palewire

There are some interesting j-posts floating around trying to puzzle out how and why big media companies missed the boat online.

One piece of history that I’m interested in, but never see come up in these sorts of attempts to wring meaning out of the past, is the derregulation of major media rammed through Congress in 1996.

The lifting of ownership bans kickstarted a wave of consolidation across print and electronic media that gave us the doddering dinosaurs we all slag on today. Tribune Company, Clear Channel, McClatchey, et cetera simply could not exist in their present form if that bill hadn’t passed. And my boss Sam Zell, telling the story of how he and Randy Michaels bonded at Jacor, said as much when he addressed our staff earlier in the year.

My suspicion is that the perceived economic incentives offered by consolidation and cost-cutting opened up by the 1996 dereg might have been too tempting in the short term for media executives to ignore. And why should they invest time and resources online chasing speculative new revenues, when they could clearly see immediate “efficiencies,” “synergies,” and other opportunities to increase profits through consolidation? Plus they got the rush of chasing business’ biggest prize: The Deal. (Eric Klinenberg’s book has some great reporting on how driven a lot of media execs were in that direction.)

So that’s my long way of saying I’m interested in what degree the failure of the MSM to invest online was a victim of that opportunity cost. And I’d love to ask an executive who worked during the era as much.

Yesterday I launched Tickertube.org, my first attempt at hosting a site using Amazon’s EC2 service. It’s a simple app, just an ever refreshing list of links from sites that write about telecommunications policy. I used to cover this stuff in DC, and I don’t really like using RSS readers, so it’s useful for me, if not anyone else.

But my objective isn’t to build a hit site. I just want to figure out Amazon’s toys. What I learned is that while they aren’t all that well documented, they can be a lot of fun once you figure out the basics. You’ll have to do more hands-on server configuration than you would with Google App Engine, but greater control does come with benefits.

I’d like to use Tickertube to woodshop a little in developing for smart phones. But since I don’t have an iPhone or Blackberry, I don’t have any way to test it out. Or a lot of motivation to get it done. But if somebody out there would like to use the site with a mobile device (and wouldn’t that be a shock!), just let me know and I’ll try to put in the extra time to adapt the HTML. Same goes if there are any feeds you’d like me to add the pool. Just shout.

Thanks to all the great tools that made this project easy. Besides Amazon, much love to Django, YUI and Feedjack.

I had a little excess energy available tonight while watching Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s appearance on Bill Moyers’ program, so I dumped the transcript of his new statements into Many Eyes and ran it against what the Guardian bills as an “excerpt” of his famous post Sept. 11 sermon.

See anything interesting?

I’ve got nothing but love for my Wizz RSS reader. But sometimes it’s still not enough to keep up. The more feeds I add, the clunkier it gets to click my way down through the list. And I find myself lazing out and only reading about half as much as I should.

So, in an effort to help myself better keep up on what’s going on, I’ve put together news.palewire.com, a feed aggregator that blends together the mix of pundits, blogs, delicious feeds and gossip sheets that I dig on. The topics tend toward newspapers (plight of), data analysis and news media geekery. It’s all brought together using Sam Ruby’s excellent, Python-based Planet Venus application, which I previously used to assemble Shawington.com. The one cool add this time around is Ruby’s “meme” plugin, which scans the feed pool for common links and ranks the past week’s most popular posts.

If it’s something you like, feel free to tune in. The site is mostly intended for my personal use, but it would be great if other people found it useful. So, if there are feeds you’d like to see thrown in, or changes that would help make your life easier, just let me know and I’ll try to do it up. I’m sure I left out a lot of great stuff, and I’m always out to improve my media diet.

The media circus found its latest entertainment Friday when word of Barack Obama’s allegedly controversial remarks shot across the blogosphere. Unlike previous presidential titillations, this one was set off by The Huffington Post. That alone seems somewhat remarkable, considering how the lefty HuffPost openly apes the practices of the usual outlet for this sort of news: the more rightly Drudge Report.

But, in keeping with the spirit of Dave Berry Barry, may he rest in peace, let’s not take this opportunity to reflect upon what the means for the state of the news media, or even the campaign of one Barack Obama. No, let’s use it to consider which related news headline contains the best potential band name.

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Sources:

• Huffington Post: “Obama: No Surprise That Hard-Pressed Pennsylvanians Turn Bitter”
• Associated Press: “Obama Concedes Remarks Were Ill-Chosen”
• LA Times: “Obama seeks to explain ‘guns or religion’ remark”
• Powerline: “OBAMA ‘SCRAMBLES TO QUELL THE FUROR’”
• NYT: “Obama Says He Mispoke; Clinton Raps Him Hard”
• Daily Kos: “Barack Obama Shows Disrespect For Rural Americans”
• Newsday: “Obama says ‘bitter’ didn’t come out right”
• FoxNews: “Obama on Guns and Religion: ‘I Didn’t Say It as Well as I Should Have.’”
• Washington Post: “Opponents Paint Obama as an Elitist“
• Washington Post: “In Hoosier State, Clinton Ramps Up ‘Bitter’ Talk”

Tonight I attended my first world-class classical music performance (I’m guessing my teenage vist to the Cedar Rapids Symphony probably doesn’t count). It was up Bunker Hill at the Disney Music Hall where I saw András Schiff perform four of Beethoven’s sonatas, including the famous no. 14, the Moonlight Sonata. My seat had a clear view of Schiff’s gliding hands, an enjoyable sight. I’m not sure I was ready for two hours of piano playing, but it was definitely an impressive show.

For your enjoyment, here’s a YouTube recording of Schiff performing a Schubert sonata.

And, if you’re into this kind of thing, the Guardian has published a series of lectures Schiff gave on Beethoven’s work, including the four sonatas I saw tonight.

There’s a great nugget buried in the back of the Berkman Center’s new study on the Iranian blogosphere. I’m sure their awesome social networking diagram is going to rack up hits across the Western Web this week, and deservedly so, but what I’m really taken with is their ranking of Iran’s most highly cited YouTube videos (as of Feb. 2008). The study’s general finding is that Iran’s blogosphere has a fairly diverse set of views, but they mention that expatriates and secular reformers tend to link in YouTube more often than conservos. Their methodology for the study (and, presumably, the ranking) is at the bottom. But, first, let’s get those mothers out the pdf and onto the Web, where they belong.

10. “Against Capital Punishment—Against the Islamic Regime”

09. “Mansour Osanloo - Freedom Will Come”

08. “Iran ey Sara e Omid”

07. “Mohsen Namjoo”

06. “Nazeri”

05. “Crack in Iran”

04. “Holy Crime”

03. “A girl with a childish voice”

02. “Akhoond’s (Cleric) Comment on Girls.”

PRIVATE! NO!

01. “Kiosk: Love for Speed”

Berkman provides a translation for the No. 1 hit. Here goes:

The power of love or love of power
Modernism versus tradition forever

Living in the evil axis
Speed freaks in jalopy taxis

Why feel any pain and suffer
When pills and powders’ all on offer

Nothing for lunch or dinner to make
Then let them eat Yellow Cake

Multiple choice elections left to chance
Holy matrimony by loan and finance

Scraped up the very last dime
Sent it straight to Palestine

Guaranteed success or money back
Underground music or cultural attack

No need for cardiologists
Just facelifts by cosmetologists

Immoral zealots, fanatic factions
Chinese-style economic expansions

Religious democratic droppings
Pizza with Ghormeh Sabzi toppings

Now for the Berkman methodology:

The basis of the social network analysis and blogs selection was a corpus of blog data collected by Morningside Analytics (MA) between July 2007 and March 2008. MA tracks a list of over 200,000 Persian language blogs, built initially from a snowball spidering process. 98,875 of these blogs are monitored daily, with all new text and links recorded to a database. Social networks analysis was used to identify the most active and prominent blogs, the top 6018 of which were mapped to identify the core structures of the Iranian blogosphere, create visualizations, and identify blogs for human and computational text analysis. The map (visualization) of the Iranian blogosphere is plotted using the Fruchterman-Rheingold algorithm, which employs a ‘physics model’ approach in which blogs that are more densely connected are drawn together into clustered ‘network neighborhoods.’ The color of the blogs results from ‘Attentive Cluster Analysis,’ in which the linking histories of blogs are compared statistically in order to identify groups sharing similar linking preferences. The largest seven attentive clusters corresponded with major structural features of the Iranian blogosphere, and were selected for qualitative study. Smaller clusters were not studied in-depth, though this would be a worthy topic for future analysis.

The news out of the political circus yesterday was that Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, had been booed during a speech honoring Martin Luther King Jr. on the 40th anniversary of King’s assassination.

As Steve Benen and others have recorded, McCain has followed a serpentine path on the issue. And I’m not sure I can clearly reconcile their accounts of the candidate’s past actions with his current position.

MLK holiday angst is hardly a new story in American politics (Remember Public Enemy’s “By The Time I Get To Arizona”). What caught my imagination this weekend for the first time was the possibility that we might be one day playing out an identical drama, but in a different color.

Less than a week before the anniversary of King’s death, another notable date passed. March 31 is the birthday of union organizer and Hispanic-American hero Cesar Chavez. With Hispanic participation in the Democratic party vaulting, Sen. Barack Obama took the opportunity to make a point of supporting a national holiday, which dovetails with a fledgling resolution in the House of Representatives offering to make the same idea law. Meanwhile, an array of prominent union organizers have signed on to the lobbying effort.

If the Democratic leadership ever brings the measure to a vote, I wonder if a ‘Nay’ might one day come back to haunt a future presidential candidate, just as McCain’s 1983 vote haunted him yesterday. Voting against Chavez Day might not be so politically beneficial four or five election cycles from now if you’re running for president in an America where Hispanics are a larger, more affluent and more political active segment of the population.

While it was a new thought for me — living only blocks from Los Angeles’ Cesar Chavez Boulevard may be having an effect — the concept of Hispanic demographics as destiny certainly occured to Chavez himself. In the course of kicking around the web this afternoon, I found the following passage from a 1984 Chavez speech that offers a strong prediction. You can read and listen to it here.

I am told these days farm workers should be discouraged and pessimistic. The Republicans control the governor’s office and the White House. There is a conservative trend in the nation. Yet, we are filled with hope and encouragement. We have looked into the future and the future is ours. History and inevitability are on our side. The farm workers and their children and the Hispanics and their children are the future in California, and corporate growers are the past. Those politicians who ally themselves with the corporate growers and against farm workers and the Hispanics are in for a big surprise. They want to make their careers in politics; they want to hold power 20 and 30 years from now. But 20 and 30 years from now, in Modesto, in Salinas, in Fresno, in Bakersfield, in the Imperial Valley and in many of the great cities of California, those communities will be dominated by farm workers and not by growers, by the children and grandchildren of farm workers and not by the children and grandchildren of growers.

…

Like the other immigrant groups, the day will come when we win the economic and political rewards, which are in keeping with our numbers in society. The day will come when the politicians will do the right thing for our people out of political necessity and not out of charity or idealism. That day may not come this year. That day may not come during this decade, but it will come someday. And when that day comes, we shall see the fulfillment of that passage from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament: “The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.” And on that day, our nation shall fulfill its creed, and that fulfillment shall enrich us all. Thank you very much.

It’s a little eerie how closely it mirrors MLK’s famous last speech in Memphis, but with a stronger nod to the virtues of bare-knucked, union-style politics than King’s offer of divine revelation. What do you think of the comparison?

Considering all the hoopla, I can’t be the only one wondering what the hell is actually in a passport file.

According to the State Department’s official blog (yes, the State Department has an official blog), here’s what they keep:

Generally, after the State Department issues a passport, all personal documents are returned to the applicant – the only document kept in the Department’s passport file is the passport application. Passport files do not contain travel information, such as visa and entry stamps, from previous passports. Almost all passport files contain only a passport application form as completed by the applicant.

And, according to Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, here’s what the paper trail looks like.

When you send in your passport application, it might go to a State Department office around the country, it might go to a clerk of the court, it might go to a library or a post office. That information is — your application is assembled with others and transmitted via registered mail, via Federal Express — all of it is traceable — to one of our facilities, a facility such as the one that we work with the Department of the Treasury on in Newark, Delaware . And the information then is — the envelopes are opened, the checks are removed so that they can be deposited to the Treasury’s account, and then they are processed for onward transmission to one of the State Department’s facilities that actually print out the passport books in your name (Source).

If you review the passport application form, you’re not going to find much more than what’s printed on your driver’s license. At first blush, that hardly seems like the sort of thing that contains much to get excited about.

But, being good paranoids, we should be sure to note the weasel words in the State Department’s blog post. They are “generally” and “almost all,” which I can only take to mean that while most passport files may only contain the application form, some files contain other documents. What documents those are, it doesn’t say.

On this particularly alarmist segment of The Countdown with Keith Olbermann, the host and his guests seem to think there’s the potential for quite a lot more to be in there. (In a memorable bit of hype, Keith speculates that the file might be of “Watergatian” proportions). On the other hand, the reporting of Time’s Brian Bennett seems more in line with the State Department’s blog.

But hell if I know.

The good news is that we live in a free country, governed by laws, one of the best of which is the Freedom of Information Act (a.k.a FOIA). And, thereby, we all have the right to review government documents pertaining to ourselves.

So, getting to the bottom of this should only be a matter of paperwork and collective effort. Below is a form letter I’ve prepared using the State Department’s FOIA handbook as a guide. I’ve already filled in my own information and will, later today, mail it off as a formal request.

You should feel free to do the same. Just don’t expect a rapid response. The State Department annual report says the median response time on a typical request last year was 212 days. (Though, if you’re willing to pay a little more money, the State Department’s manual suggests you might get your documents quicker if you bypass FOIA law and make your document request with the Passport Services office.)

If you want to share what you get back, drop a comment when the time comes. I’ll be sure to do the same.

[Today's Date]

[Your Name]
[Your Street Address]
[Your City, State and Zipcode]

Office of Information Programs and Services

A/ISS/IPS
Department of State, SA-2
Washington, DC 20522-8001
Re: Freedom of Information Act Request

Dear Sir or Madame:

I am writing to request the release of personal records under the Privacy Act and the Freedom of Information Act.

I, [Your Name], born [Your Place of Birth] on [Your Date of Birth], request the release of any and all documents contained in my passport file. I believe the Department of State is likely to have maintained such records since I am a current passport holder who has traveled abroad.

I further request that the results of your search be forwarded to my current address, detailed above. If the expense required to perform this search is estimated to exceed $25 dollars, I expect notification from your office and the option to reformulate the request as stipulated in your agency’s official policy. If any information is withheld, I request to be notified of the amount of information withheld, the basis for its withholding and my options for appeal, as is my right.

I [declare, certify, verify, of state] under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United

States of America, that the foregoing is true and correct.

If you have any questions or concerns, I can be reached by telephone at [Your Phone Number].

Sincerely,

[Your Signature]

If you’re going to play along, you don’t have to send the exact same letter, but you should be sure to include that line about verifying your own identity under penalty of perjury. Otherwise you’ll either have to have the letter notarized or the government won’t take you on your word that this is a personal request. At least that’s what the manual says.

If you checked out the front page of latimes.com today, you found an investigative story about the low wages paid to some of LA’s carwasheros, which, for those blog readers who don’t do Spanish, is roughly translated to “a dude or dudette who works at the car wash.”

There’s a certain “no duh” element to the story. I doubt many people are surprised to learn that SoCal carwashes offer low wage jobs to Spanish speakers who may or may not be, to indulge in the parlance of our times, “documented.” But it might still be a bit surprising to learn just how little many workers claim to be paid, regardless of where you stand on the immigration thing.

From Santa Monica to Westwood to Koreatown, many workers said they received only tips for some or all of their shifts. Labor division inspectors estimated that about 10% to 20% of car dryers are not paid by owners.”

Tips only” is a requirement for some new workers until owners are satisfied that they can properly dry a car, laborers said.

But, issues of newsworthiness and government regulation aside, the Times story is interesting to me for a different reason. Included in the online package that accompanies the paper’s effort is a Spanish language translation, also published on the Web site’s front. Take a look.

Last month a Times blog posted a Spanish quote from the paper’s sister publication, Hoy, and took a little flack for it. So this certainly isn’t the first time across this particular ford in the stream.

But I wonder what the response will be like to this. Any thoughts? Is this the sort of thing a newspaper in a place like LA should be doing? If not, why not? And, if so, how can a Spanish language story here or there on a Web site that’s primarily English be effective and reach an Spanish speaking audience?

And I can’t read Spanish, so I’m unable to discern whether there are any significant differences between the two stories, but I’d be curious to hear comparisons from people who can.