August 17, 2009
“As every Afghan knows, there is one powerful force in Afghan politics not represented in this week’s elections. But they have other ways of getting their message across.”
- Guardian’s Jon Boone, reporting from Kandahar
Worth checking out is an audio slide show (NT reviews) produced by the LA Times, on improvements in the lives of Afghan women. Great photos, nuanced commentary.
August 15, 2009
A New Jersey police officer picked up Bob Dylan recently. Responding to a report that “a weirdo” was hanging around a neighborhood in Long Beach, NJ, she confused the cultural icon for a hobo. The officer took him back to his tour bus and checked his ID, resolving the misunderstanding. According to the officer, Dylan “was really nice, though, and he said he understood why I had to verify his identity and why I couldn’t let him go.”
Dylan and NJ Police Officer
After Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates’ recent run in with police, much of the conversation revolved around race, and much of it struck me as naive. Obama’s beer summit, where the white officer, black professor, and everyman Vice President gathered at the White House to drink past the incident, came off as a pathetic, hollow, and depressingly inauthentic photo op.
I’m not suggesting that Gates wasn’t wronged, and certainly don’t mean to compare Dylan’s experience with that of Gates. Both the characters and the circumstances are very different.
However, it is worth considering Dylan’s celebrity, perhaps as something to aspire to. Though I’m certainly no expert on his bio, I do know that Dylan consistently made choices that flew in the face of convention. From going electric and then apolitical while at the top of the acoustic, politicized 60’s folk scene, to doing a Victoria Secrets commercial in 2006, he’s consistently disregarded the roles people expect him to play. He’s musical royalty who still plays at county fairs, and makes no big deal that a young officer didn’t recognize who he is.
I feel that increasingly, we place value on shaping our image and controlling other’s expectations us, at the expense of the kind of inexplicable, grating, and profoundly human (flawed) reinvention that makes Dylan a true star, 48 years after he left Minneapolis to play music in New York.
July 28, 2009
Mahr is an obligatory gift given to the bride by the groom as part of an Islamic marriage contract (Nikah). The mahr becomes the bride’s exclusive property, and is considered such an important part of the union that in some Sunni schools she can annul the wedding if the groom fails to fulfill his end of the bargain.
There are plenty of resources online if you’re interested in learning about the prophetic precedent and legal intricacies of mahr. A good place to start is Wikipedia, or the excellent guide to mahr written by a woman convert. Also check out a well-cited scholarly exploration of mahr as a right of women in Islam, and an amusing podcast-conversation on the issue between two muslim American women.
July 5, 2009
I’m the type who can’t really love art without loving the process and story of its creation. Its why Let it Be is my least favorite Beatles album, or why I find great architecture more beautiful than great painting.
In this Sunday’s magazine, Times media critic David Carr gets at why I can’t stop loving Wilco. Their latest album isn’t brilliant, but neither is it a formulaic derivative, or an exasperated groping for reinvention. It sounds like authentic satisfaction. The songs are familiar but not tired or self-conscious.
Carr’s take on the unique emotional space Tweedy inhabits makes for a worthwhile read.
May 13, 2009
I’ve never liked the way newspapers sites and blogs list comments under the article. Its inelegant and not very usable.
The Wall Street Journal lists comments on a separate tab, and the product works.
Beside making the comments more accessible and usable (you don’t have to scroll like crazy), it separates the two kinds of content in a way that’s respectful to both — the professionally created article or opinion, and the user generated comments.
More on the proper use of tabs from usability guru Jakob Nielsen >>
March 5, 2009
Every American newspaper company is in some state of drowning in the Internet information flood. Most can be seen haplessly grasping at any online distribution/social media trend that comes there way. RSS, Twitter, Facebook apps, iPhone apps, in-house bloggers, and commenting, to name just a few. Sensing which way the wind is blowing, many have embraced the newspeak of the new media punditry. Take this excerpt from a memo to the staff of the Hearst Corporation (with 16 newspapers in their stable):
… Our sites must continue to be the superior and dominant free Web sites in their markets. This means they must offer the best in breaking news, staff and reader blogs, community databases and photo galleries. In fact, we need to expand the number of reporters, editors and photographers who are running a truly great blog, creating a rich dialogue of opinion and data sharing. We must do a far better job of reaching out to prominent citizens in our communities, those who already have a blog and those who don’t, and providing them a prominent platform to state their views. We must develop a rich network of correspondents to help us grow the deepest hyper-local community microsites in our markets. We must do a better job of linking to other great sources of content in our communities. And we must put staff resources behind building those channels of interest that have the greatest potential: those built around pro sports teams, moms and high school sports, to name a few. Exactly how much paid content to hold back from our free sites will be a judgment call made daily by our management, whose mission should be to run the best free Web sites in our markets without compromising our ability to get a fair price from consumers for the expensive, unique reporting and writing that we produce each day. [bold formatting is mine. via WSJ]
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with what Hearst president Steve Swartz is saying. The full memo doesn’t mince words about the threat that Hearst faces, and I agree with and applaud many of his recommendations. But I’ve been been observing new media for too long not to recognize that “creating a rich dialogue of opinion” or “linking to other great sources of content in our communities” are the empty words of a social media consultant.
There’s more to dissect in the Hearst memo, but I’ll save that for another time. Suffice to say I’m sure Hearst will limp out of this newspaper crisis alive. The New York Times, on the otherhand, will emerge with its head high and guns blazing. I’d put my money on the Times understanding how to serve trustworthy, curated information like no other media company, old or new.
The Times has dabbled in all the new platforms everyone else has. They have one of the more successful Facebook news applications in the form of a news quiz. Their new iPhone app has received excellent reviews, and their mobile site is my choice news site on my G1 Android phone. They’ve even brought in community bloggers from New Jersey and Brooklyn in an experiment heralded a thousand times on Twitter.
But “the Gray Lady” shows an understand of the opportunities in sharing information online at a level deeper than simply adding a new Twitter feed. The release of a New York Times API is a most obvious example.
An API (application programming interface) gives developers to access your information, and create new applications by remixing your content however they choose. APIs are what allow for the development third party Twitter clients, apartment rental visualizations using Google Maps and Craigslist, and the syncing of your Yahoo address book on your Mac. APIs enable a flowering of innovation around your content that in aggregate can’t be matched by even the most ambition in-house R&D lab. Where Hearst is talking about putting some of their content behind a pay wall, The Times is giving developers a direct pipeline into the heart of their organization.
Their bet, and I think its the right one, is that the new money-making models for news content may not come out of newspapers, but as long as they own the content and syphon it to third parties on their terms, it’ll be NYTimes reporting that people pay for, however they end up paying.
Publishing an API isn’t the only smart, proactive move by the Times. They’re leveraging the multimedia, interactive capacities of the Internet to present news and information in some meaningful ways.
January 4, 2009
After a week-long, self-imposed Internet quarantine, I returned to San Francisco and to news that Israel’s operations in Gaza had escalated to a ground invasion.
The kind of violence imposed on the Palestinians is suffocatingly stale, even from a distance. It’s a violence without imagination, without even a mirage of hope. The motivations of both Hamas and the Israeli government appear desperate and provincial in an unhinged, school-boy-like rabidity. How can a moderate partner in peace possibly rise from the remains of innocent Palestinians shredded by American-built bombs raining down on Gaza?
On blame and victimhood:
Undoubtedly, Israel is slaughtering the Palestinians, but Hamas is walking them to the slaughter house. The UN condamns; the US vetoes; the Iranians arm; the Arab governments shake Israeli hands in the back alleys of international politics while at home they deflect from their defectiveness by indulging their citizens to demonstrate against Israel – a healthy stress reliever; the Islamists collect donations to build more mosques in Gaza and recruit more suicide bombers; Palestinian children die.
And Israel’s strategic short-sightedness:
… What is the exit plan here? Pound Hamas until they cry uncle? And why would Israel be willing to trade some temporary advantages in Gaza for a number of strategic setbacks: the effective end of the Annapolis process, a possible collapse of the peace track with Syria, worldwide opprobrium, a reinvigorated radical camp in Iran, the further undermining of pro-Western regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and a Hamas that may in fact emerge stronger vis-à-vis the ever-shrinking Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction?
May 13, 2008
After reading about today’s bomb blasts in Jaipur, Rajasthan on Sepia Mutiny, I immediately navigated to my go-to Indian newspaper – The Hindu. It’s a more serious paper than the Times of India, and was a consistently satisfying news source the last time I spent a significant amount of time in India in 2002.
Their website, however, is no pleasure at all. The Hindu was the first Indian paper on the Internet in 1995, but appears to have made few improvements to their site since. It’s a four column format, two of which are advertising. One column in the middle has news stories- stories that are not contextualized or obvious for a non-Indian resident such as myself. An article on the Jaipur bombing was available, but not at the top of the page as it should have been.
I haven’t been to India in a while, and don’t know the degree to which middle and upper class Indians read their news online. But as a paper with international repute, I would think The Hindu would do more to make their content accessible online. With open source CMS’s like drupal and their location in a sea of developers in South India, I’m not sure what they’re thinking.
(They do have an ePaper version that simulates reading an actual paper- which sucks. Newspapers are formatted in work in the limitation of a paper medium. Why would anyone replicate that on an online medium that has very different capabilities and limitations?)
May 6, 2008
Coming off of the NewsTools Conference where the decline of enterprise journalism was a dark backdrop to all the optimism and energy among the participants, I wanted to highlight a couple pieces that effectively diagnose the problems newspapers are facing. From Balkinization, Neil Netanel looks at what the web means for papers and considers the role of copyright. A great read, time permitting, is Eric Alterman’s “Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper” in the New Yorker.
