Friday, November 08, 2002

A LI'L UPDATE: The new, re-redesigned print MISC isn't likely to be out before December. That means there won't be an autumn issue; we'll go straight from summer to winter, and then go from there. This also means there's still a little time to write something for it. Email me for the particulars.

We're also redoubling efforts to sell ads for the thing. The new print MISC will be a new and different type of local ad forum. It's in a regular magazine size, on better paper, at lower ad rates than the previous newsprint format. Because it's not a newsprint throwaway, your business's message will work for you all quarter long. The new rates will be posted here on the site soon; until then, send in for the great new rates.

posted by clark 1:16 PM

BLOG-ROLLING IN OUR TIME: First, thanx to those who braved the onset of autumnal rains to attend the li'l "weblogs: what the heck do they all mean?" panel Thursday night. Alas, Rebecca Blood called in sick and couldn't show. But the rest of us had a fab time and even attained a couple of insights about this whole web-writing phenom.

Since the evening had been organized under the auspices of the Society of Professional Journalists, a major discussion theme concerned whether blogging constituted a threat to "traditional" journalism. I, for one, said no.

For one thing, many blog-type sites are full of links to stories on "traditional" newspapers' and TV stations' sites, and therefore help those sites attract readers.

For another thing, the "blog" tag encompasses a staggering array of different types of sites. Within the basic premise of chronological, scrolling text bits, different blogs have different proportions of links to other sites' stuff (accompanied by longer or shorter intros to those links), discussion-board entries, personal observations, original and/or found graphics, and, yes, actual research- and interview-based journalism—all on a much wider range of topics, both "public" and "private," than any one print publication could ever fit in.

My own site is organized the way my old print column was, as an amalgam of longish and shortish items expressing facets of an overarching worldview. It is, as I've always said, a classic journalistic format.

The panel's moderator, Alan Boyle, is the author of a blog that's part of a "traditional" journalism site (MSNBC). His mix includes three-dot-column type items, links to recommended stuff on other sites, emailed reader responses to previous items on the blog and on other MSNBC.com pages, and longish essays and news pieces with links added. The whole olio is bound together aesthetically by Boyle's writing style and by his curatorial sense for topic- and link-picking.

Boyle's page proves a blog can be maintained under the auspices of a big institution, and can hew to the legal/ethical rules of professional journalism, while also providing the personal "voice" that keeps readers clicking in.

Here we get to the big thing that differentiates blogging from corporate journalistic editing.

Most daily papers and TV news operations (and, to a lesser extent, radio news operations and news magazines) have tried for half a century to maintain faceless, institutional images. A big-city, chain-owned paper is written in an impersonal style, and presents a mix of what its editorial bureaucracy thinks you want to read and what its publishing bureaucracy wants to tell you (which is usually whatever the local business leaders want you to believe).

It didn't use to always be this way. As any glance at a typical (i.e., non-NY Times paper from before 1950 can show you, papers used to know the value of a more direct rapport with readers. Writers and editors had more leeway to include emotions, passions, wordplay, and all the other time-honored techniques of effective storytelling. The papers themselves often had well-defined, well-expressed points of view that weren't confined to one page. (Granted, most of those points of view were at least as reactionary as those on today's talk radio, but at least you knew where they stood.)

Old-time radio had its own individualistic commentators. Lowell Thomas, Walter Winchell, and Louella Parsons entertained as they informed. Edward R. Murrow and Charles Collingwood provided extremely personal accounts of the stories they told, while holding to standards of accuracy and fairness.

The best, most "professional" blog sites combine this storytelling sense with the dynamic immediacy of the web. They represent not a threat to "real" journalism but the rediscovery of values the profession has lost.

How this might relate to the recent elections: There's not much of a "liberal news media" these days, despite what the right-wing demagogues keep screeching. There's the far-right conservative media, and the near-right corporate media. Democrats, especially progressive Democrats, are routinely ignored, dismissed, or directly vilified in both media camps, with relatively few opportunities to speak for themselves.

We need to build a for-real "liberal media" camp. One that goes beyond a few little magazines that circulate in ivory towers or intellectual ghettos. One that speaks to larger swaths of the populace offering agendas for empowerment, progress, justice, equality, liberty, and opportunity. The corporate media won't, and more importantly can't, do this.

Individual, first-person blogs can't do it all either. No one person can cover everything (or even link to everything). No all-volunteer operation (which almost all blogs are) can fully do the same job as full-time researchers and interviewers.

But the aforementioned values of blogging—of personable storytellers, regularly delivering well-selected info, in digestible chunks, to an attentive and involved readership—can form the essential foundation of any new progressive communication outlets.

posted by clark 12:58 PM

Wednesday, November 06, 2002

ONE MORE REMINDER: You can see yr. humble web editor this Thurs. evening at a Society of Professional Journalists gabfest, Invasion of the Bloggers. Also on the dais will be three other prolific online scribes—Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, Glenn Fleishman, and Rebecca Blood.

It all goes down at 7 p.m. in the Seattle Times auditorium on Fairview Avenue (north of John Street, south of Hooters). There's no admission fee, so be there or be rhomboid.

posted by clark 4:37 PM

LAST NIGHT I experienced a hopeful mood and awful music.

This morning I experienced a lousy mood and terrific music.

I deliberately stayed away from election-nite coverage, instead watching the surprisingly good Sonics win their fourth straight basketball game. Then I stopped by the new Carpenters' Hall in Belltown. (The old hall had been razed several years ago for a high-rise condo, incorporating the smaller new union hall.) There, the monorail campaigners held their party. The aforementioned awful music was provided by a lowest-common-denominator "blooze" band, churning out tedious arrangements of the tritest '60s-nostalgia hits.

(Memo to all campaign organizers: Progressive politics isn't just for Big Chillers anymore.)

But aside from that, it was a triumphal evening. Asking taxpayers to make a major investment during tuff economic times is always a challenge. (Note the inglorious defeat of the statewide highway levy.) But despite that, and despite the powers-that-be's smear and scare campaigns, the monorail referendum achieved a solid lead in the polls, pending the late absentees. The city came together to create a better future for itself, in the form of a tourist-friendly commuter system (or a commuter-friendly tourist attraction).

Then in the morning came the horrible news. The GOP goon squad held onto the U.S. House and had regained at least a tie in the Senate. This means the Consitution-busters, the domestic enemies of freedom, have a rubber-stamp Congress to pass any roughshod legislation, appoint any crook, and give away the whole country to the billionaires.

Of course, the Democrats hadn't provided much of a hindrance to these schemes anyway. Maybe this second-straight electoral debacle will, once and for all, finally discredit the Democratic Leadership Council and its Right Lite policy of subjugation.

The terrific music that cheered me up today came from the previously discredited Trio cable channel. This morning it showed one of the hundreds of British music shows in its library. This particular hour compiled old performance footage by scads of early punk legends (Sex Pistols, Clash, Jam, Iggy, Siouxsie, Joy Division, Buzzcocks, Undertones). It all cheered me up immensely.

You have every right to ask why I'd frown at 1967 nostalgia music but grin at 1977 nostalgia music. Well, there's a reason. The band at the monorail party interpreted old Beatles and Stones numbers into slowed-down, dumbed-down exercises in collective self-congratulation. The live performances in the punk documentary were brisk, brash statements of mass resistance. The Thatcher and Reagan regimes (like the Bush regime today, only slightly less stupidly) were on jugggernauts to redistribute wealth upward, to spread war and poverty, to make the world safe for corporate graft. Punk rock, at its best, was one big loud defiant NO! to the whole reactionary worldview.

(Progressive politics isn't just for slam-dancers anymore either. But punk's classic note of rejecting the given situation, and creating/demanding a more human-scale world, is something we could all use a lot more of now.)

posted by clark 4:29 PM

Sunday, November 03, 2002

GETTING ON TRACK: The Seattle monorail referendum is the only major issue on this year's mid-term local ballot. (There's also a statewide highway levy, and the ritual re-elections of unopposed congresspeople and state legislators. But the monorail's the one ballot item assured to change the region's future.)

Since the movement's start in 1996 by ex-cabdriver Dick Falkenbury, through two initiatives (the second was to repeal the city council's actions to kill the project), and now on to the vote to actually build a 14-mile phase-one line, the monorail's been loved by almost everybody except the big guys.

Thus, the three-month barrage of questionable "facts," innuendo, and outright smear tactics by assorted political and business "leaders," whose chief spokesman is a former scandal-plagued port commissioner.

The shallowness and shrillness of the anti-monorail drive has only helped confirm my suspicions that this isn't just a vote on building an in-city transit system. It's also being treated by many as a referendum on the "Seattle Process" political machine itself. This machine believes it has the sole right to paternistically decide what's best for the citizenry (which usually means whatever the Nordstroms and Paul Allen want). The machine's m.o. is all about the deserved primacy of "experts," planners, and authorities. It can't stand the threat of actual citizen-driven democracy.

Seattle needs an economical, efficient, out-of-car-traffic transit system designed just for in-town everyday movement (as opposed to suburban commutes). The process machine needs a comeuppance. There are other reasons for Seattle residents to vote for the monorail, but these two are the most important.

posted by clark 9:17 PM

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