Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Lobbyists, Bearing Gifts, Pursue Attorneys General
When the executives who distribute 5-Hour Energy, the popular caffeinated drinks, learned that attorneys general in more than 30 states were investigating allegations of deceptive advertising — a serious financial threat to the company — they moved quickly to shut the investigations down, one state at a time.
But success did not come in court or at a negotiating table.
Instead, it came at the opulent Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel in California, with its panoramic ocean views, where more than a dozen state attorneys general had gathered last year for cocktails, dinners and fund-raisers organized by the Democratic Attorneys General Association. A lawyer for 5-Hour Energy roamed the event, setting her sights on Attorney General Chris Koster of Missouri, whose office was one of those investigating the company.
“My client just received notification that Missouri is on this,” the lawyer, Lori Kalani, told him.
Ms. Kalani’s firm, Dickstein Shapiro, had courted the attorney general at dinners and conferences and with thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. Mr. Koster told Ms. Kalani that he was unaware of the investigation, and he reached for his phone and called his office. By the end of the weekend, he had ordered his staff to pull out of the inquiry, a clear victory for 5-Hour Energy.
The quick reversal, confirmed by Mr. Koster and Ms. Kalani, was part of a pattern of successful lobbying of Mr. Koster by the law firm on behalf of clients like Pfizer and AT&T — and evidence of a largely hidden dynamic at work in state attorneys general offices across the country.
Attorneys general are now the object of aggressive pursuit by lobbyists and lawyers who use campaign contributions, personal appeals at lavish corporate-sponsored conferences and other means to push them to drop investigations, change policies, negotiate favorable settlements or pressure federal regulators, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
But unlike the lobbying rules covering other elected officials, there are few revolving-door restrictions or disclosure requirements governing state attorneys general, who serve as “the people’s lawyers” by protecting consumers and individual citizens.
A result is that the routine lobbying and deal-making occur largely out of view. But the extent of the cause and effect is laid bare in The Times’s review of more than 6,000 emails obtained through open records laws in more than two dozen states, interviews with dozens of participants in cases and attendance at several conferences where corporate representatives had easy access to attorneys general.
But success did not come in court or at a negotiating table.
Instead, it came at the opulent Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel in California, with its panoramic ocean views, where more than a dozen state attorneys general had gathered last year for cocktails, dinners and fund-raisers organized by the Democratic Attorneys General Association. A lawyer for 5-Hour Energy roamed the event, setting her sights on Attorney General Chris Koster of Missouri, whose office was one of those investigating the company.“My client just received notification that Missouri is on this,” the lawyer, Lori Kalani, told him.
Ms. Kalani’s firm, Dickstein Shapiro, had courted the attorney general at dinners and conferences and with thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. Mr. Koster told Ms. Kalani that he was unaware of the investigation, and he reached for his phone and called his office. By the end of the weekend, he had ordered his staff to pull out of the inquiry, a clear victory for 5-Hour Energy.
The quick reversal, confirmed by Mr. Koster and Ms. Kalani, was part of a pattern of successful lobbying of Mr. Koster by the law firm on behalf of clients like Pfizer and AT&T — and evidence of a largely hidden dynamic at work in state attorneys general offices across the country.
Attorneys general are now the object of aggressive pursuit by lobbyists and lawyers who use campaign contributions, personal appeals at lavish corporate-sponsored conferences and other means to push them to drop investigations, change policies, negotiate favorable settlements or pressure federal regulators, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
But unlike the lobbying rules covering other elected officials, there are few revolving-door restrictions or disclosure requirements governing state attorneys general, who serve as “the people’s lawyers” by protecting consumers and individual citizens.
A result is that the routine lobbying and deal-making occur largely out of view. But the extent of the cause and effect is laid bare in The Times’s review of more than 6,000 emails obtained through open records laws in more than two dozen states, interviews with dozens of participants in cases and attendance at several conferences where corporate representatives had easy access to attorneys general.
by Eric Lipton, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Why Innocent People Plead Guilty
The criminal justice system in the United States today bears little relationship to what the Founding Fathers contemplated, what the movies and television portray, or what the average American believes.
To the Founding Fathers, the critical element in the system was the jury trial, which served not only as a truth-seeking mechanism and a means of achieving fairness, but also as a shield against tyranny. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”
The Sixth Amendment guarantees that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.” The Constitution further guarantees that at the trial, the accused will have the assistance of counsel, who can confront and cross-examine his accusers and present evidence on the accused’s behalf. He may be convicted only if an impartial jury of his peers is unanimously of the view that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and so states, publicly, in its verdict.
The drama inherent in these guarantees is regularly portrayed in movies and television programs as an open battle played out in public before a judge and jury. But this is all a mirage. In actuality, our criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors and with no judicial oversight. The outcome is very largely determined by the prosecutor alone.
In 2013, while 8 percent of all federal criminal charges were dismissed (either because of a mistake in fact or law or because the defendant had decided to cooperate), more than 97 percent of the remainder were resolved through plea bargains, and fewer than 3 percent went to trial. The plea bargains largely determined the sentences imposed.
While corresponding statistics for the fifty states combined are not available, it is a rare state where plea bargains do not similarly account for the resolution of at least 95 percent of the felony cases that are not dismissed; and again, the plea bargains usually determine the sentences, sometimes as a matter of law and otherwise as a matter of practice. Furthermore, in both the state and federal systems, the power to determine the terms of the plea bargain is, as a practical matter, lodged largely in the prosecutor, with the defense counsel having little say and the judge even less.
It was not always so. Until roughly the end of the Civil War, plea bargains were exceedingly rare. A criminal defendant would either go to trial or confess and plead guilty. If the defendant was convicted, the judge would have wide discretion to impose sentence; and that decision, made with little input from the parties, was subject only to the most modest appellate review.
After the Civil War, this began to change, chiefly because, as a result of the disruptions and dislocations that followed the war, as well as greatly increased immigration, crime rates rose considerably, and a way had to be found to dispose of cases without imposing an impossible burden on the criminal justice system. Plea bargains offered a way out: by pleading guilty to lesser charges in return for dismissal of the more serious charges, defendants could reduce their prison time, while the prosecution could resolve the case without burdening the system with more trials.
The practice of plea bargaining never really took hold in most other countries, where it was viewed as a kind of “devil’s pact” that allowed guilty defendants to avoid the full force of the law. But in the United States it became commonplace. And while the Supreme Court initially expressed reservations about the system of plea bargaining, eventually the Court came to approve of it, as an exercise in contractual negotiation between independent agents (the prosecutor and the defense counsel) that was helpful in making the system work. Similarly, academics, though somewhat bothered by the reduced role of judges, came to approve of plea bargaining as a system somewhat akin to a regulatory regime.
by Jed S. Rakoff, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Honoré Daumier: A Criminal Case
To the Founding Fathers, the critical element in the system was the jury trial, which served not only as a truth-seeking mechanism and a means of achieving fairness, but also as a shield against tyranny. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”The Sixth Amendment guarantees that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.” The Constitution further guarantees that at the trial, the accused will have the assistance of counsel, who can confront and cross-examine his accusers and present evidence on the accused’s behalf. He may be convicted only if an impartial jury of his peers is unanimously of the view that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and so states, publicly, in its verdict.
The drama inherent in these guarantees is regularly portrayed in movies and television programs as an open battle played out in public before a judge and jury. But this is all a mirage. In actuality, our criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors and with no judicial oversight. The outcome is very largely determined by the prosecutor alone.
In 2013, while 8 percent of all federal criminal charges were dismissed (either because of a mistake in fact or law or because the defendant had decided to cooperate), more than 97 percent of the remainder were resolved through plea bargains, and fewer than 3 percent went to trial. The plea bargains largely determined the sentences imposed.
While corresponding statistics for the fifty states combined are not available, it is a rare state where plea bargains do not similarly account for the resolution of at least 95 percent of the felony cases that are not dismissed; and again, the plea bargains usually determine the sentences, sometimes as a matter of law and otherwise as a matter of practice. Furthermore, in both the state and federal systems, the power to determine the terms of the plea bargain is, as a practical matter, lodged largely in the prosecutor, with the defense counsel having little say and the judge even less.
It was not always so. Until roughly the end of the Civil War, plea bargains were exceedingly rare. A criminal defendant would either go to trial or confess and plead guilty. If the defendant was convicted, the judge would have wide discretion to impose sentence; and that decision, made with little input from the parties, was subject only to the most modest appellate review.
After the Civil War, this began to change, chiefly because, as a result of the disruptions and dislocations that followed the war, as well as greatly increased immigration, crime rates rose considerably, and a way had to be found to dispose of cases without imposing an impossible burden on the criminal justice system. Plea bargains offered a way out: by pleading guilty to lesser charges in return for dismissal of the more serious charges, defendants could reduce their prison time, while the prosecution could resolve the case without burdening the system with more trials.
The practice of plea bargaining never really took hold in most other countries, where it was viewed as a kind of “devil’s pact” that allowed guilty defendants to avoid the full force of the law. But in the United States it became commonplace. And while the Supreme Court initially expressed reservations about the system of plea bargaining, eventually the Court came to approve of it, as an exercise in contractual negotiation between independent agents (the prosecutor and the defense counsel) that was helpful in making the system work. Similarly, academics, though somewhat bothered by the reduced role of judges, came to approve of plea bargaining as a system somewhat akin to a regulatory regime.
by Jed S. Rakoff, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Honoré Daumier: A Criminal Case
A Plutocratic Proposal
[ed. Interesting, not only for the proposal, but the ethics and procedures involved in getting a new drug to market.]
“But you have missed the bigger idea!” exclaimed Peter Lanciano, grabbing the pepper grinder and banging it on the table. “The problem isn’t how to get my drug into Mr Pepperpot. The problem is how to protect me from being sued if Mr Pepperpot dies.”
It had taken me two years to track Lanciano down. For this meeting I’d broken off my holiday, woken up at three in the morning and flown 1,000 miles across Europe to have breakfast at a London hotel built like a penitentiary. Lanciano is the Executive Director of a small US drug company. In his early 50s, with a Teddy Roosevelt moustache and a lumberjack shirt stretched tight across his broad chest, I believe he can help solve a niggling problem that holds back medical research around the world and makes patients suffer. Every year, an untold number of potential new drugs or interventions, any one of which might go on to improve thousands of lives, are thrown away without being tested in humans. It is a matter of funding, not science: there is not enough money in the public or private sector to run clinical trials on every exciting proposal that comes out of research labs. Thoughtful but hurried (and often arbitrary) judgements are therefore made about which products to save – and the rest of these potentially life-saving therapies are ditched. “There’s tons of promising stuff out there,” says David Stojdl, cofounder of the Californian biotech company Jennerex Biotherapeutics, “and it is dying on the vine.”
I have a simple proposal for a way to rescue this waste. I’m not a scientist or a physician; I have no medical training. I’m a biographer and an illustrator, and until a couple of years ago I’d never heard of clinical trials. But I know my idea works because I’ve already tried it once, to rescue a promising anticancer therapeutic that was about to be thrown out in Sweden. The general version of my proposal has now received backing from a select group of university research departments and a clutch of experts on medical ethics, and has the interest of one of the world’s largest law firms specialising in the life sciences. If the scheme can be made to work on a larger scale, it will open up the possibility of millions (I think, billions) of pounds of extra money for clinical trials, especially for rare and difficult-to-treat diseases – the ones that traditional funders are reluctant to support. (...)
I began thinking again about the fundraising we’d done. Why not extend the principle of selling trial places, to raise money for other Uppsalas and other diseases: not just neuroendocrine cancer, or just cancer, but any illness? There are over 12 million millionaires in the world – any one of these would want to buy a place on a trial if it might purchase relief or stave off death. Every one of them has people they love for whom they’d pay good money to get an extra chance. Why not set up a charitable or private body that would arrange these ‘sales’?
My first thought was that it would be run like a dating agency. (...)
“But you have missed the bigger idea!” exclaimed Peter Lanciano, grabbing the pepper grinder and banging it on the table. “The problem isn’t how to get my drug into Mr Pepperpot. The problem is how to protect me from being sued if Mr Pepperpot dies.”
It had taken me two years to track Lanciano down. For this meeting I’d broken off my holiday, woken up at three in the morning and flown 1,000 miles across Europe to have breakfast at a London hotel built like a penitentiary. Lanciano is the Executive Director of a small US drug company. In his early 50s, with a Teddy Roosevelt moustache and a lumberjack shirt stretched tight across his broad chest, I believe he can help solve a niggling problem that holds back medical research around the world and makes patients suffer. Every year, an untold number of potential new drugs or interventions, any one of which might go on to improve thousands of lives, are thrown away without being tested in humans. It is a matter of funding, not science: there is not enough money in the public or private sector to run clinical trials on every exciting proposal that comes out of research labs. Thoughtful but hurried (and often arbitrary) judgements are therefore made about which products to save – and the rest of these potentially life-saving therapies are ditched. “There’s tons of promising stuff out there,” says David Stojdl, cofounder of the Californian biotech company Jennerex Biotherapeutics, “and it is dying on the vine.”I have a simple proposal for a way to rescue this waste. I’m not a scientist or a physician; I have no medical training. I’m a biographer and an illustrator, and until a couple of years ago I’d never heard of clinical trials. But I know my idea works because I’ve already tried it once, to rescue a promising anticancer therapeutic that was about to be thrown out in Sweden. The general version of my proposal has now received backing from a select group of university research departments and a clutch of experts on medical ethics, and has the interest of one of the world’s largest law firms specialising in the life sciences. If the scheme can be made to work on a larger scale, it will open up the possibility of millions (I think, billions) of pounds of extra money for clinical trials, especially for rare and difficult-to-treat diseases – the ones that traditional funders are reluctant to support. (...)
I began thinking again about the fundraising we’d done. Why not extend the principle of selling trial places, to raise money for other Uppsalas and other diseases: not just neuroendocrine cancer, or just cancer, but any illness? There are over 12 million millionaires in the world – any one of these would want to buy a place on a trial if it might purchase relief or stave off death. Every one of them has people they love for whom they’d pay good money to get an extra chance. Why not set up a charitable or private body that would arrange these ‘sales’?
My first thought was that it would be run like a dating agency. (...)
Wealthy people financing clinical trials is not new: this type of private funding already exists all over the world if all you want to do is make money. As Savulescu said, “If I were a venture capitalist, I could invest millions of dollars in funding the development of a drug, hoping to make hundreds of millions of dollars if it’s successful. So why shouldn’t I be able to pay the same money for the same development, to have a chance of saving my life? It is completely ludicrous.” (...)
In medical parlance, there are typically three phases of trials a drug has to pass before it can be sold commercially. Phase I tests the tolerable dose range and safety in healthy volunteers or, in the case of serious diseases such as cancer, in sick patients. With a few exceptions, the doses used are too small to offer medical benefit. In phase II the research team tests efficacy, and uses the information from phase I to provide potentially therapeutic treatment at the optimal safe dose. This second phase of trialling can be divided into two parts: IIa, which is open to all suitable patients and has no placebo wing, and IIb, in which placebos and randomisation are introduced. Phase III tests whether the drug is better than the best already available – this is abominably expensive, involves hundreds of people and is not worth thinking about unless you’re a multibillionaire.
O’Connor’s objection therefore restricted the Dating Agency to brokering phase I or phase IIa trials. That’s not terrible. That’s almost all it was intended to do anyway: get promising preclinical research over the hurdle into early-stage clinical trials, because that comparatively small amount of money is way beyond the reach of ordinary university departments. Uppsala is a combined phase I/phase IIa trial.
O’Connor’s next objection had not occurred to me at all: “What happens if the drug works?”
In medical parlance, there are typically three phases of trials a drug has to pass before it can be sold commercially. Phase I tests the tolerable dose range and safety in healthy volunteers or, in the case of serious diseases such as cancer, in sick patients. With a few exceptions, the doses used are too small to offer medical benefit. In phase II the research team tests efficacy, and uses the information from phase I to provide potentially therapeutic treatment at the optimal safe dose. This second phase of trialling can be divided into two parts: IIa, which is open to all suitable patients and has no placebo wing, and IIb, in which placebos and randomisation are introduced. Phase III tests whether the drug is better than the best already available – this is abominably expensive, involves hundreds of people and is not worth thinking about unless you’re a multibillionaire.
O’Connor’s objection therefore restricted the Dating Agency to brokering phase I or phase IIa trials. That’s not terrible. That’s almost all it was intended to do anyway: get promising preclinical research over the hurdle into early-stage clinical trials, because that comparatively small amount of money is way beyond the reach of ordinary university departments. Uppsala is a combined phase I/phase IIa trial.
O’Connor’s next objection had not occurred to me at all: “What happens if the drug works?”
by Alexander Masters, Mosaic | Read more:
Image: Jean Jullien at Handsome Frank
Monday, November 3, 2014
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Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World
A few months ago I made the trek to the sylvan campus of the IBM research labs in Yorktown Heights, New York, to catch an early glimpse of the fast-arriving, long-overdue future of artificial intelligence. This was the home of Watson, the electronic genius that conquered Jeopardy! in 2011. The original Watson is still here—it's about the size of a bedroom, with 10 upright, refrigerator-shaped machines forming the four walls. The tiny interior cavity gives technicians access to the jumble of wires and cables on the machines' backs. It is surprisingly warm inside, as if the cluster were alive.
Today's Watson is very different. It no longer exists solely within a wall of cabinets but is spread across a cloud of open-standard servers that run several hundred “instances” of the AI at once. Like all things cloudy, Watson is served to simultaneous customers anywhere in the world, who can access it using their phones, their desktops, or their own data servers. This kind of AI can be scaled up or down on demand. Because AI improves as people use it, Watson is always getting smarter; anything it learns in one instance can be immediately transferred to the others. And instead of one single program, it's an aggregation of diverse software engines—its logic-deduction engine and its language-parsing engine might operate on different code, on different chips, in different locations—all cleverly integrated into a unified stream of intelligence.
Consumers can tap into that always-on intelligence directly, but also through third-party apps that harness the power of this AI cloud. Like many parents of a bright mind, IBM would like Watson to pursue a medical career, so it should come as no surprise that one of the apps under development is a medical-diagnosis tool. Most of the previous attempts to make a diagnostic AI have been pathetic failures, but Watson really works. When, in plain English, I give it the symptoms of a disease I once contracted in India, it gives me a list of hunches, ranked from most to least probable. The most likely cause, it declares, is Giardia—the correct answer. This expertise isn't yet available to patients directly; IBM provides access to Watson's intelligence to partners, helping them develop user-friendly interfaces for subscribing doctors and hospitals. “I believe something like Watson will soon be the world's best diagnostician—whether machine or human,” says Alan Greene, chief medical officer of Scanadu, a startup that is building a diagnostic device inspired by the Star Trek medical tricorder and powered by a cloud AI. “At the rate AI technology is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.”
Medicine is only the beginning. All the major cloud companies, plus dozens of startups, are in a mad rush to launch a Watson-like cognitive service. According to quantitative analysis firm Quid, AI has attracted more than $17 billion in investments since 2009. Last year alone more than $2 billion was invested in 322 companies with AI-like technology. Facebook and Google have recruited researchers to join their in-house AI research teams. Yahoo, Intel, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter have all purchased AI companies since last year. Private investment in the AI sector has been expanding 62 percent a year on average for the past four years, a rate that is expected to continue.
Amid all this activity, a picture of our AI future is coming into view, and it is not the HAL 9000—a discrete machine animated by a charismatic (yet potentially homicidal) humanlike consciousness—or a Singularitan rapture of superintelligence. The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off. This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need. Like all utilities, AI will be supremely boring, even as it transforms the Internet, the global economy, and civilization. It will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize. This new utilitarian AI will also augment us individually as people (deepening our memory, speeding our recognition) and collectively as a species. There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or interesting by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. This is a big deal, and now it's here.
Today's Watson is very different. It no longer exists solely within a wall of cabinets but is spread across a cloud of open-standard servers that run several hundred “instances” of the AI at once. Like all things cloudy, Watson is served to simultaneous customers anywhere in the world, who can access it using their phones, their desktops, or their own data servers. This kind of AI can be scaled up or down on demand. Because AI improves as people use it, Watson is always getting smarter; anything it learns in one instance can be immediately transferred to the others. And instead of one single program, it's an aggregation of diverse software engines—its logic-deduction engine and its language-parsing engine might operate on different code, on different chips, in different locations—all cleverly integrated into a unified stream of intelligence.Consumers can tap into that always-on intelligence directly, but also through third-party apps that harness the power of this AI cloud. Like many parents of a bright mind, IBM would like Watson to pursue a medical career, so it should come as no surprise that one of the apps under development is a medical-diagnosis tool. Most of the previous attempts to make a diagnostic AI have been pathetic failures, but Watson really works. When, in plain English, I give it the symptoms of a disease I once contracted in India, it gives me a list of hunches, ranked from most to least probable. The most likely cause, it declares, is Giardia—the correct answer. This expertise isn't yet available to patients directly; IBM provides access to Watson's intelligence to partners, helping them develop user-friendly interfaces for subscribing doctors and hospitals. “I believe something like Watson will soon be the world's best diagnostician—whether machine or human,” says Alan Greene, chief medical officer of Scanadu, a startup that is building a diagnostic device inspired by the Star Trek medical tricorder and powered by a cloud AI. “At the rate AI technology is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.”
Medicine is only the beginning. All the major cloud companies, plus dozens of startups, are in a mad rush to launch a Watson-like cognitive service. According to quantitative analysis firm Quid, AI has attracted more than $17 billion in investments since 2009. Last year alone more than $2 billion was invested in 322 companies with AI-like technology. Facebook and Google have recruited researchers to join their in-house AI research teams. Yahoo, Intel, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter have all purchased AI companies since last year. Private investment in the AI sector has been expanding 62 percent a year on average for the past four years, a rate that is expected to continue.
Amid all this activity, a picture of our AI future is coming into view, and it is not the HAL 9000—a discrete machine animated by a charismatic (yet potentially homicidal) humanlike consciousness—or a Singularitan rapture of superintelligence. The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off. This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need. Like all utilities, AI will be supremely boring, even as it transforms the Internet, the global economy, and civilization. It will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize. This new utilitarian AI will also augment us individually as people (deepening our memory, speeding our recognition) and collectively as a species. There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or interesting by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. This is a big deal, and now it's here.
by Kevin Kelly, Wired | Read more:
Image: MIT News
Desperate Measures: An Interview with David Gordon
David Gordon’s fiction doesn’t fall comfortably into one category. Depending on what you’re reading and who you’re talking to, he might be a mystery writer, a postmodernist, a satirist, or a hybrid. His new collection, White Tiger on Snow Mountain, runs an impressive gamut. Its cast is large and varied—there are gunmen, grad students, investigators, vampires, struggling writers, Internet sex trolls, and men named David Gordon. (One of these stories, “Man-Boob Summer,” first appeared in The Paris Review’s Fall 2012 issue.) Gordon’s sentences are crisp and often jarring. His plots unspool in strange, sometimes disturbing ways. There’s little to be gained in trying to situate yourself according to generic conventions; better just to enjoy the disorientation and to trust that you’re in the hands of an earnest storyteller.
White Tiger on Snow Mountain is your first story collection. Did you approach the stories differently than you would a novel?
In conceptual terms, I do think there’s a difference, at least for me. A story usually comes into my mind like a three-dimensional object—something I can see and feel and rotate. I’m often completely wrong about what the object is, but it’s still there. Whereas a novel is more like a set of directions for a road trip to California, with a planned stop in, say, Colorado and a visit to the Grand Canyon. The truth is I have no idea what’s going to happen along the way or whether I’ll even get there, but I have this general sense of direction and an end I hope to reach.
Now that the stories are completed and assembled, are you surprised at any of the themes or images that crop up?
I wrote these stories over a period of years, so some of the thematic echoes that people point out seem fairly straightforward for somebody who’s been writing for a long time—you deal with certain recurring ideas and problems. But then there are very specific echoes that I wasn’t aware of, and those are really interesting to me. My protagonists eat a lot of Chinese food and go to a lot of cafés. People tend to have cats in my stories, and the women have long fingers. I have no idea where this stuff comes from. I have no lost love with long fingers. I guess these things just leak out of my subconscious. (...)
Struggling and failed writers seem to be a mainstay in your work. You’ve had quite a bit of success with your own writing, so I wonder, without involving any shrinks—why that particular fixation?
It’s been a very long haul. I’m one of those weird people who knew in the second grade that this is what I wanted to do with my life and really set about doing it. At least in my own mind, I was trying to be a poet and to write serious fiction at the age of seven. I was probably sending things to The Paris Review when I was a teenager. But I really didn’t start publishing until four or five years ago. It felt like a long, epic journey to where I wanted to be as a writer. So in a strange way, I think I tend to write about people who are somehow living in this twilight where they’re not really part of mainstream society. They might be comp-lit professors or artists or drug dealers, but they tend to be on the fringes. That’s just where I found myself trapped for twenty-some-odd years. If I meet somebody now and they say they’ve heard my name or read my work, I assume they must have me mixed up with someone else. It takes a long time to undo that underdog mentality.
You’ve managed to straddle the line between mystery and literary fiction, and in this collection you look to other genres as well.
I think that horror and sci-fi in particular are great generators of imagery, and genre produces great characters. To find figures in Western culture as lasting and powerful as Dracula and Sherlock Holmes, you have to go to the Bible or Greek myths or Shakespeare. But as my work matures, it’s really more about the forms of genre storytelling—the way these stories shape and generate and vivify narrative. I’m trying to express something very personal through these classic forms, to use them as a poet uses a sonnet form.
Image: Michael SharkeyIn conceptual terms, I do think there’s a difference, at least for me. A story usually comes into my mind like a three-dimensional object—something I can see and feel and rotate. I’m often completely wrong about what the object is, but it’s still there. Whereas a novel is more like a set of directions for a road trip to California, with a planned stop in, say, Colorado and a visit to the Grand Canyon. The truth is I have no idea what’s going to happen along the way or whether I’ll even get there, but I have this general sense of direction and an end I hope to reach.Now that the stories are completed and assembled, are you surprised at any of the themes or images that crop up?
I wrote these stories over a period of years, so some of the thematic echoes that people point out seem fairly straightforward for somebody who’s been writing for a long time—you deal with certain recurring ideas and problems. But then there are very specific echoes that I wasn’t aware of, and those are really interesting to me. My protagonists eat a lot of Chinese food and go to a lot of cafés. People tend to have cats in my stories, and the women have long fingers. I have no idea where this stuff comes from. I have no lost love with long fingers. I guess these things just leak out of my subconscious. (...)
Struggling and failed writers seem to be a mainstay in your work. You’ve had quite a bit of success with your own writing, so I wonder, without involving any shrinks—why that particular fixation?
It’s been a very long haul. I’m one of those weird people who knew in the second grade that this is what I wanted to do with my life and really set about doing it. At least in my own mind, I was trying to be a poet and to write serious fiction at the age of seven. I was probably sending things to The Paris Review when I was a teenager. But I really didn’t start publishing until four or five years ago. It felt like a long, epic journey to where I wanted to be as a writer. So in a strange way, I think I tend to write about people who are somehow living in this twilight where they’re not really part of mainstream society. They might be comp-lit professors or artists or drug dealers, but they tend to be on the fringes. That’s just where I found myself trapped for twenty-some-odd years. If I meet somebody now and they say they’ve heard my name or read my work, I assume they must have me mixed up with someone else. It takes a long time to undo that underdog mentality.
You’ve managed to straddle the line between mystery and literary fiction, and in this collection you look to other genres as well.
I think that horror and sci-fi in particular are great generators of imagery, and genre produces great characters. To find figures in Western culture as lasting and powerful as Dracula and Sherlock Holmes, you have to go to the Bible or Greek myths or Shakespeare. But as my work matures, it’s really more about the forms of genre storytelling—the way these stories shape and generate and vivify narrative. I’m trying to express something very personal through these classic forms, to use them as a poet uses a sonnet form.
by Dwyer Murphy, Paris Review | Read more:
Sunday, November 2, 2014
Eat Spinach, Not Kale
[ed. I couldn't agree more. I usually eat spinach salads with chopped bok choy (for crunchiness and a bit of peppery flavor) and sliced red tomatoes. A little mixture of chinese mustard and soy sauce for dressing.]
Kale is a perfectly fine ingredient, but its bitterness and toughness have become indicators of quality to a certain segment of Americans, rather than characteristics to be overcome through cooking. And that’s led to its usage as a trendy ingredient in weird new places. But: Dishes do not usually become better or even more interesting when a trendy ingredient or process is foisted onto them. They almost always become worse. For example: the classic spinach, bacon, and egg salad, familiar to anyone who’s ever been to a steakhouse. This is a classic for a reason. The flavors and textures work beautifully, each individual ingredient holding its own. Replace the spinach with kale, and everything’s thrown off. Typically, the hot vinaigrette slightly wilts the spinach, adding a new flavor and texture, but kale is much tougher and won’t even notice that a hot vinaigrette has been added. Kale’s raw flavor, unchanged by the dressing, will thus overwhelm the egg and bacon.
That’s not to say that kale is a bad ingredient; it just needs to be used thoughtfully. Kale is in the brassica family, like collards, so it’s related to cabbage, broccoli, and brussels sprouts. It’s not related to spinach, which is in the beet family. The greens in the beet family, which also include chard, are more delicate and tender than the brassica greens; they cook much more quickly and can be eaten raw, without the rigamarole of massage (and I’d argue that no matter how thorough the massage, raw kale never attains an appropriately tender texture). The stems of beet-family greens are also edible and delicious, even the tougher chard stems (which take well to roasting and pickling).
Spinach comes in a few different forms. Probably the most common on grocery store shelves is bagged baby spinach. Never buy this. (Never buy any bagged green, now that I think about it. They go bad within a day of being opened, and are typically several times more expensive than the non-bagged kind.) If you can get real spinach from the farmers market, the kind with the little pink caps on the roots still attached, do that, but totally usable tasty spinach is also available year-round in grocery stores. It should come in a bundle, and in probably two types: one is very dark green and has curled edges around the leaves; this is called savoy spinach. The other is slightly lighter and has flat leaves, like a larger version of baby spinach. I tend to prefer savoy if I’m cooking it for awhile, and flat-leaf if I’m eating it raw, or doing a real quick cook.
by Dan Nosowitz, The Awl | Read more:
Image: David Wagoner
Berlin Now
When the German writer Peter Schneider published “The Wall Jumper,” his celebrated elliptical novella about the divided Berlin of the Cold War, in 1982, the city’s central importance to the 20th century was unquestioned. First the kaiser and then the Führer had touched off world wars from Germany’s capital. And when the world was split between Soviet and American blocs, Berlin could rightly claim to be the front line. The concrete barrier zigzagging through its streets stood as the tangible symbol of that division.
President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Berlin speech is best remembered for the phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner,” but before his indelible German declaration he said more broadly, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.” Caring about what happened in Berlin meant caring about what happened everywhere, lending added significance to works like “The Wall Jumper” or the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire.”
Now, 25 years after the fall of the wall, the city is once again the object of intense fascination — not because of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s influence over European fiscal policies but because bohemian young people are moving to the city from every part of the globe and clubbing all night. It’s Berlin as Ibiza or Cancun, but with bad weather.
In “Berlin Now,” Schneider seeks to explain why the city became “the capital of creative people from around the world today,” attracting artists, D.J.s and software developers from Tokyo, Tel Aviv and all points in between. He also tackles the interconnected question of how, once Berlin “burst out of the shackles of reinforced concrete, barbed wire and iron bars . . . the severed veins and limbs of the divided city fused back together.” (...)
Schneider identifies “the weirdness, perpetual incompleteness and outlandishness of Berlin,” not as a failing but as an attraction. A jewel of a city like Dubrovnik or Venice feels like a closed circuit, a finished book. “Imperfection, incompleteness — not to say ugliness — afford a sense of freedom that compact beauty never can,” he writes.
For centuries Berlin has had something of a chip on its shoulder. It lacks the ancient ruins of Rome or the sophisticated beauty of Paris. It is landlocked and flat, with a climate that can be frigid, gray and unpleasant up to eight months out of the year. “Imagine Geneva, lost in a desert,” Balzac wrote in 1843, “and you have an idea of Berlin.”
President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Berlin speech is best remembered for the phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner,” but before his indelible German declaration he said more broadly, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.” Caring about what happened in Berlin meant caring about what happened everywhere, lending added significance to works like “The Wall Jumper” or the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire.”Now, 25 years after the fall of the wall, the city is once again the object of intense fascination — not because of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s influence over European fiscal policies but because bohemian young people are moving to the city from every part of the globe and clubbing all night. It’s Berlin as Ibiza or Cancun, but with bad weather.
In “Berlin Now,” Schneider seeks to explain why the city became “the capital of creative people from around the world today,” attracting artists, D.J.s and software developers from Tokyo, Tel Aviv and all points in between. He also tackles the interconnected question of how, once Berlin “burst out of the shackles of reinforced concrete, barbed wire and iron bars . . . the severed veins and limbs of the divided city fused back together.” (...)
Schneider identifies “the weirdness, perpetual incompleteness and outlandishness of Berlin,” not as a failing but as an attraction. A jewel of a city like Dubrovnik or Venice feels like a closed circuit, a finished book. “Imperfection, incompleteness — not to say ugliness — afford a sense of freedom that compact beauty never can,” he writes.
For centuries Berlin has had something of a chip on its shoulder. It lacks the ancient ruins of Rome or the sophisticated beauty of Paris. It is landlocked and flat, with a climate that can be frigid, gray and unpleasant up to eight months out of the year. “Imagine Geneva, lost in a desert,” Balzac wrote in 1843, “and you have an idea of Berlin.”
by Nicholas Kulish, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via:
This Weekend, College Is for Everyone
When Diane LaPointe went off to Wesleyan University in 1975, her parents dropped her off freshman year and didn’t return until graduation. “I put my stuff in storage and took the bus home during breaks,” she said.
Now that her daughter, Megan, is a sophomore at Wesleyan, Ms. LaPointe keeps in much closer contact. She is regularly invited to Megan’s dance recitals, receives a weekly email from the school about happenings, and last month attended Family Weekend, a three-day festival featuring office hours with the dean, astrology walks, seminars (“Parenting Through the Job Search”) and boomer empowerment sessions (“The End of Back Pain”).“I know I’m not supposed to be a helicopter parent,” Ms. LaPointe said. “I’ve made a concerted effort not to call her, not to email her, not to text her.” But when she learned about Family Weekend, she leapt. “Because it’s a sanctioned event, you don’t feel like you’re intruding,” she said.
Few idylls are more entrenched in the mythology of American childhood than the ritual of going off to college. The teenager stuffs belongings into milk crates, kisses a sniffling mom and dad on the cheek, waves goodbye to the younger siblings and the dog, and strides off into the future.
Nearly everything about this image has become outdated. First, colleges are employing elaborate farewell ceremonies, strict deadlines, even “parent bouncers” to get traumatized parents to actually leave campus after dropping off their children. Second, technological umbilical cords like texting and FaceTime allow parents and students to confer on everything from class selection to birth control. And third, just weeks after the start of school, parents, younger siblings, even the pet are invited to return to campus.
Once sleepy, overlooked occasions for a few nearby parents, Family Weekends have become hyper-organized, multiday extravaganzas with lectures from Nobel laureates, Olympic-style sports events, Hollywood entertainers, even parades. They’re also occasions for big recruiting, big fund-raising and, inevitably, big stress.
Anyone with vague memories of a slightly awkward parental visit during college would be stunned by the ornate architecture of the modern-day experience. Boston University lists 59 events, including a mind reader, a primer on social media (“#wasteoftime OR #valueforconsumers”) and dozens of lectures on everything from surviving finals to “Monsters and the American Psyche.”
The University of Texas at Austin has 95 events, including bingo night, ghost tours, six different times for family bowling and a photo booth. Pomona College offers “Coffee at the Queer Resource Center”; Reed College a “Nuclear Reactor Tour.” And a remarkable number of schools bring in big-ticket entertainers: Seth Meyers (George Washington), Kathy Griffin (Hofstra) and Jay Leno (Connecticut).
Why such a fuss? Anna Thomas, the director of parent and family programs at Vanderbilt University, said parents today crave a higher level of engagement. “They really want to be part of their student’s experience,” she said. More than 4,300 people attended Vanderbilt Family Weekend this year, up 50 percent from a decade ago.
by Bruce Feiler, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Charlie Mahoney
Shift The Darkness Around, It Won't Help Any
by Alex Balk, The Awl
Image: via
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Smuggling Snowden's Secrets
Late on the evening of January 11, 2013, someone sent me an interesting email. It was encrypted, and sent from the sort of anonymous email service that smart people use when they want to hide their identity. Sitting at the kitchen table in the small cottage where I lived in Berkeley with my wife and two cats, I decrypted it.
The anonymous emailer wanted to know if I could help him communicate securely with Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who had repeatedly cast a critical eye on American foreign policy.
From: anon108@■■■■■■■■■I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just been contacted by Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who was then preparing a momentous leak of government data.
To: Micah Lee
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2013
Micah,
I’m a friend. I need to get information securely to Laura Poitras and her alone, but I can’t find an email/gpg key for her.
Can you help?
A month earlier, Snowden had anonymously emailed Glenn Greenwald, a Guardian journalist and chronicler of war-on-terror excesses, but Greenwald didn’t use encryption and didn’t have the time to get up to speed, so Snowden moved on. As is now well known, Snowden decided to contact Poitras because she used encryption. But he didn’t have her encryption key, as is necessary to send someone encrypted email, and the key wasn’t posted on the web. Snowden, extraordinarily knowledgeable about how internet traffic is monitored, didn’t want to send her an unencrypted email, even if just to ask for her key. So he needed to find someone he thought he could trust who both had her key and used encrypted email.
That was me.
And as it turned out, several months later I was drawn more deeply into the whole thing, when Snowden got back in touch and asked me to work with him to launch an online anti-surveillance petition.
Until now, I haven’t written about my modest role in the Snowden leak, but with the release of Poitras’ documentary on him, “Citizenfour,” I feel comfortable connecting the dots. I think it’s helpful to show how privacy technologists can work with sources and journalists to make it possible for leaks to happen in a secure way. Securing those types of interactions is part of my job now that I work with Greenwald and Poitras at The Intercept, but there are common techniques and general principles from my interactions with Snowden that could serve as lessons to people outside this organization.
When I got that first email, I was working as a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and as the chief technology officer of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. My encryption key was posted at both sites, so Snowden was able to find it easily, and the key was digitally signed by people who were well-known in the privacy world (pioneering blogger Cory Doctorow and free software champion Richard Stallman, for instance); this meant those people had digitally vouched, in a way that was incredibly difficult to forge, that the key really belonged to me and not to, say, some NSA trickster. In other words, Snowden didn’t need to worry about the key being a fake. Poitras was a founding board member of the FPF, so he assumed I would have her key, and he was right.
It wasn’t uncommon for me to receive the type of email Snowden sent — strangers send me encrypted emails all the time, requesting help. Some of those emails are from people who appear to have personal issues to work out, but the inquiry from Snowden, emailing under a pseudonym, struck me as serious. I quickly forwarded it in an encrypted email to Poitras. The encryption technology we used — the standard among email users concerned with privacy — is known by two acronyms: GPG, for GNU Privacy Guard, or PGP, for Pretty Good Privacy.
From: Micah LeeLike me, Poitras was accustomed to receiving anonymous inquiries, and she recognized that this one was credible. A few hours later, she sent me a reply.
To: Laura Poitras
Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2013
Hey Laura,
This person just send me this GPG encrypted email. Do you want to respond? If you want to, and you need any help with using crypto, I’m happy to help.
From: Laura PoitrasThe frustrating and ironic thing about GPG is that even experts make mistakes with it. Even, as it turns out, Edward Snowden.
To: Micah Lee
Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2013
Hey Micah,
Thanks for asking. Sure, you can tell this person I can be reached with GPG at: laurapoitras@gmail.com
I’ll reply with my public key.
I’m also on jabber/OTR at:
l.p.@jabber.org
I hope all is good with you!
Laura
I now had Poitras’ permission to send Snowden her encryption key, but in his first email to me, Snowden had forgotten to attach his key, which meant I could not encrypt my response. I had to send him an unencrypted email asking for his key first. His oversight was of no security consequence—it didn’t compromise his identity in any way—but it goes to show how an encryption system that requires users to take specific and frequent actions almost guarantees mistakes will be made, even by the best users.
After receiving Snowden’s key, I sent him an encrypted email with Poitras’ key. This enabled him to send his first encrypted email to Poitras, in which he called himself Citizenfour. But I wasn’t out of the identity-confirmation picture yet.
Snowden and Poitras quickly set up a more secure channel for communication. Poitras created an anonymous email account, doing so with the Tor Browser that masks your identity on the web, and she created a new GPG key, just for communicating with Citizenfour. This was advisable because, if she were under surveillance by the NSA or any other intelligence agency, they might have compromised her known accounts, and she would prefer for there to be no trace of her true name in the correspondence with this secrecy-seeking stranger.
But the internet is a hall of mirrors.
Should Journalism Worry About Content Marketing?
[ed. See also: Newsrooms struggle with free-content strategy]
At a glance, the Daily Growl could be any morning news meeting held in the “win the internet through pet videos” bureau of a lavishly funded media startup. Rows of eager young people stand behind their monitors—“TMZ-style,” managing editor Lisa Keller told me—as Keller solicits memes and news pegs to supplement the content already scheduled on the team’s editorial calendar. Monitors are tuned to Twitter feeds and Photoshop works in progress. Any of the team’s 10 “community managers” and eight designers might produce as many as 10 postings a day. Those numbers don’t include the constant interaction with fans and followers and strangers that is also a big part of the job. The office is light-filled and, despite the heavy productivity expectations, seemingly free of stress. I’m struck by this, having been in so many newsrooms in which there’s a palpable sense that the media industry, to say nothing of the country and the human race, is at the abyss.
The Daily Growl is the morning ritual of Nestlé Purina PetCare’s content marketing team. Neither the Daily Growl nor its counterpart, the Weekly Meow, are really news meetings. But the Purina operation is, in some ways, closer to a newsroom than journalists would care to admit. As its name, The Feed, suggests, the team produces timely information and entertainment and pushes it out to an audience on social platforms. It’s focused on speed, accountable for accuracy, and perpetually aware of the needs of its readers. The most obvious difference between The Feed’s work and that of an actual newsroom is that the team is explicitly aligned with the interests of the world’s second-largest pet food company. Then again, boundaries between editorial and advertising in journalism newsrooms aren’t what they used to be. Editors at Time Inc. now report to managers on the business side, and a series of recently leaked emails suggests that executives at Vice expect to know in advance about stories that mention advertisers or other corporate brands. That The Feed’s work is overtly coming from a brand is arguably a win for transparency.
The Feed devotes itself to customer service, with the ultimate goal of making money. Signs posted throughout the team’s office remind members of this: “Engage,” “Impact Business Now,” “Convert,” “Results.” How different are these reminders of the realities of capitalism from the various measures of popularity (total traffic, new readers, etc.) prominently displayed in newsrooms? Are the lists a reminder that reporters should be giving readers what they want, or just rankings of the writers whose stories have been most successfully monetized that day, not unlike the sales-leader board in a firm hawking timeshares?
Another thing The Feed’s work on behalf of Purina has in common with the work of journalists on behalf of their own (often corporate) owners: People are reading it.
The employees of The Feed are practitioners of a shape-shifting genre that has taken over billions of dollars of corporate marketing budgets globally in the last decade. Content marketing is so broad that it eludes definition even by its most ardent practitioners, but the term includes essentially any form of content (a Facebook post, a celebrity Q&A, a feature-length documentary) created by or on behalf of a brand with the hope that it will attract an audience on its own merits—as opposed to traditional advertising, which has the far smaller ambition of gaining notice from a captive audience before the ad break ends, or the page gets flipped, and the real content begins.
Most content marketing bypasses traditional media entirely, and as such it threatens to further erode journalism’s dwindling advertising revenue. (...)
As journalism newsrooms have diminished in strength and ambition over the last decade, “brand newsrooms,” a term that’s now used casually within the marketing and PR industry, are booming—and have been for some time. As Sam Slaughter, the vice president of content at Contently, a software platform with a network of freelance writers available to both marketers and journalism publishers, notes, Red Bull was covering the action-sports industry when “BuzzFeed was just a twinkle in Jonah Peretti’s eye.” American Express has a publication devoted to small-business owners, and General Electric covers its own scientists and hopes to never send another press release to an inattentive newspaper reporter. Chevron runs a community news site for Richmond, CA, where it is the town’s largest employer. Coca-Cola now reportedly spends more money creating its own content than it does on television advertising.
Nestlé, Purina’s parent and the world’s largest food company, creates more than 1,500 pieces of content each day company-wide, and its brands have accumulated more than 250 million Facebook fans.
Advertisers and journalists have always been partners, and that partnership has always contained an inherent tension. Content marketing has the potential to turn that tension into an existential threat. Journalists like to think of themselves as protectors of the public interest, intermediaries who police both fact and rhetoric. The very premise of the profession is that it’s dangerous to have words pass straight from the mouths of CEOs or politicians to the public’s ear. This intermediary function is at the core of journalism’s identity and, though it wasn’t always thought of this way, the core of its business model. But each successful piece of content marketing is, in effect, a statement that a journalist wasn’t wanted or needed. Each time a consumer clicks on a piece of content marketing, or shares it with a friend, it’s confirmation that they’re very comfortable being out there in the information landscape on their own.
At a glance, the Daily Growl could be any morning news meeting held in the “win the internet through pet videos” bureau of a lavishly funded media startup. Rows of eager young people stand behind their monitors—“TMZ-style,” managing editor Lisa Keller told me—as Keller solicits memes and news pegs to supplement the content already scheduled on the team’s editorial calendar. Monitors are tuned to Twitter feeds and Photoshop works in progress. Any of the team’s 10 “community managers” and eight designers might produce as many as 10 postings a day. Those numbers don’t include the constant interaction with fans and followers and strangers that is also a big part of the job. The office is light-filled and, despite the heavy productivity expectations, seemingly free of stress. I’m struck by this, having been in so many newsrooms in which there’s a palpable sense that the media industry, to say nothing of the country and the human race, is at the abyss.The Daily Growl is the morning ritual of Nestlé Purina PetCare’s content marketing team. Neither the Daily Growl nor its counterpart, the Weekly Meow, are really news meetings. But the Purina operation is, in some ways, closer to a newsroom than journalists would care to admit. As its name, The Feed, suggests, the team produces timely information and entertainment and pushes it out to an audience on social platforms. It’s focused on speed, accountable for accuracy, and perpetually aware of the needs of its readers. The most obvious difference between The Feed’s work and that of an actual newsroom is that the team is explicitly aligned with the interests of the world’s second-largest pet food company. Then again, boundaries between editorial and advertising in journalism newsrooms aren’t what they used to be. Editors at Time Inc. now report to managers on the business side, and a series of recently leaked emails suggests that executives at Vice expect to know in advance about stories that mention advertisers or other corporate brands. That The Feed’s work is overtly coming from a brand is arguably a win for transparency.
The Feed devotes itself to customer service, with the ultimate goal of making money. Signs posted throughout the team’s office remind members of this: “Engage,” “Impact Business Now,” “Convert,” “Results.” How different are these reminders of the realities of capitalism from the various measures of popularity (total traffic, new readers, etc.) prominently displayed in newsrooms? Are the lists a reminder that reporters should be giving readers what they want, or just rankings of the writers whose stories have been most successfully monetized that day, not unlike the sales-leader board in a firm hawking timeshares?
Another thing The Feed’s work on behalf of Purina has in common with the work of journalists on behalf of their own (often corporate) owners: People are reading it.
The employees of The Feed are practitioners of a shape-shifting genre that has taken over billions of dollars of corporate marketing budgets globally in the last decade. Content marketing is so broad that it eludes definition even by its most ardent practitioners, but the term includes essentially any form of content (a Facebook post, a celebrity Q&A, a feature-length documentary) created by or on behalf of a brand with the hope that it will attract an audience on its own merits—as opposed to traditional advertising, which has the far smaller ambition of gaining notice from a captive audience before the ad break ends, or the page gets flipped, and the real content begins.
Most content marketing bypasses traditional media entirely, and as such it threatens to further erode journalism’s dwindling advertising revenue. (...)
As journalism newsrooms have diminished in strength and ambition over the last decade, “brand newsrooms,” a term that’s now used casually within the marketing and PR industry, are booming—and have been for some time. As Sam Slaughter, the vice president of content at Contently, a software platform with a network of freelance writers available to both marketers and journalism publishers, notes, Red Bull was covering the action-sports industry when “BuzzFeed was just a twinkle in Jonah Peretti’s eye.” American Express has a publication devoted to small-business owners, and General Electric covers its own scientists and hopes to never send another press release to an inattentive newspaper reporter. Chevron runs a community news site for Richmond, CA, where it is the town’s largest employer. Coca-Cola now reportedly spends more money creating its own content than it does on television advertising.
Nestlé, Purina’s parent and the world’s largest food company, creates more than 1,500 pieces of content each day company-wide, and its brands have accumulated more than 250 million Facebook fans.
Advertisers and journalists have always been partners, and that partnership has always contained an inherent tension. Content marketing has the potential to turn that tension into an existential threat. Journalists like to think of themselves as protectors of the public interest, intermediaries who police both fact and rhetoric. The very premise of the profession is that it’s dangerous to have words pass straight from the mouths of CEOs or politicians to the public’s ear. This intermediary function is at the core of journalism’s identity and, though it wasn’t always thought of this way, the core of its business model. But each successful piece of content marketing is, in effect, a statement that a journalist wasn’t wanted or needed. Each time a consumer clicks on a piece of content marketing, or shares it with a friend, it’s confirmation that they’re very comfortable being out there in the information landscape on their own.
by Michael Meyer, CJR | Read more:
Image: Noma Bar
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