In looking for some sidebar video for a blog post, I stumbled across this lovely clip of Maya Angelou discussing from where she draws her inspiration. Her thoughts seemed worth sharing.
Her thoughtfully chosen words, spoken with a beautiful, powerful voice, are an inspiration.
Flickr image from user danperry
But while watching the final round of this major championship, as well as during the hours I spent at Pebble Beach helping with local newspaper coverage of the U.S. Open, I saw an unspoken storyline playing out.
And that’s the continued self-destruction of traditional media outlets.
Where to begin….
At home during today’s final round, I tuned into NBC’s coverage while keeping an eye on Twitter. I monitored the hashtags #usopen and #pebblebeach, as well as the commentary of a few sportswriters I follow via my own account. All afternoon, Twitterers bemoaned the wonky weird commentary of Johnny Miller, a former PGA great who is now synonymous with odd golf announcing. An AP writer picked up on one especially bizzare comment:
Did anyone at NBC respond to this and many other Tweets about the announcers’ odd deliveries? Did the broadcasters respond?
Of course not. Would it have been difficult to tune in to what their viewers were saying? No. Would it have been difficult to plan ahead and perhaps solicit and take questions from folks at home via Twitter? No.
Lest we get too down on the TV boys, a look at newspapers.
All week at the media tent, I felt somewhat in awe of the big-name newspaper guys. Most are old enough to be my dad (I say “dad” because there were something like 10 women in the media tent) and they work at big-brand papers: The Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, The New York Times. Heady stuff.
Mind-boggling, though, is that they’re all sitting next to each other, each writing slightly different versions of the same stories without realizing that portals like Google, Yahoo and MSNBC are aggregating all their work in the same place anyway. When are journalists going to realize that the only “on ramp” to their work isn’t their brand’s website or printed product?
I have no idea why they all didn’t talk to each other - especially newspapers who share owners - to determine who is writing what, and how not to overlap.
Oh yeah. And extra weird is that the paper dudes sit right next to the dudes from AP - who, by the way, work for a wire service nearly every other newspaper represented at the U.S. Open pays to provide copy.
And they’re all.writing.the.same.thing.
The night before the final round, nearly every outlet I named above carried stories on the following topics:
- Tiger Woods’ big jump up the leaderboard and his quest for a comeback
- Phil Mickelson’s implosion in Saturday’s round
- Dustin Johnson’s lead; the fact that he’s a two-time winner at the PGA Tour’s annual stop in Monterey
- The little-known Europeans in the hunt: McDowell and Havret
- Tom Watson playing all five U.S. Opens at Pebble Beach
….and aside from various notebook items, that about covers it. So, what’s the problem here?
Think Google.
Here’s the Google News page for Sports, as seen about two hours after Graeme McDowell laid up for par on 18 to become the first European in 40 years to win a U.S. Open:
You can see that the national papers trump regional content providers, which is somewhat of a shame in this case. Consider the case of Dustin Johnson, who had a horrible Sunday round after playing well all week and owning the lead going into the final round. He’s won the past two AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am tournaments; the regional media are quite familiar with him and prepared to write good stories about him. He comes from South Carolina; the reporters from that state probably also have a lot of local knowledge on him.
But because regional newspapers - like the Monterey County Herald and San Jose Mercury News - are typically part of newspaper chains whose owners reside states away, they’re not able to quickly adopt to new media … and consequently don’t do things that would bump them up in Google rankings.
For example, neither the Herald nor the Mercury News have a policy of including many (if any) outgoing links. Further, their archive systems are terrible; most stories expire in two weeks. so it’s not really worth linking back to them. This complete lack of participation in linking culture seriously hurts them when it comes to helping their copy stand out on Google or on Yahoo homepages.
Golf links. But why don't writers link? Flickr image from user neil-farnworth.
Flickr image from user Lars Plougmann
And this is not just because I’m extremely prone to getting lost.
I can stare at my office wall map (which has sadly become a floor map of late, because I’m too lazy go to HomeDespot and find a new thingamagig for the back of it) for at least the duration of two TV commercials (hey, it’s the digital age!); I quite frequently do. The yet-to-be-visited southern hemisphere drives me mad. Vast expanses like central Asia beckon. I gaze at the islands of Hawaii and marvel that my national cell phone plan works there. I wonder nerdy things like, “Gosh, map makers must love when states like Kosovo declare independence - everybody needs new maps!”
OK, OK, so wall maps are so 18th century. Fast forward to the digital era, in which I am totally that girl who thinks it’s cute to see the London Tube map replicated on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs.
Maps have been Internet trendy for years now, and are being used for all kinds of purposes you or your seventh-grade colored pencils could have imagined. My faves include the Web Trend Map, a super groovy example of how maps can convey all kinds of meta-level info. Then there are the cool mashups like WikipediaVision, which helped me realize that duh, of course the people who edit English-language Wikipedia mainly come from England, the U.S., South Africa, India and Australia (and the French-language Wikipedia from France & Africa… and so on). Then there’s HerdictWeb, which helps me see watch which websites are being censored where. Want to see more GoogleMaps mashups? Yep, there’s a blog for that!
I’m just really amazed at how much information can go on a map. It’s enough to make a girl want to learn Flash (or at least some decent Photoshop skills, eh). I love this Golf World map of Pebble Beach, it’s basically the realization of an idea I pitched to the local paper for its U.S. Open coverage after I sat through a presentation about the fab multimedia section of the Las Vegas Sun, home to this super cool interactive map of the history of the Vegas Strip.
In recent weeks I’ve made a Google mashup showing where the EJC is currently training journalists, a second mashup showing spots in Maastricht a new colleague might want to visit (which I actually think is one of the nicest ways I’ve thought of to help someone who is new in town) and created an annotated map using the free photoediting tool Gimp to help my boyfriend with a presentation.
Yes, the terrorist cutouts are tacky. But with beards like that, they asked for it. And my boyfriend earned a good grade on his presentation, so there.
My Facebook Friends, also known as the people I used to see every day before I/they moved, are doing big things.
What a mess! You call that a skyline? (Flickr photo from stuckincustoms)
And I don’t get it.
Much like Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legendary novel, I am curious about the lifestyle of people who live in New York… But unlike Carraway, I feel no pull toward the supposed glitz and glam of the five boroughs.
As a native Midwesterner, when I think of New York, I think of a teeming hub of “eastcoasters.” Eastcoasters, to this Midwesterner anyway, are known to be stuck up, unnecessarily snobby and think the world revolves around their time zone. When I call someone an “eastcoaster,” I don’t mean to compliment them.
What’s odd about this prejudice - and I know it is one - is that I can get excited about visiting just about anywhere. I’ve visited 17 countries in the past five years. I’m ready to travel just about any time, any where. I have a deep-seeded love of luggage, phrasebooks and airports.
“The city that never sleeps” entered my life as “the place young and hip adults go to try to make it” during college. Specifically, if you wanted to be a magazine journalist, our professors told us, you have to go to New York City. A few friends moved there after graduation, with nothing but their caps and gowns, and whined about the rent prices for a while until they found jobs and settled in. I didn’t really find this striking at the time; I also moved to a part of the country, to South Carolina. It came with its own set of intrigues.
Then, during my first year as a sports reporter there below the Bible Belt, a very cool-but-unassuming features writer in her mid-20s announced, after much lamenting over the math section of the GRE, that she planned to move there to attend graduate school at NYU. She planned to study publishing.
The editor-in-chief of our paper, a delightful editor who was everything a beginning journalist could want - he barked awkward orders, wore suspenders and spectacles, and typed with his head down, hunched over his keyboard as he hunted and pecked across the keyboard - told the features editor that if he were a journalist in his 20s, moving to New York is exactly what he would do, too.
I looked on at her going-away party with the envy of a wanderluster, my inner vagabond stirred. But not shaken.
I have no family connections to New York. In fact, two people in particular convinced me during my early 20s to shrug off the Big Apple. And shrug off I have.
“If you love London, then you’ll hate New York. And vice versa,” said a friend of mine who studied in London a year before I did. Her family had some East Coast leanings, but she lived her childhood and teen years.
Living broke in a tiny apartment for this? (Flickr image from joiseyshowaa)
I love London. So I’ll apparently find New York big and impersonal. This advice has hung around my mind to this day, even five years after my 6-month stay in London, a city about which I believe Samuel Johnson is quite right.
“It’s like three Chicagos melded into one. It’s a mess. Way too big,” my mom said after my family went without me - I was a committed intern at Chicagoland Golf magazine at the time - to New York City for a convention related to my father’s work.
I love Chicago. I grew up in the suburbs and still usually mean Chicago when uttering the words “the city.” I love its neighborhoods, gorgeous skyline, Polish heritage. I love its accent, its pizza, its hot dogs. Its River, its lake-effect breezes. Its sports teams, its history, its mayor… Everything. Love it.
But three Chicagos? That would be a bit much. My mother made New York sound like a city that doesn’t know when to stop - kind of like its inhabitants.
But my friend the features writer, the one who moved to start grad school, began posting on Facebook about the grittiness of New York and its abundance of coolness about five seconds after she moved there.
Fast forward a year later, and I’ve moved to Maastricht, the Netherlands, trading South Carolina for the south of Holland and an editing gig. (I told you I love to travel).
In my first year in Maastricht, two more friends from that first newsroom moved to New York. I don’t recall who went first, but one copy editor went with a job secured and another reporter moved to Brooklyn with no job secured.
More photos, inside jokes and pop culture references to the gritty coolness of New York started to scrawl across my Facebook wall. This was exacerbated by friends and acquaintances who had moved to New York City after graduation and had gotten their second jobs by now, posting their daily updates from more noteworthy publications now.
I admit, sometimes I wonder… But really, feel no pull. Chicago, London, San Francisco, Barcelona, Berlin, Istanbul, Riga, Prague, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Hong Kong, Beiruit… Say the word, and I’m ready to go. But New York? I feel nothing beyond tepid curiosity.
About two years ago now, my fabulously funny and warm best friend from high school began sending me e-mails about her upcoming medical residency - in New York. We e-mailed and giggled about how cool her life would be - just like Sex in the City, only with scrubs.
Fast forward a year into my friend’s residency (which she loves) and an other fabulous friend, a Canadienne who I met in Maastricht, is telling me about her acceptance to a New York graduate school programme (Ed note: here in this paragraphwe’ve switched to poshier spellings to reflect the European beginnings of this particular friendship 
and her exciting upcoming move.
I have to say: I’m excited for all my friends’ opportunities… But again, I don’t feel the emotional pull.
I really wonder, ‘What’s the Big Deal about the Big Apple?’ (And then I wonder if that doesn’t sound like a cheesy line Carrie Bradshaw would start a column with…).
Anyone?
Eyjafjallajokull photo from Flickr user narisa
Until May.
That’s because a volcano in Iceland is emitting tonnes of ash and limiting air traffic into and around Northern Europe to nearly nothing.
Probably, you, like me, have been reading or hearing about these events via whatever media you normally consume. Copy editors and announcers alike have been tormented for nearly a week now trying to spell and/or pronounce “Eyjafjallajökull”, the name of the volcano that has been puffing ash clouds into the air above Europe and grounding airplanes around the world.
The only people who have not been following this gigantic news story?
The men and women who man the phone lines at call centers of airline companies.
The people at United Airlines - which I was supposed to fly with from Monterey to Denver, on to Newark and finally to Amsterdam - seemed particularly uninformed.
Sure, I received several e-mails urging me to change my flight plans prior to my scheduled departure from Monterey. That was nice; I have never received this kind of prior notification from an airline company (then again, they’ve never had to deal with a disruption like this).
But when I called to find out about my options, I found a very uninformed group of employees. That, or I found a very good group of actors playing the part of uninformed employees.
While I could see at its website that Schiphol airport, for example, was closed at the time of my flight from Monterey, the United people couldn’t. News media like the BBC were reporting that the situation with the ash cloud was worsening. The United people had no idea what was going on. It appeared highly likely that I wouldn’t be able to go, but United’s website still said my flight was a “go”.
At the same moment, Google News was brimming with stories about airport closures.
Scotland opened its airspace, then it closed again.
The front page of Schiphol airport’s website warned travelers that the airport was not sure when it would re-open. Check with your airlines, Schiphol’s website suggested.
Ha!
photo from Flickr user deeknow
United employees apparently aren’t allowed to use the Internet at work. I inquired about my options and told the United employee I reached after a half hour delay (nothing compared to the 160-minute delay I faced just three hours prior to my scheduled departure from Monterey) I figured she knew more than I did (being on the inside of the situation) and hoped she could talk to me about my options. She chuckled.
“We’re usually told last,” she said.
Great. Helpful.
Meanwhile, I was searching for information about the situation by using a number of media tools. I think my instinct to reach for these tools is reflective of the evolution and sophistication of Web 2.0 tools for enabling people to connect with each other to find out “what’s happening on the ground.”
But it’s also indicative that the “best” legacy media brands - like BBC, for example, - are still important. Their reporters are the ones with more access to the kinds of “official sources” that are making decisions about things like keeping airspace open.
I probably refreshed BBC.co.uk more times yesterday than I have on any other day. They do a great job of time-stamping their stories, which was a major help.
Other key resources I used to track the news events that impacted my flight plans:
- EUfeeds.eu: The web development team at the EJC created this tool, which aggregates and nicely displays news headlines from the newspapers of each European companies. I was able to quickly find out what Dutch media were reporting about the situation at Schiphol (the airport I was trying to reach).
-Google Translate: I can usually get the gist of articles in Dutch, but I’m not experienced enough with the language to get the details. But when I used my basic skills to find an article that seemed useful, I could pop it into Google Translate and learn more.
- Skype: Being able to instantly reach my colleagues in Europe, in particularly the Belgian web projects manager I work with, was great.
- E-mail: I could use CC to quickly inform groups of colleagues about the changes in my plans. And it’s great that Gmail automatically groups e-mails as “conversations” so that I could respond to individuals on the e-mail thread who replied to me individually.
- Smart phones: I myself don’t use one, but my colleagues do. My Belgian web projects manager was able to advise me throughout his Saturday night with his iPhone (that, or he added the “Sent from my iPhone” tag to his e-mails to convince me that he was having a night on the town rather than geeking out in front of his computer ; ).
- Twitter: I used Twitter in several ways. The people I follow linked to useful news articles and blog posts from other travelers (including a link to the Flickr pool of ash cloud photos) I searched “ash” to find out general information about the situation. Later, as it emerged, I followed the #ashtag. I also searched “Newark airport” to see what was going on there. I found several Tweets about the dismal situation at the international departures area at Newark.
photo from Flickr user johnmcga
- Radio - It’s a vintage medium, but important. When I had to run some errands Friday, I kept the car radio tuned to BBC World News. I heard interviews with scientists and engineers who talked about why planes couldn’t fly through the ash cloud.
So, did the United Airlines staff use any of these resources? No.
In my opinion, that’s a huge problem for the United corporation.
I truly believe United could have better helped me figure out my travel options - and craft better policies to help their customers - if its employees were all able to have Hootsuite or Tweetdeck open in front of them.
As for United’s totally bogus “we-won’t-give-you-your-money-back-until-your-flight-from-Newark-to-Amsterdam-is-actually-canceled-nevermind-that-you’d-have-to-plan-on-being-stuck-in-Newark-for-a-solid-week-in-order-to-do-that-because-we-wait-until-the-last-moment-to-formally-cancel-a-flight-but-you-can-have-a-United-voucher-now” policy… That’s a different and entirely more annoyed post!
When Wikileaks unencrypted and published exclusive US military footage of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter gunning down 12 people in Baghdad – including two Reuters journalists – the organisation gained new viewers and international attention.
Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at Columbia Journalism School, told The Independent:
“This might be the story that makes Wikileaks blow up. It’s not some huge document with lots of fine print – you can just watch it and you get what it’s about immediately. It’s a whole new world of how stories get out.”
Wikileaks is a loosely connected group of tech-savvy editors, cryptologists and activists. It doesn’t have a headquarters or office.
But it manages to break major stories the mainstream press was unable to report. Reuters had been working for two years to access the Baghdad video through the Freedom of Information Act.
In less than a week, the 18-minute version of the black-and-white footage – to which Wikileaks added narrative text and subtitles – was watched 4.6 million times on YouTube.
A 40-minute, unedited version was viewed half a million times.
Those counts don’t include copies and versions shown by broadcasters like CNN.
What is Wikileaks?
Wikileaks has been receiving and publishing leaked memos, reports, databases and briefings since 2006. It publishes explanatory press releases alongside the documents it receives from whistleblowers around the world.
Much of the information published by Wikileaks has resulted in front-page stories that lead to political or regulatory changes. These kinds of changes are the primary motivation of the site.
Wikileaks says it has published more than a million documents without revealing an anonymous source.
A few major Wikileaks scoops:
A report from the commodities company Trafigura about toxic waste dumping in Ivory Coast. Wikileaks published the information after Trafigura successfully filed a “super-injunction” against The Guardian. This was lifted after Wikileaks published the documents.
The site published a membership list of the secretive British National Party. Policeman and other professionals are not allowed to join the far-right political group; a few of the members Wikileaks exposed were fired from their jobs as teachers, policemen and clergymen.
Operating manuals for the US prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay. These described prisoner intimidation tactics involving dogs and described hiding prisoners from the International Red Cross.
A list of websites blacklisted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
A recording of a top state official in Peru talking with a lobbyist about payments to help Discover Petroleum of Norway firm win contracts. Peru’s energy and mines minister resigned as a result of the story.
Internal documents from Kaupthing Bank, an Icelandic bank taken over by that government in 2009. The documents exposed large loans the bank made to its shareholders in the weeks prior to the financial crisis in Iceland.
Kaupthing Bank’s lawyers fought to keep the story off of RUV, the national public broadcaster in Iceland. They filed a successful injunction against RUV, but the news anchors mentioned the story on air – as well as the injunction – and referred viewers to Wikileaks for more information.
National outrage over the injunction sparked a movement called the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI). It is an ongoing attempt to craft media laws that would attract media businesses – particularly those with an investigative bent – to set up shop in Iceland.
Wikileaks has been recognised with awards like the 2008 Economist New Media Award and a 2009 Amnesty International New Media Award.
The “wiki” prefix rather reflects the concept guiding Wikileaks: For anyone to be able to upload and post sensitive documents – like the encrypted US Army video – without editorial interference.
There is no relationship between Wikipedia and Wikileaks.
Who is Wikileaks?
Journalists at Wired UK, Mother Jones and Al-Jazeera have written stories profiling the shadowy and small organisation.
All reach the same conclusion: There are more questions than answers about Wikileaks.
Two things about the people involved in creating and propagating the site are certainly true:
An Australian man named Julian Assange is the public face of Wikileaks. Little is known about Assange’s background, place of residency or daily whereabouts. His behaviour during one-on-one interviews with journalists has been described as erratic and slightly paranoid.
He has left comments on articles about Wikileaks in which he says the articles contain inaccurate or unfair information about the Wikileaks. But he does not typically respond to the resulting offers to provide more detailed information about his Wikileaks colleagues.
Assange did research for the 1997 book, Underground: Tales of hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier.
The book profiles the lives of early Internet hackers. Some bloggers have speculated that Assange is himself one of the pseudonymous hackers profiled.
A podcast related to the book is available here.
Verifiable information about other Wikileaks contributors is difficult to find.
Conspiracy theories
Wikileaks is the kind of organisation about which it is easy to spin conspiracy theories:
Some people have wondered if Wikileaks is a front for the CIA.
One of the sources cited by conspiracy theorists is John Young, an American who runs the website Cryptome. It has a mission identical to that of Wikileaks; it has posted around 54,000 documents
There is a connection between Young and Assange – the two corresponded at length in a series of e-mails Young posted on Cryptome – but the tone of their current relationship is not clear.
Young responded on his website to recent questions about his opinion regarding Wikileak’s potential CIA ties:
“Copying the behavior of spy agencies is exactly what they want in order to legitimate their criminal chicanery. Until Wikileaks becomes a fully open and accountable operation it is the same as the spy agencies and indeed helps legitimate their manipulation of public opinion on behalf of their self-promotion “in the public interest.”
Business models
In early 2009 Wikileaks suspended operations to focus on fundraising.
It took all its material offline – although distributed copies remain scattered around the Internet – and said it was focusing on meeting a fundraising goal of $600,000 with a minimum of $200,000.
Wikileaks quickly met its $200,000 goal.
The site says it accepts no government or corporate funding. It relies on private donations and pro-bono support from lawyers.
The staff who manage daily operations – which Assange has said is himself and four others – is not paid on a regular basis. As for keeping fed, Assange has said he “made money on the Internet.”
In 2008, Wikileaks experimented with auctioning exclusivity rights to thousands of e-mails between Hugo Chavez and his speechwriter (himself a former ambassador to Argentina).
The auction was logistically difficult to arrange and was the subject of more media coverage than the content of the e-mails. Wikileaks has not since attempted duplicate such a large-scale auction.
Three years ago, journalists were frantically reporting on a complex credit crisis they would eventually be critiqued for failing to predict.
Dutch reporters reported day and night on the “kreditkrisis.” Spaniards were busy covering the “crisis de crédito.” French speakers were abuzz about “pénurie de crédit.”
Changing vocabularies
Nomenclature for the crisis that burst on to front pages around the world in 2007 has evolved as the scope of the crisis itself developed.
As housing prices fell in the United States, the credit crisis began. Words like “subprime” and “adjustable rate mortgaged” danced across front pages.
As housing prices dropped and pink slips flew, we realized we were in a time of financial crisis. The European Central Bank and US Federal Reserve added billions of euro into the financial markets, prompting the need for many charts, graphs and explanatory stories.
We began talking about a economic crisis. Photos of Britons lined up outside Northern Rock ran across wire services everywhere. World leaders like Gordon Brown, George Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel kept op-ed writers in business with their support – or lack thereof – for national and international bailout schemes.
Employment data and a lack of consumer spending started to indicate we were in a recession, a tricky term economists like to argue about.
Later, it became the global recession.
In February, the Associated Press, a ubiquitous wire service that produces a style guide considered in the United States to be “the journalist’s bible,” went so far as to give the crisis its own title: the Great Recession.
A crisis by any other name
Many European publications and wire services have rejected the term.
“Let the historians, not the sub-editors, categorise major historical turning points,” Lisbeth Kirk, editor-in-chief of the EUObserver, said via e-mail.
Reto Gregori, chief of staff at of Bloomberg News, said journalists at Bloomberg are loath to use capital letters when it comes to characterising the economy.
“Historians and economists will determine whether the recession that started in December 2007 should be called the Great Recession,” Gregori said via e-mail. “At Bloomberg News, we’re sticking to ‘a recession’ at this point.”
Bloomberg News is a 20-year-old initiative of Bloomberg L.P., an American company data and software company well-known for the news terminals it sells to financial firms. It says about 350 newspapers and newsmagazines subscribe to its newswire.
Tim Quinson, executive editor of the Europe, Middle East and Africa bureau at Bloomberg, said Bloomberg may reconsider its position in the future. When doing so, it will take cues from academia.
“We have decided that we won’t change our wording until the National Bureau of Economic Research at Harvard University declares that the recession is over. Then analysts can review the landscape with more of historical perspective,” Quinson said via e-mail.
“Until then, we will call it a recession.”
Ditto at The Economist, the increasingly influential weekly newsmagazine from Westminster. It has gained in circulation in each of the last four years, unlike competitors like Forbes or Business Week.
Tom Standage, the business affairs editor at The Economist, said journalists there do not use the “Great Recession” unless quoting sources who use the term.
In the past, the Economist has tracked the use of the term “recession” in the business press.
“Typically we say “the recession” for the rich world and “the downturn” when talking about developing countries, many of which did not go into technical recession,” Standage said via e-mail.
The term “Global Recession” has been discussed in the newsroom and smaller meetings dedicated to updating the Economist’s in-house style guide, Standage said.
Generally, he said, it is disliked and not likely to find its way into the Economist’s style guide.
“We dislike jargon and other terms of art,” he said.
David Marsh, who edits the style guide at The Guardian, says the term “Great Recession” appeared in print 17 times in the past 12 months.
Guardian reporters included the term mainly when quoting sources and usually qualified it with a date range, “Great Recession of 2007-09.”
“The fact that it needs to be qualified by suggesting when it took place demonstrates, in my view, that it is not yet a widely accepted definition,” Marsh said in an e-mail.
Marsh said it is unlikely the term will be included in The Guardian’s style guide.
Nor will it crop up in style manuals at the Financial Times, executive editor Hugh Carnegy said.
Carnegy said he finds the term “rather portentous” and added that he prefers to let historians name the era.
“Once adopted, there is a danger it would proliferate in an irritating way,” he said in an e-mail. “In fact, thanks to the AP, it already has!”
Crafting constructs
Great Recession is an obvious throwback to Great Depression, which began in 1929 and lasted until the Second World War.
The term Great Depression was not used during those years, though. The then-president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, did use the phrase “a great depression” in speeches as early as 1930. But the term didn’t become popular right away.
It took until 1934, when a British economist Lionel Robbins published a book called The Great Depression, before a definite article and capital letters were added.
While most historians and stewards of journalistic style – including the Associated Press – readily use the phrase to describe what is widely accepted as the worst economic downturn of the last century, at least one is more cautious.
The Economist does not use the phrase Great Depression, preferring instead “the Depression.” The capital letter helps distinguish from other depressions.
“The lesson of history is that after the Great Depression, people found a new term for depressions (recessions),” Standage, at The Economist, said.
“Might the same happen again now? Will the Great Recession catch on, and subsequent recessions be referred to as downturns?”
Standage added that he hopes not; downturn is a euphemism used in countries suffering a recession.
In a January, 2008, column, the late linguist William Safire posited that the crisis would soon come to be characterized by a phrase starting with “the Great.” His column contemplated possible follow-on nouns like “Fall,” “Reckoning,” “Devaluation,” “Unwind” or, indeed, “Recession”.
Like the editors at The Economist, FT and Guardian, Safire warned against prematurely naming the era.
“…a national or global economy takes longer to sink deeply into recession. That’s why it is premature to settle on a word or phrase for whatever it is we’re going through today. An extended credit crunch or credit crisis? A “recession that would curl your hair,” in the Eisenhower-era phrase? Or just a run-of-the-mill recession, a mere “bump in the road,” the inexorable exhaling during the business cycle?”
Although the AP has taken a stand and assigned a special moniker to the era, it is quite evident that other editors are more cautious about using potentially inflammatory language to describe the crisis.
—
Flickr images from users alexthepink, Herschell Hershey, mike d’ leo
Romulus, Remus, Lavazza. Flickr image from todd mecklem.
Despite the fact that we are well under 65 years old, my boyfriend and I are subscription people.
Delivery people visit us almost daily, materializing out of Monterey Bay to bring us everything from the Wall Street Journal to Yoga Journal. There’s also Men’s Health, Sierra Club, New Yorker, Vanity Fair and AAA magazines (come to think of it, I think our magazines are cooler than we are!)
They also bring us coffee.
Yep: We subscribe to coffee. (If Amazon should ever start selling beer, we would never leave the house!)
Three different kinds of espresso, no less:
First, there’s Lavazza Caffe Espresso Ground Coffee. In our house, its name is the “jar one” or sometimes “the black one”. It’s fab for cappuccino, which I somehow manage to make every morning before even waking up. I don’t know how it happens, but one moment I’m sleeping and the next moment I’m standing in front of the coffee machine. Sometimes I suspect Dave is somehow responsible for this, but I’m never sure.
Next there’s Lavazza Qualita Rossa. In our house, it’s known as “the red one” (which although I don’t speak Italian, I think is a fairly accurate name!) Its job it to be our after-dinner espresso. (Seriously, how else could we stay awake to watch all those Criminal Intent marathons? duh).
Flickr image from user Joshua Rappeneker
Finally, we have added Lavazza Crema e Gusto, a.k.a “the blue one”. Its job is to kick our butt should the other coffees not be enough to get us through the afternoon.
I should note here that we also enjoy Illy coffee from time to time. We’ve also tried Cafe Bustelo. So don’t think we’re brand-focus snobs (only pro-Italy, anti-drip snobs. Sorry Folgers, but ICK).
(To be fair, Bustelo is apparently the hippest espresso north of the equator and is available on subscription. But Dave prefers Italian over Mexican coffee. So as Heidi Klum’s tacky tacky producers would say, Bustelo got “Auf’d”!)
One of my favorite bloggers (who I sometimes comment to but never e-mail responses to (sorry Vrabel! It’s not you, it’s me and my horrible horrible lack of focus)) recently wrote an entire blog post just to made me feel a lot about better about all these subscriptions:
“a study…published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a title that it’s very difficult to not make a childish joke about, involved two large studies that followed professionals for over two decades. And it found that people who drank at least five to seven cups of coffee a week — around here we call that “the crossword puzzle,” but whatever — had a significantly lower risk of dying from anything compared to those inexplicable freakshows who didn’t drink any at all. Those who drink four to five cups a day had even better protection, although it’s difficult to congratulate them on it, because they’re in the bathroom all the time.”
In other coffee-related fabulousness, are you familiar with Lavazza’s super cool yearly calendar? It’s so exclusive and hip that it seems impossible to buy anywhere on the entire Internet.
cc logo from Flickr user qthomasbower
Me: Law-abiding journalist who takes blurry photos. Looking for illustrative photograph to run alongside article or blog post. Editor at a not-for-profit by day, sometimes producing video for established media brands.
You: A talented photographer who reads Lawrence Lessig on the weekends. Have posted your telling, creative photograph on Flickr. Like to put your work under Creative Commons licensing. Mainly looking for Attribution-Noncommercial, but Attribution-Share Alike is OK.
Our collaboration will hopefully go viral.
My attribution gets your picture, free and clear.
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons licences are an evolution in copyright.
Copyright law has so far developed mainly within nation-states; copyright law in the UK developed differently than copyright law in Italy or Germany.
The Internet enables more collaboration between people and businesses in these countries, though, necessitating a harmonized way to share.
Creative Commons licences allow creators of original works – be they photographs, articles or videos – to easily label their works with copyright permissions.
There are six versions of the licences, ranging from restrictive “Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives” permissions to an “Attribution” licence that allows the work to be used for commercial and not-for-profit work as long as its attributed.
Permission granted
Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, the not-for-profit that helps write and distribute the licences wrote:
“Imagine an amateur filmmaker creating content to upload to their website as they try to clear the rights of music that they’ve gathered from across the Internet.
Or imagine someone who wants to give a television broadcaster the right to use, with attribution, a photograph that they had posted on their blog.
In most cases, the legal fees would exceed the value of the transaction and the sharing would fail, either because the parties would ignore the law, or opt not to share because the legal cost of doing so was prohibitive.”
Creative Commons allow for a reversal of permission paradigms.
Editors or filmmakers previously had to find and ask authors or studios for legal permission to use a particular original work.
Creative Commons allows authors and studios to label their original work with legal permissions. Anyone who sees the work is then aware of how they may or may not legally use the work. They don’t have to ask permission.
What’s happening in Europe?
Creative Commons licences have been written for 25 of the 27 member states of the European Union. Legal experts in each country have written the licences to comply with the basis of local legal codes.
Proliferation of Creative Commons seems to be in line with current thinking in Brussels. Fostering a climate that enables Internet users to easily share their creative work is a priority within the EU.
In late January, 2010, the COMMUNIA Thematic Network On The Digital Public Domain, co-funded by the Commission to generate policy guidelines related to open access, released a dossier called The Public Domain Manifesto.
Its first principle states, “The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception.”
The Manifesto is available in 11 languages; a Facebook group dedicated to it has about 1,300 fans.
D2#07 Europe, The Borderless State? - Panel WCS 2009
Original signatories to the manifesto include Knowledgeland, a Dutch thinktank working toward a knowledge-based economy; iCommons, a UK charity promoting open-source software; and Digitale Allmend, a Swiss association dedicated to securing public access to digital assets. Other original signatories include like-minded Italian, Slovinian, Croatian, Brazillian and American groups.
The COMMUNIA is mainly concerned with open access and making analogue versions of cultural heritage available to the public in digital form. The Commission-funded digital museum project, Europeana, is a reflection of this effort.
The COMMUNIA defines open access as:
“a movement away from an ‘all rights reserved’ approach, by which rightsholders reserve every single use possible, towards a “some rights reserved” approach, by which rightsholders voluntarily renounce to some of the exclusive rights granted by copyright law.”
Future of EU copyright law
Addressing the future of copyright law online in Europe was from 2006-2010 the job of commissioner Viviane Reading, who for the second Barroso Commission has shifted to work on another portfolio.
Before Reading took this role in the second Barroso Commission, she
spoke in favour of reforming European copyright law to better enable protection of orphan works as well as the digitalisation of cultural heritage.
Dutchwoman Neelie Kroes now presides over the task of online copyrights. Like Reading, Kroes has said that allowing for the development of a single market for online content is the best way to fight Internet piracy. (Other commissioners may disagree with this approach.)
Kroes, who worked on international competition issues during the first Barroso Commission, is most famous for imposing fines on Microsoft related to an antitrust case with the American software maker.
Kroes’ stated priorities in her new job include creation of a single clearinghouse for music rights in the EU.
She could be supportive of initiatives like Creative Commons, according to Reuters reporting from 21 January, 2010:
“Kroes, however, has shown little appetite for extending crackdowns on piracy — France, for example, has legislated to disconnect consumers from the Internet for illegal downloading — before a properly functioning market is in place.
‘Copyright is important for economy and culture, people deserve its protection, but no proper action is possible while there is no single market,’ she told the European Parliament last week in a final “interview” for the Digital Agenda post.”
So what?
Whether you’re working on a non-profit media site like this one, a private media startup, a government or a blog, Creative Commons makes it possible for you to share or use writings, photography or videos.
Even established newspapers, like La Stampa in Italy, are utilising Creative Commons.
In January, 2009, Al Jazeera began hosting a repository of Creative Commons-licensed footage from Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza.
With seven reporters based in Gaza, Al Jazeera had access to exclusive footage while the Israeli Defence Forces would not allow more journalists into Gaza. Al Jazeera could have charged other broadcastors by the second for its exclusive content.
Moeed Ahmad, the head of new media for Al Jazeera, said his company benefitted from incoming links from sites like Wikipedia, which used still images from Al Jazeera videos.
In the summer of 2009, Al Jazeera opened its blog section for re-use with a Creative Commons license.
What for photographers?
Many photojournalists worry that the proliferation of free photography will lead to the devolution of photojournalism as a profession.
Others have used Creative Commons to search for new ways to profit from photography.
In autumn, 2009, professional photographer Jonathan Worth circulated Creative Commons licensed photographs of science fiction writer Cory Doctorow. The images were licensed for commercial and non-commercial use.
Alongside these, Worth began selling series of limited-edition prints of his work alongside Doctorow’s book, For the Win. He wanted to see if the free photos generated publicity for the paid-for versions of his work.
They did, and Worth made 760 GBP, or 867 euro. He also earned many of what he calls perceivable non-material benefits.
A Foto8 blogger wrote about the experiment,
“What’s at stake here is the possibility of identifying practices that enable community-building and audience-building on the fly, around an idea, something we’re seeing more and more of.”
Think legacy media brands are not reinventing and repackaging themselves?
Check out some video and print ads I’ve found online promoting news products from Russia Today to O Globo (Brazil) and TV3 (Estonia).
A slick Simpsons parody advertises Estonian news (Thanks for the tip, RFE). I was told via Twitter that the ad was very believable in its portrayal of Estonian life (kidding!).
In Belgium, this quirky ad showcases an artist frying a steak to promote cobra.be, a culture site with content from Belgium’s state broadcaster. The theme in this campaign seems to be that whenever someone famous in Belgium - like actress Marie Vinck - Cobra.be will be there to cover it.
These nice videos (with subtitles, helpfully!) come from Brazil, where they promote O Globo. It is the biggest newspaper in Brazil.
This one is my favorite. I love the action of the “mouse” picking up trash or helping students. The ad shows the paper as a partner for motivated citizens.
This one promotes O Globo as being more than “just the paper” in a newspaper
This cheeky ad comes from France, where it advertises Le Monde Magazine. The tagline is “Bring the world into focus.” It seems to be a big hit online; the two YouTube versions of it that I’ve found each have more than 50,000 views.
Finally for now, these ads promoting the international TV channel Russia Today are causing a stir in the United Kingdom. The theme here is promoting Russia Today as a channel whose journalists ask tough questions and challenge commonly held beliefs.
Kathlyn Clore
::why not::
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