The Awl

A Tale of Two Media Columnists

Choire Sicha — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 09:14:10 +0000

Outgoing Times executive editor Bill Keller's Sunday magazine column (which this week, on the topic of how the potential prosecution of Rupert Murdoch is going to ruin things for the press in the rest of the world, is an appeal to probability inside a false dilemma inside an argument to moderation inside an appeal to consequences) will end in a month. Super-smart guy! Not a fan of the column! In any event, there's a punchline to the news of the column's end that you wouldn't want to miss. Keller is off soon to the increasingly bland and Andy Rooney-ish op-ed pages.

If you would like a corrective to Keller's column, try today's David Carr column! It's bold: "James Murdoch is done. He and his father both know that." And more!

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Bill Keller, "Stop Whining," That's Not How Brains Work

Choire Sicha — Mon, 23 May 2011 12:00:25 +0000

"Here are two facts: (1) we now know from the new science of attention and the most recent findings in neuroscience that our brain is not, as was previously thought, an inheritance that come with all of its components fixed and certain; the brain is a learning organism and that means it is constantly changed by its environment, by what it experiences, by its interactions. But (2) except in B-horror movies ('The Brain that Wouldn't Die' or 'The Brain from Planet Arous' and so forth), the brain doesn't power itself and it doesn't power us. The brain R us. That is, what we experience our brain experiences."
—HASTAC co-founder, Duke prof and MacArthur Foundation advisor Cathy Davidson just couldn't let that last terrible column from Times executive editor Bill Keller pass.

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Man's Screed About Internet Stupidity Mocked on Internet

Choire Sicha — Wed, 18 May 2011 15:30:56 +0000

Important Editor: I Hate The Internet But Love Trolling. What Do You Think?less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplySeth Colter Walls
sethcolterwalls

"He just rolled up and trolled. He went into a venue where people have elected to be, and told everyone that their presence there makes them stupid. He then laments that he did not receive more positive responses from within that forum itself."
—Well, yes, here you go. As someone said earlier today, if Times mag editor Hugo Lindgren really wanted to be a big man, he could probably kick it up a notch by firing his boss and columnist, Bill Keller.

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Was the Pulitzer Jury Intentionally Nice to Everyone?

Choire Sicha — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 15:30:47 +0000

It used to be, back in the day (AKA like, 2008? And 2009?) that you had to get someone to sneakily send you a cruddy iPhone shot of the Times newsroom on Pulitzer day. Now they tweet it themselves. IN ANY EVENT, Executive Editor Bill Keller still has all his hair, despite the long nights he spends tearing at it whilst writing his daily (kidding!) column for the Times mag, and the paper was not snubbed this year, with two Pulitzers, including one shared by the eminently worthy Ellen Barry, the best reporter ever. There's a little something else for almost everyone in these here Pulitzers, in fact! You've got your Globes, your Washington Posts, your LA Times, even your Wall Street Journals. It's the feel-good Pulitzers of the decade! (Well, except for the Miami Herald, who were finalists in the "Breaking News" category this year, which was then not given an award at all.) It's almost like they decided to spread the love amongst all the fabled giants of old. (In other news, Jennifer Egan won for fiction!)

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Sally Singer Doesn't Want Stupid Eyeballs (Nor Should She)

Choire Sicha — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 11:20:57 +0000

Yay, it's a fun profile of T editor Sally Singer, possibly the last remaining truly interesting person in media! The one minor quibble I have with this discussion of the Times' fashion mag is the idea that intellectual reading might be menacing to its luxury advertisers. Who else do luxury brands want to reach but high-earning people who think they're smart? Singer addresses it well: "I think advertisers want to be in a magazine that is read by educated people who have the means to understand their product and possibly consume their product." Hello! One highly enjoyable thing is that Times executive editor Bill Keller basically calls former T editor Stefano Tonchi "stupid," saying that Singer's hire was to "add something that was never Stefano’s priority: articles that an intelligent reader might actually want to read." Ha, meow.

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Bill Keller Tells All About Julian Assange

Choire Sicha — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:30:56 +0000

Times executive editor Bill Keller weighs in, in full, on the paper's relationship with Julian Assange—such as it is, as he describes Assange as "arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous." The relationship, well! Assange was pissed that the Times wouldn't throw a link to the Wikileaks website, and then he got too big for his britches. Oh, and then he started wearing "skinny suits." Unfortunately, Keller reads the Swedish sex charges against Assange rather glossily to my taste: "Two Swedish women filed police complaints claiming that Assange insisted on having sex without a condom; Sweden’s strict laws on nonconsensual sex categorize such behavior as rape." That is not really how I would describe their testimony. In any event, the Times makes much of its willingness to choose and redact Wikileaks data that might embarrass the government or private individuals who provided information. They agreed to not publish things "like a cable describing an intelligence-sharing program that took years to arrange and might be lost if exposed." Gosh that is intriguing! I sure would like to know more. Keller also makes an excellent case against the many popular stupid charges against the Times: "The journalists at The Times have a large and personal stake in the country’s security. We live and work in a city that has been tragically marked as a favorite terrorist target.... Moreover, The Times has nine staff correspondents assigned to the two wars still being waged in the wake of that attack, plus a rotating cast of photographers, visiting writers and scores of local stringers and support staff."

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Bill Keller, History Slut (Or, Bigfoot Strikes Again)

Tom Scocca — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:52:30 +0000

Tom Scocca: Keller of 'NYT' in Iran: 'The Iranians Watch Us Closely'
Choire Sicha: Mr. Executive Editor of the Times is driving me a little crazy. His Reporter's Notebook?
Tom Scocca: Oh? Oh. "A newcomer to town."
Tom Scocca: Oh, he did not do a "Welcome to..." transition.
Choire Sicha: He's like 20 seconds away from a "Reader, I x'd Him."
Tom Scocca: Why only halfway? Why not "Webster's defines 'theocracy' as...."
Tom Scocca: The Iranians are crazy drivers!
Tom Scocca: Does he go to a bustling bazaar full of live chickens and trinkets of dubious provenance?
Tom Scocca: Does a kohl-eyed woman lift a curtain by a balcony and briefly, tantalizingly meet his gaze?
Tom Scocca: I also like his whole thing about how he just happened to be in the neighborhood to see how his reporters were doing.
Tom Scocca: Him and David Remnick at the New Yorker: "In Communist Russia, editor writes YOU."
Tom Scocca: Bill Keller in E&P, from Romenesko:

"Do people in the media crit game really think editors are supposed to be desk jockeys who never go get a sense of the story? (When I was a correspondent I had visits from Max Frankel and Joe Lelyveld, among others, and welcomed them as a chance to share my enthusiasm for the beats I covered.) Or is the idea that when a big, exhausting news breaks visiting editors should hole up in the hotel and let the reporters do all the work? Weird."

Tom Scocca: Um, there's a difference between dropping in on the bureau and commandeering the Page One news analysis hole.
Choire Sicha: Also? Isn't he actually holed up in a hotel? Didn't he write a whole thing about that?
Tom Scocca: The one about how Google didn't work?
Tom Scocca: "I think they welcomed having an extra pair of hands. Among other things, it meant that while Nazila and Bobby (and Roger) followed the main event in Tehran, I could go check out conditions somewhere else (Isfahan), which other news organizations lacked the resources to do."
Tom Scocca: I mean, look, more reporting is a good thing.
Choire Sicha: Yes, I want more reporting!
Tom Scocca: But if we can acknowledge up front that there are many problematic elements of cultural politics and professional envy in the use of the term "danger slut," he's still a danger slut, or something related, but with cap-H History in place of danger.
Choire Sicha: Lots of reporters are built that way, though.
Tom Scocca: And perhaps one of them would have been eager to go to Isfahan.
Choire Sicha: I think that if I were the executive editor, I would send myself out on a story like this once a year. I also think I would do a bad rusty job of it however.
Tom Scocca: And who would edit you?
Choire Sicha: No one! WHO WOULD DARE. Nah. Some total bitch who works for me would do it.
Tom Scocca: That is the other problem when these warhorse reporter-editors, Keller and Remnick, hear the rumble of History's cannon in the distance and feel their blood quickening with the memory of what it was like to Be There as the Soviet Union fell. Who's going to say, actually, let's get the News Analysis piece written by one of the guys who was working the capital?
Tom Scocca: "Isfahan is nice color, Bill, but it doesn't feel right out in front like that."
Tom Scocca: "Actually, David, I'm not sure we need another big piece on Obama and race, reported off Inauguration Day-it might feel a little stale and redundant, at this point."
Choire Sicha: I'm not sure Bill Keller brought that much (anything? Did he ever file?) home from Des Moines, back in 2007, either, that the folks who were out there weren't getting.
Tom Scocca: I'm sure they have people they think they trust to make editorial judgment calls about their reportorial work. I bet Kim Jong-Il asks people for feedback on his screenwriting, too.
Choire Sicha: Well they are very good reporters!
Tom Scocca: They have proud records of accomplishment. And Mao was a good poet, when he was young.
Choire Sicha: I have never read the early works of Mao.
Tom Scocca:

Alone I stand in the autumn cold
On the tip of Orange Island,
The Hsiang flowing northward;
I see a thousand hills crimsoned through
By their serried woods deep-dyed,
And a hundred barges vying
Over crystal blue waters.
Eagles cleave the air,
Fish glide in the limpid deep;
Under freezing skies a million creatures contend in freedom.
Brooding over this immensity,
I ask, on this boundless land
Who rules over man's destiny?

Choire Sicha: Oh! That is pretty damn good.

Tom Scocca: But then he wrote stuff like this:

On this tiny globe
A few flies dash themselves against the wall,
Humming without cease,
Sometimes shrilling,
Sometimes moaning.
Ants on the locust tree assume a great-nation swagger
And mayflies lightly plot to topple the giant tree.
The west wind scatters leaves over Changan,
And the arrows are flying, twanging.
So many deeds cry out to be done,
And always urgently;
The world rolls on,
Time presses.
Ten thousand years are too long,
Seize the day, seize the hour!
The Four Seas are rising, clouds and waters raging,
The Five Continents are rocking, wind and thunder roaring.
Our force is irresistible,
Away with all pests!

Choire Sicha: Eep. Well, you know, sometimes our ideas change as we age.
Tom Scocca: Yes. And sometimes the quality of feedback we get changes.
Choire Sicha: Although I don't know if regimes of terror are quite the right analogy!
Choire Sicha: Although I have heard not dissimilar terms from inside both headquarters!
Tom Scocca: Nevertheless, it's not possible for people to treat the top boss as a normal reporter. So the reason that Bill Keller may be feeling "bizarre vibes" is that this littlefoot/bigfoot dance makes people feel weird.
Tom Scocca: "I'm just a regular reporter! Who assigned myself to the story!"
Choire Sicha: Sure! Never not awkward!
Tom Scocca: And I am personally quite strongly against making writing and editing into mutually exclusive career tracks.
Choire Sicha: That's because you're an opportunist. Oh no wait: because you're poor.
Tom Scocca: Yes. It's because it's never clear to me which one of those two things, if either, I'm more able to make a living at.
Choire Sicha: Also editors I think forget something about how to write. They have work lives where they say things like "Well that won't play in Nassau county!" Their job is to make reporting, in a way, less specific. Which is the opposite of the writer's job.
Tom Scocca: Maybe Keller should have sent A.G. Sulzberger to cover Iran.

Previously: Matt Taibbi Has A Bad Pottymouth

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The 'New Yorker' On Carlos Slim And The 'Times'

Choire Sicha — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:30:15 +0000

I have emerged victorious from reading Lawrence Wright's Carlos Slim profile in this week's New Yorker. (The article is about the Mexican billionaire-mogul, in light of his financial entanglement with the New York Times.) Here are a few thoughts.

One incredibly irksome thing that writers keep doing, when writing on the situation of the Times, is describing the layoffs at the Times in this way: "[T]he Times had resisted making the sort of staff cuts that have decimated newsrooms all over America. But in April Times employees were informed of a five-per-cent pay cut. Soon afterward, a hundred employees were fired from the business side."

Well, actually, the Times company got rid of 750 people in the course of a single week not very many months ago! But no one actually cares about the physical laborers, and the drivers, and all the people who used to be involved in putting out a paper before the company's profit-model crashed and burned. The sacred newsroom, though! All A-OK! Sort of, not really!

But to have executive editor Bill Keller say that the "people you need to actually be the New York Times" are the "reporters, editors, photographers, graphic artists, and Web producers" is noble and maddening. The people you need, to be the Times, once were the pressmen and the delivery men. Now they are the online advertising sales people.

But I won't take him too strongly to task, since at least he included web producers in his list of all things that are good. (Boy, the Times sure changed its attitude fast! How they used to sneer at blogs.)
It is epically hilarious, when the New Yorker is struggling financially, that this article is not online. They believe that this is a good financial choice.
The support expressed for Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. by the likes of Thomas Friedman and Frank Rich-at least, when they are speaking on the record!-is absurd. Rich: "Any change in ownership would be highly traumatic." You know what's going to be traumatic? Chapter 11. Friedman expressed his hope that any future partners with the Times would be "a junior partner to the Sulzberger family," whatever that vague and strange construction means. In any event! This is not the actual story of the viewpoint inside the New York Times about Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. right now.
The New Yorker did itself a disservice with the question-mark sub-headline about Carlos Slim. "[W]hat does he want with the 'Times'?" Answer: Read between the lines, if you must. There is a long accounting of the growth of his various companies, which were largely bought up during financial crisis and which operate as, essentially, monopolies. The comparison is fair! Yet there is no answer at all to the question. Time will tell! Maybe we will know while there is still a New Yorker to tell us about it.

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