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A Tick on the Bill Keller Hide
Editor of the New York Times Bill Keller writes “All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate” for today’s Sunday magazine. In his screed, Keller picks a fight with Arianna Huffington, whom he calls “the queen of aggregation.” Both Bill Keller’s piece and Arianna Huffington’s eviscerating riposte have already been much commented upon. Here is my take, in which I presume to edit Editor Keller (his piece in much need of it).
Hey Bill Keller, the New York Times is feeling the pinch—aren’t we all?—but surely your very own Check’n Go Carlos Slim pays for editors? Still?
Heck, Bill, that’s why I left the elephant walk led by that lusty pachyderm Huffington, clearing a path through the media thorn brush for her mighty herd, chomping across the savannah to that journalism boneyard on the horizon.
I wanted editorial companionship for the trek. The tender morsels of attention and fame, yawing mouthfuls of readership—tasty, yes, and maybe I was spoiled because Lead Pachyderm provided so much—but at the end of the day all I wanted was an editor. Peanuts, I thought.
But maybe not. Because you, King of the Jungle ( or 50th most powerful beast, or 26th—whatever) have wandered under a high Sunday sun into the middle of the blogging landscape without any editor’s guidance. You have blundered among the fast-moving herd and been crushed.
Even though I am only a tick who once sat low on the pachyderm haunch—for in truth I am not a herd animal but merely one along for the ride—I am going to help you to your feet with a few nips of what I have craved and you clearly need.
Let’s begin.
According to the list makers at Forbes, I am the 50th most powerful person in the world — not as powerful as the Pope (No. 5) but more powerful than the president of the United Arab Emirates (56). Vanity Fair, another arbiter of what matters, ranked me the 26th most influential person in the country. The New York Observer, narrowing the universe to New York, put me 15th on its latest “Power 150,” a list that stretches from Michael Bloomberg to Lady Gaga. New York magazine asked Woody Allen to name the single most important person in our city; he named — aw, shucks — me.
The world conspires to convince me of my significance. A respected Hollywood screenwriter has purchased an option on my “life rights” (a Faustian-sounding transaction, yes?) so that someone can portray me in a movie. When I did a radio call-in show a while back, a media reporter considered it an event of such urgency that he live-blogged the entire hour. Whatever I do, or don’t do, seems to be an event. Recently my sleepless wife sent out a midnight Twitter post — “Insomnia. Who else is awake?” — but she inadvertently sent it on my Twitter account rather than her own, prompting a global Twitter forum on my state of mind.
You may ask yourself, as I often do: What the hell? I run a newspaper. I haven’t cured a disease, governed a country, built a business, discovered a galaxy or written a series of books about wizards or vampires. What makes me so important? But these days even asking the question marks you as out of touch, the kind of naïf who thinks Bill Gates’s value to the human race increased when he moved from algorithms to poor children. It’s a media world, kids, and media begins with Me.
My putative status as the 50th most important person on Planet Earth derives in part from a belief that the editor of an important newspaper does not merely harvest the initiative of hard-working journalists but personally directs a vast, global conspiracy. I don’t. But then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?
The other, more insidious reason that I have been deemed more important than the founder of Amazon (66th, says Forbes) or Hosni Mubarak (unrated, presciently) is that our fascination with capital-M Media is so disengaged from what really matters.
Omit first 5 paragraphs.
Talking about yourself without seeming egoistic is a difficult rhetorical device to master. Bill, you don’t, quite. Since “Aggregation” is full of “voice” and is therefore a very bloggy piece, here’s a blogger tip: whenever you mention yourself, always leave your readers wanting more. Here you have told us too much. You have over-shared. A good blogger cuts 99% of the personal stuff by the final edit.
Once again, I can hardly believe you beasts at the Times don’t have a flock of editorial peckers.
Much as the creative minds of Wall Street found a way to divorce investing from the messiness of tangible assets, enabling clients to buy shadows of shadows, we in Media have transcended earthbound activities like reporting, writing or picture-taking and created an abstraction — a derivative — called Media in which we invest our attention and esteem. Possibly I am old-fashioned, but in these days when actual journalists are laboring at actual history, covering the fever of democracy in Arab capitals and the fever of austerity in American capitals, the obsession with the theoretical and self-referential feels to me increasingly bloodless. Then again, I am somewhat complicit on this score; as this magazine lands on doorsteps, I am due in Austin to be interrogated once again about The Future of Journalism.
Of course I care deeply about The Future of Journalism, and I know the upheavals in our business matter a great deal.
Progression of thought here? Do you mean to say: “That’s why I’m in Austin for the SXSW Conference, because I care about my profession, even though
But the orgy of self-reference is so indiscriminate, so trivializing. We have flocks of media oxpeckers who ride the backs of pachyderms, feeding on ticks, flock to Austin this time every year.
Verb choice: stronger is better.
We have a coterie of learned analysts — Clay Shirky, Alan Mutter, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and the rest — who meditate on the meta of media. By turning news executives into celebrities, we devalue the institutions that support them, the basics of craft and the authority of editorial judgment. (If I were vaporized by aliens tomorrow, my family would miss me, but the 1,100 journalists of The New York Times would not miss a deadline.) Some once-serious news outlets give pride of place not to stories they think important but to stories that are “trending” on Twitter — the “American Idol”-ization of news.
Importance of facts. Check to see what’s trending on Twitter. Right now, as I edit your article, trending are Sister Wives, imthetype, Angela Lansbury, Bojan, Google Circles, waystopissoffafatperson, Fab Five and Watching Juice. Are any news outlets giving “pride of place” to these?
Importance of structure. You need to build an argument; so far, however, you have given me only an odd assortment of observations. What do the “coterie of learned analysts” have to do with “the orgy of self-reference?” Are you saying that Shirky et al. turn news executives into celebrities?
And we have bestowed our highest honor — market valuation — not on those who labor over the making of original journalism but on aggregation.
“Aggregation” can mean smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe. It kind of describes what I do as an editor. But too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.
The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.
Importance of accuracy. If you are confronting the Queen of the Jungle, you had better be a dead shot. Alas, you’ve learned this lesson the hard way, Bill.
Importance of protecting your flank. Bill, you should have conceded, straight off, that The Huffington Post pays for its own original reporting and has long done so. By this omission, you left yourself open to damaging pachyderm counter-attack.
Side note: “adorable kitten videos?” That’s AOL. Don’t get the two Internet sites mixed up. That’s Arianna’s future job.
Now let me tell you, from my experience as a lowly tick on the haunch, what you should have observed.
Two different elements of The Huffington Post inflict those bruises on the Gray Lady’s butt. Those 5,999 unpaid bloggers-of-the-herd ingest your paper and then spew forth opinion. A little news can feed an entire nation of opinionators. There ‘s nothing you can do about this modern miracle of loaves & fishes.
What you can do, if you want to take the time and trouble and Carlos Slim $$$-willing, is do something about the “back pages” of Huff Post, the pieces from non-famous bloggers that few people read but that provide the Huff Post “depth of content.” Here lie the lack of attribution & linking, the lifting of content, the plagiarism from print media.
If I weren’t an unpaid blogging tick, I might give you a few choice examples. Better idea. Why don’t you get a few Times interns to research Huff Post back page practice for you this coming summer?
How great is Huffington’s instinctive genius for aggregation? I once sat beside her on a panel in Los Angeles (on — what else? — The Future of Journalism). I had come prepared with a couple of memorized riffs on media topics, which I duly presented. Afterward we sat down for a joint interview with a local reporter. A moment later I heard one of my riffs issuing verbatim from the mouth of Ms. Huffington. I felt so . . . aggregated.
Never rely on memory. You did check the event transcripts, right?
Last month, when AOL bought The Huffington Post for $315 million, it was portrayed as a sign that AOL is moving into the business of creating stuff — what we used to call writing or reporting or journalism but we now call “content.” Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company’s announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.
Then again, some of the great aggregators, Huffington among them, seem to be experiencing a back-to-the-future epiphany. They seem to have realized that if everybody is an aggregator, nobody will be left to make real stuff to aggregate. Huffington has therefore hired a small stable of experienced journalists, including a few from here, to produce original journalism about business and politics.
Belaboring my point because it is an important one. Criticism, to work, must be on-target. The Huffington Post has had a paid political team, if a small one, for several years.
There is no question that in times of momentous news, readers rush to find reliable firsthand witness and seasoned judgment. (In the first hour after Mubarak fell, The Times’s Web site had an astounding one million page views, and friends at other major news organizations tell me they enjoyed a similar surge.) I can’t decide whether serious journalism is the kind of thing that lures an audience to a site like The Huffington Post, or if that’s like hiring a top chef to fancy up the menu at Hooters. But if serious journalism is about to enjoy a renaissance, I can only rejoice. Gee, maybe we can even get people to pay for it.
Listen to this old tick, Bill. Your problem at the Times is not we creatures of the blogosphere. What threatens you are the new ticks of the twitterverse who can gather and aggregate news faster than any news site, new media or old.
For your next assignment—because I’ve latched on to you and I’m not ready to let go—I want you to write a 1500 word column in praise of and appreciation for a baker’s dozen of your reporters. Your pride—and indeed you should be most proud—need regular care and feeding. This is why I left the elephant walk—neglect.
You must learn the whole of the great ecosystem of news, Bill. Even we ticks have our place.
March 12, 2011
