Let me first associate myself with Matt Yglesias’s remarks here:

The trouble is that when journalists talk about journalism, they talk about it from the producer point of view. What Google does, from the media-as-production point of view, really isn’t much better than what the paper boy does. But from the consumer point of view, having a paper boy who will fetch any paper you want in the world, for free, at any time, and open the paper to the page you were looking for, is a massive improvement.

This points to what’s going to happen to those newspapers, like the New York Times, that have any hope of surviving. You hear people worrying about how few papers still have foreign bureaus, and wondering what will happen when the Times and the few other papers that maintain a lot of foreign desks are forced to shutter them. In fact, it’s very hard to justify keeping them open—from a financial perspective, of course, but from a journalistic perspective as well.

The Times’s London bureau has maybe a half-dozen reporters covering everything that happens in Britain. When there’s an important story they cover it; when there isn’t they write features on random topics. What service are the bureau’s employees providing for the Times’s readers?

Let’s say you were designing the New York Times from scratch. Would you begin from the assumption that all the reporting on matters British should be done by paid employees of the New York Times Company? Or would you arrange for a Times editor in New York to pore over the many fine British newspapers, extract the most relevant content, and present it to readers? Has the London bureau produced any significant scoops in the past decade? What about Paris or Sydney or any other bureau in a place that’s well-served by local media?

The Times’s Baghdad bureau is doing heroic and irreplaceable work. The Times’s London bureau, on the other hand, is duplicating some small fraction of the labor done by perfectly competent British journalists.

October 11, 2009 ▮ media

This article on Slate attempts to answer the question “Are blackboards more environmentally friendly than whiteboards?” It’s a perfect encapsulation of everything that’s wrong with the environmental movement. Representative chunk:

As with mechanical pencils—the subject of the Lantern’s last back-to-school column—the main issue here is the plastic: Plastic manufacturing requires petroleum, a nonrenewable resource.

(Hard to believe I missed that column on mechanical pencils! Click at once!)

Look: if saving the planet requires billions of individuals to interrogate every decision they make, up to and including the decision to purchase a blackboard or a whiteboard, the planet is obviously doomed.

Fortunately, there are mechanisms by which we can coordinate the decisions of many people at once. A crude one is regulation—making it illegal for people to sell blackboards, or whiteboards, or whichever one we’ve decided is marginaly worse for the environment. A more sophisticated one is through taxation. If petroleum were taxed, then whiteboards (or blackboards, or whichever uses more plastic) would become incrementally more expensive than blackboards (or etc.), and so people would buy fewer whiteboards (etc.) without having to write to “environmental-advice columnists” in online magazines before buying a fucking whiteboard.

Unfortunately, a meaningful number of people get off on their own self-righteousness, and these people have enough free time to read and write columns about how to make sure your smallest decision is maximally virtuous, and so other people will continue to believe that meaningful environmental change requires them to devote their free time to making meaningless comparisons of consumer goods, and the constituency that supports environmental measures will be confined to middle-class people looking to gratify their ethical vanity.

September 11, 2009 ▮ media, politics

NYT: “Polls show that Mr. Obama is more popular than his own policies, a worrisome sign for a president with such an ambitious agenda.”

Would it be a better sign if Obama were less popular than his own policies? Or is it worrisome if there’s any discrepancy in either direction?

July 22, 2009 ▮ media, politics

Josh Marshall hears that Harry Reid’s giving up on a bipartisan health care bill and getting tough on wavering Dems:

When your Leader files cloture, you support him. If you want political cover, vote against final passage.

Roll Call has a similar story.

This is obviously the right thing to do given the Republicans Reid has to work with, but it puts health care reform in a precarious position.

If Reid lines up exactly 60 votes to block a filibuster, every Democrat has a chance to be the guy who saves the private insurance industry. Voters don’t pay attention to cloture votes; you can block a filibuster and still say you voted against the health care bill. But you know who does pay attention? Lobbyists. So what happens if, say, Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) decides that after this term is up it might be nice to spend some time on the golf course while his family enjoys the kind of lifestyle that he just can’t provide on a senator’s salary? Taking a principled stand against your caucus starts to look pretty good at that point.

July 7, 2009 ▮ politics

The powder-blue column to the left of this post is where I’m collecting links that I think are worth your attention. Which allows me to reserve this column for the more <ahem> substantive aspects of the endeavor. Which means I’m not 100 percent sure what. But anyway: for the proper entertainment/reading pleasure, investigate Link Rodeo, to your left.

July 6, 2009 ▮ meta