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Even as an action taken to ensure nothing less than survival, it couldn’t come at a worse time: effective June 1, readers of The New York Times will have to dig deeper in their wallets for their daily dead-tree fix of information.
The price of individual copies of The New York Times on Mondays through Saturdays will climb to $2 — the third time in 23 months. the Times' weekday price goes up at city and national newsstands by 50 cents, or 33 percent, from today’s price of $1.50.
The New York Times also is raising the price for its Sunday national and Northeast editions: $6 a pop, an increase of $1. In the New York metropolitan area, it will cost $5, a $1 increase.
While it’s of course completely defensible from a bottom-line perspective, given the industry's continuing decline in advertising revenue, there’s no escaping the fact that this increase — following others between July 2007 and now, in something of a rite of spring for The Times — comes during the grimmest economic period for the American consumer in generations.
The blogosphere (undoubtedly many of the very same cohort The Times needs to survive) has weighed in, with some remarks that should be at least briefly concerning to the company's brain trust.
CommonSenseMom at HuffPost commented today:
Three words: Cancel My Subscription Three more words: I Have Internet
MED1025, HuffPost, wrote: Six bucks? I'll read it on line.
MED1025 may be onto something. With much of the best of the Sunday Forklift Edition available free at nytimes.com, and with the Times unwilling (for now) to re-enlist in a paid-content strategy, budget-conscious readers may make the digital switch and never come back.
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Scott Heekin-Canedy, president and general manager of The New York Times, answered questions about the fate of The Times on April 29, before the announcement of the price increase. “We must preserve and protect our print franchises while growing our digital businesses. We must invest to grow our businesses while aggressively controlling costs. We must control costs while protecting the quality of our journalism. …
“Our news, information and opinion content have never commanded a larger, more engaged audience than today. Our print audience is stable and is being replenished with younger readers. About 70 percent of our 1.1 million subscribers use NYTimes.com. Seventy percent have also subscribed for at least two years.”
That kind of duplication of print subscribers and online readers is encouraging; it points to the kind of loyalty that newspapers would kill for (or die for, as the Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Ann Arbor News already have this year). But the current state of the economy — and the fact that individual consumers’ recovery is a lagging indicator of that economy as it improves — may well make some of those 770,000 Times readers rethink the belt-and-suspenders habit of their daily Times consumption.
The Times may be on to something; maybe this is one of those brilliant counter-intuitive moves borne less of inspiration than desperation. The implicit message to print readers may be "you get what you pay for, and you pay for quality."
Rumors of Google’s invincibility may have been greatly exaggerated. That’s the takeaway from recent developments in the world of online news and search — one a consequence of clashing business interests, the other a result of the never-ending quest to build the better information mousetrap.
Google News, Google’s algorithmically-generated news component, has for years feasted on news content from The Associated Press, the 163-year-old news cooperative. AP stories, along with those of hundreds of other news providers, form the spine of much of what Google News republishes.
But in an April 29 interview with Forbes, Associated Press Chief Executive Tom Curley threw down the legal gauntlet, threatening Google with a prohibition of use of its news content without Google taking action against those who misappropriate AP content with the aid of Google’s search rankings.
The threat follows News Corporation’s charge last month that Google commits copyright infringement when it borrows material from news stories to build its search rankings.
Robert Thomson, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal owned by News Corp., lashed out at Google recently. "There is a collective consciousness among content creators that they are bearing the costs and that others are reaping some of the revenues. There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet.”
The AP signed a licensing deal with Google in 2006. Since then, Forbes reports,
Google has paid the AP undisclosed fees to carry AP content on the Google News section of the site. Search rankings on Google News give priority to recognizable news brands like the AP. But Google applies no such algorithmic discretion to general searches. The broader search rankings spread AP content out across the Web, says Curley, encouraging misappropriation by other sites. Curley wants Google to “protect content from unauthorized use and pay us for the longtail.” By “longtail,” Curley refers to the thousands of small sites that collectively drive vast herds of traffic using AP content.
Curley said that the 2006 agreement with Google was only reached only after the AP threatened to sue Google for copyright infringement. "They threw us a bone," he told Forbes, warning that if Google doesn't strike a better compensation deal with the AP soon, “They will not get our copy going forward.”
Industry analyst Ken Doctor of Outsell spoke to the point of fair compensation with the BBC on April 7, at the Newspaper Association of America's (NAA) annual conference in San Diego. “The real question is, 'Is it fair for news companies to produce all this content for Google and for Google to keep the lion's share of revenue? What we should be focusing on is 'fair share'.”
That issue will probably be resolved sooner rather than later. The no-doubt handsome fee Google pays the AP has to be welcome in this current economy — an economy that’s already seen the newspaper industry AP relies on having experienced serious contractions around the country.
As newspapers scale back operations, or close altogether, the AP loses some of its traditional base of content clients. With online as the evolving arena for the news and Google News already reaching more than 6 million users a month, one suspects that these two will reach an accommodation soon.
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Another challenge to Google’s dominance is still on the horizon, and will be a hell of a lot harder to dismiss.
The Wolfram|Alpha computational search engine has been the talk of geeks, media pundits, analysts and computer scientists for months now; that critical mass of critical thinkers has spilled over into the online media; some are calling Wolfram Alpha the first, real and serious challenge to Google, and, at the same time, hailing W|A as maybe the next big advance in computational technology. It's scheduled for public release sometime this month.
The W|A search engine was created and developed by physicist Stephen Wolfram, the mind behind Mathematica, the celebrated software program that enables users to visualize and manipulate applications of mathematical principles in theoretical and everyday uses, something with application in everything from flight simulators to statistics, music recording to disease diagnosis.
Wolfram, who introduced the "knowledge engine" on April 29 at a lecture at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, used a classic show-and-tell to do it, breaking down the virtues of W|A in a classroom context — complete with fuzzy overhead projection. Consequently, you can’t glean that much from the YouTube video of Wolfram’s address; since it’s a video of a projection of screenshots, a lot is lost in translation.
But much of it is clear enough to showcase W|A’s ability to offer a range of computed answers to actual questions written in the most general terms. That means a fuller range of probable responses within a single page than that provided by Google, which responds to a query with a list of sources of possible answers arrayed across several web pages.
To go from Wolfram’s demo, W|A apparently also lets you enter search terms other than plain English and still get a workable search result based on the context of the query; for scientists used to speaking and thinking in the shorthand nomenclature of their chosen professions, this would no doubt be a timesaver.
For example, to go from Wolfram’s demonstration, typing (as he did) “6000C,” the W|A engine makes implicit assumptions from the start. In Wolfram’s demo, the search engine assumes that “C” represents a unit of something, then assumes that “C” represented a measurement of temperature (Centigrade or Celsius), then builds out a number of linear and graphic responses extrapolating from the initial assumptions.
If the real-world W|A engine works like the demo, then, typing in “C atomic number” would presumably bring up entries on carbon — the chemical element identified as C, and bearing the atomic number 6 — as well as a graphic of the periodic table carbon is part of, its byproducts (graphite and diamonds), a photograph of carbon, and other information displayed in linear and graphic form — all from dropdowns on the landing page. No drill-down to other pages required.
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There are some drawbacks: W|A is said to be weak on information for searches related to popular culture and entertainment. It’s been acknowledged that W|A’s release is meant to concentrate on the needs of professionals and academics. But that won’t last long — not if the damn thing is going to have any real traction in the mainstream of computing.
There’s a lot more everyday people than there are academics and professional number-crunchers; if W|A isn’t ultimately intended to be a "knowledge engine" for everyone … what’s the point?
Some aren’t that impressed yet.
Loftwork, writes in response to an article in The Independent (UK): “This appears to continue Harvard's Natural Language AI research, which has been ongoing for decades. It sounds interesting but I suspect its inherent difficulties with the apparent illogic of culturally based questions … where significance is largely determined by context and meaning is overloaded, may leave it as an alternative search methodology rather than a dominant system.”
Some are ready not to be impressed at all. “Hyped up pile of shite this!!” writes ffredson at YouTube.
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Others would beg to differ.
“For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for,” blogged Michael W. Jones at Tech.blorge.com.
“I would invest in this, literally and figuratively. If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha,” said Doug Lenat, on Semanticuniverse.com, back in March.
The truth will probably be somewhere between these extremes of reaction. But it’s been 13 years since Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google, and about 11 years since it became a company. In Internet time, 11 years might as well be a millennium. Back then, a dozen years ago, most of us did pretty well (or thought we did) with the information we could get. Then, after Google was invented, we didn’t know how we got along without it.
U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice David Souter announced this week that he was ready for a change he could believe in, mainly a change in his own life. The 19-year veteran of the high court confirmed on Friday to the White House of his intention to step down at the end of the current term.
Souter never much liked Washington; he got mugged there some years ago, and he once referred to his own lofty position as “the world’s best job in the world’s worst city.” Presumably when the court’s term ends in June, Souter will gas up the Volkswagen sedan he drives and decamp for the New Hampshire farmhouse that’s been his longtime home-improvement project and sanctuary.
The Supremes have been due for a change in the lineup for some time now, even with the investiture of John Roberts as Chief Justice back in 2005. The conventional wisdom may have thought that either Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 76 and ailing, or Justice John Paul Stevens, 89 and, well, 89, would have been the first to change the court's current lineup.
But Souter’s low-key, maverick, New Hampshirite independence got the better of everyone. The question of his replacement looms big. The speculation fax machines are working overtime in the nation’s capital right now.
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You’ll be hearing the phrase “short list” for just forever, as court watchers cogitate on the nominees that President Obama may be considering. The media’s already compiled its own frontrunners' list; it includes the names of U.S. Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Diane Wood, and the new Solicitor General, Diane Kagan.
And as of Friday there’s been a new name dropped: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Leah Ward Sears, Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice, is also apparently being vetted.
What’s right with this picture? They’re all women; if Obama were to pick from this group, it would signal a fresh validation of women to the highest ranks of the judiciary, and a continuation of the social progress that saw Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor become Justices in two of the preceding decades.
And other benefits. The nomination of Sotomayor, whom many early handicappers at the betting window have decided is the odds-on favorite, would buttress the administration’s already solid bona fides with the Latino community. That fact is peripheral to Sotomayor’s judicial qualifications, of course, but it’s a legitimate political calculus just the same. Esquire says she's a lock for this and other reasons.
Other names have surfaced in the past. Cass Sunstein, the brilliant Chicago legal scholar, law professor and prolific author who’s known President Obama for years, from time at the University of Chicago. Laurence Tribe, a highly-regarded author and professor of constitutional law at Harvard who once had Obama as a student. That theoretical short list will expand in the weeks to come.
But if past behavior is prologue, we can count on President Obama being as cautious and deliberate in this nomination process as he’s been (or tried to be) in the past. Hell, you see how long it took ‘em to decide on a family dog — you think he’s gonna rush on this?
It’s a certainty, of course, that out of respect for the decorum of the court, the president will keep his counsel utterly until closer to the end of the Supreme Court’s current term, in late June. But looking over a wealth of candidates, each endowed with a wealth of qualifications, we all may be surprised — President Obama included — at how difficult this decision may be.
The only short list that matters is the one that probably doesn’t exist yet. ----- Image credits: Justice Souter: SCOTUS (Public domain). Judge Sonia Sotomayor: Still from video of panel at Duke University Law School, 2005. Judge Diane Wood: Linda Rux, republished under GNU Free Documentation License, v1.2 or later. Cass Sunstein: Matthew W. Hutchins, Harvard Law Record, republished under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported LIcense.
The $3.4 trillion federal budget, the first of the Obama administration, passed in the Congress on Wednesday without a single Republican vote behind it. The Senate voted 53-43 for the Obama plan after the House voted 233-193, again without one Republican vote in support.
That’s zero. Zilch. Nada. Sound and fury signifying (literally) nothing. Maybe they were too busy sulking in the Senate cloakroom, or they were hunkering down in strategy sessions around the Senate figuring out other ways to tell the president No, No & Hell No.
Whatever the reasons, the absence of the GOP’s support for one of the biggest and most important budgets in the nation’s history was another sign of the utter and willful irrelevance of the Republican Party. The votes on Wednesday symbolize their standing in the great American scheme of things. Right now they’re nonentities. Anachronisms. They might as well be the Whigs.
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Students of history will recall the Whigs — not the incredibly excellent garage-rock band from Athens, Ga., nor the Afghan Whigs, the equally excellent grunge & soul band from Cincinnati, but the political party that was in many ways the antecedent to today’s Republican Party, right down to the GOP’s current and uncanny appetite for self-destruction.
Like the Republicans, the Whigs had an innate appeal to the business classes, and adopted an aristocratic mein that excluded as many people as it included.
Like the Republicans, the Whigs championed moralism as a fundamental component of social relationships and interactions.
Like the Republicans, the Whigs would come to ally themselves philosophically with xenophobes who would do their best to Keep America Ethnically Pure.
And like the Republicans, the Whigs’ ranks would be rife with infighting, disloyalty and an increasing inability to define themselves for a steadily growing electorate — a formula for political extinction.
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The Whig Party began about 1833 when it was founded by Henry Clay, the brilliant orator, congressman, Senator, Secretary of State and three times the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
As king of the Whigs, Clay hailed the "American system" of government, reinforcing the need for high tariffs on imported goods, the development of so-called "internal improvements" and the primacy of the Congress as the legitimate will of the American people.
The Whigs’ early platform had to do with expansion of some basic functions of government, such as the building of roads, schools and infrastructure. United in their opposition to the increasingly autocratic aspects of President Andrew Jackson, the Whigs made a convincing case against an imperialist America. Abraham Lincoln was a Whig before he entered presidential politics as a Republican.
After the death of William Henry Harrison (who in political terms was in the White House just long enough to have a cup of coffee) and the renunciation of their economic policies by turncoat Whig President John Tyler, the Whigs displayed internal dissension over those policies and other matters. As the country’s economic fortunes increased, as well as the political fortunes of the Democrats, the Whigs were shown the door in the 1842 Congressional elections.
In the 1850s, some Whigs desperate for political traction flirted with the Know-Nothing Party, lulled by its seductive nativist campaigns against “corrupt” Irish and German immigrants — a distinct parallel with modern conservatives’ nativist thinking about Mexican and Central American immigrants.
It was pretty much over for the Whigs in 1854, as the issue of the expansion of slavery reached fever pitch. That year Whig Winfield Scott was soundly defeated by Democrat Franklin Pierce for the presidency.
Ohio Rep. Lewis D. Campbell of Ohio, deeply affected by his party’s defeat that year, was quoted saying something that might well ring in the ear of Republicans now: “We are slain. The party is dead, dead, dead!”
Campbell later ran for office, and won, as a Democrat. Make of that what you will.
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Maybe the Republicans should tie up with The Modern Whig Party, a movement of avowed moderates that, according to its Web site, "represents moderate voters from all walks of life who cherry-pick between traditional Democratic and Republican ideals ... This includes general principles of fiscal responsibility, strong national defense and bold social progression.”
Or they could just come up with their own tweak on the Whig moniker. The EarWhig Party has a nice ring to it. They could make it look real postmodern by running the words “ear” and “Whig” together, in one of those hip, shiny word ligatures CorporateAmerica is so fond of.
Whatever. They need something. CNN’s reporting today that a range of Republican Party leaders will help spearhead a new GOP outreach initiative, the National Council for a New America. The principals in this redesign of a retrofit, announced today, are many of the party’s usual suspects (Romney, Jindal, McCain, Barbour, among others). It’s the second rebranding effort the Republicans have mounted in about four months.
But Olympia Snowe knows what’s up, and what’s really needed: “There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party,” the Maine senator wrote on Wednesday in an op-ed in The New York Times. “Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities — indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.”
Just when it seems like we're at war with nature, a little bit of nature walks our way. Or dances. Or struts, or just plain rocks.
This is Snowball, a cockatoo who lives with his owners somewhere in Indiana, and living proof that nature has a sense of humor.
Snowball's favorite song is the Backstreet Boys' "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)." Watch him go; this parrot with a Billy Idol pompadour keeps the beat, totally in the pocket. The scientists are trying to make sense of it all; Snowball was recently the subject of tests proving that, rather than mimickry of someone else in the room, Snowball's mad skills actually reflect a recognition of rhythm and nuance (knowing when to pause from time to time, consistent with the music, for example), as well as a sense of stagecraft. Snowball owns the space at the top of that loveseat, moving about with the cock-o'-the-walk abandon of the best rock singers. Jagger hasn't strutted like this in years.
There've been no reports on how Snowball has performed under different auditory conditions. We don't know if he can do this with Kanye or Nine Inch Nails on the box. But it's a start. Snowball's a hit on YouTube. He's been approached about the development of a Snowball situation comedy; a six-figure book deal is reportedly in the works. And negotiations are underway for Snowball to mount a national tour. He'll be working with the Backstreet Boys.
The roads and turnpikes of the state of Pennsylvania will probably be a joy to drive on very soon. Besides receiving its part of the stimulus money devoted to the national infrastructure, the Keystone State can be expected to gain other benefits from the party in power, the Democrats, whose ranks swelled by one on Tuesday, when Republican Senator Arlen Specter walked across the aisle, apparently for good.
Specter’s reverberant action on Tuesday conveyed unto the Democrats the numerical bragging right, the legislative tipping point of a 60th seat in the United States Senate. In ways we’ve yet to see, that lever of a decided majority may be the most powerful weapon at the disposal of President Barack Obama.
Today — the 100th day of an Obama administration poised for action on a number of vital fronts — can also mark the first day of a truly productive phase of an administration suddenly liberated from the prospect of indefinite senatorial gridlock.
It took him a hundred days, but now, today, Barack Obama may well have achieved his first chance to truly, fully govern this nation.
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We’ve been waiting for today — the 100-Day Milestone Benchmark Touchstone — almost as long as we had to wait for the dog. Both wings of the punditburo will cough up bulletized hairballs, “report cards” and subjective checklists of promises kept and promises shunted, for now, to the back or the side of the first-term agenda.
Even by the twisted, elastic, utterly partisan yardstick of the Republicans who oppose him as a conditioned reflex, President Obama has so far been more than game to the challenge of the presidency, a thoroughbred whose biggest shortcoming may be an outsize sense of what’s possible in a nation whose largest institutions — the ones right now most in need of various rescues — are the ones that move the slowest.
He’s moved on several fronts: repealing restrictions on stem-cell research; rolling back destructive Bush White House initiatives on energy and the environment; closing the Guantanamo Bay prison and torture facility; and endeavoring to impose a finality — an end time if not an end date — on the tragic, costly and unnecessary war in Iraq.
But what’s important isn’t so much what Obama has achieved legislatively or by executive order; what predominates in these 100 days has to do with what he represents to the American people: a sense of the possible, that indelible embrace of the future we haven’t had in quite a while. It’s not tangible, it doesn’t lower your mortgage interest rate, and it sure as hell isn’t folding money.
But that feeling of things improving, the ability to impart that intrinsically American sense of Yes is as central to the presidency as the nuclear launch codes. This appeal reflects not the cult of personality, as the conservatives insist, but the power of personality. And there’s a profound difference between the two.
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The American people are able to make that distinction. The latest Associated Press poll finds public approval of Obama in the 60 percent range, up there with heavy hitters like Roosevelt, Reagan and Clinton at similar points in their presidencies. And the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, sampling Americans’ feelings towards Obama, found that 51 percent approve of him and his policies, while another 30 percent approve of him personally even though they disagree with those policies.
That’s why the end of the “honeymoon” expected by the punditburo and the Republicans may not come to pass in the usual way. Americans understand that the listing ship of our economy didn’t take on water overnight, and couldn’t possibly be righted in a hundred days, or two hundred or maybe even three.
That doesn’t mean President Obama gets a pass. Style points alone don’t a president make. Some of his most important campaign pledges — an insistence on the rule of law; a refusal to turn a blind eye to lawbreakers — have yet to fully materialize. As Obama’s taken up the baton of leadership, he’s found himself squaring the circle between the rhetoric of the campaign and the reality of governing.
Sen. Specter’s defection will make that reconciling of principle and practice an easier thing to accomplish. But President Obama must going forward continue to stay out in front of the American experience, holding himself accountable for the nation’s policies, staying in touch with the country he leads and doing it with the visible accessibility we associate with the nation’s best leaders.
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It’s like when you’re riding the New York City subway or the BART train in San Francisco, and midway through your journey, the train … slows … to a stop somewhere under the heaving bowels of Manhattan or some point under the cold water of San Francisco Bay.
You don’t know why you’ve stopped. You’re sure it’s for a good reason. But it’s reassuring to hear the voice of the engineer, telling you: Everybody chill, we have a technical difficulty, we’ll be moving soon. You can’t do anything about it, but it’s just good to hear someone’s on the case doing his level best to get things moving again. Somebody’s at the helm. Someone’s in charge.
Whatever happens over the next 1,363 days, President Obama will do himself a lot of good by maintaining and building on the visceral connection he has with the American people. No doubt, his legislative agenda will advance in fits and starts; setbacks and missteps are coming that he won’t be able to do anything about; we can count on coming global upheavals that Obama can neither predict nor prevent.
But as long as Obama maintains his dialogue with the American people, and continues working to pursue the agenda that won him election, he’ll be able to make withdrawals from the tranche of national goodwill he now enjoys.
America from 2004 to 2009 –its new ironies and old habits, its capacity for change and transition – is topic A in this collection of essays and blog posts on pop culture, the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, a transformative presidential election and the first 100 days of the Obama administration. | Now available at Authorhouse
One nation subject to change: A collection of topical essays exploring television, hip-hop, patriotism, the use of language under Bush II, and the author's own reckoning with mortality. | Available at Authorhouse
A veteran journalist, producer and blogger, Michael Eric Ross contributes to Medium, and the content channels of Creatd Media. He writes from Los Angeles on the arts, politics, race and ethnicity, and pop culture. A graduate of the University of Colorado, he's worked as a reporter, editor and critic at several newspapers and websites, including The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, MSN, Current, msnbc.com, and TheWrap, a major online source of entertainment trade news. He was formerly an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, PopMatters, Salon, The Root, seattlepi.com, NPR.com, theGrio, BuzzFeed, Daily Kos, and other publications. Author of the novel Flagpole Days (2003); and essay collections Interesting Times (2004) and American Bandwidth (2009), he contributed to the anthologies MultiAmerica (edited by Ishmael Reed, 1997) and Soul Food (2000).
The New York Times also is raising the price for its Sunday national and Northeast editions: $6 a pop, an increase of $1. In the New York metropolitan area, it will cost $5, a $1 increase.
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