When art fails to persist …

I took this photograph on May 30, 2015. This old truck sits beside Route 93 north of Ely, Nevada, at what was once a Pony Express station. But what caught my eye is not the truck; rather, what’s on the passenger door. Please look at it carefully. That work of art depicts the scene of my photograph (and others I took).

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Newspapers’ big problem: failure to distinguish meaningful from meaningless

[first published at Scholars & Rogues 5.28.2016]

Warren Buffett, the newspaper-loving Oracle of Omaha, isn’t loving newspapers quite as much these days. Speaking of the industry’s attempts to create a viable business plan, he told USA Today’s Rem Rieder, “We haven’t cracked the code yet.”

Said Buffett:

Circulation continues to decline at a significant pace, advertising at an even faster pace. The easy cutting has taken place. There’s no indication that anyone besides the national papers has found a way.

Well, duh, Mr. Buffett. We’ve known about your first two sentences for a decade. And the third? The New York Times is the only “national paper” I pay to read, as a digital subscriber. But I routinely read stories in The Washington Post, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal — as I’m doing this morning over breakfast. The Times gets a ten spot from me every month. Everyone else gets squat.

Unlike millennials, for whom all information must be free, I’m willing to pay. That’s because at my age, I have a long history of paying for news. That’s how newspapers operated: Pay us and read our ads, and we’ll provide you the news you want and need. That was the fair exchange under the previous, and now failed, business model newspapers rode to riches (well, at least their owners) for more than a century.

Newspapers, foundering in unproductive habits, should change

[first published at Scholars and Rogues 5.19.2016]

One morning a few weeks ago, I sat at the end of the counter in my favorite diner, Robbins Nest. Lisa brought tea, Jessica asked, “The usual?” and owner Crystal badgered chef Anthony (as usual).

I set up my iPad mini to read. I noticed, however, the house copy of the metro daily from the big city two hours north. I picked it up and leafed through the 10-page front section. You know, the section with meaningful news for someone who lives two hours away.

I looked at story after story, page after page. I saw the metro had 11 — that’s 11 — stories from The New York Times in those 10 pages. That’s not unusual: Newspapers subscribe to wire services. Such services act as consortiums to provide newspapers with material they could not afford to report, write, and edit on their own. My own paper subscribed to The Times’ wire service back in the day. So seeing 11 Times stories in the local metro daily wasn’t a surprise.

But I had read each of those Times stories 12 hours before on my little iPad mini — because I’m one of The Times’ million-plus digital-only subscribers.

How does this metro daily — and others — fare financially if it prints stories many of its readers may have read online the day before?

2016: so far a bleak year, fettered by anger

[first published at Scholars & Rogues 3.17.2016]

I began 2016, the year in which I turned 70 years old, so damn angry.

More than sufficient reasons exist for all that anger. I, like many of you, am unwillingly steeped daily in the raw, heavily mediated sewage of billionaire-induced partisan politics; increasing and intolerable economic inequities; a deeply flawed educational system; conflicts in law, society, and government spawned by religion-fueled hostility; assaults on racial and ethnic sensibilities; the slow, agonizing death of democracy; and the decades-old rise of greed-driven, power-hungry oligarchy.

That’s just the background noise obscuring intelligent discursive signal about so many more problems — local, national, global — that the billions of us ruled by oligarchical forces sense are beyond our control or, often, our comprehension.

After #SCOTUSnom, political war beckons. We’ll all lose in the end.

[first published at Scholars & Rogues 3.16.2016]

If your taste in politics runs toward the hardball, then you’re about to be sated.

President Obama today nominated the chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia.

The war over the nomination, simmering for months, now begins in earnest. Let loose the dogs hellbent on partisan dominion. Here’s a lede to a New York Times story by Eric Lipton:

WASHINGTON — More than 100 protest rallies have been scheduled in key electoral states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Iowa. Television advertisements are being scripted. Twitter and Facebook campaigns are rolling out, and email blasts are filling up inboxes.

Ah. Social media. The first Supreme Court nomination to be contested on teenagers’ traditional turf. Oh, joy.

For the past year, the nation’s newspapers and cable and broadcast news outlets have fed the electorate with a steady of diet of “he said, she said” — or has it been more like “that bastard said, that bitch said” — and horse-race punditry.

Who’d work for President Trump? Guess. Go ahead, guess.

[first published at Scholars & Rogues 2.26.2016]

Imagine Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States. Really.

Journalists and pundits have been too busy covering this election cycle like a boxing match (detailing debate punches and counterpunches and little else) and fawning over Trump as “The Donald.”

So the Big Questions (important but too boring in the Twitterverse in which horse-race polls and debate body blows are captured) just don’t get asked. Thus the Answers Needed never enter the mind of the electorate.

Who’d want to work for President Trump? Presidents need the Senate’s advice and consent on nearly 1,400 presidential appointments. Chief among them, of course, are the members of the president’s cabinet.

Who would Trump ask to serve as heads of State, Defense, Treasury, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Justice, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs?

How would he select them? Would any be women? Or African-Americans? Or Hispanics? Or descendants of immigrants, legal or otherwise? Would he actually listen to the advice offered by Cabinet members?