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October 5, 2003
Times Web Editor Goes to Harvard in Search of SomethingThe Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times on the Web says he may be ready to try more weblogs, if he can figure out the right ones.Cambridge, Mass: Oct. 5, 2003…. “I came here to get an idea of how we can do this,” said Len Apcar, Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times on the Web. The “this” was the form we’re gathered in now, the modern weblog. Like hundreds of others, Apcar had come to Blogger.con, a conference featuring leading webloggers, front line troops, and assorted apostles, put on by the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. It ended today. Apcar had asked himself a disciplined question; in fact, the type of question outsiders to the Times rarely know how to ask. Not, “what would be a cool weblog to see in the New York Times?” which is fun but too easy. Rather: which version of the emergent thing might actually work, even flourish, within the relatively cautious editorial environment and weighty decision machinery that Apcar contends with at the Times? Factor in all the talent one could tap…. but to do what? Plus all the competition that could be unleashed…but competition at what? Plus the subtle politics of moving into it. Plus the fact that the Times will take risks, but only up to a point. Have any ideas about that, head bloggers in heady times? This isn’t what he said, literally. But it was the question on his mind, more or less. He didn’t ask the conference for its ideas, really. (I gave him some of mine anyway— from the audience.) He just indicated, in a very polite and open way… I’m trying to get a handle on this myself, so let’s talk. To me, this was a welcome move by Len Apcar. Good citizenship, intellectually speaking— a notion that has perhaps become more important at the New York Times after recent turmoil. Apcar took his seat with two journalists already familiar with weblogs: the moderator, Scott Rosenberg, the managing editor of Salon.com, who writes his Links and Comment there, plus James Taranto, who does the Best of the Web Today, “a column in weblog style,” as he put it, for Opinion Journal. That’s the Wall Street Journal’s online forum (and unlike the main site it’s free.) These two represented early adopters within Apcar’s tribe: experienced pros in the national press who were doing it. The Times, he said, had only one weblog, Kristof Responds, by opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof. It was working because Kristof, a driven reporter, went to interesting places and found unusual stories, but had only 700 words for his column. He could thus file to the weblog from the road, and keep a reasonable flow going with material already gathered. Then for days, weeks he could not file. Which lets the comments fill up. When there’s time he reads them, replying to some and even correcting mistakes in his Times column— correcting them online, that is, after weblog readers who argued with him won Kristof over. No correction in the print edition, though, which Apcar admitted was an unsolved glitch. An individual correcting himself in his weblog is not the same thing as the Times itself “making” a correction, a matter far more fraught. The weblog, it appears, is self-correcting for the author involved. This, I think, is one of the major arguments in its favor. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit , at another point in the conference, called this the collective truth-making feature of weblogs: readers are your editors. I’m not sure “collective” is a well chosen term, but he means a social mechanism for catching errors and improving or extending ideas, which is part of the weblog’s gift to journalism— distributed fact checking, for one. Apcar said something I found insightful: “Kristof Reponds” was essentially a contract between him and Kristof, unwritten and based on a mutual sense of where the boundaries are. This is one answer to “everybody needs an editor.” Maybe everyone needs the right contract with an editor, setting terms for mutual oversight of the writer’s venture into the new. Such things (you-and-me understandings) are efficient, and they play a bigger role in editorial invention than we sometimes think. I bet they’re a major part of the Spokane Spokesman Review’s eleven weblogs. Click here for the newest, “Journey to Vatican III,” about change in the Catholic Church. Apcar said six other things significant for the coterie at Harvard and for anyone curious about whether weblogs will make a difference for the better in journalism: 1.) He has followed with interest what the Dallas Morning News is doing with its group weblog among the editorial page staff. But he couldn’t quite figure out what it was, he said. So it qualified as news—I mean for the conference and its little world—that it had drawn to Cambridge at least one key player in the big presence the establishment press has online. Len Apcar was in a position to break ground and hire the first crew to chart a weblog course for the flagship newspaper. He could have said he was an expert in Times journalism, invited to tell us how it’s done at the Newspaper of Record. (This is the rhetorical situation 90 percent of the time with Times editors at conferences.) Instead he came as an inquirer. The Bogger.con conference had organized itself in my mind around two alternatives written in boilerplate on its website. Is the weblog form “just good enough to make a difference, or the revolution so many say it is?” I don’t have the answer yet. But the appearance by the Times Web Editor convinced me it was an open question, there on the table, not of a Net coterie, but in the press culture at large. There was one almost poignant moment during the question and answer period. Someone stood up and asked will the New York Times open its archive to free linking? (The original url’s expire after seven days for most articles, then you have to pay.) This appeared to catch Apcar off guard. Perhaps he had not fully understood the ethical universe he had traveled to, the Open Source Society, where naturally you link to everyone who enriches your account, building the social capital of the Web a tiny bit at a time. You take pains to make yourself linkable, too— that’s just good citizenship. What the crowd was really saying, however, cut deeper: Don’t you understand? We want to link to you, mighty New York Times, and give everything you publish more and more Web life. For this, the Rule of Links, is the way of our tribe, said conference host Dave Winer, who wrote the rule. But because of your foolish and short-sighted archive policy, our efforts die after a week. Why, why are you causing all this needless link death? This wasn’t entirely fair to Apcar, who isn’t a corporate head. He seemed puzzled by it. Listen here to Chris Lydon’s audio interview with Len Apcar (or another one with yours truly.) Hmmm. In the comments section Barry Parr says the total market for online archive information purchased the way the Times charges is a mere $15 million, which he calls insignificant revenue in the big picture. The source is here. Maybe this is a winnable battle down the road. Certainly we can say this: if the Times has a crew of webloggers, it will have people who grasp the principle of justice in the Rule of the Link. Steve Outing of Poynter says if the Times adopts weblogs, this will be a significant boost for the form. See his Oct. 6 item here.
Posted by Jay Rosen at October 5, 2003 4:52 PM
Comments
The whole notion of the NYT or any of the mainstream press glomming off on blogging has the air about it of the Communist Party hacks in the old Soviet Union trying to figure out how they could take advantage of the the "capitalism thing." Turns out all the old hacks became owners of the privatized holdings and the system still reeks. Posted by: Rivlax at October 6, 2003 10:05 AM | Permalink What's amazing is that, according to the Online Publishers' Association, total sales of news & information under $5/item (which includes archives) is less than $15 million/year, and it's not growing very fast. (See http://mediasavvy.com/archives/000444.shtml#000444) No doubt, the NYT has a huge share of it, but it's an insignificant market. Posted by: Barry Parr at October 6, 2003 2:04 PM | Permalink Len Apgar sounds like a decent guy and a solid journalist, but someone who needs deeper moorings in the Internet and weblog ethic (he was puzzled by the drawback of links to his site dying after a week?). I do hope the Times takes a plunge into the weblog pool (though I suspect a toe-dip is more likely). And I hope they find a better model for their efforts than Kristoff Responds, which seems like nothing more than a glorified letters to the editor page (with responses) at times. How often does Kristoff link to other sites? Over at E-Media Tidbits, Steve Outing today makes the case for a Times political reporter starting up a weblog on the 2004 political campaign trail. It's a logical first step. Meantime, here's the answer to Apcar's question about a Times weblog: "to do what?" To bring readers into the news conversation -- letting us pose questions and post observations -- instead of the traditional media model of a one-way megaphone. Thank you to the intrepid BloggerCon questioner who tried to get Len Apcar to understand how thoroughly ridiculous the Times web access policy is; and thank you, Jay for reporting on this much needed question. I'm terribly sorry that Apcar didn't understand the question. And I think this goes to the heart of the question: if he doesn't understand how his site's misguided policies diminish the effectiveness of blogs who use the Times for their news sources, then how will he ever hope to create an internal Times culture that is friendly to blogging whether it be inside or outside the Times family? Pls. take a look at my posts on this subject at http://richards1052.typepad.com/tikun_olam/2003/07/new_york_times_.html. My original title was "New York Times to Bloggers: Drop Dead" but I thought that a bit incendiary so I softened it a tad. Posted by: Richard Silverstein at October 7, 2003 1:31 AM | Permalink I'm going to throw my own small heft as one of the original bloggers into this, only to point out that before I started blogging I had no idea what it was; before AOL I had no idea what the Internet was. Today I devote a huge amount of my life to both. There's nothing saying the Times or anybody else can't learn it as well. They haven't so far because they haven't been properly motivated. Everybody is clueless till they get clued in. I blog regularly for my clients, but limit access to materials by requiring a password. It's only important to me to make feeds publicly available for syndication sites and those who regularly read my materials-- but requiring a fee to review archived materials helps pay the bills. While it is important to encourage direct linking-- I actually allow partner sites access to content when they link directly-- it's part of my business model to generate some revenue from the hours I spend researching materials. Readers often forget the amount of effort required even to produce blog entries. Who's going to pay for this time? Should the costs be passed along to current customers or distributed over the reader base? I'm sure at one time people though newspapers should be FREE-- while the costs of electronic publishing is less, it still costs to produce quality materials. To the rest of your points, I feel you are right on the mark. Hopefully blog software will implement a 2-step editorial process, the second set of eyes would certainly improve my own writing. *smile* Sincerely, Justin Hitt Posted by: Justin Hitt at October 7, 2003 11:51 AM | Permalink Newspapers only charged for the paper so they could have hard numbers for the circulation audits that determine who'll buy the ads that make the real money. For instance, national ads won't buy if circulation in under 100,000. Archive revenues are dropping, have been for three years. Posted by: anon at October 7, 2003 4:38 PM | Permalink "Steve Outing of Poynter says if the Times adopts weblogs, this will be a significant boost for the form." The last thing blogs need is a "boost" from the Times. Nothing the Times does will take blogging anywhere but away from the qualities that make it intriguing. At its craziest, Times blogging might resemble the Sunday morning chat shows. For that matter, Bloggercon smacks a bit of the institutionalization of an anarchic form, an anointing of a new priesthood. Blogging is and ought to remain more than punditry by another name. Posted by: Jeff Sharlet at October 7, 2003 9:44 PM | Permalink The Times will enthusiastically adopt blogging as soon as it figures out how to sell out-of-date blog matter. This posture stands in some tension with the intrinsic nature of the mode, which seems quite comfortable with an understanding of human speech as free, ephemeral, and hardly meriting conservation. Posted by: tom matrullo at October 7, 2003 11:32 PM | Permalink "...ephemeral, and hardly meriting conservation." Exactly -- what makes blogs exciting is not an archive or their searchability -- it's the ongoing conversation. Their ephemerality is what saves them from being simple vanity presses, storing the words of self-declared wise men for eternity. Blogs aren't meritocratic punditocracy, nor are they a Borgesian library; they're cacophony in the public square, a relief from the monotonous harmony of pressthink (the mindset, not this interesting blog). Posted by: Jeff Sharlet at October 8, 2003 12:51 PM | Permalink The "cacophony" is further fractionated in comments sections, where interesting discussions occur no longer quite in full view of the public square, but off in corners, possible to trace, but even more elusive. Of course it is possible to even fetishize that. Posted by: tom matrullo at October 8, 2003 11:10 PM | Permalink jeff, i think you are right that the conversation of weblogs is key, but i have been surprised at the value of archived weblogs, too. not every post is timeless, but searchable blog archives turn up lots of good stuff. at my own site, i was surprised to see how much traffic i get from searches that link to older posts. not an either/or to your point on conversations, but an also. Actually, PressThink has shown that to be true, as well, Ed. There are things that get read well because they are "now," or responsive to other current blogs; and then there are things that get read more slowly as reference or background. The links that bring people in the first catgeory are different than the links in the second. Both types are examples of the "conversation of weblogs," but different conversations, with different time machines implied. Thanks for these intelligent posts, everyone. Posted by: Jay Rosen at October 10, 2003 2:34 AM | Permalink |
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