This week my class started Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried which looks into the Vietnam War. In about two weeks my class will be splitting up into groups and discussing a film; my group has picked Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, which is also about Vietnam. I mention this because O’Brien writes a lot about the idea of soldiers being actors, men playing a part, or a man performing his gendered duty.

O’Brien’s own tale in the chapter “On the Rainy River” admits that he does not support the war, in one of my favorite quotes he states

“Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons (p. 40).”

Yet he goes to Vietnam.

Through the chapter “On the Rainy River” he battles within himself to decide to flee to Canada or go to war. In this chapter I found it really powerful and revealing on why some men feel they need to go to war. O’Brien does not want to be dishonorable, a pussy, a sissy, a bitch, a coward, or any other word that is given to a man with a very natural fear of dying in a war he doesn’t believe in. This idea that society will emasculate a man because he does not wish to fight is motivating to those that do not wish to be emasculated to prove their masculinity. Masculinity’s most defining trait would be violence and a military is the largest entity of violence in a society.

O’Brien doesn’t just talk about his own performance in the military but others as well. In the next few passages he really makes a connection between the performance of masculinity and how men really feel/think.

“They afraid of dying but they were even more afraid of to show it (p. 20)”

The men had a very natural and human fear of dying but to show this fear meant they were less than a “real” man. A sissy, a coward, a pussy.

“They were actors. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself (p. 20)”

O’Brien describes the soldiers as actors. Actors have the ability to model themselves into what the audience wants. Actors in gender model themselves into what society demands.

As discussed in most of my blog masculinity is socially constructed and taught to men at a young age. So masculinity being a learned behavior could be comparable to learning to lie or to be polite; the important thing is to unlearn (not teach) this behavior. Most of the my posts deal with some learned behavior—men are unable to express their feelings, men use sexual violence as a form of control, men fear emasculation, etc, (Full Metal Jacket remarkably covers racism, homophobia, sexism, rape, and violence all in the first seven minutes). If society would change its perceptions of masculinity (and in turn femininity) then people would be people not confined to a little box of qualities that one should have and should perform.

Front of Envelope. Munch's "Puberty" and photo of Vaslav Nijinsky. Photographs, rubber stamps, paint, stamps.

Back of envelope. It opens to reveal the rest of the letter.

Letter to Rae Hallstrom.  Written on a recycled envelope.  Text reads:

7 November 2009

Dear Rae,

This note is in response to your recent letter about your fiction and your dream that your projects are your babies.  I’ve had the same dream (many times).  I thought I’d also say that we’re not only the mothers of our creative work.  In Munch’s painting “Puberty” I also see myself, my fear of vulnerability, nakedness.  It’s said that fiction is “the lie that tells the truth,” but I often think fiction is in no way a lie but the truth as the imagination sees it.  As for the photo of Nijinsky (who is on my mind because my poetry class just read the William Carlos Williams’s poem inspired by Nijinsky and because Theodore Roethke sought “the secret of Nijinsky”), he is there to represent freedom and courage.  In a recent letter to me, Wayne Barham writes about shredding an old manuscript of his because it was untrue in the most important sense of being untrue.  [see letter 39]. 

For both of us, I think, truth has little to do with what happened but more so with who we really are.  Authenticity.  All of our work must grow out of our vision of the world.  I believe what we have both come to realize is that the hardest thing about fiction is telling the truth.  Rae, it’s hard to do because we spend our whole lives hiding the truth, even to ourselves.  We must dance, like Nijinsky–even if others find our dance scandalous.  Learn from other stories but find your own truth, your voice.  Don’t write with a mind of how a story “should be” because then you are using your head too much!  My friend Wayne wrote of over-intellectualizing when he wrote.  But fictional truth comes from a much deeper place.  As I’m fond of telling people, I feel the truth in my gut. 

Tim O’Brien said it this way… You experience stories in your body, not your head.  As Wayne discovered, too much of the intellect kills fiction.  Write of what’s dear to you, Rae, and tell the truth.  Good luck with your writing life–love your babies but also dance, dance, dance. 

Heart, Theresa

During the winter quarter of my last year at UCSB, I took an English course through my LCI specialization entitled “Narratives of War.”  The course studied 20th-century war literature from a contemporary perspective and explored questions related to smart war and the advancement of drones and other military technology, total war, just war, trauma and healing, models and perceptions of the enemy and the “other,” and how human rights are re-negotiated in the war on terror.  We studied novels, fictionalized memoirs, graphic novels, poetry, essays, films and documentaries, video games and media projects, and various online resources related to current conflicts.  Some of my favorite works from the course were Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie-Rose, Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, and Apocalypse Now, Jarhead, and Waltz With Bashir.

As part of the honors section of the course with the professor, we created a blog to contribute additional materials and met weekly to talk about them.  While this course was gruesome and disconcerting more often than not, its relevance to the world today was fascinating.  I learned so much and, more importantly, how much I don’t know.  We covered topics that resonated with me deeply for various reasons, and encouraged me to research and think more critically about how conflicts, wars, and violence around the globe are affecting people and societies in ways that are less than intuitive.  This was the course that covered what should be in the news, but isn’t, and what people should be educating themselves about, but aren’t.  For that reason I’m grateful to have been made aware of some small fraction of the larger problem.

A little water will put out the fire.

But wait. A little wood will keep it breathing.

It is a heart we started with ten sticks

That now are nothing, like a hundred others

Shrunk to this hectic person whose last life

Would drain the whole cool forest if it could.

Another handful, then, though it is late.

So much in little, such a hungry principle;

We are not lightly to extinguish that.

Quiet a little longer, while it hisses

And settles, keeping secret the sore word

That soon enough its embers will forget.

Our own existence, partly. A wild piece

Of me and you we presently must drown.

                                      Mark van Doren

                                                     100 Poems

= = =

ANOTHER LOVE POEM also cited in NORTHWEST PASSAGE: 

THE SAND-HILL CRANE

WHENEVER the days are cool and clear,
     The sand-hill crane goes walking
Across the field by the flashing weir,
     Slowly, solemnly stalking.
The little frogs in the tules hear,
And jump for their lives if he comes near;
The fishes scuttle away in fear
     When the sand-hill crane goes walking.

The field folk know if he comes that way,
     Slowly, solemnly stalking,
There is danger and death in the least delay,
     When the sand-hill crane goes walking.
The chipmunks stop in the midst of play;
The gophers hide in their holes away;
And “Hush, oh, hush!” the field-mice say,
     When the sand-hill crane goes walking.

                                 Mary Austin, 1910

 = = =

The Battle of the Little Big Horn, June 25 & 26, 1876. “Custer’s Last Stand”. Custer had chosen the Irish tune “Garryowen” as his marching song. He had his band play it as his troops rushed in to  massacre  Black Kettle’s camp of Southern Cheyennes in the Battle of the Washita. Below: Dunlap’s song, told from the perspective of an Irish immigrant Union soldier @ the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Mick Ryan’s Lament
From Two Journeys
(1999 by Robert Emmet Dunlap, Prodigal Salmon Music/ASCAP)

Well my name is Mick Ryan, I’m lyin’here still
In a lonely spot near where I was killed
By a red man defending his native land
In the place that they call Little Big Horn.

And I swear I did not see the irony
When I rode with the Seventh Cavalry
I thought that we fought for the land of the free
When we rode from Fort Lincoln that morning.

And the band they played the Garryowen
Brass was shining, flags a flowin’
I swear if I had only known
I’d have wished that I’d died back at Vicksburg.

For my brother and me, we had barely escaped
From the hell that was Ireland in forty eight
Two angry young lads who had learned how to hate
But we loved the idea of Amerikay.

And we cursed our cousins who fought and bled
In their bloody coats of bloody red
The sun never sets on the bloody dead
Of those who have chosen an empire.

But we’d find a better life somehow
In the land where no man has to bow
It seemed right then and it seems right now
That Paddy he died for the union.

Ah, but Michael he somehow got turned around
He had stolen the dream that he thought he’d found
Now I never will see that holy ground
For I turned into something I hated.

And I’m haunted by the Garryowen
Drums a beating, bugles blowin’
I swear if I had only known
I’d lie with my brother in Vicksburg.

And the band they played that Garryowen
Brass was shinin’, flags a flowin’
I swear if I had only known, I’d lie with
my brother at Vicksburg.

(from Josh)

Another day of doing nothing.  My cell is only big enough to walk in little circles.  It takes me 13 steps to make a complete one.  And that’s how I pass time, walking in circles.  The first 3 days you can pretty much sleep the whole time.  There’s really no reason to get up.  But after that you never really get any good sleep.  You might sleep a couple of hours here and there, but no good 6 or 7 hours at a time.  It isn’t like you go to bed at night.  There is no day or night.  You only know what time it is by when they bring your food to you.  Working out or any kind of exercise I wouldn’t do, because you stay hungry as it is.  You eat dinner at 4pm then you don’t eat again till 6am, 14 hours and no food is a long time.  With what they feed you, you’re hungry again within two or three hours anyway.

painting by ashley addair exploring the way bad institutions dehumanize their people

So what I do is I save something off each tray, put it in these little plastic containers our milk comes in and save it for later.  That little bit of food is the best tasting meal I get.  So if you was to work out you would probably starve to death.  Lucky for me I have managed to get a nurse to sneak me two books in here, which has been a life saver.  One was “Dreamcatcher” by Stephen King which sucked for me.  I couldn’t really get into, but with nothing else to do I managed to finish it.  The second one, was much better.  ”The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, the only problem is I find myself enjoying it so much I can’t put it down and pace myself.  I’m going to end up finishing it in a day then I’ll be back to having nothing to do.  Which is what we’re all trying to avoid.

July, July, Tim O’Brien (2002)

It is July of 2000, and the members of the class of 1969 at Darton Hall College are having their 30-year reunion, one year too late. In this novel we meet several of those not-so-gracefully aging flower children, now shopworn and wondering what their lives were really all about. And as the reunion progresses, we journey back into each one’s life, to other Julys in other years, when important choices were made and paths were taken that could not be reversed.

While the story and its characters are a bit confusing at first, jumping from person to person so it’s difficult to keep straight who is who, who loves who, who is married to whom, that is all intentional, and its meaning comes clear as each person’s story unfolds. Because that’s what memory is like, not a smoothly unfolding continuum but a jumble of moments, the most important moments making up a patchwork of a life. The book feels uneven from time to time, or rushed, or as if some characters get short shrift while others – particularly David, who represents the Vietnam experience – appear far too frequently, but none of that really matters.

Because these perfectly ordinary people are, in the end, completely compelling, and so are their perfectly ordinary lives. Breast cancer, Vietnam flashbacks, jiltings, divorces, affairs, the stupid mistakes we all make and we all can relate to, are lovingly detailed. And these characters, despite their many, very human faults, are our friends, our spouses, ourselves – and all the more endearing for it.

Doncs bé, he començat (ja fa dies, per això l’absència de la meva paraula) el segon curs de comunicació audiovisual i com a conseqüència ha tornat el meu vici: mirar pel·lícules. Però perquè us dic tot això. Doncs perquè mirant notícies del “mundillo” -aquest cop sí que de country- he trobat una notícia que arreplega aquestes dues meves passions i he cregut que en podria parlar. Ja sé que no és cap novetat però en deixaré constància: Steve Martin toca el BANJO. I m’encanta perquè a la notícia que donava la CMT posa “Per si us ho esteu preguntant, Steve Martin és un màquina tocant el banjo” (la llicència de “una màquina” és meva). Tot i que jo crec que la notícia no és que toquei el banjo, perquè hi ha un munt de vídeos al youtube sinó que sembla que si dedica.

Perquè amics meus, Steve Martin ha tret un àlbum perquè tot i sé còmic, quan es tracta del banjo la cosa es torna sèria. I jo, com a fan número 100 (sóc prou realista i sé que no sóc ni la primera, ni la segona) em veig amb l’obligació de parlar-vos-en una mica. l’àlbum en qüestió té per nom The Crow: New songs for the Five-String banjo. Martin, en aquest CD ha compartit estudi amb grans clàssics com ara Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Mary Black, Earl Scruggs, Tony Trischka, Tim O’Brien i Pete Wrenick. El comediant, que va començar a tocar el bajo als 17 anys assegura que només toca cançons que compon ell, que si són cançons de bluegrass (el gènere) tendeix a posar-se més nerviós.

Sincerament, és un gran entreteniment veure’l tocar, i quan se li pregunta sobre el futur d’aquest hobbie ell respon:

Em sembla que jo només tocaria en un festival de bluegrass. Encara no sé quin és l’estil i no sé que fer. Suposo que primer de tot hauria d’aconseguir una banda no? Tot i que no sé que fariem damunt l’escenari. No ho sé, encara m’ho he de pensar.

I doncs bé, per acabar us deixo amb una de les moltes actuacions:

Maria

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

It’s literally a book of war stories.  But it’s also a book about war stories.

What makes a war story true? The facts? Or the fable? O’Brien says a tall tale can be more true than what actually happened. Maybe because exaggeration better satisfies the need to communicate feelings.

O’Brien blends fiction and truth about the Vietnam war till you learn to hear the stories without caring about specific facts.

This book is about experiencing war.  And telling about that experience through stories.

It’s obscene and poetic, violent and emotional. What did the soldiers carry? More than I have.

Previous review – Next review

I’ve penned a guest post for 2 Blowhards on a subject I know all too much about – literature. An excerpt:

Anyone involved in the world of literature is aware of the old cliché, “Write what you know.” There’s an unstated implication in that phrase; make sure what you know is interesting. The best novelists had no trouble grasping this concept. Ernest Hemingway only wrote what he knew, but the breadth and depth of his life experiences – fighting in World War I, living in Paris during the Roaring Twenties, reporting on the Spanish Civil War – was a large part of what made his novels compelling. Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (as well as his other works) was a glorified retelling of his experiences during WWI and later working in colonial French West Africa and the U.S. The list of great novelists who infused their writing with their varied life experiences is endless: F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Tim O’Brien, etc.

Read over there, comment there or here. Many thanks to Donald Pittenger for allowing me this opportunity.

So, posting the pictures last night was very ambitious!  I thought I would get to do it, but we didn’t get home until midnight!  It was absolutely amazing and I can’t wait to do it again next year, though I’m definitely going to have a more concrete plan.  National Book Festival turned into Tim O’Brien day, which is actually perfectly fine with me!  But I would have liked to see a few more people.

I’m always impressed by events they hold on the Mall.  No matter how many times I go to DC, no matter how many times I see all the monuments, they’re still impressive.  Even on cloudy days like this!  Which means that none of my pictures came out that great, but I have evidence that I was there!  So I really can’t complain.  I loved all the tents, even though they didn’t do much to get us out of the rain.  By the end of the day, I was soaking wet, but I wouldn’t dream of complaining!  I got to meet Tim O’Brien!  And I got to shake his hand!  TWICE.  And it was full of awesome.

Whenever we travel to DC (every other month or so, during the semester), we take a ridiculous amount of pictures on the Metro.  Because it’s fun, and even though we technically live in the burbs of DC, it’s nice to just pretend we’re tourists.  Pretend?  Just kidding, we really are.  Metros are still exciting and I’m going to document that excitement.  If some snarky “local” wants to say something about it, go right ahead.  This is me, and She, of A Book Blog.  Period. I told you we knew each other!  I do not lie.   I’m on the right, she’s on the left.  Now you know what I look like!  GASP.  In the blue is my roommate!  She is awesome!  And likes books, but does not blog about them.  Yet.

Look at those lines!  I totally underestimated how many people were going to be there!  I think most people did.  We did not have our schedules planned out well, so I only ended up being able to meet Tim O’Brien and Mark Kurlansky, but She and our roommate, got to see Paula Deen!  Which I know they were really excited about.  I would have liked to see Paula, but Tim O’Brien was my priority!  And I was FIFTH in line.  Plus, I got to meet some cool people who were numbers 4, 6 and 7 in line. We talked about books and book recommendations and blogging.

THIS IS THE WORST ANGLE OF ME EVER.  But I am willing to share that with you because LOOK WHO IT IS.  That is TIM O’BRIEN.  Really!!!!!!!!  He is the nicest man, really.  I told him that he was one of my favorite authors and he said that that was a wonderful thing to hear and he shook my hand, TWICE.  And it was really worth it standing in line for two hours in the rain to be able to say, “You’re an amazing writer.  Your stories changed my life.” My first review for Regular Rumination was The Things They Carried, so it is definitely a sentimental thing.  Plus, I’m pretty sure that he’s one of the best authors on the planet, and one of the nicest.

Fortunately we also got to hear him do some readings.  He was AMAZING!!!!  At 62, O’Brien is father of two children under the age of 8 and he has began writing a book about his experiences as an older father.  He read us the most beautiful letter to his oldest son.  There was not a dry eye in the audience, including my own.  Then he read excerpts from the last chapter of The Things They Carried which is also a really sad section.  He said that it was a lot harder to read the passages than he thought it would be.  Even though I wish I had met some more authors, I wouldn’t have given up meeting Tim O’Brien and hearing him speak for anything.  It was a once in a lifetime experience, and I’m thrilled.  I couldn’t stop smiling after we left the Mall to get some food in Adams Morgan.

More terrible, touristy pictures of metros!  The Adams Morgan metro stop has this ridiculously tall escalator that is terrifying!  But also fun.  We ate at this amazing Irish pub and had perfect cold, rainy food.  She and I had shepherd’s pie and Werehousecat had fish and chips.  I was pretty jealous of the fish and chips, but the shepherd’s pie was amazing.  I finished it off when I got home for a little midnight snack.

So I’m sure you’re wondering what Glee has to do with my day in DC, but after dinner we met up with a friend from high school and went to see his ADORABLE house.  I’m very jealous of his house.  While we were there, we watched the first two episodes of Glee and I just haven’t had the chance to tell you HOW MUCH I LOVE GLEE.  It’s so campy and wonderful and everyone should watch it.  AND LAUGH.  I think the last episode was the best, with the football players dancing.  Priceless!  I also love Kurt.  And want to hear the football player with the mohawk sing more.

Okay, back to the books.

Here are all the books I got signed!  I met Mark Kurlansky and, obviously, Tim O’Brien.  My roommates graciously got Paula Deen to sign a cookbook for my mom.  Z, my boyfriend, really likes Mark Kurlansky so I got him a book signed, too, for Christmas.  Tim O’Brien and Kurlansky personalized, but Paula Deen was way too busy.  She had so many people in her line, it looped around three or four times.  We were pretty far back in the line, but most people got in to see her.

Paula Deen!

Tim O’Brien!

Mark Kurlansky

Other than that time when I fell on the Metro and bruised my butt, it was an AMAZING day!  Longest day ever, but still amazing.  I can’t wait until next year, when I will get there earlier and plan out the day so I can see more people speak.  Tim O’Brien!

It’s funny, innit, the improbable combinations of things one sometimes finds oneself carting around.  For instance this morning I brought into work, in addition to the usual umbrella, a bag of guns(*), a C-clamp, and a flowerpot.

Cos that’s how I roll, bitches.  Right on the edge.

(*) Water pistols and such.  So you can calm the fuck down, OK?

Next up:  a thrilling journey through the vegetable drawer in my fridge!

"Interconnectedness" From the blog Dreaming of Art and Other things

Norah: There’s this part of Judaism that I like. Tikun Olam. It said that the world is broken into pieces and everyone has to find them and put them back together.

Nick: Maybe we don’t have to find it. Maybe we are the pieces.

• From Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

In high school, my English teacher made us sit through hours upon hours of a Joseph Campbell BBC Special, The Power of Myth. At seventeen, I found this an excruciating and cruel thing to do to seniors who were killing second semester time. But time, specifically 8 years, brings perspective. I’m actually considering rewatching it.

The reason being that Campbell touched on the interconnectedness of Story and Myth.

Coming of Age

Birth/Rebirth

Home.

Isn’t that all there really is? Birth, age arrival, then a return home. Everything in-betweenis just a detail. Nuruddin Farah, and exiled Somalian says this:

What is the topic of literature? It began with the expulsion of Adam from Paradise. What, in fact, writers do is play around either with the myth of creation or the myth of return. And in between, in parentheses, there is a promise, a promise of return. While awaiting the return we tell stories, create literature, recite poetry, remember the past and experience the present. Basically, we writers are telling the story of that return — either in the form of a New Testament of and Old Testament variation on the creation myth. It’s a return to innocence, to childhood, to our sources. (1)

So… why then? Why the interconnectedness through story and myth? If fish weren’t meant to swim, they wouldn’t have been born in the water with gills and scales and fins. If we weren’t meant to write, to tell and hear stories, why are we all born with a collective imagination centering, all, around the very same issues?

What if we all have small pockets of Truth? What if every one of us, regardless of ancestry, religion or geography… has a piece of the story, a piece of the Truth of the human story?

Tim O’Brien talks about ’story truth’ in his book, The Things They Carried . The story truth can have you kill a man, even if the happening-truth is that the man died by stepping on a land mine. The story truth can bring someone back to life, even if the happening-truth finds them six feet under.

I think we… humans… man.. I think we all have a collective story truth. I think that we all have little pieces between the happenings that illustrate our creation, our life in parenthesis and our return. I think that within all of our happening-truths about love, about loss, about war, about invention, about children… within all of that, are thin golden nuggets of story-truth…

… the pieces?

(1) William Gass, “The philosophical Significance of Exile” (interview with Nuruddin Farah, Han Vladislave and Jorge Edwards), in John Gladd, ed., Literature in Exile (Durham, NC: Duke UNiversity Press, 1990), p. 4. Cited by Rubenstien, Home Matters, p. 167, n. 4.

Went to a great reading last night. Richard Lange read from his new novel, This Wicked World and Dennis Fulgoni read one of his short stories (the link takes you to another of his stories in Two Hawks Lit Journal) Check out Book Party if you’re in L.A. for future events. Speaking of short stories, Tim O’Brien has a great essay in The Atlantic. Don’t be boring! Too many short stories are. Dennis’ was not.

Commiserated with one writer friend about working under the pressure of an agent waiting. Should not be a bad problem, but there are all those pesky expectations and hopes you have to put aside or the next thing you know, you’ll be blocked. Another kicked my butt about not writing enough. Okay 3 pages a day. I still have 2/3rds of a page to go, so back to it. Now go read the O’Brien essay.

People say that soldiers are brave and courageous men fighting for honor and for their country. But is it really that way? Tim O’Brien tells it differently in The Things They Carried, his novel about the realities of the Vietnam War. “It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards” (O’Brien, 22).

Tim O’Brien admits that he and the other soldiers in his platoon did not fight out of courage, but out of fear. Yet, the public saw them as soldiers fighting for a cause (whether or not they believed in it) and because they were brave. Either way they fought. And depending on how one looks at it, they were cowards or brave men. Similarly, O’Brien feared what people would say if he evaded the draft and so he did what most people would think of as the brave thing—he went to war—all the while feeling a coward. Looking at the greater scheme of things, this was the courageous thing to do, but for him, it was cowardly.

There has never been a definite line dividing bravery and cowardice; it has always depended on the angle one looks at it from. Wars can be begun out of cowardice or bravery. Suicide might be a display of cowardice or perhaps one of bravery. Most are inclined to think the former, but as O’Brien teaches us in his book: Cowardice is a matter of perception.

Proposition: There is no black and white, merely the grey in between and the people who must interpret it.

Fear: n. that which causes a feeling of being afraid

            Mankind is afraid. It fears others, pain, and shame. To avoid fear, people run away. “It struck me then that he must’ve planned it. I’ll never be certain, of course, but I think he meant to bring me up against the realities, to guide me across the river and to take me to the edge and to stand a kind of vigil as I chose a life for myself” (O’Brien 56).

Going off to war brings fear. Death and cowardice haunt people as they are selected to fight for their country. Escaping a war by fleeing the country not only proves one’s cowardice, it brings shame upon the person’s honor. The shame will burden the person’s conscience. O’Brien was unable to escape his personal shame.  He forced himself to join the war to avoid embarrassment at home. Had he escaped, he would have joined the ranks of many others who fled the country to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War.

Many people are afraid of being embarrassed. Embarrassment will take over the person. It will slice through their heart and destroy all the pride, dignity, and confidence in their soul. People inherently retreat. They attempt to escape their fears to save themselves. However, escaping death and war and escaping embarrassment both destroy honor.

Proposition: Being a coward brings shame; going to war reveals your fear of shame. No escape is possible from fear.

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway Books, 1998.

Title definition: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fear

A recent post that I wrote included some hearty debate in the comments between Tim O’Brien of the New York Times and me (with several other people weighing in). That debate for a couple weeks didn’t include the person whose post launched the discussion, Chris O’Brien (no relation to Tim apparently) of the San Jose Mercury News.

Chris was gone to Yosemite (lucky fellow) for a week when the debate originally broke out. Then an illness further delayed his response. While I approved his comment this morning, I wanted to use it in a separate post, partly to give it greater prominence and partly so I can respond to some specific points.

I should note that this debate is really about a secondary point of my post a couple weeks ago. I argued that the Original Sin of the newspaper industry in the early days of the World Wide Web was not failing to charge for content, as Newsosaur blogger Alan Mutter has written, but failing to innovate in how we served businesses. I think this is a much more serious issue than the one Tim and Chris and I are debating: why readers buy the newspaper and how much they are paying for it. But nonetheless, this is an important and interesting issue, so I gladly highlight it again. (By the way, I’m planning another post soon about another huge mistake we made early in the digital age, and what we need to do to avoid repeating that mistake.)

If you want to read Chris’s response in context, it might help to read or reread his original post in MediaShift Idea Lab, then read or reread my Original Sin quote and the debate in the comments. From here on, you’re reading Chris’s response to that debate, except for the italics, which are my comments:

Sorry it’s taken me awhile to jump back into this conversation. As Steve mentioned in a comment above, I was on vacation for a week and then got derailed by a family member who was injured took ill. So I’m just now catching up on an interesting discussion that began about two weeks ago with my post on Idea Lab and then spread to a debate via Twitter between myself, Steve, and Tim O’Brien. And upon returning, I see that it’s gone well beyond that with Steve’s great follow up post here, and Tim’s rebuttal.

As I began writing this comment, I saw that Tim O’Brien has gone on vacation through early September, so perhaps he’ll see this next month when he returns. Also, I’ll apologize for not covering all the excellent comments here. But I need to break off a small piece of this to establish some focus.

Let me just say I think Tim and I (and Steve, though he’s spoken quite well for himself here) agree on several points. Tim writes in his comment: “With the advertising piece of the equation shredded by the Web, print pubs have to re-engineer their revenue models or go out of business.” Absolutely. And Tim says: “The bottom line in all of this endless analysis of how the MSM doesn’t get the business and journalistic challenges facing it is that it isn’t really about the journalism at all. It’s about finding the proper way to monetize content to financially support sophisticated, enterprise journalism. It’s about reconstructing the revenue model.” Agreed. It’s well past time to reinvent the business model. Our industry’s main strategy, for the most part, has been to cut our newsrooms and cross our fingers and hope that we’ll reach equilibrium. That strategy has been a disaster.

Beyond that, I’ll stand by my post at Idea Lab and try to elaborate on how I came to those views.

Both from his tweets and his comment above, I believe Tim’s main critique of my post was that it was subjective in nature and lacked data to back up the claims. (Tim can correct that later, but that’s my takeaway.) I didn’t necessarily hear him weighing in on the thrust of the post one way or the other, just that I didn’t have the hard data to convince him I was right. As Tim posted above referring to my post: “And this is based on…what? (The New York Times and Wall Street Journal don’t have comics, but that would just be an anecdotal observation, not one based on broad surveys or more hard-minded data gathering).”

And later, Tim says: “But to extrapolate from Fine’s data to say, as Chris does, and as InfoWeek does, that it shows that newspapers didn’t understand what their readers were paying for is ridiculous. I asked for any empirical data, reader surveys, etc., that outline why readers buy certain papers so we could look at that issue in a less subjective way, not one driven by Chris or InfoWeek’s assumptions. And once we have more of that, then maybe I’ll be proven wrong.”

Tim is accusing me of being purely subjective. To which I can only say: Yup.

In trying to think differently about how to deal with the ongoing news business crisis, over the past two years I’ve taken an approach that is intentionally anecdotal and subjective. I won’t even try to deliver the data that Tim seeks because I simply don’t believe that any amount of data is going to solve this industry’s problems. As I’ve worked on various newsroom reinvention and research projects over the past two years, I’ve come around to believe that the quantitative approach — putting our trust in massive reader surveys, polling data, whatever — has failed us.

Instead, I’m convinced that we need to take a qualitative approach. We need to take a fundamentally different approach to understanding the behavior, patterns and needs of our community when it comes to news and information. So if Tim needs the comfort of some cold, hard facts then I’ll just say straight up that I don’t have them and wouldn’t even try to get them. And even if I did, we’d probably still argue over what they really meant (as we are with Fine’s data).

When conducting research, weighing the quantitative versus the qualitative approach is hardly new or revolutionary. Having just recently spent a weekend at a major sociology conference in San Francisco, I can see how that academic field is split between those who spend time gathering large data sets to get at abstract truths and those who spend time observing and interviewing select subjects. Both approaches provided interesting insight. But more and more, I’ve been finding the qualitative approach has more value for me.

Why? Without listing every single study undertaken and tallying all the money spent, I think I can safely assert that over the past two decades, the news industry has spent millions of dollars accumulating data about readers and what they supposedly want. And our industry has responded by altering its products and newsrooms to produce the things that they thought the data told them that readers really wanted. Today, metro newspapers write shorter stories, with faster ledes, and publish more pictures about fluffier stuff. Our leaders have steadily used this data to make decisions that have made newspapers worse every year. Somehow, no one has stopped to consider that no industry has ever solved its problems by making its main product worse. Instead, management points to the data from readers’ survey to insist they’re doing what people say they want. The result is that we’re worse off than ever.

As I noted in my earlier post, research from the Readership Institute does agree with Chris that newspaper readers value the newspaper for a wide variety of reasons that include the journalism but are much broader (advertising, convenience, etc.). And yes, the newspaper industry spent millions of dollars on the work of the Readership Institute, not to mention lots of local readership surveys by lots of companies.

I’ll just say this to Tim: If a data-driven approach was going to solve our problems, wouldn’t it have done so by now? Our executives have been doing what they think the data has been telling them to do, and things are worse than ever. What exactly is the piece of data you feel we’re lacking to begin to address the business crisis the news industry is facing?

I don’t believe there’s a magic data set waiting to be assembled that will lead us to the big “Ah-ha!” I don’t think we’re one reader survey away from figuring it all out. We live in an era where people turn to data as a crutch, leaning on it to give themselves a false sense of certainty. The facts don’t lie, right? Except we know that they do. A lot of such data is formed by the biases and frames through which the questions are formulated, asked, and then interpreted. The newspaper business has failed to recognize its own flawed frames. To this day, no matter what you hear from a newspaper executive, they still believe their primary purpose is to get people to read them in print. It’s why newspapers still spend so much money propping up circulation by subsidizing a large number of people through persistent telemarketing.

Here I must mention the oft-told story that was part of our Newspaper Next presentations: AT&T commissioned McKinsey in 1980 to study the potential market for cell phones. McKinsey’s projection was that by 2000 the worldwide market for cell phones would be about 900,000 cell phones. Our N2 point about this data was that you can’t use market research to study a market that doesn’t exist yet. That point isn’t exactly applicable to the argument of why people buy the newspaper; that market certainly does exist. But it certainly applies to the broader point that newspapers have made lots of mistakes based on data that led us in the wrong directions. 

My intention, in the original post, was to point out that within the newsroom, these questions have been asked, and continue to be interpreted, through an incorrect frame: The belief that the primary product customers paid for was journalism. It’s not. I do think that in the newsroom, and in the management suites, many in our industry have failed to grasp the need to reinvent the business side. And even among the most experienced new executives, I think there is truly a failure to understand the dynamics of our business and our relationship to the community. While the functions in the newsroom have evolved (not as much as critics say they should, but still….), on the business side, there’s been little attempt to do anything wildly different than what’s been done before.

Want to consider something wildly different? Check out my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.

My perspective on the quantitative versus the qualitative approach to product design began to shift two years ago when I became a member of a task force for a project called “Rethinking The Mercury News.” In the summer of 2007, our executive editor at the San Jose Mercury News charged us with zero-basing the newsroom and re-imagining all of our products and newsroom staffing as if we were just creating the company today. Rather than hunting down piles of research data, or commissioning yet another survey of readers, we decided to conduct the research phase using the “design thinking” process. Design thinking seeks to create empathy with the user of a product by using observation and interviewing to allow you to see the world through their eyes, not your own. The goal is to “re-frame” the issues or problems in the hope of pointing toward different opportunities or solutions. Tim thinks my reliance on this is “silly.” I found the experience to be a powerful way to begin to see the world through the eyes of the reader, and not the newsroom. I’m not alone on this. Currently, Gannett has been working with IDEO, one of the leading design thinking firms, to take this approach as well.

In our case, at the Mercury News, we recruited 120 people from across the company, split into teams of three, to go out and conduct wide-ranging interviews and observations of people in the community. In all, the teams interviewed about 120 people. We used the responses and observations to brainstorm, identify themes, and explore potential opportunities. We didn’t look for a scientific sample, or try to quantify the results. In the end, the prototypes we built and the newsroom plan were scrapped. But that’s a tale for another post. And when I have enough distance, I’m going to write extensively about the insights we gained, because I think there’s a lot of value that challenges about things like the future of print and the news consumption habits of our communities.

But the things we heard in those interviews allowed me to see the newspaper through a much different lens than the way I had viewed it as someone working in a newsroom for more than a decade. The insights from that work were largely what drove the content of my Idea Lab post. So yes, those views are subjective. But they’re not just the random musings of someone sitting around and sucking their thumb late one night.

For me, it’s the anecdotes that provide better insight than the numbers. For instance, when I think about the value people find in newspapers as a product, I think about the Fall of 2007, when the Mercury News all but killed its Features sections. We heard next to nothing from readers about that decision. What we did get hundreds of emails about was the fact that we moved the puzzles and comics. That was frustrating to someone who wishes the journalism inspired the same outpouring of outrage. But the deep passion these people had for the print version was still incredibly moving. Here’s the thing: If I called these people and asked them why they get the paper, they may or may not tell me they buy it primarily for the puzzles. But their actions are telling, if not scientific.

I, too, have experience in hearing the reader passion about comics and crossword puzzles. That’s a universal-enough experience among editors that it’s not anecdotal.

And that’s the problem with a lot of data we’ve gathered. You can’t always be sure the people themselves know why they do what they do, or what they really want. Or whether you’re even asking the right questions. During one of my Rethinking interview sessions, my team talked to a woman in her early 40s who spoke at length about how un-interested she was in technology and how she didn’t feel like technology played a role in her life. As she was speaking, she kept taking out her BlackBerry and checking her email. Now, if I’d called her on the phone, and asked her about her interests, I would have checked her off as a woman not interested in technology. But in observing her, I could see that she was. Was she lying to me or was she ignorant? No and no. But she clearly thinks about that topic differently.

To take another example, let’s look at young people and printed newspapers. If there is one piece of data that everyone seems to agree upon, it’s that young people don’t read printed newspapers, right? Its turns out that’s totally false. Over the past two years, as part of the work I’ve been doing for the Knight Foundation (The Next Newsroom Project), I’ve been spending a lot of time visiting college newsrooms, which are far more conservative in their journalism culture and behind the new media curve than professional newsrooms. That was confounding to me for a long time. So what’s going on? The response I heard from college media advisers and college newspapers editors has been fairly consistent: The staffs at college newspapers look around and see all their classmates reading the printed version of the college paper everyday. When they get up in the morning, the newspaper bins are empty. If everyone is still reading the print version, why should they worry much about the Internet and all this new media stuff?

As I’ve considered what that means, I’ve tried this experiment a few times myself: Go into the student union and leave a few copies of the newspaper like the New York Times or the Mercury News on a table. They get scooped up pretty quick.

In fact, the generation that doesn’t read print does read a lot of print. What the surveys have really been telling us is that this demographic won’t pay to have the morning paper delivered every day. But when they encounter a printed product that’s free, is compact, and fits the way they consume news and information, and yes, usually has the crossword and comics, then they’ll consume it in large numbers. Do I think print is the future? It’s a part of it, much bigger than most folks believe, I think. How does this square with all those surveys about the news habits of young adults? Those surveys are being commissioned by news executives who are really just trying to figure out how to get young people to pay for the newspaper. They thought they could do this by altering the content. But what they really needed to do was reinvent the product form (compact, free) to fit into these people’s lives (lots of downtime on a pedestrian campus), and that’s a step that’s too radical to be considered by most newsrooms.

These are insights that I’ve gained not through studying the data, but through the subjective, anecdotal approach.

Back to my main point, I want to clarify something raised by Steve and Tim: I think the reasons that people consume newspapers in print are because of the wide range of things it provides, including the journalism. But not necessarily just because of the journalism. Even if that’s what they tell someone in a phone survey. I base that not on Fine’s data, but on my own work in the field, as they say.

The reason I cited Fine’s data was because inside the newsroom, people continue to think that journalism is THE reason people read the newspaper. And it’s not. My use of Fine’s data was an attempt to knock down that assumption from the point of view of the newsroom. No matter why people say they pay for the newspaper, the data in this case shows they never paid the full cost of the product. That print product contains many services, including journalism. So the direct funding of the cost of our journalism was less than 20 percent. Maybe it was 19 percent, maybe it was 1 percent.

Time here to reiterate my point in the earlier blog comments that the fact that consumers were never paying the full cost of the journalism they were consuming was completely relevant. Let’s say that all newspaper subscribers were buying the newspaper exclusively for the journalism, and none of them buy primarily for the crossword puzzles, horoscopes, comics or ads. The fact that they aren’t paying the full cost of the journalism is entirely relevant. If you’re paying $10 a month for all that journalism, it’s an entirely different consuming decision than paying $50 a month.  

If this seems obvious to Tim or Steve, I can say it’s not obvious to the folks running metro newspapers today. Just the other day, one of our editors during a meeting opened up a discussion by saying we have to figure out how to get people to pay for our journalism again. That view is echoed by news executives and is what is driving the push toward paywalls. Fine’s data is pretty clear that readers were only ever paying for a fraction of the cost of the product. And that’s why I think the discussion about paying to read our journalism online is a frustrating dead end. It flows from the myth that once upon a time, my parents paid for the journalism. They didn’t.

That view continues to inhibit the kind of discussion that I think needs to be happening to truly re-invent the business side of our industry and get us back on a path of the kind of growth that will support vital enterprise and investigative reporting over the long term.

I say all this knowing that I’m not going to convince Tim that I’m right. If you need data, then you need data. And I can’t help you there. But in my view, the subjective approach is the strength, not the weakness of my analysis.

Agreed. Thanks for your contribution to the discussion, Chris.

Who the fuck joins the Navy? says me, a deluded city kid who knows nothing but the smell of burnt pretzels and trash which has yet to be collected in the morning. well, that was the first thing that crossed my mind when my friend told me he was enlisting. To be honest, Im not really sure how to feel about it. I’m not the type of person who becomes an emotional wreck over other peoples shit, and I respect the decisions of others (or at least if I respect the person), but I do have my own opinions, as well as care about his well being. He’s talented as all hell but has that dangerous sense of adventure that makes you do things that most writers, like myself, only have wet dreams about, before deciding to write fiction. But I couldn’t help but think he was throwing a big part of his life away. You know, the part which keeps you not-dead.

I’ve asked around to a few people who I thought might be in the know regarding how safe the Navy actually is. My friend told me about a kid from highschool who joined the Navy. She said he got ripped, saw the world, made lifetime friends, then spent the rest of his Tour in Japan, where he met some flat Chested vixen who got off on serving him hot sake with a side of  hot sucky. it all sounded pretty appealing, to be honest.

But then I asked my grandfather. He’s a war vet, who served in some of America’s bigger skirmishes, and has the quiet, broodish personality to prove it as well. I visited him at the Vets home to ask him some questions. When I arrived he was sneaking a cigarette, sitting in the corner of the room by the window. Half in shadow, his face was divided by bars of shade, cast from the blinds. From what the nurses told me, he smoked very frequently. I didn’t ask, but wondered why they hadn’t stopped him. But when I really thought about it, it wasn’t all that odd that they gave him all the room he wanted. he was treated much the same by his family when he was living at home. It was the only way to live with Grandpa Joe. I started to speak, announce my presence as not to sneak up on him. He wouldn’t like that “Hey Gr-”

“Sit down” he called, cutting me off. He hadn’t known I was coming, but he had always had a keen awareness for when his space was being invaded. I wasn’t really sure what to say. Hello, good to see you didn’t really seem appropriate at all, even as a formailty. He would see right through that bullshit. So instead I meagerly raised a hand to wave, then let it drop to my side, and jumped right into my questioning. I asked about the Navy, and told him about my friend. He was quiet for a moment, and then he spit into a pill bottle, which he extinguished his cigarette in. He looked up at me, the illumination of his face shifting in the light that was allowed by the blinds. I could see his face clearly now. His left eye was slightly shut, almost winking. It had been done surgically, as he lacked the ability to fully open it because of nerve damage. His lips were chap, partially from constant chain smokin, but also because he rarely took in fluids . He appeared older, and grayer for someone his age, if that is possible. He pulled another cigarette from within a pocket in his wheelchair, lighting it with a zippo that I discovered, he kept tucked between his belt and the waistband of his pants. “I’ll tell you one thing” he said, his one good eye meeting eye. His contact took me off guard. You could say that I wasn’t expecting contact so purposeful, and direct.”They gunna set his shit straight” he dragged deeply. My memory lapsed for a moment, and I had forgotten what exactly he was answering. Right, my friend who enlisted.”He might be safer in the Navy, but I tell you what, a lot of us weren’t, and he might not be either. Theyre sending boys from the Navy over to Iraq. That Mick from down the hall, his nephew joined the Navy. they trained him, sent him over as an EOD. They sent him home in two plastic bags. Little prick didn’t see whuat was coming” my grandfather looked up and chuckled. “Well, actually he probably set the damn thing off.” I later learned EOD stands for Explosive Ordnance Detonator. Grandpa Joe wheeled around towards me, and lifted up a towel which was laying next to him in his chair. He unrolled it, and there was a jar of pure china white cocaine. I looked at Grandpa Joe bewildered. He suddenly looked 20 years younger, and twice as festive. I took a twenty from my wallet, and he took a twenty from his money clip. Let’s just say we spent the rest of the night with a pair of escorts, dancin’ and getting blown.

well…. Okay, I don’t actually have a grandfather who lives in a a Vet’s Hospital. I pulled most of that INFORMATION(sure. let’s call it that) from google and yahoo answers.. and I happen to be reading a lot of Tim O’ Brien books right now. Excuse me for having an active imagination and a boring grandfather. well, no I take that back. My grandfather served in WWII, and was honorably discharged because of an injury ( he broke his arm playing ping pong… for real.)

I think there was a point in there somewhere, or perhaps I was just trying to avoid putting any thought into something that deserves some real consideration. Well,

good luck man.

http://scrantonreads.wordpress.com/

The 2009 Scranton Reads selection is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The Scranton Reads blog provides information about the program’s book discussions and events, which include a Vietnam War Festival and a night of Vietnamese folktales. O’Brien will be visiting Scranton. For more information, check out Scranton Reads on Facebook.  This year’s program is part of The Big Read.

A mistaken matter-of-fact statement in an Associated Press story launched Chris O’Brien on an insightful blog post that had little to do with the original story.

In the same way, a statement in Chris’s post launched me on this post, which will start out in a different direction from his blog.

The AP story, about Microsoft, said, “If it doesn’t make the right calculation, the software maker could find itself in the same position as newspapers that gave online content away and now are struggling to replace print revenue.”

Chris, contributing to the MediaShift blog, wrote: “That second line is almost a throwaway, written with no attribution. That means that the notion has officially entered into conventional wisdom: Local newspapers screwed up by giving away for free the content everyone used to pay to consume.”

That launched him on one of the best explanations I have read about the paid-content issue. I’ll get back to that in a while, but first, as promised, I want to take this in a different direction.

The AP story was repeating a notion that has been gaining traction all year. Newsosaur blogger Alan Mutter called publishers’ decisions not to charge for online content their “Original Sin.”

Mutter is right that newspapers are still paying for an Original Sin committed in the early days of the Internet, but he (along with the AP story and lots of newspaper executives today) chose the wrong sin. (For one thing, many newspapers did try charging for online content, both initially and through the years, but that’s not my point here.)

The disastrous error that newspapers made early in our digital lives was treating online advertising as a throw-in or upsell for their print advertisers. Helping businesses connect with customers was always our business. We were facing new technology and new opportunities and we did next to nothing to explore how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers.

We just offered businesses the same old solutions that we offered in print, but pop-up ads and web banners somehow didn’t work as well as display ads. Which was just as well, because we told our business customers the ads weren’t worth much by the way we treated them.

As Borrell Associates pointed out in the Newspaper Next 2.0 report, about 60 percent of online advertising comes from businesses who don’t advertise in print. And newspaper ad staffs barely bothered with potential new advertisers, instead calling on our usual suspects. In addition to conditioning those advertisers to think that online ads were just a throw-in of marginal value, many of them just took their online ads out of their print budget, so we weren’t really getting new revenue, just shifting what they already spent with us. And increasing our dependence on the same businesses, some of whom were also failing to innovate. So we grew increasingly vulnerable to an economic recession. But that was a boom time and our business boomed.

Meanwhile, other businesses such as Amazon, Google, eBay and craigslist were exploring the possibilities we were ignoring. We could have been developing the possibilities of search, direct sales and self-service ads.

Our Original Sin was failing to  see beyond our original business model, not failing to force more of it on the new opportunity.

Which brings me back to the paid content issue. I wrote last month that I would try to stop blogging about paywallers. As soon as I wrote it, I knew it wasn’t true, so I hedged the promise immediately (I noted that it was a promise to try to stop, not to actually stop), rather than deleting it. OK, I tried for about a month.

I was goaded back into this tireless discussion by a Twitter exchange with Tim O’Brien, editor of the Sunday Business section of the New York Times (and apparently no relation to Chris, though I haven’t asked either about that). I’ve never met Tim but we’ve followed each other on Twitter a while. While I don’t always agree with his tweets, I think of him as one of the thoughtful voices of the Twitterverse.

He took umbrage when I favorably tweeted a link to an Information Week post by Michael Hickins. What I liked most about Hickins’ post was this passage: “The problem with the newspaper industry isn’t that free online content has destroyed its business model, but rather that the Internet has exposed and exacerbated its inherent weaknesses.”

Tim tweeted that the Hickins piece was asinine, the first of 15 tweets he addressed to me over Friday, Saturday and Sunday on the subject of paid content and the views of Hickins, Chris O’Brien and me on the topic. I fired back nine tweets and Chris, a business writer and journalism innovator at the San Jose Mercury News, joined the conversation with six tweets of his own. Guy Lucas, Media General manager, also weighed in with a tweet in support of Hickins.

I won’t repeat Tim’s tweets here (though you can read all our tweets by clicking the links above), but the essence of his argument, against both Hickins and Chris, was that they didn’t cite data to back up their opinions. (I wonder how frequently you could say the same thing about columns in the New York Times.) He specifically took issue with Chris’s contention that people buy newspapers for a variety of reasons — news stories, yes, but also for the coupons, comics and crossword puzzles. Tim dismissed this as anecdotal, demanding data to support this obvious point.

I was tempted to argue the value of anecdotes (the lead story in the NYTimes.com business page starts with an anecdotal lead) and to brush off the demand for data by saying that most newspapers have years worth of Belden and/or Scarborough research reports (mostly proprietary, so Chris or I couldn’t have access to them, much less cite them) showing the variety of reasons why people buy their products. But it took me just a couple minutes to find related research from the Readership Institute (delivery is one of the most important issues to newspaper readers; news content ranks more important than ad content, but advertising is important).

(I should add here that Tim’s paper, along with the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and perhaps a few others, is far different from most metro papers, and I presume that a greater percentage of Times readers do buy solely for the content than is the case for most metro or community papers. But I am sure that they buy it for different kinds of content: some for the national news coverage, some for the sports or arts, some for the business coverage, some for a particular columnist, and most, I presume, for a combination or for the whole package.)

I also need to address Tim’s dismissal of Chris’s citation of analyst Lauren Rich Fine’s figures on where newspaper revenue comes from (only about 20 percent comes from subscriptions, she said). Tim dismissed this as unrelated to the issue of why people buy newspapers. Here’s how the two are related: They are the two sides of the business model.

It is true, I believe (sorry, I won’t cite data here), that most newspaper customers do think of themselves as paying for the content of the paper, whatever reason(s) they buy the paper. So from that standpoint, it is a change for them to receive that content online without charge (and publishers who decide to charge for content invariably mention that they are tired of subscribers saying they quit taking the paper because they could get it free online). But the business model involves more than customer motive. Fine’s figures are relevant because, whatever newspaper customers think, their subscription or single-copy price barely covers the cost of production and distribution, if that. So, regardless of why customers buy the print edition or what they thought they were paying for, they never paid for the content. They would have paid several times more than they do if that were the case. What would that do to circulation? Would that model have thrived in print in the pre-Internet days?

So here’s the bottom line: Whether I am right about paid-content being a foolish idea or the paywallers are right about it being wise and necessary, it’s going to be a new business model, not the restoration of the old model. That was the central point of Chris’s blog post and I stand by my initial tweet that it was maybe the best take I’ve seen on paywalls. (And this doesn’t even address the challenge that our industry is facing in trying to force a paid-content model into a medium where free content reigns.)

And before I could get this post finished, other tweeps called my attention to two more related posts:  

• Blogger Bill Wyman (no, not the guitarist), who says he has spent most of his career in the alternate press sniping at daily newspapers, wrote a long treatise: “Five Key Reasons Newspapers Are Failing.”
• Howard Weaver, a retired McClatchy editor and executive whose writing about the business is usually insightful, responded in his Etaoin Shrdlu blog with a post headlined, “Why are newspaper doomsayers usually so sloppy?” (exactly the kind of sweeping generalization for which he criticized Wyman). 

Like Weaver, I agree with about 80 percent of what Wyman wrote. He did paint with a broad brush and damn the whole newspaper industry for some failings that were common but far from universal. His view was far more cynical than mine. But Wyman was so much closer to the truth than most of the industry leaders now that I’ll stand up and cheer the 80 percent that he got right and let the rest slide.

Wyman’s other four points deserve attention and I hope you read them. But for the purposes of this post, I will focus just on his first point: “Consumers don’t pay for news. They have never paid for news.” He went on to elaborate: “Subscribers didn’t pay for news. Advertisers did. … Some people liked the news, sure; most thought they were paying for it. And some papers spent more money on news than they had to. But the papers weren’t selling the news. They were selling ads and charging a lot of money for them because of one thing only: They held an informal monopoly on a societal convention whereby they deposited those ads—around which they wrapped some reporting, some of it serious, some of it fluff —on subscribers’ driveways.”

With this many people sounding off this vigorously on the issue of paid content, I had to weigh in. And I probably will again. But I am looking forward to a live chat for the American Society of News Editors later this month (Aug. 27, details to come soon) about some ways to innovate beyond the paywall issue. I do wish we could get past this issue and spend more time on genuine innovation.

Selected from over 500 applicants Mitch Barrett took 1^st place in the Telluride Troubadour Competition during a 2 day elimination process.  As part of the Telluride Bluegrass Competition the Telluride Troubadour Competition is a nationally recognized songwriter competition open to anyone who writes and performs original music and who is not currently signed to a major recording or publishing deal. Contestants are judged on the quality of the song’s composition, vocal delivery, and the overall performance. Finalists are awarded cash and prizes, as well as critical acclaim, well-deserved recognition and a chance to perform on the festival main stage. With the winning of the competition Mitch wins a custom made Shanti Guitar, a main stage performance and the national recognition that comes with the title. Mitch is also a Kerrville “New Folk” winner, has won The Folks Festival Songwriting Competition in Lyons, CO out of over 900 applicants and is the only songwriter to date to win Wilkesboro, North Carolina’s Merlefest “Chris Austin Songwriting Competition” twice.

The 36th Telluride Bluegrass (June 18-21) featured David Byrne, Emmylou Harris, and Sam Bush, Elvis Costello and an all-star bluegrass band; Yonder Mountain String Band and Railroad Earth, Bela Fleck and Tim O’Brien. Performers say there is a unique thrill to performing in front of the smartest, most attentive audience in the country. Artists are encouraged to take risks in Telluride, and the audience is regularly rewarded with unique blends of voices sharing the stage for the first time – as a new musical friendship cultivated backstage makes its debut on the Telluride stage.

Submitted by Mitch Barrett BMB Artist Mgt.

Chuck Brown, a Monster
Tim O’Brien

Elorriaga’s slim little book Plants Don’t Drink Coffee is very cute.  Almost too cute, if you know what I mean.  I loved reading along with our precocious narrator, Tomas, and the shenanigans of his goofy Uncle Simon trying to paint a rugby field on a golf course under cover of night.

Tomas has an adorable way of documenting and cataloging his world for us.  The book begins: “Plants don’t drink coffee.  They don’t like coffee, and neither do flowers or trees.  Birds don’t like it either.”  In another place he tells us, “It is summer now, and in summer we go out at nighttime too.  We go out for a walk come nighttime. … And we go for a walk all the way to the school or the soccer fields, and all the streetlights are lit and there’s no one around, and it smells like grass in some places, and in others it smells like soup.”  And yet later: “It’s very hot in Africa.  Dad told me.  And you can see it in movies.  In movies in Russia you see cold and in movies in Africa you see heat.  But sometimes it rains in Africa and the lions get wet, and the turtles as well, but turtles don’t care, because they are just as happy in the water or in the desert or on a roof.  Turtles sometimes are in the kitchen in some houses.  But only in a few.  Mostly they are in Africa.  And places like that.”

Cute, right?  But it gets really, really old.  A few other family members get POV chapters, which breaks up the monotony of Tomas’ narration, but even those sections are written quite simply and filled with repetition.  I’m aware that Elorriaga wrote this way on purpose, but it absolutely couldn’t have been a bit longer.  It’s 200 pages, but it’s small — smaller than the palm of my hand with my fingers outspread.

The last few chapters are labeled with the different characters’ names and the words “Last couplet,” as though each person’s story had been a poem.  This was one of the most intriguing aspects of the book for me, which is a shame because it was clearly not the story itself.  Tomas’ father Erroman has been in the hospital throughout the novel, and his illness comes to the forefront of the story toward the end, but even then the pathos did not build sufficiently to bring the story all the way home.  As Tim O’Brien says in his article “Telling Tales” in The Atlantic, “Another element of a well-imagined story, in my view, is a sense of gravitas or thematic weight.  Inventing a nifty, extraordinary set of behaviors for our characters is not enough.  A fiction writer is also challenged to find import in those behaviors.  Cleverness, in the end, is a sorry (though common) substitute for thematic weight.”