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Making Gov look good proves costly to taxpayers

by amy | 12:32 pm, January 3, 2010

Governor Bill Ritter spent more than $200,000 on TV, photographs and videos of himself, an Associated Press investigation revealed.   According to AP, “taxpayers paid that amount for photos of the Democratic governor signing bills and attending a lavish production for the state film commission.”
Also revealed in the story, the Bawmann Group, which COST reported on a [...]

Newspaper recognizes importance of transparency

by amy | 10:31 am, December 28, 2009

The Greeley Tribune, in its Sunday house editorial, acknowledges the role that transparency played in the recent defeat of 3A, a massive property tax increase for Greeley Evans School District 6.
A lack of transparency in its financial records was one of the reasons some cited for voting against the recent mill levy override. It became evident during that [...]

Dear Dean Singleton, Please Charge Me

by Ari | 12:04 am, November 25, 2009

Westword’s Michael Roberts reports that “Dean Singleton… plans to start charging readers for lotsa online content at select MediaNews papers in California and Pennsylvania beginning in 2010.” This is relevant to us in Colorado because Singleton also publishes the Denver Post. Are fees for the online Post in our future?

God, I hope so.

Good journalism is hard work. Good investigative journalism is especially hard and time-consuming work. People tend not do do a lot of hard work without compensation. (I imagine Roberts would confirm this.) Thus, journalism needs to pay.

Journalism can pay in one of three general ways: advertising, philanthropic contributions, and reader payments. Advertising can be direct or indirect; for example, Michelle Malkin runs direct advertising, and her entire blog serves to advertise her books. (You’ll notice that I advertise my own book, Values of Harry Potter, on my web page. And it makes a fine addition to the tree or stocking!) I would be interested in learning how much of the Incredible Shrinking Westword’s revenues come from print versus online advertising. (While the weekly’s print edition has gotten noticeably smaller, its online content has expanded dramatically.)

I doubt anybody is going to make a generous gift to the Post.

That leaves reader contributions to supplement advertising revenues. These payments can be by the piece or via subscriptions.

As I suggested earlier, I think papers (and it’s funny even to still call them “papers”) should give readers a choice: watch an annoying ad, pay a monthly or annual subscription, or pay to read a single article at a time.

How is that not the best of all worlds? Cheapskates can still read content for free, except they have to pay with their time by watching a real advertisement. Regular readers can subscribe, preferably for a low annual rate (I would seriously consider paying, say, $50 per year to read the Post online). And occasional readers who value their time can pay some token amount — perhaps an amount that varies with the ambition of the piece — to read a single article. As I also mentioned before, the key to this is to figure out a very-fast way to make micropayments (else there is no time savings).

The fact is that readers who value good content and don’t want to waste time looking at ads will be prepared to pay to read that content. I absolutely hate the Post’s online ads that pop up, block text, push text down the page, and otherwise annoy the living hell out of me when all I’m trying to do is read a spot of news. I would much rather pay a little than deal with those sorts of ads.

I think it’s worth revisiting what Post editor Greg Moore said in September:

In terms of advertising being a means of supporting original [journalism]… right now advertising provides like 85 percent of our revenue. It’s still a huge, huge, huge driver. It’s a huge source of revenue. It’s going to be probably for a while. But I think our survival — and when I say survival I’m not talking about the newspaper, I’m talking about our ability to do journalism — I think we’ll have to shift to a different model. And I think that model is that the user will have to pay for the content that he or she consumes.

I don’t think that the cat is out of the bag. I think that the record industry sort of proved that, the music industry sort of proved that you can change people’s behavior. Napster, in the mid-1990s, everyone thought that would just sort of kill everything, and they put those people in jail, put them out of business, and now people pay for music. They do it differently — they don’t buy albums anymore, they buy singles, but they still pay a lot of money for music.

So I think there’s still hope for us, that we can sort of reverse this trend. As somebody said, I think the worst decision that was made by the owners of newspapers was to sort of be stampeded into giving away their content for free. But it doesn’t mean that it’s over.

Unfortunately, rather than quote somebody who knows what he’s talking about, such as Moore, Roberts quotes some clueless blog post by Rob Burgess.

Burgess quotes survey results from NewFiction:

80 percent of consumers recently surveyed by Forrester Research say they would discontinue their favorite free print content if they were asked to pay for it. Less than 10 percent of respondents would agree to subscription models; only three percent would opt for micropayments.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner nicely summarize the problem with this in their new book SuperFreakonomics: “There is good reason to be skeptical of data from personal surveys. There is often a vast gulf between how people say they behave and how they actually behave” (page 7).

If you ask people if they want to pay for something they now get for free, what do you expect them to say? They’re going to give you some variant of “no.”

But if a person actually has a choice of reading a great article and paying, versus not reading that article, in at least some cases the person is going to pay up and ask for more. (Again, I think newspapers would be smart to offer a third option of spending time watching an ad, probably in the form of a short video. These sorts of ads are already common on a variety of web pages.)

So Burgess’s first argument is bunk. Let us turn to his second argument:

You ruined everything in the beginning by starting with giving everything away for free. It has now been almost 15 years since the Internet broke wide and you’re just NOW getting around to asking people to pay for your content? I don’t blame people for not wanting to pay for it anymore, why should they? Who would pay for something they can get for free?

The options are not “get free content” versus “pay for content.” The other option is “get no content,” at least as far as investigative journalism is concerned. With that as the alternative, paying doesn’t look so bad after all. People “should” pay, and they should be willing to, if that’s the only way to get hard-to-produce content they want to read. (Again, easy-to-produce content will remain free, and ads can help pay for hard-to-produce content.)

What Burgess seems to think ridiculous is Singleton’s comment, “We have to condition readers that everything is not free.” But Singleton’s comment is perfectly sensible. Moore uses the example of paying for music online. Today many people pay to receive television stations that they could otherwise get for free, because the reception is better and the broadcast stations are packaged with cable-only stations. Consumers change their behavior all the time, even (or especially) after they say they won’t.

There ain’t no such thing as free journalism. If journalists aren’t willing to work without compensation, philanthropists don’t pay, and advertising doesn’t pay enough, the only alternative is for readers to pay, if they want the benefit of the product.

Really advertising is a way of extracting a payment of time from readers. Again, I think papers should offer that alternative. I would much rather pay in dollars, as for me that would be the far less costly alternative.

Could Micropayments Save Newspapers?

by Ari | 9:54 am, October 31, 2009

At last month’s media panel, somebody (I believe Adrienne Russell) mentioned the idea of micropayments for online media content. Such payments might help save the newspaper industry as well as help fund better bloggers.

The idea is that readers would pay a small fee — say a quarter or fifty cents — to read an article online. A popular story that drew a hundred thousand readers could do quite well for a publication.

Consider how the Wall Street Journal presents its news stories. It gives you the headline and the opening sentences, then asks you to subscribe. But I don’t subscribe to that paper, because I rarely want to read one of its news stories (and its opinions are available for free). But, if I could pay a small, one-time fee to read the occasional story, I’d probably pay that paper a few dollars per year. That’s not a lot, but multiplied by a few hundred thousand extra readers it could add up. Indeed, newspapers could offer monthly subscriptions for regular readers as well as micropayments for occasional readers.

At the media panel, Greg Moore of the Denver Post said a couple of things of particular interest to this issue. First, he said that newspapers might have to print less frequently. Second, readers would have to pay for online content, eventually, for newspapers to survive and thrive. I can envision a newspaper that goes to press, say, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. The print edition would be stuffed with ads, comics, classifieds, crosswords — stuff people like to touch and feel. They would be big, perhaps nearly as many pages as seven days runs now, so subscription rates could at least stay even while production and distribution costs dropped dramatically. This would be the answer to traditionalists, who actually enjoy getting their hands dirty reading the paper. (I would as soon eat dinosaur eggs for breakfast.)

Under such a scheme, the Post would raise revenue from print and online ads, print and online subscriptions, online only subscriptions, and micropayments for individual stories. Publications that used micropayments would probably want to make some significant portion of its content available for free.

Bloggers (the kind with actual readers) and strictly online publications might also be able to employ micropayments for more ambitious stories.

The key to micropayments, of course, is to make them easy. A PayPal account might get the job done, or perhaps PayPal could adapt its existing program to make micropayments easier. Most people aren’t going to pay a small fee to read an article unless it’s as easy as clicking a button or maybe two.

One publication that has already combined ads, micropayments, and subscriptions is The Objective Standard. The publication shows the first part of an article online for no cost. To read the entire article, one must subscribe or “Purchase a PDF of this article” for, in this case, $4.95. (Micropayments for journal articles or specialty articles can be higher than for regular newspaper stories.)

The more I think about it, the more I love the idea of micropayments. Don’t saddle me with a long-term commitment. I have enough of those. Don’t litter my screen with pop ups and flashing lights trying to sell me crap. (That said, a third option to a subscription or a micropayment might be to watch, say, a thirty second video advertising some product before reading the article. I notice that Fox already does this for online video.) Just give me the option of paying a small fee to read something that interests me.

This article has been brought to you at no cost by FreeColorado.com.

Just Marketing

by amy | 9:36 am, October 24, 2009

COST learned that the $800,000 plus Colorado paid to the Bawmann Group on behalf of the Departments of Health Care Financing and Human Services was for marketing and not crisis communication.  According to Brad Bawmann, head of the Bawmann Group, services provided, mostly to Human Services, included “promoting the Promoting Responsible Fatherhood Campaign (www.coloradodads.com), LEAP, [...]

Activism and Writing Letters to the Editor

by Ari | 3:20 pm, October 14, 2009

I led an “Activism and LTE Workshop” October 6 (thank to the Independence Institute for lending me the space). Here are my modified notes.

The type of activism we should pursue is Intellectual Activism, marked by presenting reasonable arguments based on logic and evidence to the public. The goal is to reach active minds in the culture through various means of communication.

Intellectual activism may be contrasted with a couple of bad types of activism. Intimidation is what we think of regarding the typical far-left protest, where the goal is to scare people, break property, and throw stuff at police. Any sort of threat or violence falls into this sort of bad activism.

Sophistic or postmodern activism uses language as a battering ram or a weapon to change policies, irrespective of the facts. This is the modern version of what the Greek Sophists did: use language to persuade people through deceit and trickery rather than through sound arguments. On the left, this sort of activism is marked by postmodernism, using language as a social tool rather than as a means of conveying the truth. This sort of activism involves distorting statistics, cherry picking data, taking quotes out of context, and pushing logical fallacies. This sort of activism often relies upon crafting some “narrative” to spin one’s policies or vilify one’s opponents, as with calling opponents of Obamacare an unruly mob. Closely related is the obsession with unfounded conspiracy theories.

The primary goal of intellectual activism is to present the case for liberty and individual rights to the public. Generally this is done by presenting arguments in written or oral form. Other goals of intellectual activism can be to promote a positive article, person, or group, or to draw attention to some cause.

Many types of activism can be good or bad depending on the context. For example, rallies can be great, but if the participants are off message they can be counterproductive. Partisanship, or beating up the other side, can be appropriate if partisan attacks are rooted in the facts and if they put principles above politics.

So what are the types of intellectual activism? This can best be seen in graphic form (thanks to my wife Jennifer for creating the image):

tree

The image illustrates the roots of activism, the main three divisions — activist training, politics, and mass communication — and the written and oral branches of mass communication.

Note that one particular campaign of intellectual activism can involve multiple branches. For example, promoting a good article written by an ally might involve writing a blog post, posting a social media link, and mentioning the article in a letter to an elected official.

Obviously, intellectual activists generally specialize in a few branches, though a well-rounded activist can swing easily among various branches.

Writing letters to the editor is one small branch of the tree, but it is an important one. The ability to write a good letter to the editor is an essential skill of any good activist. If you can write a good letter, you can also write a good blog post, learn to write a good op-ed, and translate your skills to oral communication. That is why the workshop I led focussed on developing this skill.

I recorded my presentation on writing letters, so I’ll turn the reader over to those YouTube videos. Some of my material finds inspiration on the article by Robert W. Tracinski, “How to Write an Effective Letter to the Editor.”

Part 1

Part 2

Transparency: It’s a good question

by amy | 3:30 pm, October 6, 2009

“Why does Governor Ritter have to be dragged kicking and screaming into transparency?” asked our big boss Jon Caldara.
Investigative reporter Todd Shepherd exposed Ritter’s latest battle against transparency.  Shepherd discovered that Ritter and his administration have virtually ignored a Governor Bill Owens executive order requiring that “all cabinet members as well as senior staff members [...]

Media Panel: Discussion Continues

by Ari | 9:06 am, October 6, 2009

The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition hosted a media panel September 24 at the Tattered Cover in Denver. Previously I transcribed my opening comments and added a quick answer to a participant who asked whether she should enter journalism. Here I continue my review of the discussion.

First, though, as an aside, just yesterday I heard about the Nevada News Bureau, edited by conservative Elizabeth Crum (whom I met at the Sam Adams Alliance earlier this year). This service allows free, attributed reproduction of content. The about page states: “We’re launching this news service in part because the owners of newspapers and television news teams have, in many cases, cut back on statehouse reporting and investigative journalism which in turn has eroded their ability to be a true ‘watchdog’ for the voter and taxpayer. … The Nevada News Bureau is a non-profit project of Citizen Outreach, a 501(c)(3) exempt organization.” So, I don’t know anything about that nonprofit, and I don’t know what caliber of journalism the service will produce, but it struck me as an interesting model.

Now on with the media panel discussion. I’m pulling quotes from the longer recording, and again these quotes are slightly redacted to ease the transition to text.

Adrienne Russell added weight to my point that independent writers often conduct original journalism: “What are bloggers going to do if mainstream journalism dies [one of the questions asked]? I think anyone who knows anybody who is an online journalist knows many many cases of journalism stories that break into the larger news media landscape that actually originated in the blogosphere. And most often times, it’s not even traced back to that after the first couple hours or the first day.”

Russell continued:

I think what I want to try to focus on for my few minutes is…. [journalism's] role as a public service or a public interest. … What is the future of newspapers? But I think what obviously we really should be asking is, what is the future of journalism, and its ability to facilitate, and further, and make for a healthy public discourse, in this democracy and all over the world. …

I think those two questions go hand in hand. But recently there have been all these stats that have come out, specifically one recently from the Pew Foundation… report that says that web traffic to the highest ranked news sites has gone up 27 percent from 2007 to 2008. And so what does that tell us? I’m actually not a huge stats fan, I usually don’t throw them around. I’m more of a cultural studies person. But what does that tell us? It tells us that people are still interested in news.

And also I recently read that the Columbia journalism program, the masters degree program, got almost twice as many applicants this year as they did last year, which also signifies something about our attitude, and our understanding, and our relationship with journalism in this country.

… I think that the question of the business model has to look beyond newspapers, and has to look at all of these great examples that are actually emerging and beginning to flourish. Like, whether or not you like the politics associated with them, or you think they could be sustained in this giant model, things like the Colorado Independent, the Huffington Post, Slate — there’s all these examples of journalism that is flourishing, that is serious journalism. … One of the better examples is ProPublica…

So probably what needs to happen is, traditional news organizations need to keep paying really close attention to what’s going on with these successful models, whether they be for profit or not for profit. …

Like Ari said, this is a time of innovation and great flourishing in terms of journalism, if not the journalism industry as we know it. And one of the reasons for this is that the new media technology, which is so often framed as threatening journalism as we know it, is creating these new possibilities for people to get involved in creating media. …

So I think embedded in one of your questions was this idea of, are we just going to be inundated with this information that hasn’t yet been debunked, and what are we going to do with it, and how are we going to… function without the filters that we’ve come to depend on. An the answer to this, to me, is that we’re all, not only having an increased capacity to create media, but in that process we’re learning how to assess it. So we’re learning — we have to learn a higher level of media literacy. So, in that way, we’re so much more engaged in the media landscape than we ever could be.

And the old model was great in certain respects, but I think we all know that it also privileged particular sectors of society, it propped up the status quo, it’s failed us in major ways. In ways I’m not sure that is possible anymore, given the dynamic environment where people are actually contributing. …

Dominic Graziano feared that his classes aren’t preparing future journalists for new media. He also said he thinks more people are applying to graduate school “because there’s no jobs.” Russell said at least “they must have a faith that there will be [jobs available] some day.”

Graziano continued:

The points that we’re making about how journalism — decent, investigative journalism — can still be seen on the internet… I truly believe that. … But, my problem as a student at least, is [this.] We can take this upon ourselves. Every citizen can take it upon themselves to look into whatever they believe deserves looking into, and write a story about it. The question is where does the money come from. As a blogger… you’re not going to get corporate sponsorship. …

I can spend weeks up on weeks researching a story, and doing interviews, and stuff like that, and post it up on my blog, and it can get picked up by CNN, or the Post, and they can spend eighty bucks as a freelancer. …

The problem with getting rid of corporate journalism is you get rid of the possibility of a salary. And when everybody’s working freelance hours on freelance budgets, we will see a decrease… What happens when we’re not covering everything? What happens when we can’t be at every [hearing?] in the courtroom? … Where are people going to get this information? … That’s really what concerns me the most about the future of journalism.

Ari talks about bloggers being able to provide feedback to content that’s being published. But when that content isn’t being published, when bloggers are responsible for all that content, it’s going to turn into very partisan arguments… People will visit the websites that either completely support what they already believe, or [are] completely against what they already believe, in order just to argue with it.

We need to focus a lot more on balanced reporting, fair reporting, in-depth reporting. And my fear, as a student, and as a journalist, is that as everything moves away from these media giants, is you lose the ability to pay somebody to do a good job.

I thought of the fact that newspapers of old tended to be overtly partisan, but I never saw the opportunity to discuss this point at the forum.

Wendy Norris followed:

… I think there is a crisis in our nation around critical thinking. And that hits on the editorial/journalistic side, and that hits on the readership side. People are too willing to believe whatever is delivered to them, whether it’s in the newspaper, or a blog, or on television. And I think Tom’s example of Justice Sotomayor is a very good example of that. It’s very easy to find that speech online and learn that those remarks were taken completely out of context.

And I think that we talk a lot in this country about First Amendment rights, but there are also responsibilities with the First Amendment. And I think that if we’re going to find a new way to deliver news content — and I’m a huge proponent of blowing up what we’ve got now and starting anew, because it just simply does not work in this era — then we need to be really honest about what it is that we’re trying to do and what it is as news consumers that we want.

Norris said that even when working with a nonprofit organization, “I had to fight constantly to do the kind of investigative reporting that I thought was important for this community to have access to.” She said that readers have a responsibility to support something better than fluff and sensationalism.

Greg Moore rounded out the introductory remarks:

I’m really surprised that so many people are out tonight. I think it’s great, and to see so many young people in the audience is really heartening.

The first question was, what will become of the newspaper business model in the next five to ten years? Is there any hope for advertising as a means of supporting original reporting? And then the whole thing about public or nonprofit subsidization.

I don’t believe, first, that we’re in a post-journalism era. We are not. And I don’t think we’ll ever be in a post-journalism era. It may take on different forms or be done by a disaggregated sort of collection of people like what we’re beginning to see now. But there’re always going to be things happening that we didn’t know, or that we’re intensely interested in. We’ll always be looking for people to help us understand what’s happening.

In the next five to ten years, I think that newspapers will be still around. I think there’s something about the authentication of an event that is really important. I’ll just give you an example. When Barack Obama won the election, that was posted online. But people were lined up in our lobby to get a newspaper. Why? Because 100 years from now, would you rather have a printout from this blog or whatever, or would you rather have a 92-point headline that declares the election of the first black president? That’s simple.

If your kid runs for 350 yards for the football game, do you want a printout that could have been manipulated or whatever, or would you want it in a newspaper? You’d want it in a newspaper.

So I think there’ll be newspapers. I think we’ll be smaller. I think we probably will come out less frequently. I think it’ll cost more. I think the notion of being a paper of record, of trying to cover every city council meeting and things of that nature, will increasingly be left to bloggers and other sort of independent gatherers of news and information. …

In terms of advertising being a means of supporting original [journalism]… right now advertising provides like 85 percent of our revenue. It’s still a huge, huge, huge driver. It’s a huge source of revenue. It’s going to be probably for a while. But I think our survival — and when I say survival I’m not talking about the newspaper, I’m talking about our ability to do journalism — I think we’ll have to shift to a different model. And I think that model is that the user will have to pay for the content that he or she consumes.

I don’t think that the cat is out of the bag. I think that the record industry sort of proved that, the music industry sort of proved that you can change people’s behavior. Napster, in the mid-1990s, everyone thought that would just sort of kill everything, and they put those people in jail, put them out of business, and now people pay for music. They do it differently — they don’t buy albums anymore, they buy singles, but they still pay a lot of money for music.

So I think there’s still hope for us, that we can sort of reverse this trend. As somebody said, I think the worst decision that was made by the owners of newspapers was to sort of be stampeded into giving away their content for free. But it doesn’t mean that it’s over.

In terms of public or nonprofit subsidization, I think it’s still an open question. We’re sort of like still the nascent stages of that. I stood on the advisory board of ProPublica, and I think that it’s a really interesting experiment. We’ve published some of their stories. I think they do good work. But they look more like old media than new media. I think that’s important to acknowledge.

I also think it’s really sort of hard assess what the future’s going to be like, because the people who work for ProPublica are some of the best old media print journalists ever. And so that whole thing about a firewall between the people who pay for the news operation and the people who gather the news operation is really scrupulously adhered to. …

Second question is about the internet. Is what we see on the internet from sources other than mainstream media really journalism? I will say, yeah, it is. It’s a different kind of journalism. But, when we put together our newspaper, it’s a menu of things. While I would not necessarily describe everything that’s being done by bloggers as journalism, I think it’s content generation. And it’s interesting content. Sometimes it does lead to stories in mainstream media.

And I might add that bloggers have existed since the beginning of newspapers; they wrote letters to the editor. … There’s always them, when you write a story, somebody out there who knows a lot about a little. They know a lot. And they can finds things you left out of a story, they can find things you got wrong. So bloggers don’t bother me. I don’t have any problem with blogging. But what will bloggers do and cable commentators do? They’ll just do what they’ve been doing. And hopefully they’ll do it a little bit better.

But here’s the big distinction. And you can deride corporate journalism if you want to. But the thing about corporate journalism is that you have a support structure to do tough things. That’s my lawyer, okay? I mean, I pay him a lot of money to open doors, to stop people from trying to prevent us from publishing stories. And the question is, what’s the structure an independent blogger has? What happens when you’re trying to write a really tough story, and they say, you know, I’m going to sue your butt off? I’m going to take your house, I’m going to take your car, I’m going to take everything? Does that journalism get done? Well, it’s much more likely with the sort of support structure that we have — corporate journalism — that we can. …

What do we need to do to keep the public service component of newspapers alive? We need money. You know, what I always say is, a free press ain’t free. It costs a lot of money to do journalism that matters.

And to your point, that newspapers or journalism has supported the status quo, I vigorously disagree with that. I think that newspapers and journalism is about challenging the status quo. It always has been. …

We’re not entering a post-journalism era. We are entering a post-fact era, where facts aren’t really that important to a lot of people. And I don’t mean that they don’t care about facts, they just care about the facts that agree with their position. And there’s this really interesting book that’s out that’s called… True Enough. And it talks about sort of the belief society, where people actually won’t let in information that challenges things that they believe, and only accept information that sort of supports their point. … So we’re in a post-fact era, and I think we run the risk of getting in really deep trouble by only letting in stuff that we agree with.

I think that one of the things that sort of contributes to a vigorous democracy is finding out about things that challenge your assumptions. That make you question what you believe. And I worry about the silo mentality that seems to be developing in this post-fact society. …

I will say this about the Sotomayor quote. … The day after the story came out, when Newt Gingrich accused her of being a racist, we read the speech. We read the speech — we do have time to do good journalism. We read the speech, and we actually wrote a story that said that’s out of context. Here is what she said. Here is what she meant. Here’s what she said before, here’s what she said after. And that’s really what journalism’s about. Journalism is about the business of verification. And we as a society can’t afford to lose that.

During the questions I offered one final push (and this is where I’ll leave things here):

One big issue that we’re talking about here is this idea of impartiality or disinterestedness, versus partisanship. … I think that, as a goal, disinterestedness is completely wrong. If you’re disinterested, that just means that you’re lazy and you don’t care about the story. What you ought to be is passionately interested in obtaining the truth.

So it’s not about being disinterested versus being partisan. It’s about, are you looking for the truth, or not? And I totally agree with Greg Moore that we do need some larger media enterprises with these checks and balances, with good editors. Because there are a lot of bloggers who just don’t have the discipline to write good stuff. …

That doesn’t mean that a large organization is overcoming this partisanship. I’ve seen some what I consider overtly partisan “news” stories in the pages of the Denver Post. … You’re not going to escape the problem by having big media versus little media. The difference is, is the individual reporter going to go after the facts.

So I’m overtly partisan. I mean, that’s why I do journalism, because I’m a political activist. I’m an advocacy journalist. I’m oriented toward free markets and individual rights. That’s my thing. So, for instance, I did a lot of original research into corporate welfare in Colorado. …

Instead of having a distinction of disinterestedness versus partisanship, I would like to make another distinction, which is the straight, easy, fact-based news… versus more of the analysis, the integration of the facts. Now, with that integration of the facts, that’s a lot harder, and that’s where we get into a lot more disagreement. So that’s why I love reading Colorado Independent, Westword (some writers at Westword tend to have sort of a left-wing bent), but I love reading these publications because they look up good facts, and that’s useful to me. I mean, a fact’s a fact, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican, Democrat, right winger, left winger.

I’d like to briefly address the Sotomayor issue, just because that illustrates what we’re talking about. So, if you tend to lean toward the left, and you’re reading a publication that tends to lean toward the left, and it says that a quote by Sotomayor is out of context, it’s like, “Yes, we’re all right, and everybody who’s beating up Sotomayor is wrong.” But, you know what, I read that speech too… I’ve done a detailed analysis of that speech on my web page. … And the fact is that she is basically a judicial subjectivist. That’s what she is, and she repeats the point over and over again, in many different ways. So the broader point is not out of context. …

So one of the complaints is we filter the facts according to our perception. But a lot of people saying this, and beating up the other side, are doing the exact same thing, right? So it’s a mirror that we need to hold up to ourselves too. … Whether we’re partisans overtly or unnamed partisans, I think that that’s very very important.

Headline: Taxpayers don’t need more transparency

by amy | 4:11 pm, October 5, 2009

Greeley Tribune publisher Bart Smith criticized taxpayers who demand more transparency in the face of 3A, a massive property tax increase for Greeley Evans School District 6.  In an opinion editorial urging a yes vote, Smith reveals his own naive understanding of transparency in Colorado. 
Others who say they want more transparency show their lack of knowledge of how [...]

Light in the Digital Age: Media Panel

by Ari | 1:08 pm, September 30, 2009

I joined a media panel September 24 at Tattered Cover in downtown Denver. There were a few sparks. I sat right next to fellow panelist Greg Moore, which was a great position to heap abuse on the Denver Post (which Moore edits). One guy treated the question period as his personal monologue time and finally was asked to leave with security.

Yet the panelists also shared much common ground, and the discussion was interesting. Here I recount much of it. (Due to the fact that I sat on the panel, I was unable to capture any photographs or video of the event.)

The event was sponsored by the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition and moderated Thomas Kelley. The other panelists were Wendy Norris, founding editor of the Colorado Independent; Dominic Graziano, editor of the campus Metropolitan; and Adrienne Russell, a professor at the University of Denver.

The title of the event was ominous: “Darkness in the Digital Age: Has the Advent of Citizen Journalism, the Blogosphere, and the Demise of Newspapers Made Us Less Well-Informed?” When Kelley asked us for our comments beforehand, I send back a note, “I do not see ‘darkness’ in the digital age, but more light. The average person can much more easily obtain quality news and views than ever before in human history.”

In case you’re wondering how I came to sit on a panel with the likes of Greg Moore, here’s what Kelley said in his introduction: “Finally we have Ari Armstrong, a writer of several prolific and eloquent blogs, some say veering toward the right. I find him to be thoughtful.” This elicited a chuckle. So I was the token conservative (even though, as I later noted, I’m not really a conservative). At any rate I was delighted to be invited, and Kelley ran an informative and well-attended event.

Prior to the event, Kelley sent out some questions to set the tone for the evening:

1. What will become of the newspaper business model in the next five to ten years? Is there any hope for advertising as a means of supporting original reporting? Is public or non-profit subsidization the answer?

2. Is what we see on the internet from sources other than mainstream media really journalism? Are we entering a “post-journalism” era? If the industry of independent reporting is dying, where are the bloggers and the cable commentators going to get their content?

3. What do we need to keep the public service component (by that I mean digging out information on all subjects of public interest and reporting it according to a code of ethics that requires disinterest) of the newspaper business alive?

4. What is the cultural effect of a post-journalism era? Are we becoming more partisan, less broadly educated, and more exposed to un-debunked bogus information?

By luck of the draw, I spoke first. Following are my (slightly redacted) comments. In a follow-up post I’ll continue with the comments of other panelists.

One of the questions that was asked of us in e-mail prior to the event had to do with what’s going to happen now — it’s kind of a “woe is us” scenario — what’s happening now that many newspapers are going out of business. I think the title is “Darkness in the Digital Age.” … To me, I see a lot of lightness in the digital age. So that’s kind of the theme that I want to focus on.

To me, there’s been no better time, ever, to be a consumer of journalism. Today I read articles from the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Denver Post, Denver Daily, Westword, Colorado Independent, and I could probably name a dozen others if I’d kept track of that during the day.

At the click of a button you can read the best quality journalism in the world, which you simply couldn’t do before [the interent]. I remember years ago, stringing a telephone line to my computer, and that was pre-internet. So now we have more opportunity than ever as consumers of news.

But then of course there’s the problem of if you’re a professional journalist. I guess we’re shipping some more of ours off to Canada these days, from the old [Rocky Mountain News] positions. So there are definitely some transitional problems here.

I’m sure other people here know more about the industry. But I just wanted to mention a few examples of how other publications are solving these problems.

So the Wall Street Journal has in fact gone to paid, online subscriptions, and then they make their editorial content available for free.

The weeklies, Westword and Boulder Weekly, seem to be doing pretty well with a combination of online ads and print ads. But they have less printing costs, obviously. And the Westword has cut back, obviously, too.

Other things like NPR, Face the State on the right, Progress Now on the left (which does some journalism), operate by philanthropy. And this is great. So I tend to be free-market oriented, but to me voluntary charity, philanthropy, is a perfectly legitimate part of the free market.

I just looked up the Christian Science Monitor. They’re going from a print publication to a strictly online publication. But they do have a subsciption-based weekly publication, and they also will charge you for a “Daily News Briefing” for $5.75 per month. So I don’t know if that’s going to work for them, but there are certainly people who are trying to find the balance between philanthropy, online advertising, print advertising [and subscriptions].

I’m going to jump now to one of these points that was mentioned prior to us coming on, which is: What’s going to happen if the flow of journalism stops going from established newspapers to bloggers? I want to say that that whole premise is basically false.

There’s not a one-way flow of information. There’s a two-way flow of information. Now it’s true that a lot of bloggers tend to focus on commentary, which means they’re integrating news facts that they’re reading around them, such as Mike Littwin might do at the Denver Post or the editorial staff might do. So it’s a similar function.

But that’s not the only function. Just like Mike Littwin might do original journalism, original investigative work, so bloggers might do the same thing. And often the journalism flow is coming back to the newspapers. So I’m just going to give a few examples here.

Last year, Katy Human of the Denver Post wrote an article about health insurance, and about the effects of children and health insurance, and the effects of not having any. And she mentioned these studies that prove her point. Well, the studies sounded a little bit fishy to me, so I sent her an e-mail and said, hey, why don’t you send me what the list of your studies is. And she hemmed and hawed, and finally I sent an e-mail to David Kopel and Jason Salzman, because at the time they were the media critics at the [Rocky Mountain News], and finally she was persuaded to hand over her studies.

But then David Kopel wrote up a follow up for the Rocky, pointing out that none of the studies supported her point.

So this is an example I thought of bloggers and people on the editorial side sending feedback to the journalism side of the news.

I’ll just give one more example. The Denver Post published an op-ed by a guy named T. R. Reid (again on the health policy issue, since that’s what’s hot). [Read my critique.] And he completely misstated international comparisons on waiting times for elective surgeries. Now I know this because I looked it up. I did the research, I looked at the original sources, and I found the real stats. He simply misstated them. And he also omitted stats on emergency visits and specialists. Unfortunately, the Denver Post chose not to run my letter correcting that piece. But nevertheless the flow of journalism goes both ways.

I wanted to quickly run through a few examples of some real journalism being done by bloggers. And I also contribute to a group of vaguely right-wing, conservative bloggers called the People’s Press Collective. So I want to mention several examples.

If you want to hear what people are saying at some of these rallies — the tax rallies, Tea Party rallies — there’s really no other place to look, if you want extended interviews with the actual participants, than my web page. [Listen to interviews from 4/15, 7/4, 7/28, 8/6, and 9/12.] Because I got my video camera, interviewed them extensively, and had a lot of them published online. The Denver Post maybe quoted one or two people in very short snippets (and that’s just the nature of the medium). So that’s one example of positive journalism.

When an economists named Thomas Woods came to Colorado to speak about his new book on economics, I looked up some of his older articles in which he blasted abolitionists and was praising antebellum culture. So I thought that was a little odd. I thought that was worth looking up as a journalistic enterprise.

Earlier this year, in response to a CNN report, I conducted my own “Low-Carb Food Stamp Diet.” Now this was more proactive, obviously — I was part of the story. But I thought it was a fun way to illustrate some of the facts surrounding the story.

In 2007, I solicited and published a letter from Mark Udall about the separation of church and state, which I thought was a pivotal issue in that election.

So you heard about the vandalism at the Denver Democratic Headquarters. Thankfully Denver police caught the [alleged] perpetrator, the name of Schwenkler. One of my friends, Michael Sandoval, did some searching online and found that this character had been paid by a left-wing organization to do Democratic campaign work. So this was an important break in a big story.

I’ll just give one more. A guy named Todd Shepherd, who actually works for the Independence Institute, recently found that Jared Polis, the congressman up in the Boulder area, was investing in medical tourism, meaning companies that specialize in taking people to other countries to get medical treatment. Which I thought was an interesting detail given the current national debates.

My main point here is that journalism works both ways. Independents and bloggers can feed back journalism to newspapers, and they can do their own original investigative reporting. And this is a great thing. So, while it stinks if you were an employee of the Rocky Mountain News (and I don’t know if the Post is looking at any layoffs, hopefully not), in the world of independent writing and blogging, there’s been an explosion of great content.

NPR Gets Liberty On the Rocks Reaction to Obama’s Health Speech

by Ari | 8:21 am, September 10, 2009

NPR reporter Jeff Brady watched Barack Obama’s health address to Congress with members of the Denver Tech Liberty on the Rocks. He interviewed numerous participants and quoted three in his report.

Amanda Teresi, founder of Liberty On the Rocks, explained why forcing insurers to ignore pre-existing conditions runs contrary to the basic purpose of insurance: “The idea is that it’s health insurance. And the whole concept of insurance is that you get it before you get sick, or before something happens to you. It would be the equivalent of not having any car insurance, hitting a tree, and then calling Geico and saying you want to sign up. It doesn’t make sense.”

(I’ve written a first and second article on the topic.)

T. L. James suggested that Obama’s comments about tort reform won’t amount to much. James told Brady, “Tort lawyers fund an important part of the Democratic power base, their funding base for their elections. There is no way that he’s going to do anything that’s going to turn them away from the Democratic party.”

Finally, Orin Ray said he didn’t think Obama’s speech really changed anybody’s mind.

Brady did a nice job with his brief report. However, I wish he had mentioned the more fundamental issues. The fact that Obama wants to force everybody to buy politically-controlled insurance is a huge deal, as is the fact that Obama wants to expand subsidies. Nor did Brady mention the political causes of today’s problems in medicine, or that Massachusetts has already tried — and failed — to successfully implement Obama’s key “reforms.” (I discussed all of these issues with Brady.) Yet Brady didn’t have much time for his portion of the report, and he was basically fair.

“Rocky Times for Colorado News Media” panel discussion recap

by The Peripatetic Pundit | 8:00 pm, May 2, 2009

“What forces in America’s economy and culture are threatening the survival of newspapers and diverting audiences to other information sources? What are the consequences for us as citizens in a free society?”
Former Rocky Mountain News alternating ombudsmen David Kopel and Jason Salzman led a short (one-hour) discussion on the topic of declining newspaper readership and [...]

W.R. Grace Deficit Commercial – Prescient, and Delightfully Creepy

by T.L. James | 10:57 pm, April 6, 2009

I don’t remember seeing this commericial when it was originally on…

…but I was surprised to discover that it had been made in 1986. By Ridley Scott.
It looks newly-made, and it certainly fits the current situation. And it has a catchy retro feel to it, as if it had been made on the set of Dune  [...]

Sheeple Watch #9: The Most Platitudinous Administration in History

by T.L. James | 7:24 am, December 25, 2008

I sure am glad that we as a country have replaced the moronic and secretive George W. Bush with a President willing to share the details of his policies and plans:

The president-elect has held a record number of press conferences, and quite naturally he has earned lavish public praise for the frequency of his appearances. [...]



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