that the competition must be crushed. I digress to the inevitable quote: "But many suspect that if Job One for a Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is suffocating The New York Times, then Job Two is crushing the FT. (via Romanesko.)"

I'm all for good sportsmanlike tussles, mind you, but crushing other companies strikes me as a bit over the top. Especially when media companies aren't really competing against each other anymore, but against the consumer's time and habits. It's kind of like Johnny sweeping the leg. Shouldn't the bigger victory be for karate teachers everywhere?

In all seriousness, my first acquaintance with destroying the competition, at least in a journalistic sense, came when I interned at the Kenyon Review. No, we weren't throwing down the gauntlet against the Paris Review or the Yale Review. (Sissy publications all!) But our managing editor at the time had recently come from the newspaper business and was delighted to land at the Review. He said his previous job at a Cleveland newspaper involved putting the city's other paper out of commission. And that that just wasn't a very fun task, he told us, or anything that he wanted to do with his career. Hence his defection to the Review.

That always stuck in my mind. I'm all for free market economies and such, but there's a point beyond which too much competition can obliterate the market. And in their haste to maintain their relevance to consumers, today's news outlets shouldn't be racing toward such obliteration.

Kvetching--a great journalistic tradition

I'm certainly among the last reporters to write or comment about AngryJournalist.com, but I still think I can throw some thoughts out there. Primarily, I'd like to offer a half-baked theory to explain why the site has been so successful---that is, success measured in terms of hits, posts, etc.

Here it is: good journalists cannot flip the switch.

The "switch" refers to the difference between two methods of living & working. The first method is how most professions demand that its workers conduct themselves---normally. Even in today's 24-hour work cycle, most workers still punch the metaphorical clock. Even if they're workaholics, the nature of their work is always directed outward, on the project or matter at hand. Work is work, family is family, and usually that separation stands up over time.

The second method is how journalism requires reporters to conduct themselves---hungry to dig up information, knock down walls and analyze disparate or complex stories. This requires reporters, in many instances, to become bastards. Sure, we can sound polite on the phone, but the fact remains that we're always trying to get information. If someone is forthcoming with that information, we're always trying to leverage them for more. If someone isn't forthcoming, then we're digging all around them so that they'll have no choice but to give it to us.

In grad school, a classmate became catatonic in her car before interviewing a tough source. She called our professor---a grizzled yet polished veteran editor and reporter for the Mercury News---for advice. "I have to be honest with you," she told him. "I'm scared out of my mind to talk to this guy." "I hear you," he responded. "But if you don't talk to him, you don't have a story. So take a deep breath or suck it up or do whatever you do--and get out of the damn car." Everyone in class---including the student---agreed. The professor was right to talk to her this way.

Then comes deadline. We have no time to atone for our rough edges. We have to make some words. And we do so with manic energy.

Anyone who lasts as a reporter for more than one month will admit it: the whole process revs us up. Few other professions require its workers to step out of their comfort zones so consistently, and simultaneously demand the quick, difficult analysis of writing on top of it all. Few professions also deliver such satisfaction when the process is done right. And the only way to survive is to keep your engine revved so that you're ready to do it right at all times---ready for any story, any moment.

Small wonder, then, that reporters can't help themselves from the type of kvetching that they suppy to AngryJournalist. The state of the media today is convoluted, indefinite, and often times antagonistic. Just like the stories we usually report. We can't very well report the world in one manner, and report on our own experience as reporters in another.

Like I say, we can't flip that switch. And readers wouldn't want us to flip it, because the consequence would be soft articles, press releases rehashed into briefs, and stories that stop after a couple of passes instead of prying open the real stories beneath the surface.

The salient question, however, isn't how or why we kvetch about our tough times in journalism. It's whether we should be doing it to such a degree. What good is complaining unless you propose some solutions---and then act on them?

No good at all, of course. The former is navel gazing; the latter is gettin' it done.

Panic! on the dais

Everyone's wunderkind of the moment, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, found himself at the center of one of the oddest online/offline PR moments in recent times in early March. Zuckerberg was being interviewed by BusinessWeek reporter Sarah Lacy at the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas.

The crowd filled the room. Tech fans were ga-ga to hear Zuckerberg talk about the popular online platform. Then the crowd apparently turned on Lacy, upset with the way she was interviewing Zuckerberg. Daniel Terdiman's article at C|Net tells the story:

"Other than rough interviews," an audience member asked Zuckerberg during a short Q&A session at the end of the keynote, "what are some of the biggest challenges Facebook faces?"

"Has this been a rough interview?" Lacy asked Zuckerberg.

"I wasn't asking you, I was asking Mark," the audience member said.

The battle between Lacy and the audience began almost immediately. From the beginning of her interview with Zuckerberg, she repeatedly interrupted him, and all around me, I started to hear annoyed murmurs of people saying that she should stop doing so.

Later on, Zuckerberg himself seemed to get annoyed by Lacy's style. As he was answering one of her questions, she began to talk over him, only to notice his reaction.

"I kind of cut you off," she said. "You kind of had this hurt look, like, 'I was talking.'"

Near me in the third row of the ballroom, someone said, "Is she serious?"

It only got worse from there. At one point, Lacy got confused about how much time was left for the interview, and Zuckerberg teased her.

"Did you run out of questions?" he asked.

The line got a huge cheer from the thousands in the audience.

Lacy's party line afterward was to claim that she and Zuckerberg were on the same side, and wondering why the crowd turned against them. One interviewer pointed out that they didn't turn against "them" so much as they turned against "her." Nonetheless, she was unapologetic, even pulling the gender card and boasting of her increased Amazon ranking. Hardly the humble approach consumers generally appreciate from their journalists.

It's hard to get an accurate read on such a bizarre event, even with all the feeds of interconnectivity that were plugged into the moment---live-blogging, texting, Twitters, etc.---but a few things seem certain. First, mob rule is insatiable, particularly among a crowd as overly caffeinated and supercharged as the tech crowd. Second, be careful when and where you play minority/disadvantaged cards or boast of your own profile and accomplishments. Especially when a reporter is videorecording you.

Most important, however, is a basic journalistic tenet: Don't be the story. Consumers don't read even the most beloved and uniquely voiced columnists for the way they say things---it's always the what that consumers are after. The way is always a value-add; it's never the substance.

Anyway, feel free to judge the interview for yourself.

Woman identified by NYT despite asking not to be identified

There I was a couple of weekends ago, cruising along through a Sunday edition of the New York Times. Until I came across an article on Eckhart Tolle, a name I recalled from my days as a publicist for Shambhala Publications. (I don't believe Shambhala ever published Tolle, but his name was in the same circles, and I believe he blurbed a book or two.)

The article was straightforward enough---a typical mainstream dip into New Age media, via an Oprah newspeg---until I reached this passage:

Mr. Tolle’s own representatives had fewer specifics. “We don’t have a lot of knowledge about Eckhart Tolle as a person,” said a woman who answered the phone last week at the Vancouver office of Eckhart Teachings, and who asked not to be identified. “And I’m the only one here.”

That's a mighty quick process of elimination for someone who doesn't want to be identified!

This is surely a moment in which the rights and privileges of journalists lock horns with the uninformed expectations of the "area woman"---in this case, the one who "answered the phone." More likely than not, this woman hadn't been interviewed by a reporter before (at least not in her current capacity as a Tolle representative), and didn't realize every word she uttered was on the record. She was sharp enough to declare that she wished to remain anonymous; but she wasn't sharp enough to withhold information that could identify her. Or at least come close to identifying her.