Tag: insights

My Experience as an Example of Old and New Media

Post author By David
Post date September 11, 2009
2 Comments on My Experience as an Example of Old and New Media

Warning: Undefined array key "adf" in /home4/hpvcxhmy/public_html/wp-content/plugins/similarity/similarity.php on line 69

Warning: Undefined array key "sim_pages" in /home4/hpvcxhmy/public_html/wp-content/plugins/similarity/similarity.php on line 70

I realized after writing earlier this morning about the way new media is changing the news that my experience was a perfect example of the way that old and new media can interact to augment each other. It also pointed me to one of the key factors that is hurting existing media organizations and thus a possible way to reverse the trend in theory. Unfortunately I am unable to identify a business model that would take advantage of this theoretical key.

Consider the example. A newspaper journalist decides to do a story on the impact of new media on our political system. He interviews someone who has used new media to follow a political campaign in a way that traditional media sources sis not provide. He contacts elected officials and other people connected with government. He contacts a political blogger (me in this case). he takes all the information that he has gathered and using his own experience and his skill in the art of written communication tells a story showing how new media is changing the face of politics and what it means to citizens. He turns the story over to his editors who take that story, assign it a place in the paper, edit it for content and in the interest of meeting size limitations on their physical page trims part of the story – the part that explains what this means to the average reader. It has now become a story without a moral – not because the journalist failed, but because of space limitations.

After that happened I, as a blogger who is not constrained by any physical space limitations in what I write, posted the entire list of questions I was asked as the journalist prepared his story and my full answers. This is the unfiltered data from one source which the journalist used to create his story. One symbiosis between traditional journalism and citizen journalism is that those who are interested in what the journalist wrote could look into the raw questions and answers that produced the story and decide for themselves what more they can learn than the paper was able to publish.

I realized this morning as I reflected upon the process of producing that story from fact gathering to publication that a key factor that is hurting old media organizations is that they are trying so hard to put out the maximum amount of information within their limited physical space that they have sacrificed the moral to virtually every story (that’s easy to do because taking out the moral can also make them feel more objective) and the result is that readership declines (especially paid readership) not because reporters are doing their thinking for them, but because almost all thought is expunged from the final product in the interest of keeping a maximum amount of data.

The theoretical way to reverse that trend would be to use digital media with traditional reporting to again publish the whole story – without space limitations. Those organizations interested in having a physical paper could use the paper as a gateway to the digital content – showing teasers of stories with the full story online and/or only printing the top story or stories in the paper while printing all stories worth printing in the digital version. The digital version could be augmented with complete references and links where possible to the original sources on each article so that readers could dig deeper as they were so inclined. By doing this the organization could even begin to learn in more detail what stories and sources their readers were most interested in and follow up on those with more traditional reporting. This encourages the new media ecosystem which them serves as a valuable tool and resource for the traditional media.

Like I said at the beginning, I don’t have a firm business model for how to support this (how to fund it being a major missing component), but I think I am getting a picture of how these “competing” interests can and should work together.

Tags blogging, insights, media, Press Bloggers

National

Honest Democrats in Congress

Post author By David
Post date July 24, 2009
1 Comment on Honest Democrats in Congress

If we are ever to achieve any health care reform that will actually have a positive impact on our society it will require that we have honest Democrats in Congress. Not just any honest Democrats, but enough of them and in the right places that they can use their honesty to guide the debate. The way that you will be able to recognize a Democrat with the honesty to help the process is that he will reject the assertion of President Obama that Republicans only want to maintain the status quo.

An honest Democrat would have to recognize and admit that Republicans have been publicly acknowledging for years that we need health care reform. An honest Democrat would work from a position that understands that believing that the proposals they currently don’t have time to read are actually worse than the status quo (as Republicans generally do) is not the same as believing that the status quo is acceptable (as Republicans generally don’t). Using the scare tactic that doing nothing will make the cost of health care double within ten years without acknowledging that a poor solution could be crafted in a way that makes the cost triple within nine years is not honest. Such honest Democrats would be willing and able to actually have a dialog with Republicans and see if they have anything of value to offer on this issue.

Tags Democrat, discourse, Elevated, health care, insights, issues, parties, questions, Republican

culture

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address

Post author By David
Post date July 17, 2009
No Comments on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address

I was tempted not to include Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address among my review of founding documents, but I have become very interested in the parallels between the struggles over slavery and some of the struggles of our day. One question I asked as I read it again was, “have we learned anything in the last 150 years about how to deal with a peculiar and powerful interest within the nation?”[quote] I could not say whether or not we have learned that lesson, but I am confident that we will have occasion(s) in the future to find out whether we have learned that lesson.

I was reminded as I read it that having conflicting opinions and resolving on a uniform course of action while we hold differing perspectives on an issue is a universal and eternal aspect of having an existence endowed with individual liberty – we must learn that lesson individually and as a nation so that we can always say as Lincoln did (whatever the issue we face):

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. (emphasis added)

Tags civic participation, documents, history, insights, questions, thoughts

General

What Journalism Could Offer

Post author By David
Post date January 14, 2009
2 Comments on What Journalism Could Offer

James Fallows offers a list of benefits that the journalist has the potential to offer consumers. I would like to share his list and see if there anything he left out of the list.

Perspective – reporters and editors are forced to act as a filter when deciding what to investigate and publish out of the endless supply of things that could be investigated and published. (This is the same basic process that the Attorney General has to go through when deciding whether he should be investigating the BCS or the Payday Lending industry.)

Placement in Time – little if any of the news that journalists choose to cover comes without any preceding events. On the other hand, many of those preceding events have gone unnoticed before the newsworthy item registers in the public consciousness. This might also be called “context.”

Similarities and Differences – most news items are not singular events. News has the potential to help us understand how the current event compares to previous similar events. This would allow us to learn what we can from prior experience and also know where we are breaking new ground.

Usefulness – there is a difference between information that is interesting and information that is useful. While there is some value in merely interesting information, that which is simply interesting should not crowd out that which can actually be useful to the news consumer. (News Fluff/Flash covers this idea.)

This seems like a reasonable list of offerings for journalism to tackle as an industry. Getting it right would be a challenge, but a very worthwhile challenge. I would be very interested in supporting a news operation that consistently gave me useful coverage of the things that mattered – rather than simply a datastream about what has been happening. If that coverage offered the placement in time and information on the similarities and differences between the curent event and past events of the same type I would find such an organization indispensible. (In fact I do find such coverage to be indispensible, but I don’t find that coverage from traditional sources.)

Tags communication, insights, media

culture

Wandering

Post author By David
Post date April 13, 2008
No Comments on Wandering

I thought about the value of wandering as one of our neighbors walked past our house this afternoon. He was just out for a walk with his daughter and their dog. There are many possible reasons that might have prompted the walk, but arriving at a specific destination or in a specific time was obviously not a major concern.

I was reminded of similar walks that our family has taken over the years – like our first Christmas soon after we moved into this house when the girls wanted to go for a walk and we met a bunch of our neighbors for the first time after their Christmas mornings. There is so much that we can gain from having times when you do not have a specific goal to strive for and you are free to follow a whim or prompting that you could not plan in advance.

Tags insights, kids

General

Our Crisis in Foreign Policy

Post author By David
Post date September 13, 2007
4 Comments on Our Crisis in Foreign Policy

Frank does a good job discussing One Lesson From Two September 11th Events. He is completely right to ask:

What will it take for America to learn a similar lesson–that if we expect to be respected and not feared, that we must give respect? Why does America think it is better than the rest of the world, and that we don’t have to abide by the same rules and morals when dealing with the rest of the world? If we learned and practiced this one simple lesson, we would once again have the respect of nearly everyone. As it stands, they would spit on us if they didn’t think we’d drop a smart bomb on them for it.

Our crisis seems to be that the loudest voices in foreign policy seem to be those on the right who think that war is good for our popularity here at home (they’ve been proven wrong since we went to Iraq) and those on the left who think that spreading our money around the globe will make us popular internationally (they were proven wrong on September 11th, 2001). The fact is that both courses to action lead us to be resented. If our foreign policy was not bad enough, our domestic policy does the same thing as we insist from both camps that we must have the highest standard of living in the world. The fact is that we need to work hard and respect others and just take the standard of living that results from our hard work.

Tags connections, insights, international, money

General

Economies of Scale

This news is disturbing but hardly surprising – our existing entitlement programs are unsustainable in the long term. The more I think about it the more I realize that this is like a lesson I learned as a child about ants. There’s an old movie that depicts 25-foot tall ants attacking people. What I learned as a child was that ants could not exist at that scale.

Ants at their existing scale are extremely strong. They can carry many times their body weight with their little exoskeletal bodies. Ants at the scale depicted in the movie would collapse under their own weight. As it turns out, people are the same way. I remember watching a documentary on giants and one thing that really caught my attention is that they have extra health problems because of their size. In fact, their life expectancy is decades shorter society as a whole because their organs tend to fail trying to maintain bodies that are larger than human organs are meant to support.

What I am realizing now is that the same principles of scale hold true for governments as well. Large, intrusive governments are unsustainable over time. The larger a government is, meaning the more it tries to do for citizens, the shorter it can remain stable. Either it must be scaled back or it will collapse. In our case we are staring at the possibility of economic collapse, but sometimes the collapse is a societal collapse.

If you want more proof that there exists a natural law of scale just remember that all the largest elements that have been “discovered” in the last few decades have actually been manufactured in labs. Without exception they rapidly decay into smaller elements because atoms larger than Uranium (weight 238 au) are not sustainable.

Tags economics, Elevated, insights, politics

culture

The Law of Abundance

I have thought for a long time about the basic premise of capitalism and economics. Thanks to the discussion on Wealth is Always Distributed I have decided to write down my thoughts on the subject.

Economics are based on the assumption of scarcity. My observations lead me to believe that the only real scarcity is a scarcity of effort, and a scarcity of time. Even when we consider those two scarcities we do not actually have any shortage of resources with which to meet our needs as a society.

This thinking has led me to what I call the Law of Abundance. This law is illustrated in Each Little Bit Helps from last year. I think the law could be stated that we could accomplish anything (besides defying the laws of physics) if people would just get in and help make things happen without asking the questions of scarcity – Is it going to be fair? Will I get paid for my work? How much will it cost? The only question that is asked under the law of abundance is – Should this be done? Once that question is answered then the work moves forward. Questions of efficiency (such as maximizing profits) are laid aside (although answers about efficient means are still welcome).

I admit that this law of abundance is not very useful on an individual, day-to-day scale. As an individual I have to eat and provide for my family so I am not always free to just jump in and do things without regard to what’s in it for me. I am very interested in the development of my community, but unless someone can pay me for it I can’t devote all my time to those efforts – I must still remain gainfully employed. (I’m lucky enough to enjoy my gainful employment but that is not the topic of this post.)

Where the law of abundance works is things like feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. When we operate under this law of abundance we do not let fields lay fallow in order to receive a government subsidy or prop up the price of the crop we could have been producing. Instead we produce the crop and get it into the hands of those who need it. In essence, production becomes more important than profit. We do not avoid hard work so long as the work has value. We would rather have grain rotting in bins than stomaches rotting with hunger while there is any way to provide food.

We often see an attitude similar to this during times of crisis when people pull out all the stops and just make things happen without prejudice, favoritism, or concern for financial repercussions. I argue that we should operate in this mindset more – always where possible. The key is to make sure that we are careful about getting the right answer to the “should it be done” question.

Tags economics, ideal, insights

culture

Formalism and Details

I have been thinking about the merits of formalism in our laid-back society. I wonder how many people even have a basic understanding of parliamentary procedure or know what Robert’s rules of order are. I suspect that more people are familiar with the details of table manners than are familiar with the details of how to run an organized meeting.

I studied Robert’s rules of order when I was starting as the president of a graduate student organization. Before that I was aware of the general structure of parliamentary procedure but not with the details. Now, as I question if these are dying arts, I start to wonder what we might gain by making people more knowledgeable about these kinds of formalisms. In the world of text messaging is there something to be gained by putting more emphasis on the rules of spelling, grammar and punctuation.

I really would like to know what other people think about this. What is the value of the details? Are we losing those skills in our society?

Tags insights, questions, thoughts

culture

Wealth is Always Distributed

Post author By David
Post date June 19, 2007
13 Comments on Wealth is Always Distributed

I’ve been thinking about the whole distribution of wealth thing and I begin to wonder if it is really a problem. What happens when Alex Rodriguez gets paid $25 million dollars a year? (I pick him because I know his salary)

I have heard arguments that if we tax the rich too heavily they will not be motivated to compete – in my mind, there’s no difference between $25 million and $20 million a year – both are more than I can spend so why would I work harder to earn more money if I am already drowning in the stuff. Then I realized something – these guys probably learn really fast how to spend more money than I can imagine because they have it. If I’m making $2 million a month but I have managed to acquire $1.8 million a month in expenses and I can see another $400,000 a month that I could spend my money on, then I am going to be motivated to try to earn $2.2 million a month.

What I realized is that the very wealthy are spending large amounts of money and that money provides work for the rest of us. If someone buys a mink coat for $100,000 dollars I might say that no coat is worth that price, but where does that money go? It does not go into the fur – it goes into the economy. It arrives in the accounts of the store that sold the coat, but then it is used to pay bills, sales commissions, coat makers, mink farmers, mink food producers, etc. Someone will complain, “but they don’t spend all of it, some of that money goes to corporate profits.” Corporate profits are used to produce more goods, pay investors, or expand businesses. For those who want to argue that “investors” tend to be the already wealthy I reply that they are busy spending their money one way or the other. Those people who would hoard their wealth eventually die and pass it on. Somewhere down the line it will still get spent – and there’s no need to worry about the detrimental effect of hoarding – even if Bill Gates were to sit on all his Billions (as if most of his money were not already tied up in charitable causes) it would hardly even register on our national economy.

When someone argues that there is a problem with some people having more wealth than others they do so with an assumption that there is a limit to how much wealth is available. Even if that were true (and I’m not sure it is) that is only a problem if there is not enough wealth to provide for everyone. We all know very well that there is plenty of wealth available to meet the basic needs of our entire society with much to spare.

Wealth is not about cash, it is about cash flow – to be wealthy all you really need to do is flow less cash out than in. Because of the flowing nature of wealth we need not worry that someone else has it, all we have to do is find a way to the waters edge by producing something that others find valuable enough that they flow cash through us. In fact, the worst thing that could happen economically is to set up a system which gives some people incentive to not produce anything.

Tags economics, insights