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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

New Media, Newspapers, Press

Lessons from a Digital Newspaper Now Making Money

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In late April, I wrote about The Media’s ‘Post-Advertising’ Future (advertising’s not enough to sustain publications, subscriptions will prove necessary for most publications, and “[t]he key lesson for publishers is to offer sharp (and sometimes sharp-tongued) writing, to see that content is king”).  (A word about FREE WHITEWATER.  This website accepts no advertising, requires no subscription, and never will.  For-profit publications with employees don’t have that luxury.)    

As it turns out, The Guardian in Britain (with a focus on American topics) shows how one can succeed as a digital medium.  Joshua Benton, writing at NiemanLab, tells the tale in Want to see what one digital future for newspapers looks like? Look at The Guardian, which isn’t losing money anymore.

Benton describes The Guardian:

The Guardian is a weird newspaper.

Most newspapers don’t have nearly two-thirds of their readers coming from outside the country they’re based in.

Most newspapers don’t start in one city and then move to another one.

Most newspapers aren’t owned by a trust that mandates they promote“liberal journalism both in Britain and elsewhere.”

And most newspapers don’t lose money year after year after year. Sure, some papers that are run by rich men more interested in influence than profit, and some families have chosen to rank civic duty above the bottom line. But in the main, when revenues decline at a newspaper, costs get cut — cut to the point that whatever profit level the owner seeks gets met. Most newspapers that consistently lose money die.

And yet The Guardian is, here again, an especially noteworthy exception.

Benton also lists a few keys to success (for any for-profit digital publication):

We’ve been writing here for a long time about the difficult transition newspapers are making (or not making) to digital. If you had to define a few key financial landmarks papers need to hit along the way, you might pick these three taken from Ken Doctor pieces early this decade:

In all of this, one needs compelling content, sharp and interesting, to attract, retain, and increase readership.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.5.19

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Good morning.

Cinco de Mayo  in Whitewater will see occasional afternoon thundershowers with a high of seventy.  Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 8:00 PM, for 14h 17m 38s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862, the Mexican Army defeats French occupying forces at the Battle of Puebla.

 

Recommended for reading in full:

Maria Perez writes A company tried to open an immigrant detention center in Wisconsin. A community that voted for Trump said no — again:

Plans to build the first privately-run immigration detention center in Wisconsin are off the table — at least for now — part of larger trend in which companies that build them are being encouraged by federal officials but resisted at the state and local level.

For at least a year, Virginia-based Immigration Centers of America wanted to build a 500-bed detention center in St. Croix County. The company said it would generate more than 200 full-time jobs and millions of dollars in state and local tax revenue.

However, earlier this month it withdrew its proposal to build in New Richmond. The city’s staff had issued a report recommending officials reject the application for rezoning and related ordinance changes, saying the project didn’t fit in the city’s development plan. In addition, public outcry over the plan was fierce, with residents opposing the detention of immigrants, and expressing concerns about property values and use of tax dollars.

David Frum writes Trump Attacks Facebook on Behalf of Racists and Grifters (“But unlike in previous eras, the social giant knows it can just ignore the president”):

President Donald Trump despises “fake news.” The Washington Post, The New York Times—these are “enemies of the people.” He has urged the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Election Commission to force Saturday Night Live off the air to punish the comedy show for making jokes about him.

What he likes are independent and honest voices who say things such as: Vaccines cause autism. President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a “carefully crafted fake.” Democratic Party insiders organized the murder of a staffer to cover up their nefarious plan to blame Russia for the hack of their emails. Sharia police are enforcing sharia law in Minneapolis. The Sandy Hook massacre never happened; the dead children were paid actors. (These are all false claims.)

One thing at least will follow from the president’s Twitter campaign: It will become even more difficult than before for the shamefaced remains of what used to be mainstream conservatism to separate themselves from these grifters, racists, and liars. According to the president, they are now martyrs, saying things that deserve to be heard. There have been times in the past few years—especially during the hoax to shift blame from the Russians for hacking the Democratic National Committee—that Fox News and Infowars blurred into each other. Those days will now return.

Perhaps this goat truly is the Greatest of All Time:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.4.19

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-seven.  Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 7:58 PM, for 14h 12m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 2.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1864, the Union Army’s Overland Campaign begins:

a series of battles fought in Virginia during May and June 1864, in the American Civil War. Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of all Union armies, directed the actions of the Army of the Potomac, commanded by Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, and other forces against Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Although Grant suffered severe losses during the campaign, it was a strategic Union victory. It inflicted proportionately higher losses on Lee’s army and maneuvered it into a siege at Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia, in just over eight weeks.

Recommended for reading in full:

John Sipher writes The Russia Investigation Will Continue:

Although Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe is over, and although President Trump on Friday again described the probe as a “Witch Hunt,” the FBI is almost certain to continue its counterintelligence investigation into Russian espionage efforts related to the 2016 election. More important, they will continue to search for Americans working on behalf of the Kremlin.

The inability to establish that the Trump campaign conspired in a “tacit or express” agreement with the Russian government is not surprising. Most espionage investigations come up empty unless and until they get a lucky break. That does not mean there was no espionage activity in relation to the 2016 election. Every previous Russian political-warfare campaign was built on human spies. Russian “active measures”—propaganda, information warfare, cyberattacks, disinformation, use of forgeries, spreading conspiracies and rumors, funding extremist groups and deception operations—rely on human actors to support and inform their success. Counterintelligence professionals must doubt that Russia could have pulled off its election-interference effort without the support of spies burrowed into U.S. society or institutions.

Indeed, troubling patterns, unanswered questions, and tantalizing leads suggest that Russia relied on human sources to interfere in the 2016 election. Both the Mueller report and Intelligence Community assessments have identified a variety of Russian actors involved in the attack. They uncovered the activities of the Russian GRU, cyberhackers, and the Russian troll factory. However, one key player is missing: Russia’s premier espionage service, the SVR. Is it possible that the Russian espionage service played no role in Russia’s operation, and had no spies helping support what the Mueller report characterized as a “sweeping and systematic” attack of American institutions? The FBI would be professionally negligent if it assumed so.

Reuters reports State Dept. allowed foreign govts to lease luxury condos at Trump World Tower without Congress OK:

The U.S. State Department allowed at least seven foreign governments to rent luxury condominiums in New York’s Trump World Tower in 2017 without approval from Congress, according to documents and people familiar with the leases, a potential violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause.

The Prosecutors Ending Mass Incarceration:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.3.19

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty.  Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 7:58 PM, for 14h 12m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 2.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Niccolò Machiavelli is born on this day in 1469.

Recommended for reading in full:

Benjamin Wittes reports The Catastrophic Performance of Bill Barr (“The attorney general misled the public in seven key ways”):

The core of the problem is not that Barr moved, as many people worried he would, to suppress the report; it is what he has said about it. I have spent a great deal of time with the Mueller report, about which Barr’s public statements are simply indefensible. The mischaracterizations began in his first letter. They got worse during his press conference the morning he released the document. And they grew worse still yesterday in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

….

The dishonesty only begins with the laughably selective quotation of Mueller’s report in Barr’s original letter, the scope of which Charlie Savage laid out in a remarkable New York Times article shortly after the full report was released. I urge people to look at Savage’s side-by-side quotations. The distortion of Mueller’s meaning across a range of areas is not subtle, and it’s not hard to understand why Mueller himself wrote to Barr saying that the attorney general’s letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.”

Barr, before the Senate yesterday, described the letter as “snitty.” Actually, it was generous. As Paul Rosenzweig summarized the situation on Lawfare, “the excerpts of the report contained in Barr’s original summary letter are at best a favorable spin on the report and at worst a rather transparent effort to mislead the public in advance of the report’s release.”

(Wittes, like many of us, at first gave Barr the benefit of the doubt, despite our opposition to Trump.  We were too generous.)

Adam Serwer writes The Dangerous Ideas of Bill Barr:

Barr is no flunky. He is a hardened ideologue who believes that the president he serves is largely above the law. Barr seems genuinely committed to defending the imperial prerogatives of the office against shortsighted liberals who would weaken the presidency in a delusional quest to remove a Republican from office. As he put it in his 2017 memo attacking the special counsel’s investigation, “crediting” the belief that the president could have committed obstruction by his official acts “would have grave consequences far beyond the immediate confines of this case and would do lasting damage to the Presidency.”

Barr is not protecting Trump because he thinks Trump is the most accomplished president in modern history, because he fears Trump, because the real-estate mogul has some psychological hold on him, or because he has been corrupted. Barr is defending Trump because Barr is a zealot.

How Much Do NFL Draft Picks Make?:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.2.19

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see occasional morning showers with a high of fifty-one.  Sunrise is 5:46 AM and sunset 7:56 PM, for 14h 10m 22s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 6.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM, and the Fire Department Board at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1933, Alex Campbell, water bailiff for Loch Ness and a part-time journalist, first describes a supposed animal sighting as a Loch Ness monster in an Inverness Courier report.

 

Recommended for reading in full:

Emily Holden reports the Trump EPA insists Monsanto’s Roundup is safe, despite cancer cases (“Administration to keep weedkiller on the market after landmark court rulings and concerns over food”):

The Trump administration is keeping the weedkiller Roundup on the US market, insisting it is safe for humans despite thousands of lawsuits launched by people who claim it gave them cancer.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains in a new decisionthat glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, which is made by Monsanto, does not cause cancer or other health problems if it is used according to instruction labels.

Glyphosate is used on more than 100 crops, including genetically modified corn, soy, cotton, canola and sugar beet, according to the EPA. Groups campaigning against glyphosate say it is most dangerous for farmworkers and others applying it but also poses risks for people consuming it in food.

Courts have found in favor of a school groundskeeper who is terminally ill with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and another man who used the chemical for decades and developed the same kind of cancer.

The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and it made initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials.

Margaret Sullivan writes Fact-checking President Trump isn’t enough:

First off, they should stop using euphemisms, such as the New York Times did the other day when on Twitter it described one particularly brutal falsehood by Trump — that doctors and mothers collaborate to execute newborns — as a case of the president reviving “an inaccurate refrain.”

….

The Times is far from alone in this tendency to soft-pedal, as Daniel Dale, the excellent Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, told Benjamin Hart of New York magazine.

“I think our job as journalists is to call things what they are. And so if someone commits 100 crimes, you don’t say, ‘We’re gonna call the first two ‘crimes’ and the [rest]’ — I don’t know what the softer word would be — ‘non-legal behavior.’?”

….

And look for innovative ways to tell the story of the endless lies, as the Times did in a graphic, putting to rest the often-heard argument from Trump supporters that “all presidents lie, you guys are just picking on our guy.”

Tonight’s Sky for May 2019:

Babbittry, Bad Ideas, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Economy, Foxconn, Government Spending, Scott Walker, State Capitalism, State Government, That Which Paved the Way, WEDC

America’s Best Know Better

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A story from the Wall Street Journal‘s Valerie Bauerlein explains the damage that the Foxconn scheme has done to ordinary people in Foxconn Tore Up a Small Town to Build a Big Factory—Then Retreated (“The iPhone maker got fat incentives to build a $10 billion LCD plant that largely hasn’t materialized on land where Mount Pleasant, Wis., razed homes and crops”):

MOUNT PLEASANT, Wis.—Six miles west of Lake Michigan lies a cleared building site half as big as Central Park, ready for Foxconn Technology Group’s $10 billion liquid-crystal-display factory.

Contractors have bulldozed about 75 homes in Mount Pleasant and cleared hundreds of farmland acres. Crews are widening Interstate 94 from Milwaukee to the Illinois state line to accommodate driverless trucks and thousands of employees. Village and county taxpayers have borrowed around $350 million so far to buy land and make infrastructure improvements, from burying sewer pipes to laying storm drains.

One thing largely missing: Foxconn.
….

The impact on Mount Pleasant, by contrast, is palpable. Its debt rating has slipped. Local politics has become fraught. Neighbors have fallen out over land seizures.

“At some point we’re talking about things that are just imaginary,” said Nick Demske, a commissioner in Racine County, where the plant is. “We’re pretending.”

The gap separating critics of the Foxconn project – among them economists and business reporters at America’s finest universities and publications – and the boosters flacking this idea is unbridgeably wide.  (I’m obviously not including myself in the ranks of august critics; it is simply enough to be able to tell the difference between wheat and chaff.)

Claims about the project sound like silly jabbering; critiques of the project are grounded in applied reason.

Someone should tell Foxconn’s local peddlers: America’s best see you clearly, and so view you dimly.

Previously: 10 Key Articles About Foxconn, Foxconn as Alchemy: Magic Multipliers,  Foxconn Destroys Single-Family Homes, Foxconn Devours Tens of Millions from State’s Road Repair Budget, The Man Behind the Foxconn Project, A Sham News Story on Foxconn, Another Pig at the Trough, Even Foxconn’s Projections Show a Vulnerable (Replaceable) Workforce, Foxconn in Wisconsin: Not So High Tech After All, Foxconn’s Ambition is Automation, While Appeasing the Politically Ambitious, Foxconn’s Shabby Workplace Conditions, Foxconn’s Bait & Switch, Foxconn’s (Overwhelmingly) Low-Paying Jobs, The Next Guest Speaker, Trump, Ryan, and Walker Want to Seize Wisconsin Homes to Build Foxconn Plant, Foxconn Deal Melts Away, “Later This Year,” Foxconn’s Secret Deal with UW-Madison, Foxconn’s Predatory Reliance on Eminent Domain, Foxconn: Failure & Fraud, Foxconn Roundup: Desperately Ill Edition,  Foxconn Roundup: Indiana Layoffs & Automation Everywhere, Foxconn Roundup: Outside Work and Local Land, Foxconn Couldn’t Even Meet Its Low First-Year Goal, Foxconn Talks of Folding Wisconsin Manufacturing Plans, WISGOP Assembly Speaker Vos Hopes You’re Stupid, Lost Homes and Land, All Over a Foxconn Fantasy, Laughable Spin as Industrial Policy, Foxconn: The ‘State Visit Project,’ ‘Inside Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn,’ Foxconn: When the Going Gets Tough…, The Amazon-New York Deal, Like the Foxconn Deal, Was Bad Policy, Foxconn Roundup, Foxconn: The Roads to Nowhere, Foxconn: Evidence of Bad Policy Judgment, Foxconn: Behind Those Headlines, Foxconn: On Shaky Ground, Literally, Foxconn: Heckuva Supply Chain They Have There…, Foxconn: Still Empty, and the Chairman of the Board Needs a Nap, Foxconn: Cleanup on Aisle 4, Foxconn: The Closer One Gets, The Worse It Is, and Foxconn Confirms Gov. Evers’s Claim of a Renegotiation Discussion.

Education

In the Milton School District, Disorder Takes Its Toll

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Years of wrangling, opposition to open government, attempts to stifle free speech, administrative stipends out of ordinary policy, and erratic behavior take a toll, as one reads that the nearby Milton School District’s top officials are resigning at the end of this school year:

School District of Milton School Board President Joe Martin read a statement this morning announcing that Superintendent Tim Schigur and Director of Administrative Operations Jerry Schuetz have submitted their voluntary resignations. Their employment with the school district will end June 30.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.1.19

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Good morning.

May in Whitewater begins with rain and a high of fifty-five.  Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 7:55 PM, for 14h 07m 53s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 12% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.

The Whitewater School Board is scheduled to meet beginning at 6 PM for a closed session, returning to open session:

4. CLOSED SESSION
A. Adjourn into closed session, pursuant to Section 19.85(1) (c), Wis. Stats., to consider employment, promotion, compensation, or performance evaluation data of any public employee over which the governmental body has jurisdiction or exercises responsibility. Specifically, to discuss administrator contracts, evaluations, and performance of duties with the District’s legal counsel. (Action Item)
5. OPEN SESSION
A. Reconvene into open session per Section 19.85(2)Wis. Stats., for potential action on any matters discussed in closed session. (Action Item)

On this day in 1931, the Empire State Building officially opens.

 

Recommended for reading in full:

Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky report Mueller complained that Barr’s letter did not capture ‘context’ of Trump probe:

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post.

….

At the time Mueller’s letter was sent to Barr on March 27, Barr had days prior announced that Mueller did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In his memo to Congress, Barr also said that Mueller had not reached a conclusion about whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, but that Barr reviewed the evidence and found it insufficient to support such a charge.

Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote the previously undisclosed private letter to the Justice Department, laying out his concerns in stark terms that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and it made initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials.

Jennifer Rubin observes Rod Rosenstein is leaving as a diminished man and shamed lawyer:

“Rosenstein talks a lot about the rule of law in very eloquent ways,” former prosecutor Mimi Rocah tells me. “But his recent actions — signing on to Barr’s letter which misrepresented the Mueller report and gave a legally indefensible and unnecessary conclusion, standing behind Barr at a press conference that was more like a defense closing argument — directly threaten the rule of law, because he no longer looks like someone leading the DOJ in neutral ways.” She adds that “we can’t have faith in decisions he’s made. For him to cite Trump as a defender of the rule [of law] given the damage he has done to the DOJ and FBI as institutions is shameful.”

 Large tornado caught on camera near Sulphur, Oklahoma:

Mendacity, Trump

10,000

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We expect honesty even from children, but septuagenarian Trump may be the most prolific liar on the contemporary scene. He is a model of mendacity and depravity.

The Fact Checker is keeping a running list of all of President Trump’s false or misleading claims, reviewing every word the president says (or tweets) to compile an exhaustive catalogue of misstatements. In the course of his more than 10,000 false or misleading claims, Trump made nearly three times as many false or misleading statements in his second year than he did in his first. And he’s nearly made as many false claims in his third years as he did in his first. Almost a quarter of these claims were during campaign style rallies and nearly a fifth were about immigration. Here’s what you need to know. Read more on the Fact Checker database: https://wapo.st/2GTsnga.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 4.30.19

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see afternoon rain with a high of forty-seven.  Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 7:54 PM, for 14h 02m 52s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 18.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board will meet for a bargaining session beginning at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1803, American representatives sign the Louisiana Purchase Treaty: “The Louisiana Territory was vast, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to Rupert’s Land in the north, and from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west. Acquiring the territory would double the size of the United States, at a sum of less than 3 cents per acre.”

Recommended for reading in full:

Robert Reich contends In fighting all oversight, Trump has made his most dictatorial move:

“We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” says the person who is supposed to be chief executive of the United States government.

In other words, there is to be no congressional oversight of this administration: no questioning officials who played a role in putting a citizenship question on the 2020 census. No questioning a former White House counsel about the Mueller report.

No questioning a Trump adviser about immigration policy. No questioning a former White House security director about issuances of security clearances.

No presidential tax returns to the ways and means committee, even though a 1920s law specifically authorizes the committee to get them.

Such a blanket edict fits a dictator of a banana republic, not the president of a constitutional republic founded on separation of powers.

If Congress cannot question the people who are making policy, or obtain critical documents, Congress cannot function as a coequal branch of government.

If Congress cannot get information about the executive branch, there is no longer any separation of powers, as sanctified in the US constitution.

There is only one power – the power of the president to rule as he wishes.

David Graham contends Charlottesville Was a Turning Point:

The weekend of August 12, 2017, may well have been a turning point in recent American history, but it’s not entirely clear which way things turned.

That weekend was when neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. Marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us” and employed other anti-Semitic slogans. There were multiple violent clashes, and one woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when James Alex Fields Jr., one of the marchers, drove his car into a crowd. And President Donald Trump infamously equivocated about the incident. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” and then vacillated over the course of several days, declining to mount a sincere and forceful condemnation of the march.

By any objective standard, the incident was one of the lowest points of an administration defined by its nadirs, and the immediate reaction showed that public opinion concurred. Americans condemned Trump’s response, and his approval hit a record low.

  Veterans to the Rescue:

America, Babbittry, City, History, New Media, Newspapers, Press, Social Media, Writing

The Media’s ‘Post-Advertising’ Future

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Nationally and locally, the media (whether profit or non-profit) continue their significant transformation: the decline of print, the rise of (interactive) digital media, and the collapse of a middle-of-the-road partnership of boosterism between mediocre newspapers and middling officials.

Print’s doomed, and so is digital that merely repeats the same banal style of contemporary print.

Traditional forms of advertising are also doomed, as Derek Thompson explains in The Media’s Post-Advertising Future Is Also Its Past (“Why the news is going back to the 19th century”).

Thompson makes key points that apply in places big and small:

Advertising’s not enough:

One year ago, I described the media apocalypse coming for both digital upstarts and legacy brands. Vice and BuzzFeed had slashed their revenue projections by hundreds of millions of dollars, while The New York Times had announced a steep decline in advertising.

America’s past:

To understand the future of post-advertising media, let’s briefly consider its past. During a period of the early 19th century known as the “party press” era, newspapers relied on patrons. Those patrons were political parties (hence “party press”) that handed out printing contracts to their favorite editors or directly paid writers to publish vicious attacks against rivals.

That era’s journalism was hyper-political and deeply biased. But some historians believe that it was also more engaging. The number of newspapers in the United States grew from several dozen in the late 1700s to more than 1,200 in the 1830s.

Advertising’s influence:

It was advertising that led to the demise of the party press. Ads allowed newspapers to become independent of patronage and to build the modern standards of “objective” journalism. Advertising also led to a neutered, detached style of reporting—the “view from nowhere”—to avoid offending the biggest advertisers, such as department stores. Large ad-supported newspapers grew to become profitable behemoths, but they arguably emphasized milquetoast coverage over more colorful reader engagement.

….

Mid-century newspapers were as broad and unobjectionable as department stores, because department-store advertising was their business. News media of the future could be as messy, diverse, and riotously disputatious as their audiences, because directly monetizing them is the new central challenge of the news business.

The future: 

Every once in a while, somebody asks me whether we’ll ever get back to a place where the country can agree on a “single set of facts.” Those asking the question tend to be nostalgic for the 1950s, when they could count the number of television channels on one hand and rely on Walter Cronkite and a local media monopoly to control the flow of information.

That past is dead and irrecoverable. We’ve accelerated backward, as if in a time machine, whizzing past the flush 20th century to a more distant, more anxious, and, just maybe, more exciting past that is also the future.

The key lesson for publishers is to offer sharp (and sometimes sharp-tongued) writing, to see that content is king.  They’ll also have to rely not on advertising but on subscriptions or patronage (of others or oneself). Advertisers want calm, but calm in turbulent times is another word for avoidance, acquiescence, or appeasement.

Just as bloggers are a return via digital to America’s eighteenth-century pamphleteers, so newspapers will have to return via digital to the style of America’s nineteenth-century papers to survive.

It’s improbable that those who have adopted the mid-twentieth century style will carry on into the new era: their writing is dull, and their outlook mere babbittry.

For America, however, is outlook is favorable: we are a vigorous people who will meet the demands of a more vigorous era.