That little thing called supply and demand

Nicholas Carr looks at the future of journalism and sees things that most new media pundits ignore:

The writing is on the paywall

Now here's what a lot of people seem to forget: Excess production capacity goes away, particularly when that capacity consists not of capital but of people. Supply and demand, eventually and often painfully, come back into some sort of balance. Newspapers have, with good reason, been pulling their hair out over the demand side of the business, where a lot of their product has, for the time being, lost its monetary value. But the solution to their dilemma actually lies on the production side: particularly, the radical consolidation and radical reduction of capacity. The number of U.S. newspapers is going to collapse (although we may have differently branded papers produced by the same production operation) and the number of reporters, editors, and other production side employees is going to continue to plummet. And syndication practices, geared to a world of geographic constraints on distribution, will be rethought and, in many cases, abandoned.

As all that happens, market power begins - gasp, chuckle, and guffaw all you want - to move back to the producer. The user no longer gets to call all the shots. Substitutes dry up, the perception of fungibility dissipates, and quality becomes both visible and valuable. The value of news begins, once again, to have a dollar sign beside it.

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It's sort of like the old joke about out running the bear. The New York Times does not have to be profitable right now. It just has to lose money slower than the other newspapers.

Armed citizens and al Qaeda swarms

This recent op-ed offers a sobering look at the evolution of terrorist tactics.

The Coming Swarm

WITH three Afghan government ministries in Kabul hit by simultaneous suicide attacks this week, by a total of just eight terrorists, it seems that a new “Mumbai model” of swarming, smaller-scale terrorist violence is emerging.
The basic concept is that hitting several targets at once, even with just a few fighters at each site, can cause fits for elite counterterrorist forces that are often manpower-heavy, far away and organized to deal with only one crisis at a time. This approach certainly worked in Mumbai, India, last November, where five two-man teams of Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives held the city hostage for two days, killing 179 people. The Indian security forces, many of which had to be flown in from New Delhi, simply had little ability to strike back at more than one site at a time.

The author believes that current US doctrine is too centralized to deal effectively with this type of multiple, small-scale attacks. He recommends dramatic changes or necessary to prevent Mumbai-scale carnage in this country.

At the federal level, we should stop thinking in terms of moving thousands of troops across the country and instead distribute small response units far more widely. Cities, states and Washington should work out clear rules in advance for using military forces in a counterterrorist role, to avoid any bickering or delay during a crisis. Reserve and National Guard units should train and field many more units able to take on small teams of terrorist gunmen and bombers. Think of them as latter-day Minutemen.

He overlooks a critical dimension that is directly relevant to his scenario. The original Minutemen were civilians ready to take up arms in defense of their community. A non-trivial minority of US citizens still live by that ideal. Armed citizens may be the most effective force in limiting the death toll should terrorists try to carry out swarm attacks here.

I argued that point here in response to Richard Clarke's "scenarios" several years ago. The new terror tactics make civilian response even more promising.

For one thing, small terrorist teams (two men each in the Mumbai example) decrease the odds against civilian responders. Private citizens fight back--successfully-- against armed assailants everyday. It may appear suicidal to take on eight or ten terrorists with a handgun. That is not the case when armed citizens fight back against one or two criminals.

Second, the slow expected response by the professionals actually undercuts one of the most popular arguments against civilian resistance to terror attacks. Skeptics often claim that arriving first responders will shoot anyone with a gun. Thus, fighting back makes you a target of both the terrorists and counter-terrorist units.

But if the counter-terrorist response is expected to be slow and deliberate, then the risks are all on one side. The danger of being mistaken for a bad guy by the SWAT team is low. Against terrorists any resistance is better than passive capitulation.

See also:

Richard Clarke in The Atlantic

"But Richard Clarke was a wimp"

Mall Shooting and future terrorism

Lessons and preparations

Why legal technicalities matter

Here's a terrible story out of Texas.

Seeking justice for convict who died in prison

Rape victim, late inmate's family have DNA tests, other man's confession to back their claim.

The family of Tim Cole cleared his name and had his rape conviction overturned. That is a small victory in a bleak, tragic story. Cole was falsely convicted and died in prison.

At the heart of the nightmare is a faulty, unduly suggestive police line-up that led the victim to identify Cole as the man who raped her.

When defense attorneys challenge investigative procedures, their arguments are frequently dismissed as trivial. Yet this case demonstrates why sound procedures matter. For Tim Cole, they were a matter of life and death.

Jason Whitlock-- Genius

No other sportswriter can pack so much good sense into a few words:

A-Rod comes clean — now baseball needs to do same

[A-Rod] even expressed respect for the most clueless and potentially most dishonest commissioner in the history of professional sports, Bud “Iceberg” Selig, who had a front-row seat for McGwire and Sosa and was repulsed by Bonds. Selig pimped the ’roiders for relevancy when the game was in the toilet and now claims he was a victim of the steroids era.
Please let this end. The discussion of performance-enhancing drugs in sports is clearly the most deceitful, unintelligent, unsophisticated and hypocritical debate ever held in sports journalism.
We’ve done virtually nothing to rid football, baseball, basketball, hockey, golf, tennis, soccer — or any other sport performed for large sums of money — of performance-enhancing drugs. We’ve crucified and jailed a few high-profile athletes. We’ve made a few sportswriters wealthy and famous, or in the case of A-Rod’s hunter, Selena Roberts, we’ve hyped her tell-all book about the third baseman and given new life to her floundering back-page column in Sports Illustrated.

As a journalistic outsider, i think Selena Roberts's role in this deserves greater scrutiny. How was it, exactly, that she obtained the results of "confidential" drug tests. Who broke their word to give her the hot info about A-Rod?

Over 100 players failed those tests, yet Roberts published one name. Oddly enough, that one player she outed is the subject of her forthcoming book.

Sweet!

Number Six baby

This pretty much removes all doubt. The Steelers are the greatest NFL franchise of the Super Bowl era.

The flag of Steeler nation

A great story in the New York Times no less

For Terrible Towels, a Wonderful Legacy

Is there any hope for the academy?

Some days i doubt it. This is one of those days. I just finished KC Johnson's review of the latest Duke lacrosse book. His incisive analysis shows once again that too many modern academics spend most of their brainpower avoiding inconvenient facts that are right in front of their eyes.

Review: Race to Injustice

Having fun with a serious subject

R.S. McCain has a little sport with the latest sex "research".

Sex and science

Unfortunately, this kind of bad research can have terrible consequences when it gets into the hands of educators.

Give us science, but not too much


"What Lies Beneath the Titillation"

The future of newsweeklies

Howard Kurtz looks at Time and Newsweek as they struggle to adapt to a changed media marketplace.

Do Newsmags Still Matter?

Two elements of their strategy seem problematic.

First, both magazines have reconciled themselves to shrinking readership. Each of them are moving away from a mass audience model and are concentrating on a niche marketing approach.

The rival editors are turning out weeklies that are smaller, more serious, more opinionated and, though they are loath to admit it, more liberal.

It is striking that both editors are fighting for the same liberal readers as an answer to a shrinking market. Both magazines would rather compete for the same readership instead of repositioning to appeal the under-served center-right readership.

Selling opinion does have one advantage-- it is cheaper than reporting.

The shift toward analysis carries an ancillary benefit: It is cheaper than shoe-leather reporting. Each magazine's editorial staff -- 215 for Time, fewer than 200 for Newsweek -- is about half the size it was a decade or so ago.

The short-term cost savings may be an illusion. Opinion is free and plentiful on the web. As Time and Newsweek become less news-based, they end up competing with all that internet punditry.

Lower costs are only part of a solution for any struggling company. They also need to put out a product that people will pay for. I think it is debatable that the week-old commentary of Jonathan Alter or Joe Klein constitute a compelling proposition to potential subscribers.

This has long been one of my favorite quotes

Eric Hoffer

Nice write-up about one of my favorite Steelers

James Farrior: The Quiet Riot

Steelers linebacker James Farrior doesn't have Baltimore star Ray Lewis' flamboyance, but he's every bit the competitor

He has topped the acclaimed [Ray] Lewis three of the past four years in tackles and sacks and surpassed him three of the past five years in forced fumbles and fumbles recovered. But Farrior's number of Pro Bowls? Counting this year's, two, compared to Lewis' 10 in 13 seasons. Farrior's number of Defensive Player of the Year Awards? He finished No. 2 to Lewis' Ravens teammate Ed Reed in 2004, compared to Lewis' two first places.

See more here.

How the game is played in Washington

Peter Pettigrew Politics From the Land of Powell

Wilkerson seems oblivious to the idea that his comments paint not only himself but Secretary Powell into a newer version of what was said of Richard Nixon during Watergate. Either, said the liberals (and others), Nixon was corrupt (if he knew about Watergate and was a participant of some sort) or he was utterly stupid (if he had no idea what was going on around him in his name). It was a lose-lose proposition that meant Nixon had to go. In the Wilkerson version, either he and his boss Powell knew all about these high crimes being committed by Bush, Cheney and company (in which case they should have done something about it post haste) -- or in not knowing what was going on around them every day proved Powell and company as little short of spectacularly incompetent in their respective posts at the State Department.

Yet Powell himself received a great deal of favorable press during his tenure. And still does, as the mainstream media lapped up his endorsement of Obama. How can this be if Powell and his staff did such a lousy job? It is one of the hardiest if hoary rules of thumb in Washington that there is a direct relationship between positive press clips and leaks. The revelation that Powell Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was in fact the leaker of Valerie Plame's CIA identity to columnist Robert Novak provided a quite accidental look-see for Washington outsiders into how the Powell people played the game, even if Novak wasn't into the burnish-the-Powell-portrait game. It was decidedly not an accident -- nor the action of a "dumb strongman" -- that Bush refused to give the Powell-Wilkerson clique a second tour of duty at State. The President had to suspect or know outright what the game was. That whatever the real object with Powell and his entourage, to give this clique another four years in which they could quietly, on a not-for-attribution basis, continue to trash their own president in precisely the kind of terms Wilkerson suddenly began spouting in public after his and Powell's departure from Foggy Bottom would be a big mistake.

An extraordinary memoir

One of my Christmas presents was Robert Novak's The Prince of Darkness. It is an amazing memoir-- honest, opinionated, and unflinching. Novak shows us the inside of Washington journalism and how it changed over the past half-century.

The book is worth reading simply for the inside story of the Plame/Wilson "leak" and the phony scandal it produced.

Sympathy for the devil

The New York Times has an interesting obituary for CIA traitor Philip Agee. Of course, since it is the New York Times, they manage to 1) minimize the harm he did, 2) overlook the KGB's role in his activities, 3) blame the CIA for "exploiting" Agee's public treachery.

The New Criterion offers a necessary corrective here.

Merry Christmas

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Luke 2:8-14

Worth reading

Conservative Snobs Are Wrong About Palin

Inevitably, Lloyd Bentsen's famous put-down of Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate is resurrected, such as by Paul Waugh (in the London Evening Standard) and Marie Cocco (in the Washington Post): "Newsflash! Governor, You're No Maggie Thatcher," sneered Mr. Waugh. Added Ms. Coco, "now we know Sarah Palin is no Margaret Thatcher -- and no Dan Quayle either!"

Jolly, rib-tickling stuff. But, as it happens, I know Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher is a friend of mine. And as a matter of fact, Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have a great deal in common.

Ace tries to help the MSM avoid extinction

He's good like that.

Indeed. I think this is 90% of the press corps' problem -- they're overly taken with themselves for, um, having a job.

Mechanics don't assume they're all-purpose experts without portfolio on every subject in the universe simply because they're fixing cars.

Reporters shouldn't assume that merely because they are capable of asking questions, writing down the answers, and cranking out pedestrian copy they've somehow become Einstein.

RTWT

Worth Noting

Sarah Palin vs. Barack Obama

Don't make Steyn angry

You won't like Steyn angry.

Well, actually, most people will like it. There is nothing like watching a master work. As R. S. McCain says, this is the mother of all fiskings.

THE SHAGGED SHEEP

RTWT

That mysterious thing called team chemistry

Here's part of the reason a 70 year old coach is running the best defense in the NFL.

The type of thing that makes a grown man cry

It seems funny now the Steelers picked the Bengals game to honor LeBeau. That day, Bengals coach Marvin Lewis sent star wide receiver Chad Ocho Cinco home for violating a team rule. The problem is believed to have started when Ocho Cinco disrespected offensive coordinator Bob Bratkowski during a meeting the night before the game.

"For one thing, that would never happen with coach LeBeau," Smith said. "And if by some chance it ever did, the guy wouldn't make it out of the room in one piece. The rest of us would take care of him."

That's respect.