NEWSPAPERS ARE DOOMED

“The Shatzkin Files” is an on-line newsletter in which Mike Shatzkin ponders matters having to do with print, but not the writing of it.  He is the second generation of his family to be book sellers, not just in terms of shops but also in terms of sales and distribution systems.  Therefore he thinks about details most of us aren’t aware even exist.  http://www.idealog.com/blog/newspaper-publishers-face-different-much-immediate-threats-book-publishers/

The first time I woke up to these issues was a presentation that Russell Chatham made at the Montana Festival of the Book many years ago where he explained that a bound book is a commodity that is taxed, so printing and binding a lot of books in order to capture the lower prices of scale, meant exposing the books to warehouse misadventures in case of fire or flooding, but also losing value because of being taxed.  Therefore, he printed the pages of his books, but didn’t bind them.  The loose pages, which is where the factor of scale was in the paper and ink, were not taxable.

Another moment of realization was visiting the Fort Benton museum that has an attached bookstore and wondering why — since they were the guardians and exhibitors of Bob Scriver’s Blackfeet bronzes — they didn’t stock “Bronze Inside and Out,” which is the book I wrote about Bob and these specific bronzes.  Their explanation was “no one told us to do it.”  They were completely dependent on the system of publishers who send “drummers” around to bookstores, displaying and recommending what would sell.  No one explored what was available outside of that system or thought about the value it would add to stock the book.

In the last newsletter, Shatzkin was comparing book publishing to newspaper publishing, which he hadn’t really focused on before.  He figures that periodicals as we know them are doomed, because their income is not dependent on subscriptions but rather on advertising.  The two sources are interlinked since the amount advertisers will pay depends on how many readers there are and whether they are read by a demographic that will buy the product advertised.  As the young, who are the most likely to buy high-profit things like clothes and electronics, have wandered away from reading any print at all, they no longer subscribe to newspapers, but they will look at glossy bright images.

The months that I worked at the Prairie Star were educational.  The two salesmen there went out on the road to sell advertising, but they were required by law to print no more advertising than the bottom third of every page in order to qualify for certain advantages, like lower postage rates.  I had assumed that I would be there to do a certain amount of writing, but it turned out that the actual copy was simply downloaded from county agents and ag colleges.  It was valuable enough but free and accessible by anyone with a computer.  In 1999 not so many people had computers or knew how to access specific materials.  Since the readers of the paper were farmers and ranchers, they were outdoor people.  But they also did a lot of figuring about equipment and materials, so the major job of a clerk was logging in payment for the classified ads.  These, of course, soon migrated to the Internet.

The case of the big prestige newspapers was different.  The NYTimes and the Washington Post are active participants in the governing of the country, monitors of events we’d never know about otherwise.  Increased costs of a paper-and-ink distribution confronting a citizenship less and less able to read and analyze print, much less willing to participate in the machinery of running a country, means that readership goes down.  What advertisers remain are the ones who haven’t yet converted to Internet advertising, which they must eventually.  

As a countervailing force, digital advertising is now saturating everything online, aggressively intruding into articles and vids even as we read, so that even their own consumer research -- questions that must be answered in order to clear the screen -- obstruct the real articles.  Always the new annoyance and impediment.  It becomes less and less worth the effort.  I go to the library.

The major newspapers of the country impose limits on how many articles one can read (pay walls) without subscribing, which is legitimate from one point of view, but one can read the paper newspapers at the library.  More and more information depends on whether a person has the funds to be in the class advertisers want and we become numb to advertising-based commodification of something like the presidency.  To save money, the big papers skimp on overseas reporters who could keep us aware of the world and they shrink arts coverage.  For years every Sunday I read the arts section of the NYTimes.  For a long time I subscribed to the separately published Book Review section, but also it was given away free in the better bookstores.  The equivalent is not where I can find it online.

Journalism was the focus of Ivan Doig at Northwestern, with a strong element of history.  In time he found himself diverted to a kind of semi-literary fiction, popular, though none became movies.  He was not a digital guy.  At the same time I was getting a theatre education which slid over to religion, not surprising if you know the history of the relationship between the two.  History focuses on facts and forces in the real world.  It's print-friendly.  Theatre goes to possibilities and the forces beneath tragedy.  It loves Netflix.

Journalism is a print medium while theatre depends upon oral presentation.  Serious literary work is often both when sales depend upon readings.  Sid Gustafson’s many readings around the state to promote his book called “Swift Dam,” which also mixes reporting and fantasy, builds awareness but also trust, because the people can see the author in person and gauge his sincerity.  Video interviews would not be quite as effective.  His "audible" stories are somewhere in between.

Can journalism, like our many news hours and panels on video, ever come up to the standards of print, where thought and skill must be frozen into a version that can be dissected, footnoted, pinned down to a point in time?  Can print be stabilized, made into a contract-like entity?

Shatzkin points out that newspapers and magazines are compendiums, while a published book is a coherent argument or plot that can’t be chopped up, though some experiment with that.

“The aggregation created by each newspaper was intended to compete as an aggregation. In the 20th century, a consumer didn’t have the choice of reading the Times’s op-ed page and the News’s coverage of the Yankees unless s/he bought both newspapers. But, even with the paywalls that are up today (and weren’t up at the beginning), there is a lot of competition for almost every single individual piece of content in every newspaper. And it has also become just about impossible for a printed newspaper to deliver you any “surprises”: any news that is important to you personally that you won’t have seen first in an email or an online aggregator (including that own newspaper’s web site.) Any “scoop” will be “reported” by competitors and the information itself would be in the public domain very quickly after it is released.

“So, the fundamental distinction between the businesses is that publishers often sell an indivisible unit and newspapers (and magazines) sell aggregates of content nuggets, each of which is valued differently by different readers of the paper and each of which has its own array of competitors.”

Maybe the American people have learned to react to slogans rather than reasonable arguments.  Perhaps this explains why we're now hearing that Facebook and Google before the election were consciously allowing the online publication of lies in paid political form — which they now repudiate since the sale has been made and there’s no need for advertising anymore.  No profit.  Form follows profit.

THE SCRIVER SAGA

Meadville/Lombard Theological School

On my shelves are a set of two 3-ring binders labeled “The Scriver Seminary Saga.”  They are the collected one-page typed weekly reports to my home church (First Unitarian of Portland, OR) during my four year seminary education, including the summer of Clinicial Pastoral Education in Rockford, IL, and the year as an intern minister in Hartford, Connecticut.  (78-82)  Once I began to serve churches, their newsletters replaced the practice.

Firmly, I believe that anything closely examined over a period of time is worth preserving evidence from to look at again when one’s mind and being has evolved or cooled or caught on fire or whatever other change might happen.  I was very much impressed by a course with an historical bent that discussed a church record in Europe that was kept for centuries but had some mysterious gaps.  The point of the discussion was how powerful the gaps were once a person inquired into their cause:  like, for instance, the Black Death.

But there are no gaps in the Scriver Seminary Saga because in those days (and now) I considered one of my virtues to be consistency and tenacity, partly natural temperament and partly reinforced by marriage to Bob Scriver who also valued those characteristics since he was a musician and the way to Carnegie Hall is practise, practise, practise.  (He didn’t make it past the Montana Historical Society warehouse.)  But I haven’t gone back to see what I said or, as Kenner would put it, what it meant.  I have been discouraged by the collapsing of both seminary and denomination.  But maybe it’s time now.  There's been a gap.

A small part of the reason I left the ministry in 1988 turns out to be related to a big part of the UUA’s problems.  The Unitarian Universalist Association that so attracted me changed into something else and it was — in my eyes — ugly.  I didn’t realize until recently that others shared my opinion, at least in part.  This morning I stumbled upon “Regaining Balance” by Michael Werner, a monograph published by the American Humanist Association which is a kind of sibling to the UUA that is sometimes pulled in and sometimes pushed out.  It’s a history of the roller coaster ride both movements have been on for the last decades as the cultures surged around them. 

I can’t order the booklet at the moment because someone fraudulently used my VISA to order car parts (!) which was evidently detected immediately -- maybe because I only order books and cat food.  A “fraud specialist” called me to explain and to tell me to cut up my invalidated VISA.  A new one is on the way.  I gather that there are plenty of these cases, thus justifying a specialist, and I also gather that most of the fraudsters are amateurs, easily caught.  (Is this a clue to religion?)  

So to get the booklet, I went to the AHA to request a review copy.  All copies are Kindle via the Internet, so if they refuse, the delay will only be the time it takes to mail me a new VISA, not mailing the booklet, but the mail is entirely unpredictable these days.  I don’t know whether AHA will send a review copies since I'm only a blog.

"Starhawk" he's not.

So I read the part of the publication that’s on Google Books and was startled that it was so clear and that I am so much in agreement.  BUT it’s old-fashioned.  (Consider the source.) Or at least "old-school" which sounds a little better.  These days, everybody who is more than ten years behind on the avalanche of technical scientific discoveries is old-fashioned. Even "The Edge" is old-fashioned.  So are Aeon, TED, maybe not Nautil.us.  They are ALL culture bound.  To the dominant culture.  Even Ozy.  Al Jezeera went under.  Indigenous equals invisible.

Anyway, why is it is that the American Humanist Association never takes on the current assault on the humanities?

The shifts (indeed, explosions!) in paradigms they (logically) demand, the radical revision of our cherished 19th century humanist and religious ideas, our tanglefooted integration of contradictions, and the necessary economic/governmental implications, require some working premises to anchor or center ourselves for the sake of sanity.

Many, as always, are finding that anchor to be a life in community, maybe simply growing where they are.  Ecology, IMHO, is the root of harmony.  Happily, the Internet means possible virtual community online.  My additional strategy is a rather ascetic private life (AKA poverty) in order to wring out enough time to think and to find sources beyond sensational media skewings and commodifications.  

Werner’s book is part of a series.  I would like to add to it the implications of the new science that I read about and that are so deeply suggestive.  The findings continue to unroll, so it’s not worth a bound book, but there's enough evidence to write something.

Here’s a partial list of what I mean:

1.  New understanding of how the human body works, what “thought” means in bodily terms, the evolution of the brain, the actions of neurons, the 200 specialized sense cells that are in our brain besides the familiar organs, how memory works (it’s complex), gut thinking, limbic thinking, and the capacity to share thought and feeling simply by looking at each other.  Why consciousness is not the key to survival.

2.  Instead of the bricolage interpretations of pluralistic “equal” religious tolerance, an environmentally informed deep understanding of metaphor drawn from living experience, and the dangers of institutional rigidity and “ownership” if it becomes dogma.

3.  The idea that a print-based culture, “People of the Book”, is better than all others;  how that suppresses the more basic speaking-only small-group cultures; and what iPhones means to them.  What many identify as a fall from grace because of agriculture with its walls and hoarding, it’s priests and lawyers and kings, might really be about the hegemony of writing: record keeping, laws, hierarchies.

4.  The slow realization that there is no such thing as “rationality” and logic, as opposed to deep feeling of the Sacred, because both emerge from the formation of basic theories of life when we are infants, structures of conviction that are nearly impossible to escape.  Both rationality and emotional responsiveness are part of it, always in conversation with each other.

5.  Humans, including the 200 estimated hominin species preceding us, cannot be defined as the end point of evolution or even the apex.  The march of life up the beach to the triumph of progressive humans is a broken metaphor.  Rather there is a surge, a sheet, a symphony of unfolding life that emerges from itself in surprising ways.  Salvation is not going to heaven, it's participating in the furor and ferment that we both receive and pass on.

6.  We need far better ways to balance resources with their uses.  Food, rare metals, energy, water, soil fertility, each other.

7.  People, some on the other side of the planet and some just down the street, are suffering terribly and being actively destroyed.  We cannot address this by making ourselves oblivious.  Instead we need to approach, to question, to sift through the shit, get dirty.

8.  Religious denominations are controlled by demographics and economics, much of it unconscious and propelling evil forces. They can stifle all progress and replace genuine responses and observations with whatever makes them feel good:  inclusion, therapy, economic safety, elitism.  They are not about beliefs.  They should not be controlled by political factions in the larger world.  The killer of both AHA and UUA is arrogance, privilege, entitlement.

My tenacity is still paying off.  Consistency is a lot tougher.  People who have not been keeping up with this new research don’t even understand what I’m talking about.  My seminary has literally been gutted, the library and faculty moved downtown.  But the building, now housing the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, IS addressing this new body of inquiry by supporting a series of scholars and lectures.  That’s nice and a good use of the building.

But “nice” is a very suspicious category.  If you think your church is “nice,” you are stuck in the past.  What IS a church anyway, but an institution?

Neubauer Collegium of Society and Culture

IS JOHN WALSH A NAUGHTY BOY?

General John Walsh

Every now and then, in the chaos of our shifting and inventing world, some issue comes to the top and bites dignified people in the ass.  Most recently it was plagiarizing and the victim was Senator Walsh of Montana who had done military service (in the National Guard but including “combat” in Iraq).  With a brush cut and good posture, he looks military in uniform.  Two cultural norms are in collision.  Maybe three.  Or four.

One is that a person ought to “own” their own creativity: whatever writing, inventions, art, and so on they have originated.  Copyright, trademark, patent are three legal theories for ownership of valuable stuff from best-selling books to the image of Ronald MacDonald.

Medieval cult of the book

Another is the product of academic practices that go back to medieval times.  A student works with a professor and with respected written materials (that book worship thing) until they feel they have mastery of the material.  Then the student writes a massive thesis demonstrating their learning and goes before a panel who questions them closely while they “defend” their thesis.  When this thesis is accepted, the result is the awarding of a degree.  This is described in monetary terms: one “earns” the credential (BS, BA, MS, MA, Ph.D.) and it is worth money in terms of hiring.  The predominant goal is the continuation of the body of knowledge, which is assumed to be definitive and unchanging.

A third is very modern and partly the result of the internet.  Knowledge is seen as a shared “cloud”, as a body of material held in common.  This also applies to something like the cultural heritage of a tribe.  Then the highest virtue is not knowing more than anyone else -- competing -- but rather sharing for the greater good.  Entitlement may go to the group, not individuals, even to all of human beings.  In the highly respected “Euro”-style Encyclopedia Britannica, each essay included is signed and justified by the prestige of the writer.  But the global "folk" Wikipedia is written by whoever gets interested in the project, unedited and unsupervised but possibly with references, unfortunately often citations of sources just as vague.

People who know degrees are not impressed by initials: they want to know specifics.  The MA in Religious Studies at the U of C is a filter for the Ph.D. level work, but was included as part of the Meadville/Lombard D.Min. as a marker for "learned" ministry.  The Ph.D. thesis in any part of the U of C is notoriously difficult and takes years.  Many people never complete it; those who do often see it published as a major contribution to the field.  Such rarified intellectual work is not relevant for congregational ministry.

Meadville/Lombard (now moved downtown)

U of Chicago Divinity School

At that point in the history of M/L (’78-’82) the school was moving from the BD (Bachelor of Divinity), which had been the standard degree for ministers, to an MA and a D. Min. which would require a thesis.  My MA in Religious Studies is from the U of Chicago Div School but my doctoral thesis could not pass at M/L. On this blog now you are seeing the result of my work on my thesis, at least where I began.  I could not get my thesis past my committee of three, each of the three demanding that I conform to their conflicting ideas.  

Others had similar dilemmas.  The school was barraged with objections to the MA foreign language requirement (I passed a French exam and am glad I did) and ML students were piling up like cattle at a fence in a blizzard.  Potential new students went elsewhere.  Finally, M/L just gave everyone in the pile-up an M.Div. -- no thesis needed.  By now their D.Min has disappeared.  At one point before I left Chicago, I went into the stacks and read a dozen theses.  IMHO they were not useful or even interesting.  Just recapitulations.    

What I’m saying is that degrees are negotiable, variable, and political.

Walsh’s 33-year career in service was being burnished with a Master’s degree.  In an unnamed class he submitted a paper on American Middle East policy.  The class was a part of the work for the school’s master’s degree.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/us/politics/montana-ex-guardsman-now-must-fight-to-keep-senate-seat-given-to-him.html action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article  This issue has brought up other issues as described in the above article.  That may have been the goal.

To really judge Senator Walsh’s behavior in this instance means judging the War College.  How do their shining and glorious goals play out in the actual courses, the requirements of each course, the KINDS of qualification for the professors (war experience?), the care for those students suffering from PTSD or any other compromising state?  REALLY judging Walsh means judging the War College.  Closely following the missile silo exam scandal and the veteran’s administration hospital scandal, taking the lid off the War College is probably pretty dangerous.

As for the actual plagiarism, there’s a huge difference between a failure of editing that missed quotation marks and citations and what is described as “up to forty per cent” (2%?  20%?) of a fifteen page paper for a specific class (how much of the grade did it count for -- were there other papers and perhaps tests?) to outright cheating like a covertly downloaded paper from a website provider, deliberate deception.

“Mr. Walsh completed the paper, what the War College calls a “strategy research project,” to earn his degree in 2007, when he was 46. The sources of the material he presents as his own include academic papers, policy journal essays and books that are almost all available online.”  This is from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/us/politics/montana-senator-john-walsh-plagiarized-thesis.html?_r=0  I don’t know what the Times reporter was using for sources.  Times reporters in the past have flunked the truth test.  Of course, some informants to journalists are protected by anonymity.  I’d like to see the bibliography of that paper, particularly since I could read them online.

We are drowning in information, much of it controversial and contradictory, hard for a nonspecialist to interpret.  I’m very bad about “sourcing” (always echoes sorcery to me) because ideas just stick in my head like cockleburs and I don’t always take notes.  My solution is to stay away from traditional academic contexts.  These blogs of mine are speculative.  But if a professor has assigned a 15 page paper (which might be a plan for a thesis but is not much more) in a narrow field, in which part of the quotes are noted and part are not, at the very least he or she ought to be able to recognize that and return it to the student for the missing indicators to be added.  

Low value, unascribed, ephemeral print abounds.

When I taught at the local community college (BCC), we were instructed to automatically flunk every plagiarism.  As it happened, the problem came up in a speech class.  We discussed it at length.  It became clear that to the students print was "print" -- not WRITING.  It had never registered with them that someone had to write all that print.  It was just there. And speaking was not talking on a subject they knew, but rather reading out loud some print.  This is what they had known through their whole public school career.  

It was the very CONCEPT of plagiarism that they didn’t get.  To them “copying” was leaning over to see what some other student put on a multiple-choice answer sheet.  Print rains down on us all the time.  The notion that someone struggled to compose it, to get it to that mysterious level of slick and cute -- much less insight -- just never entered their minds.  It was not cultural difference -- it was small-town inexperience and ignorance.

So we did idea-webbing, brain-stormed lists of possible details, chose a thesis and supported it with evidence -- not as individual assignments but as a group with me doing the “writing” on the blackboard (which was a whiteboard).  The thing that turned the tide was my statement: “We want to know what YOU think -- not someone we don’t know.”  It appears this point was not made to Senator Walsh.

The famous "before and after" of Carlyle education.  This is not Photoshop.

I googled Army War College and was startled to see that it is located in Carlyle, PA, the place where a school for Native Americans was charged with “killing” their old culture and installing the new one: obedience, cleanliness, conformity.  It backfired when the NA’s who attended learned how to present themselves as an assimilated and loyal workforce, but then went back home and used what they had learned to further the goals of their own people.

http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/about/aboutUs.cfm sets the definition of the Army War College.   http://home.epix.net/~landis/histry.html  describes the history of the Carlyle Indian Industrial School, which was founded on military ideas of how to produce soldiers obedient to the goals of the leaders. 

A Scot and a Brit

Examples.  I had one classmate at Div School whom we teased because his footnotes on a page sometimes almost exceeded the actual content.  He was Princeton-educated and successfully earned the D.Min.   He was exemplary at conformity and has prospered.  He was born in England but raised in the US.  I, on the other hand, am Irish/Scots in origin (that should tell you something), female, twice his age in seminary, with a BS (’61) in theatre from Northwestern University which at the time was famed for teaching “Method” acting, emotion-based.  I was at M/L and U of C to develop my “other side.” When I got back to Montana, like a Carlyle Indian, I reverted to type.  At that point, I felt free to use my thesis material my own way.

Butte, Montana

Walsh grew up in Butte.  Think about it.  I'm surprised he wasn't a flat-out, full-bore Marine like my brothers.