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Scott Rosenberg

Technology, politics, culture


If newspapers were gone tomorrowYesterday

For those still following the small-picture “death of the newspaper industry” tragedy while the much larger “collapse of the global economy” unfolds around it, there is a worthwhile exchange unfolding between Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer (starts with Jeff here, Dave answers here, Jeff responds, Dave replies).

It’s all food for thought but I want to highlight an analogy Dave raises today, which has, I think, a great clarity:

Imagine a group of doctors knew that all hospitals and pharmacies were about to shut down. What would they do? Might they do something to make sure their client’s health needs were at least partially attended to?

The same would presumably apply to many other professions, whose services are in some way necessary for life: police, fire, bus drivers, garbage collectors.

We’re often asked to believe how noble the profession of news is — now that is about to be tested in a whole new way. Are we just supposed to cry for this industry and throw our hands up and wait for the collapse before starting to put it back together, or would they like to help while they’re still here?

The Gift keeps on givingDecember 1

I read the recent New York Times magazine profile of Lewis Hyde with some interest. As it happened, I wrote a review of Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift just about 25 years ago as one of my early assignments at the Boston Phoenix. My editor at the time, Kit Rachlis, thought I might find Hyde’s uncategorizable mixture of literary criticism, sociology and anthropology intriguing, and he was right. (As the profession of editing moves into eclipse, let’s not forget that this matching of writer and subject is one of the subtle arts that we do not yet know how to automate.)

At the time, Hyde’s effort to establish a language of value separate from the financial marketplace spoke hauntingly to me — as a disaffected young liberal stunned by the Reaganite rise of free-market, anti-government ideology. The book’s themes feel somehow timely again today, at the end of the arc of history that began a quarter-century ago, as we scrabble through the ruins that said ideology has left of our economy and try to imagine rebuilding along different lines.

I was fascinated to

Why Obama let Lieberman goNovember 19

A lot of people are upset that the Democrats didn’t go all vindictive on Joe Lieberman and boot him from his committee chairmanship. I have no love for Lieberman and detest his choice to stump for the Republicans this year. But I think I understand what Barack Obama was up to in pushing the Senate Democrats to bury the hatchet.

Obama spent most of the marathon campaign that just ended telling people that he wanted to move beyond the old partisan politics. Having won the election, he now faces a set of problems of a magnitude we haven’t faced since the 1930s. Just as Obama was Mr. Consistency on the campaign trail, sticking to the same themes and policies across the states and months, so, I think, he wants to demonstrate consistency from the campaign through the transition into government. “Remember what I said on the trail?” he’s in effect saying. “I meant it. And I’m going to act on it.”

A president with that sort of carry-through would be something extraordinary — and unfamiliar. I understand why Obama partisans might discount the promise of transcending partisanship as being so much blather. Our last president made campaign noises about “being a uniter, not a divider” and proceeded to pursue an intensely divisive agenda with the thinnest of mandates.

After such an experience, we can be forgiven for collectively discounting all talk of moving beyond the old battles.

“One voice can change a room”November 14

I guess I’m going through campaign withdrawal, but stumbling on this clip from the end of the campaign (via Mark Bernstein) got me all teary. In four minutes, a perfect oratorical arc, from relaxed storytelling to “Fired up! Ready to go!” With the disasters we face, we’re going to need this sort of inspiration.

“One voice can change a room. And if a voice can change a room, it can change a city. And if it can change a city, it can change a state. And if it can change a state, it can change a nation. And if it can change a nation, it can change the world.”

Knight Challenge, John Leonard, writing productivity, outliners [Links for November 11th]November 11
  • MediaBugs: an open service for anyone to report, track and try to resolve errors in media coverage: My project in the Knight News Challenge has made it into the second round. Have a look and post a comment! It’s been tough to focus on this while trying to finish the book but they write the checks, so they get to name their deadlines. I’m excited about this idea — applying the concept of bug-tracking software as used in open source projects to the news media, a proposal I first floated years ago (followup here; of course the idea has since evolved). We’ll see whether I get the chance to try to build it.