Image on loan from Spot.Us

There’s an interesting article by Sameer Bhuchar at PBS’s MediaShift Idea Lab about a survey of users of the community-funded journalism organization Spot.Us on what they think about the importance of objectivity in journalism. There are several charts accompanying the piece showing the results, which speak for themselves.

The most striking thing about the study for me was the fact that it gave us a glimpse of just how wide a range of definitions people have for “objectivity.” A sample of those definitions are included in the Community Views section of Bhuchar’s post. To me, that seems to indicate a need for more precise questions in future studies about objectivity. If you ask, “How important is objectivity?” and everyone responds with a different definition in mind, the data will be pretty misleading. For instance, do those who say objectivity is important think he-said-she-said journalism is ok? Or do they merely define objectivity as something that does not include the practice of creating a false balance? Also consider that “objectivity” — and “transparency” for that matter — has become a pretty loaded word in this debate, and its use likely would trigger some sort of strong reaction one way or another.

My suggestion would be that instead of asking about “objectivity” or “transparency”, a future survey should ask about the various practices and approaches associated with those concepts. For instance, you can ask people to rate, on a numerical scale, the importance of each of the following in journalism:

• Giving all sides of a debate an equal chance to make their case to the reporter.
• Giving all sides equal space in the story to make their case.
• Constructing the story to give each sides’ arguments equal weight.
• Presenting a counter-argument for every argument put forth in a story.
• Limiting the story to only information that is factually verifiable.
• The reporter maintaining a detached position from the players in the story.
• Drawing a conclusion for or against a particular argument based on the information presented in the story.
• Disclosing the reporter’s biases that are directly related to the story’s core issue.
• Disclosing anything in the reporter’s background that may be indirectly linked to the story’s core issue and thus could color the reporter’s views.
• Posting transcripts of the complete interviews with each person mentioned in the story.

This way, you avoid getting mired in a debate about the grand notions of “objectivity” and “transparency,” which can be pretty fruitless when everyone has a different idea of what exactly those terms mean and what results they lead to. Instead, you get at the real issue: Which parts of current journalism practices are not working and should be eliminated, which parts are working and should be preserved, and which new practices should be incorporated more. The resulting set of practices may not be pure objectivity or transparency per any one person’s definition, but it probably will be better than anything you can get by continuing to deal with the issue at the level of those vague, ill-defined terms.

For the Sake of Transparency

The opinions from the Community Views section of Bhuchar’s post that I agree the most with are these two:

” ‘Transparency is the new objectivity’ is a fun riff, and it’s close, but I think we (in the media business) grossly overstate the public’s interest in our affiliations and conflicts.” — Ryan Sholin

“No one is truly unbiased or objective but that doesn’t mean that a good reporter doesn’t look for the truth behind everyone’s agenda. Objectivity means not sitting on a story that would make someone look bad just because you’re invested in their success. I almost said “Transparency is the new objectivity” only because it is the latest and most fabulous word to throw around. Transparency only helps identify lapses in objectivity, it doesn’t replace it. As for transparency, it certainly helps identify lapses in objectivity, but it doesn’t replace it.” — Amanda Hickman

I bolded that sentence in the second response because it closely aligns with my thoughts on the subject. Transparency and objectivity do not occupy the same niche and are therefore not in direct competition with each other. Thus it would be folly to posit that the adoption of one necessitates the abandonment of the other. I wrote more about this thought in an earlier post.

I’ve always seen the rising emphasis on transparency as a greater benefit for the audience than for journalists. For the audience, transparency provides more information on which they can base their decision of whether or not to trust the report. For journalists, however, it remains to be seen whether that transparency earns more trust in their work — the ultimate motivation for journalists practicing transparency — or whether it simply increases the likelihood of trust and distrust equally. Transparency is a clear plus for the audience, but I’m not sure if it’s a clear plus for journalists or if it’s one of those “you can’t afford not to” things where the best you can hope for is breaking even because it beats a minus. In any case, the answer to that question doesn’t change the fact that increased transparency is here to stay. However, that fact also doesn’t necessarily dictate that we must do away with objectivity … at least the way I define “objectivity.”

Side Notes

The survey data, which the post itself admits are not scientific, raised a few other questions for me:

• In order to see whether this data represents a shift in opinions about the importance of objectivity in journalism, we need to have something to compare it to.
• The sample included both journalists and non-journalists. I’d be interested to see how the answers to the questions concerning objectivity break down within each of those of segments. Also, how does that breakdown within each segment compare with previous surveys about journalists’ and non-journalists’ opinions on objectivity?
• The answer options for some of these questions are not really mutually exclusive. For instance, on the question “Is objectivity even possible?”, the answers “Yes, that’s what journalism is” and “Possible but difficult. It separates wheat from chaff” can co-exist. The fact that I pick one doesn’t mean I’d reject the other. In fact, can you not legitimately say, “Objectivity is possible but difficult. It separates good journalism from bad. Therefore, that’s what journalism is”?
• I also question some of Bhuchar’s interpretations of what some of the responses mean. For instance, he says

A staggering 44.6 percent (199) people agreed with the answer, “Objectivity is possible but difficult. It separates wheat from chaff.” In essence the answer implies that objectivity should be seen more as a quest for honest, factual reporting.

To me at least, it’s difficult to draw a real connection between the answer and the interpretation. It seems a bit of a leap to reach that conclusion based on that answer alone. The same holds for his interpretation of the next answer option:

Of the respondents, 27.6 percent (123 people) chose the answer “transparency is the new objectivity,” implying that it is the reporting of truth that is most important, rather than a detached account of a scene.

So how does “objectivity” come to mean “a detached account of the scene” in the second answer option, but “honest, factual reporting” in the first?

It looks like for the first time in quite a while (maybe since 2001?), I won’t be playing fantasy football this year. The main reason is just that I’m finding better, or at least more important, uses for my time these days. A secondary reason is that I just haven’t kept up with the comings and goings this past off-season (L.T. is still a Charger, right?), and between work, planning a trip to England, and preparing an application for an online master’s program, I really just don’t feel the motivation to do catch-up research at this point, with the season only a couple weeks away.

I’ve done fairly well in fantasy football in the past. I usually put together high-scoring teams, and I’ve won a couple league championships, including my initial exposure to fantasy football in a cut-throat league where people paid $60 to play and would push your mother in front of a moving vehicle if she stood in their way of picking up somebody’s third-string tailback who might sniff the field that week because the starter is listed as questionable. I do enjoy tweaking my lineups and scouring the waiver wires for hidden gems, but to do that well requires way more time for research than I’m willing to dedicate to it these days. I’m not the type to start a team and then do a half-assed job managing it, and the thought of digging through mountains of stats to decide which team’s backup tight end is a better waiver-wire pickup just makes me cringe right now.

Finding time to do research wasn’t a problem when I worked in a newspaper’s sports department, since I was blitzed with more NFL minutiae than I cared to read every day. Since leaving newspapers, however, my interest in sports has plummeted. I’ve found that I’ve watched a lot more of — and find much more enjoyment in — the sports I really care about (basically UNC basketball), and much, much less of everything else, and I can’t say I’m sorry about that. I haven’t watched a baseball game in years. NASCAR? Yeah right! The NBA? What’s that? Even the NFL, which was probably my second favorite sports-viewing option before, only managed to pull me to the TV for short stretches of a couple games last year. Even college basketball, which flows in my blood given my UNC alum status, has struggled for my attention. Outside of UNC games, I’ve watched maybe a handful of contests the last couple years. I turned on the national championship game this past April just in time to see Butler’s last shot barely miss, and immediately turned it off again.

So I’ll be taking a break from fantasy football this year. I’m sure I’ll miss it at some point, just not as much as I would have before, and I definitely won’t miss having to get up early on Sundays to check the injury report.

After reading about how many people in China are forgetting how to write Chinese characters because of the rise of electronic gadgets on which people simply pick the characters from a list, I decided to brush up on my Chinese writing. I was writing at a fifth-grade level when I left China, but by now I’ve forgotten how to write most of the characters I knew due to lack of practice (reading Chinese and writing Chinese are two very different things, with the latter being much more difficult). So one night last week, I found the text to the Chinese textbook I used in first grade and started copying the chapters by hand.

Once I got going, a surprising number of characters came back to me, and I was able to remember how to write most characters in the (albeit simple) text by the second or third time I encountered a particular one. In about an hour or so, I filled up two-and-a-half pages in a spiral notebook and actually felt pretty proud of myself. The experience also gave me a new (or rediscovered) appreciation for the Chinese writing system, especially how visual it is. Obviously, being a system that began as ideograms, there are some very obvious examples, such as this character, which means mountain:

But the visual nature goes well beyond that simple resemblance between the character and the object it represents. For a good illustration of this, take this character, which means “to break apart by hand”:

As you can see, it’s made up of three distinct components. Let’s look at the left and right parts:

If they look similar, it’s because they are both stylized versions of the same character:

… which means “hand”.

As for the component in the center, when by itself, it means to split apart:

So put the three together, and you have a character that literally says:

Left hand — split apart — right hand

When I see this character, I can literally see two hands pulling something apart.

Another example

Take this string of characters from another chapter:

These are six characters grouped into three pairs, with each pair consisting of what you would consider to be a word in English. You probably notice that these six characters all share a common component:

The translation of each pair of characters: butterfly, dragonfly, centipedes.

And that left component that all six characters share? It’s a stylized variation of this character:

… which means “insect”.

Now, take the first character in the sequence and compare it to this one:

The right two-thirds of each character are identical, so there’s got to be a relationship between them, right? In this case, the only similarity between them is the way they are pronounced (hu). In fact, the right two-thirds of each character is pronounced hu. As for their meanings, while the first one means butterfly, the second character means lake. Just as you can guess at the meaning of the first character by the component that means insect, you can guess the meaning of the second character by its left component:

… which means water.

This is how one can often deduce the approximate meaning and pronunciation of Chinese characters.

Saturday, August 7, 2010; evening

It has been several hours since I made it over the fence and away from my god-forsaken former residence. I hear my lo’taurs calling my name and begging me to return, but I have no intention of doing so. I had to get away from there. The lo’taurs’ servitude continues to be unfit for a regal creature such as myself. Bingley, the zebra-skunk-panda-owl hybrid that dares to call himself a cat, has been getting on my nerves as usual. And on top of it all, I just found out my daughter has a tumor on her jaw, which means she’s going to demand even more maternal attention from me than usual. Seriously, I gave birth to you. What more do you want from me? I won’t have to deal with this whole mothering thing if girl lotar hadn’t brought me home along with my daughter nine years ago from the cat colony where I was on the verge of building an empire.

Nonetheless, I have finally escaped my gilded cage and left behind that horrifying, demeaning life of sunbathing, canned food-eating, and human-administered grooming. What’s next? Hmm. My catnip patch is flourishing again. Perhaps I will take this opportunity to expand my nip-dealing business. I’ve seen those neighborhood cats eyeing my patch from a distance. Off I go on my new business venture.

Sunday, August 8, 2010; mid-morning

Just received a visit from my lo’taurs while I was taking a nap in their neighbors’ flowerbed. Girl lo’taur seemed relieved and happy to see me. Can’t say the feeling is mutual. Can’t a cat take a nap after staying out all night without having groveling humans looming over her? The lo’taurs said something about not wanting to pick me up. I see the scratching and hissing have finally gotten through to them. Perhaps they are not as dimwitted as they look (though I admit I do find humans’ inferior intellect to be … amusing). I heard them say something about waiting for me to return to their slave cabin on my own. Little do they know that I have no intention of doing so. The open air is doing me good, and I am enjoying taunting the neighbors’ cat masters through their sliding door, rolling in their flowers while they look on. Perhaps tomorrow I will come back and tease them with some nip.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010; evening

From my hideout in the woods I spied my lo’taurs going door to door handing out flyers with my likeness on them an hour ago, trying to elicit the assistance of their fellow lo’taurs in locating me. The fools! Given the utter failure of their search thus far, I don’t know why they don’t just give up. I’ve looked on with amusement these past two days while they stumbled through the woods looking for me. Girl lo’taur even almost fell into a dry riverbed when she foolishly tried to cross the chasm on a few fallen trees. I overheard them saying that I must still be in the vicinity. I wonder how they knew, considering they haven’t caught sight of me for two days. Somebody must have squealed. I bet it was that black cat with the red collar from down the street. I’ll fix her good. There isn’t enough room in this neighborhood for two black cats.

Friday, August 11, 2010; night

I remain unshackled from the burdens of lo’taurs and ailing daughters. The lo’taurs continue to search for me every evening, all with the same futility. Yet they keep leaving food out for me on their patio at night. Humans are so born to be a slave race. Even as I continue to scorn their love through my prolonged absence, they grovel and beg for a hint of affection from me in the form of allowing them a glimpse of my magnificence. Boy lo’taur has even pointed some strange contraption at the patio. I think it is an image-recording device meant to capture my movements should I get desperately hungry enough to insult my palate with the wet food they are offering as a token of their everlasting obedience to … Hey! What’s that tabby cat doing?! … How dare he eat the food the lo’taurs have offered up to me?! He has just earned himself a spot on my blacklist. HISSSSS!!

Saturday, August 11, 2010; early morning

Blarrgh! I’m still wet. What kind of incompetent lo’taur accidentally sprays a god while watering the lawn? Stupid neighbor! Here I was, minding my own business, catching some early-morning shuteye in his bushes. Next thing I know, I’m being assaulted with a garden hose. And to think, I did him the honor of staying in his yard for two nights last weekend.

Saturday, August 11, 2010; afternoon

The lo’taurs just left. I think I heard them talking about going to church. It amuses me to no end how pathetic humans keep praying to their false idols. Haven’t they learned by now that there’s only one true god — me? Go ahead, lo’taurs, pray to your “Lord” to send me back to you safely, but we all know I’m the only one with the power to do that. Your “god” zero, me one.

Sunday, August 12, 2010; evening

Uh oh, my cover might’ve just been blown. I was out for my evening scavenging meal when one of the lo’taurs’ nosy neighbors saw me. I think he must’ve recognized me from those damned flyers the lo’taurs were handing out a few days ago. Good thing my lo’taurs are away or … wait, what’s that? Oh no, the lo’taur’s car! Quick, must hide.

…

Ah, this car should provide sufficient cover. What’s that neighbor doing? He’s approaching my lo’taurs … he’s talking to them … and pointing in this direction. You better not be tattling on me, human! I knew you were trouble from the minute you moved in. Anyone who owns two barky Scottish terriers is bound to a shady character. Uh oh, lo’taurs heading this way.

…

Girl lo’taur, stop invoking my name in vain. No, I will not come home. Hey, stop reaching under the car. Fine, I’ll find myself another hiding spot. What’s this? Oh, the lo’taurs and their treacherous neighbor are trying to trap me. Ha! Good luck! What’s this? More lo’taurs showing up? I don’t like the looks of this …

…

[Pant pant] Stop … [pant] chasing me … [pant pant] lo’taurs!! How dare  you!! You shall be eternally punished for your insolence. Ooh, I see woods beyond that fence. SANCTUARY!! Quick, over the fence. Hey, what’s this blanket doing over my head? Ah, I’m falling …

…

I’m currently reading a book about the education system in China from 1960 to 1980. It kind of reads like somebody’s dissertation (which it probably was), but I’ve found it to be an interesting read with some nice insights (and it specifically looks at the schools in Guangzhou, my hometown). One part of the book discusses how the classroom curriculum in the 1960s emphasized political ideology starting from primary school. While doing some additional research into the topic, I came across some images of Chinese textbook covers from different eras in the last 60 years. These are textbooks for first-grade Chinese class.

1950s

1960s

1980s to 90s

2000s

It’s interesting, and kind of disturbing, how clearly you can deduce the political mood of the respective eras just by looking at the covers of first-grade textbooks. Also quite telling are the first sentences of the first lesson in each of these books (translations below the original passage):

During the Great Leap era (late 1950s to early 1960s):

爷爷六岁去放羊，爸爸六岁去逃荒。今年我也六岁了，公社送我上学堂。

When my grandfather was six, he went to herd goats. When my father was six, he fled famine. I’m six this year, and the commune is sending me to school.

During the mid-1960s (beginning of the Cultural Revolution):

毛主席教导我们：在现在世界上，一切文化或文学艺术都是属于一定阶级，属于一定政治路线的。

Chairman Mao teaches us: In the world today, all culture or literature and art belong to a certain class, to a certain political line.”

1970s (latter stages of the Cultural Revolution):

最高指示：学习马克思主义，不但要从书本上学，主要还要通过阶级斗争、工作实践和接近工农群众，才能真正学到。

Highest directive: In order to study Marxism, one must not only study from books. Only primarily through class struggle, practical work and being close to the workers and peasants can we truly learn Marxism.

According to one source I found, the “highest directive” was at the beginning of every chapter in Chinese and math textbooks from the era.

1980s-90s (Beginning of new economic policies and China’s opening up to the world)

冰雪融化，种子发芽，果树开花，我们来到小河边，来到田野里，来到山岗上。我们找到了春天。

The ice and snow have melted. The seeds are sprouting. The fruit trees are flowering. We come to the bank of the stream, to the fields, and to the hills. We’ve found spring.

2000s

一去二三里，烟村四五家。亭台六七座，八九十枝花。

远看山有色，近听水无声。春去花还在，人来鸟不惊。

Both of these are classic Chinese poems and they are the first lessons in the reading and literature sections of the first-grade Chinese textbook for the new millennium, respectively. The first poem, which was written in the Song dynasty and is about a sightseeing trip, goes something like this:

Without realizing it, I had already gone two or three li. In the distance I see four or five houses with smoke coming out of their chimneys. As I walk, I see six or seven pavilions on the side of the road, and eight, nine, no, ten flowers on a branch near me.

The second poem, a Tang dynasty piece titled “Painting”, goes something like this:

From a distance, I can see the colors of the mountains, yet when I get close I cannot hear the sound of the waters. Even after spring has passed the flowers still remain, and when one approaches, the birds are not startled.

Perhaps the most striking thing about these two poems are the lack of political undertones in them. Both of these poems, by the way, are brilliant examples of classic Chinese poetry in terms of efficiency of words and the vivid imageries they convey with a meager 20 characters.

Side note: The book covers from the 1980s triggered a bout of nostalgia for me, as those were the books I used while in elementary school. Looking at the scans of the inside pages and reading the text from the chapters that people have posted online, it’s amazing how much of it seems so familiar to me even though until last week I had forgotten about all of it. There might be another blog post on the topic of Chinese textbooks as I scroll down memory lane.

Bill Gates’ recent prediction about the Internet becoming the best single source of education in five years and that the university education will be five times less important touched on something I’ve been thinking about: How technology will and will not change higher education in the near future.

I started thinking about this because of my experience in journalism and seeing how technology has affected newspapers. What struck me as kind of interesting is that if you take away the difference in the two industry’s financial situation, higher education resembles newspapers in many ways. For instance, like newspapers, higher ed

• Is a big industry.
• Has a reputation for not providing satisfactory service to a significant portion of its users (just think about how often someone says that they learned more on the job than they ever did in college, or that they never use most of what they learn).
• Is often out of touch with the people it serves (students).
• Lags behind in terms of truly embracing new technology to connect with its users.
• Is hesitant to embrace social media.
• Uses information systems that are big, cumbersome, out of date almost as soon as they go live, and difficult to upgrade.
• Has small pockets of innovation surrounded by widespread intransigence and resistance to change.
• Recognizes the need to change, yet cannot do so quickly.
• Is hampered by its own outdated performance-evaluation systems that stymie change by giving little incentive and often outright discouragement for employees to experiment with new ways of doing things.

If you think about it, in some ways the only major thing differentiating higher ed from newspapers is that newspapers’ model of scarcity — their hold on the distribution of information — has been shattered while higher ed’s model of scarcity — the universities’ status as the generally accepted and preferred accreditation bodies — remains intact. That is why I think that while technology will undoubtedly affect higher ed in some significant fashion in the near future, I don’t know if I agree with Gates’ assessment that a university education will be five times less important in five years (believe me, if it comes true, I won’t be sorry to be wrong).

Already, a vast amount of information is available online for anyone with the desire to learn, and that’s only going to grow. However, that increase in freely available information isn’t a threat to the financial stability of higher-education institutions as long as they remain the only ones who can give you a piece of paper that employers would accept as evidence that you possess enough basic knowledge and skills to be employable. That’s why universities can afford to put their lectures online for all the world to see.

Let’s say MIT puts all of its lectures and other course material online. Without enrolling at MIT, I can watch every lecture, do every assignments, and even take every test. After four years of going through the exact same curriculum as someone who is actually enrolled at MIT, am I going to be able to walk into a job interview and convince a potential employer that I am just as qualified as an MIT graduate? Most likely not. Right now, if you want an education in the truest sense of the word, you have many options. But if you want to get a certification of your education, there is really only one widely accepted source — colleges and universities. That’s why universities can keep charging — and people will keep paying — tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition. The thing that keeps students and tuition dollars rolling in is no longer necessarily the knowledge that higher ed institutions offer or even the faculty who impart that knowledge, but rather the fact that these institutions are the only ones who can hand out certifications that enable their students to get jobs. The significant time and money that people invest in higher education are aimed at — above all else — obtaining that piece of certification.

I personally think that’s a bit of an absurdity, but I also think that model probably isn’t likely to dramatically change in the near future, much less five years. Universities have little incentive for making such drastic fundamental changes unless their model of scarcity is broken or at least seriously threatened. For that to happen, employers must generally reach the conclusion that a diploma from a university is no longer a stamp of employability, or at least no longer the sole stamp. Yet, what incentives do employers have to change that mentality? They still need an efficient and cost-effective way to gauge which among the hundreds of applicants for a job opening are equipped with the knowledge needed for the position. If nothing else, a university degree at least tells you that someone took a number of courses specializing in whatever field they majored in. In essence, the universities are conducting educational background checks and weeding out unqualified candidates for employers, at no cost to the employers. The universities are making oodles of money from this, and employers are saving oodles of money and time from not having to do such background checks on their own. I see few incentives for either to change their mindset any time soon.

To break that model of scarcity, we need to first have sufficient information on the Internet, available for free or relatively low cost, to substitute for the amount of knowledge you will acquire through a college degree program. I think we already have that, and much more, for many fields and I have no doubt the amount of publicly available knowledge for the taking will only increase. However, what we then need — and this is more important — is for someone to organize that gigantic pool of knowledge into curricula focusing on various fields and then devise an effective, less expensive, and more efficient way to certify that someone has digested the contents of a particular curriculum. There are many possibilities for how this could be accomplished (another post for another day), but the bottom line is that whatever solution they come up with has to be at least as cost-effective and efficient for employers as the current do-you-have-a-college-diploma system. If we can pull that off, then we’ll see a sea change in higher education. This involves more than just change in a few sectors or professions. It requires a fundamental rethinking of how a major component of society should function. That, I think, will take significantly more than five years.

My wife and I are avid viewers of the Travel Channel. While we generally prefer No Reservations or Bizarre Foods, we’ve spent many an hour snarking on Samantha Brown’s ditziness while we watching her travels in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Lately, we’ve been watching her ditz it up around Asia, though I’d say that this series is a bit better than her Great Weekends series, which pretty much consisted of her going shopping and getting boozed up. However, her pathetic showing in the last couple episodes — Cambodia and Vietnam — has really incurred my wrath.

Her travel sins:

• Everywhere she goes, she makes a big fuss about finding authentic culture. Ironically, you see English signs and a number of fluent English speakers at most of the places she visits — a dead giveaway that she’s in touristy locales. I’m fine with touristy. Heck, I do my share of touristy things when we travel, but I don’t fool myself into thinking I’m blending in with the locals. Does Samantha think that the typical family in a Vietnamese village would be fluent in English?
• In a segment about food in Cambodia, she starts off raving about the variety of food available, and then ends up going to one of the most upscale restaurants in the country, a complete departure from the street-food scenes she had just shown. Ok, that’s alright, but what happened next sent me over the edge. The chef prepares for her a giant prawn from the Mekong River and tells her, correctly, that the best part was the brain of the prawn (the yellow head fat you see in shrimp heads). She immediately winces. When they sit down to lunch, Samantha oh-so-predictably tells the chef, “I think I’ll let you have the brain.” First of all, it’s not like eating shrimp heads is that exotic a practice, even in America. Any foodie worth their salt knows that it is indeed the best part on a shrimp. Secondly, you’re traveling, Samantha. Where is your sense of adventure? Stop being a wuss, listen to the chef, and eat the damn brain!
• Speaking of being a wuss, there’s her street-market scene in Vietnam. So she goes to a street market and raves about what a great experience it is to walk through it. Then she says she has to blur her vision a bit whenever she walks past a meat stand so as to avoid seeing things she doesn’t want to see. Ok, yes, there can be some things in an Asian street market that might be shocking to Westerners. But then she points to one stand and says, “See what I mean?” They cut to that stand and the sight that so horrified her was … a couple of plucked chickens. Really? Chickens? Out of all the potentially disturbing sights she might see in an Asian meat market? Why yes, Samantha, chickens have heads and feet. This is what real chicken looks like, not those precut, shrink-wrapped slices of breasts in your American grocery stores or the thin slices of meat in your deli.
• In the final segment of the Cambodia episode, she visits a nature preserve (again replete with English-speaking guides and English signs, of course). First, she idiotically asks the guide, “So are there animals out here to see?” And then she freaks out when the guide tells her that there are, among other animals, king cobras. She acts like a total pansy about having to tread through a couple feet of muddy water to reach the bank of the river, which was only about 10 yards away. Then, while trekking down a path through the forest, she again freaks out when they come across a giant spider, even though she’s standing a good 10-20 feet away from it.

To top it all off, her jungle trek ends on a secluded beach where she said she was going to spend the night. So you’re thinking a rustic woman-with-nature scene with campfire and sleeping bags. Then you remember this is Samantha we’re talking about. She’s staying in a tent, but it’s a tent whose interior is straight out of a hotel room, replete with a Western-style toilet (the one thing that seems to put her most at ease). To top it off, there’s someone there to pour her drinks, cook her a meal, and make a fire on the beach so she can lounge on a chair, sip booze, and admire the view. You’re really roughing it there.

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, she writes on her blog:

I should mention in the interest of full disclosure that I did not spend the night in the tent on the beach. As awesome as it was after seeing that spider and then being told by the guide that a jaguar or some large Travel Channel-host-eating cat was walking the beach the other day I thought best that I just go back to the hotel. I know my limits.

Just unbelievable. Not only does she pick about the most touristy thing she can do — stay in novelty lodging accommodations on a secluded beach with someone to cater to her every need — she is too wussy to actually stay there. Her unadventurous nature is kind of the antithesis of what a traveler should be. If she comes across a local food stall selling delicious but slightly “non-American” looking food next to a Seven Eleven, she’d probably go into the latter and get a gas-station hotdog instead of trying the local food. She’s acting like the worst kind of travelers — the ones who want to just go out in the morning to see the sights in a foreign country, eat a club sandwich in some faux Western cafe, and then come home to America at night. I’m not asking for her to get totally immersed in the local culture or start doing her own Bizarre Foods show (though that’d be something to watch), but if you are all about finding “authentic” local culture, you can start by sucking down the head fat from that prawn like the locals do (except I wonder how many locals can afford to go that restaurant).

Side note: On the plus side, her ditziness is helping pump more money into the local economies of these countries. I loved that in the final scene of the Vietnam episode, she gets suckered into buying a whole crate of birds to release at the Buddhist pagoda (tourist fleecing, anyone?), and that just as she was getting all spiritual before releasing the birds, the monk walks away to answer a cellphone call and then comes back smirking at the camera. Very Zen.

Side note No. 2: Travel Channel, please send her to sub-Sahara Africa for her next series. Please please please??

I’ve spent the last few years working at a pharmacy school, and my experience there has me thinking that professional journalism desperately needs to develop a culture of continuing education the way the health-care professions and some other fields have. Professional pharmacists, for instance, are required to earn a certain number of continuing-education credits each year to retain their licenses, and pharmacy schools, among other entities, help provide such opportunities by offering CE programs. In addition to attending these programs, pharmacists can also earn credits through self-study — reading certain courses or articles on their own and then completing related exercises. The programs and self-study projects are approved and assigned a number of credit hours by an accreditation body. The system helps ensure that practicing professionals are up to speed on the latest developments and research in their field.

One of the biggest problems in journalism right now is that many of its practitioners are not all that familiar with the latest relevant trends and technology. Yes, journalism schools are retooling their programs to adapt and provide a more up-to-date education for their students, but that doesn’t help the journalists who are already out of school. Given the rapid pace with which communication technology is evolving, it doesn’t take that long for skills and knowledge to become dated. Yet, there is no formal professional-development system to ensure that journalism practitioners are continually updating their knowledge and repertoire. That task is left up to the individual, and in the high-stress, high-workload, modest-compensation world of professional journalism, it is far too easy, even for motivated self-learners, to let things like attending workshops or reading about the latest journalism research fall out of sight and out of mind.

Journalism Organizations’ Responsibility

I think a big part of the problem is that unlike the health-care fields, one doesn’t need to be licensed to become a journalist (and rightfully so). The lack of a profession-wide licensure mechanism makes it difficult to implement a profession-wide continuing-education system. However, I think you can build a culture of continuing education without tying it to licensure. For example, professional journalism organizations can independently require their employees to fulfill a certain number of hours of professional-development activities each year as part of the terms of their employment.

With that, of course, comes the obligation on the part of the companies to make sure their employees have the time to fulfill those requirements. That means setting aside a certain number of hours for each employee to pursue CE activities and creating an environment that encourages employees to seek out such opportunities.

There are several benefits to the news organization in this. First of all, it would ensure its journalists are up on the latest practices in the field, which can only help the organization’s work. Secondly, it could be leveraged as a recruiting tool — “Come work for us and we’ll give you time to help yourself add new skills.” That second point would obviously also be a motivation for journalists to pursue continuing education, and it’d become even more so if more and more news organizations begin adopting this approach. You may not need to be in a continuing-education program to be hired for a job at a news organization, but if that organization is taking steps to make sure its employees have the latest skills, then chances are you’d have a better shot at a job there if you have the latest skills as well.

Journalism Schools’ Responsibility

It is not enough to merely have news organizations impose CE requirements for their journalists. There needs to be a rich variety of CE programs available for those journalists. This is where journalism schools come in. I did a quick search to see how many journalism schools offer continuing education for professional journalists and was rather disappointed. Of the 56 schools on this list, only seven mentioned a CE or professional-development program on their Web site:

• Ball State
• CUNY
• Columbia University
• UNC-Chapel Hill
• NYU-SCPS
• University of Oregon
• University of South Carolina

Note: The list I linked to is obviously not comprehensive, but I think it is large enough to be a representative sample size. I went to each school’s Web site and looked for links to the effect of “continuing education” or “professional development.” On sites with a search box, I searched for “continuing education” and “professional education.” It is possible that some of the other schools do offer CE programs for journalists, but if you can’t find it through the navigation or easily through a site search …

Many of the schools offer graduate programs and fellowships that provide further training in journalism. However, such programs require the journalists to give up their current jobs for at least a year for a fellowship and more than that for a graduate program. Family obligations, financial burdens, and the prospects of having to find another job in a tight job market make these programs an unfeasible option for many working journalists.

In addition to the relatively few CE opportunities being offered by J-schools, a number of the ones I did find were simply not very accommodating for the working journalist. A weeklong immersion program is no doubt useful, but how many journalists can take off from work for a whole week and plop down a couple thousand dollars plus travel and hotel expenses to attend such programs? Worse yet are the programs that are spread out over several weeks. If attending for a whole week is difficult for many journalists, attending for one or two days a week for four or five weeks in a row would likely be impossible unless you happened to work within driving distance of the program site and have a very accommodating employer. Basically, such programs are occasional indulgences — something that a relatively few get to do once every few years if their schedules and budgets allow — rather than an ongoing process of continual learning for the masses.

Frankly, I think journalism schools are doing a disservice to their alumni by not having more comprehensive CE offerings. Think about it: You graduate from a J-school with (you hope) the latest skills. Five years later, a chunk of those skills are probably in need of an update, but journalism schools offer few opportunities for you to do that without quitting your job and incurring major expenses to enter a graduate degree program. Meanwhile, the schools have updated their degree programs’ curricula and are producing new graduates whose skills are more up to date than yours, thus making it more difficult for you to compete with them for that next job.

Aside from doing right by their alumni, J-schools also might benefit from CE programs in several ways. For one thing, it’d foster stronger ties between faculty at the schools and journalists in the field, spurring more opportunities for academia-industry collaboration. Secondly, the CE programs could be an additional source of revenue, especially if they’re designed in such a way that they can be offered to a large number of people at the same time. Third, it helps the schools be more connected to their alumni and helps those alumni be more competitive in the job market, which probably doesn’t hurt when it’s time to ask those alumni to send in their donation checks.

If we’re to build a culture of continuing education in journalism, then the nature of the CE programs being offered must change. Comprehensive weeklong or multi-week programs have their place, but we need a much greater number of shorter, less expensive programs. Also, these programs should be designed with the idea of being accessible to journalists regardless of where they are. In an era where you can produce a livestream with just a laptop and a webcam, surely a school of journalism can whip up something to deliver good online sessions to off-site participants. Delivering programs online would also eliminate physical limits on how many people can attend and probably cut down on the cost of holding these programs, making them affordable to more journalists.

How It Might Work

Here’s a scenario of how a CE system for journalism could work:

A journalism organization hires journalists based on the usual criteria — skills, experience, potential, etc. All employees of the company are required to fulfill, say, 15 hours of continuing education each year. The company sets aside a number of each employee’s annual work hours (let’s just say 40 hours — a mere five days per year) specifically for such activities, covering the duration of the programs, travel time, and time for the employees to devise ways to apply the new skills and knowledge to their jobs. That last part is important, because what good is going to a seminar if you have no time afterward to digest what you learned there and think about how to put it to use? If the budget allows, the company might also set aside some money to cover a portion of the employees’ CE expenses, though I’m not counting on this last part, at least not in the current environment.

The CE programs can come from several sources. The easiest thing to do would be for the company to organize internal sessions, led by employees in various departments. A photographer can teach reporters the basics of taking a decent photo, for instance, since reporters are increasingly being asked to do that for some of the events they cover. The company can also partner with several journalism schools and, where it makes sense, other entities to create CE programs that are designed to appeal to various types of journalists. For instance, there would be a selection of programs for reporters, a selection for copy editors, a selection for programmers, a selection for ad salespeople, etc. In addition, each focus would have courses targeted at people with different levels of expertise so that an experienced programmer can opt for a more advanced programming session while a beat reporter who’s interested in learning about programming can take an introductory workshop or something specifically geared toward how reporters can use programming in their work.

These CE sessions would vary in length and cost, but most would be relatively short (an hour to a day) and at a reasonable price ($50 to a few hundred dollars). Also, as much as possible, these sessions would be delivered online as well as in person (you’d pay more for in-person). That way, instead of having to leave their jobs for a whole week and spend a couple thousand dollars for an intensive immersion program, journalists would spread it out, spending $50 for an hour-long online seminar here, two or three hundred dollars for a four-hour, hands-on program there. What the schools might lose in offering less expensive programs can be made up by having many more attendees than before.

The journalists would be able to earn CE credits by:

• Attending the aforementioned CE programs offered internally and by partner schools.
• Leading internal sessions (which encourages people to share their expertise across departments).
• Attending other relevant conferences or workshops.
• Learning how to use new software programs through online learning sites such as Lynda.com, documenting that learning experience, AND using those programs in their work.
• Reading pieces about relevant trends and new practices, logging and sharing what they read, AND coming up with ways to put into practice the ideas from those pieces.
• Other activities as approved on a case-by-case basis.

With that system in place, the company would then make CE part of its employee-evaluation formula and tie in various incentives to reward employees for putting what they’ve learned from the CE activities into practice. The hope is that under this setup, journalists would not only be required to keep their skills current, but would also have incentive to actively seek out new skills, in part to fulfill their CE requirements and in part because there’s a carrot dangling in front of them.

Each journalist would fulfill the requirement through a combination of the above activities according to their own scheduling and budget limitations. So if you can’t afford to go to several sessions at a partner J-school, you can make up for it by doing more reading and online self-learning. And by requiring the journalists to not only read or learn new software programs, but to also come up with ways to put that knowledge to use in order to get CE credit for it, it would help spur experimentation and innovation from the bottom up, which is desperately needed at many traditional news organizations.

If a couple journalism organizations can do this and show tangible, positive results, others would follow, and with luck and time, it could become a common practice in the industry. However, it would not prevent outsiders from breaking into the business the way a licensure system would, since 1). you don’t need to work for a journalism company to be a professional journalist, and 2). even if you do want to work for a journalism organization, your lack of prior CE experience would not hurt you as long as you have up-to-date skills, regardless of how you obtained them.

So what do you think? Too crazy? Will never happen? Already being done somewhere and I just don’t know about it?

The Los Angeles Times had a recent story about how some are worried that the increasingly frequent use of electronic devices in place of pen and paper is causing Chinese people to gradually forget how to write their native tongue. This is something I can definitely relate to. When I moved to the United States at age 10, I was in the fifth grade and had a decent grasp on Chinese writing. However, due to the lack of practice, it only took a few years for me to forget how to write a significant chunk of the characters I knew.

This doesn’t mean that I can’t read Chinese anymore. I can, in fact, read and comprehend probably about 65 percent of the Chinese text I come across on news sites. However, recognizing Chinese characters on sight is quite different from being able to write them out from memory. Last year, while we were visiting family in China, I was talking to one of my cousins and setting up a time to go visit his home. He handed me a piece of paper and a pen and told me his address, and somewhat embarrassingly, I could only write out two of the characters in the address (thankfully, my cousin wrote the whole address out for me).

As someone who has struggled to remember how to write his native tongue, I’m quite thankful for computerized Chinese character-input programs (such as this one) that allow me to punch out a comprehensible (if somewhat simple) e-mail to my relatives just by typing in the way the character is pronounced and then picking out that character from a list of homophones. This process does take a while, but it sure beats not knowing how to write a letter or not being able to trade IMs in Chinese with my relatives. On the other hand, it’d be a real shame if more and more people end up forgetting how to write Chinese characters because they are too used to picking them out from a list on a gadget. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

We just re-watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade over the last couple days and it really struck me how dated the special-effects sequences in the movie look … and how little that mattered in my enjoyment of the movie, either back then or today, when we’ve seen much, much better special effects. It’s not hard to figure out why: The terrific storytelling and the humorous and witty banter between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery more than make up for whatever shortcomings there were in the effects, and the movie was a showcase for the story and the dialogs rather than for the special effects.

The dated effects were especially obvious during the dogfight scene when Indy and his father were fleeing from the Nazi blimp:

Nice sky in the background, isn’t it?

If you saw something like that in a movie today, you would laugh at how bad the effect looked. And yet, even when I rewatch this movie today, that doesn’t get in the way of my enjoying the film at all. I think it speaks volumes about what Hollywood blockbuster movies focus on these days compared to 20 years ago, and it’s a shame. Give me 10 Last Crusades over the mindless, CGI-laden crapfest that is the Transformers movies, that abomination of a Star Trek film, or the thoroughly mediocre fourth installment in the Indiana Jones series. Compare that last Indiana Jones movie with The Last Crusade, and the difference in the approach to movie-making is stark. For instance, one scene from The Last Crusade had Indiana Jones and Nazi stooge Elsa crawling through the sewers under Venice looking for an ancient coffin. They run into a giant pack of rats and at one point, they’ve got rats all over them.

What is this? Real rats?

Just imagine if they shot that scene today. Would they use real rats? Dream on! They’ll probably just plop the actors in front of a green screen and add in some CGI rats later. And they’ll probably end up looking about as real as that CGI gopher or the ants army from the last Indiana Jones movie.

Now that I think about it, the same holds true for computer games as well — really great story-telling trumps deficiencies in graphics. That’s why those old Monkey Island games are still a joy to play, despite not having voices or super-amazing graphics, and why I still keep an OLD computer around just for the times when I get in the mood to play those games again. Computer graphics have made leaps and bounds since those games came out, but the story-telling aspect of computer/video games haven’t really improved (if anything, they’ve regressed). That’s why I’m very happy to see a company like Telltale Games (the name says it all, doesn’t it?) picking up where those great story-telling games left off.

Now, if only we can get someone in Hollywood to follow suit …

During the group tour portion of our trip to China in 2008-09, we were frequently trucked to touristy souvenir shops, where the tour would stop for 30-45 minutes while salespeople tried to fleece us. This was part of the package because the cost of the tour was kept low to encourage more tourism, and these “partnerships” with stores are the only way the travel companies can recoup their money. So we stopped at porcelain factories, traditional pharmacies, tea shops, jade factories, etc. Most of the time, we didn’t have much problem. We were traveling with a group of close to 20 people, and at least a handful of us usually ended up buying something at one of these stops. When we were visiting Wuxi, however, it was just the four of us, and the pressure-sale tactics at the pearl refinery there did get kind of annoying.

However, nothing we experienced in mainland China or Hong Kong can compare to this: A Hong Kong tour guide berated her group of tourists from mainland China on the bus for not buying enough swag at one of these tourist traps. Someone on the bus recorded the tirade, though it was just all shots of the back of the seat. As for what she’s saying, if you don’t speak mandarin, the video doesn’t tell you much except for the tone of her voice, which ricochets between angry and passive-aggressive. I’ve included a translated excerpt from a BBC story.

The female tour guide shouted that there is no free lunch in the world, meaning that the 1,000-plus yuan each visitor paid for the tour doesn’t even cover airline tickets, much less lodging and meals in Hong Kong.

She fussed at the tourists, saying, “I provide food and lodging for you, yet you won’t contribute. If you don’t pay me back in this life, you’ll still have to pay me back in your next life.”

The female guide even made a threat: When they stop for 1.5 hours at the watch shop, if the tourists don’t buy more stuff, they won’t get food or a hotel to stay in.

She also ridiculed the tourists, saying: “It’s fine if you are poor at home, but don’t act like this when you’re out.”

Some other tidbits I picked up from the video:

You’re the ones who owe me! I don’t owe you anything!

Next we’re going to a watch store. Anybody got any objections?! … This stop isn’t just for window-shopping; you need to buy something. Don’t just go in and walk around. Just now, you left the store before the allotted time was up. The other group spent 100,000-some yuan and was still in there. We only spent about 10,000 and yet we came out before time was up.

Wow! Just … wow!

Well, that was a nice week or so away from the blogosphere. No hand-wringing, no snark, no self-righteous tomes. Oh well, break is over. Once more unto the breach. Time to get back to blogging and back to writing about the journalism business that I’m no longer a part of.

Among the items from this week that caught my attention was Gannett’s announcement that it’s going to centralize design functions for its entire chain of newspapers at five hubs, with each hub handling the design of up to 20-some newspapers. A Gannett memo said

The goal of this project is to elevate the quality of design at sites where the recession caused a loss of focus on design.  And to sustain good design at sites that have been able to keep that a strong focus.

But let’s be honest here. This is a cost-saving move. As a former newspaper designer, it’s hard for me to see how distancing the designers from the rest of the actors in the journalistic process would improve the end product. The Gannett memo also said that each paper’s look will remain unique and that copy-editing functions would remain at the individual papers. However, as with all things in newspapers these days, when a company makes statements like that, you might as well attach the words “for now” on the end. There’s no doubt that the centralizing of design functions will make it easier for instituting a common template across all papers down the road and sets a precedent for future centralization of other functions.

The Society of News Design has written an open letter in protest of Gannett’s move. The letter points out (correctly) that:

If one considers the sole value of design to be making pieces fit on pages, an “assembly line” solution may seem attractive. However, architecting publications to meet reader needs is something more complicated, nuanced and essential.

While I agree with most of that sentiment (aside from the use of “architect” as a verb), here’s the thing to consider: The job of a publication designer is certainly more complicated and nuanced than just making things fit on a page, but what if it’s not (or no longer) that essential to the organization that’s employing the designers, or as essential as other needs that require money from the same pot? This isn’t a problem restricted to newspapers; it exists in any organization where creating good designs isn’t the primary mission (which would cover just about every organization except design agencies). Case in point: My first post-newspaper job was designing course packs for a nonprofit working to increase high school students’ interest in science. When I got there, their course packs were a mess — a hodgepodge of photocopies from a dozen different sources stuffed into a binder. That didn’t stop the program from becoming a big hit with science teachers across the state. I completely revamped the course packs and made them look good, and the staff and the teachers they worked with loved them. However, when the program ran into funding difficulties, the designer position was eliminated.

Want more examples? Just look around you and you’ll see an unending stream of publications and collaterals screaming for better design. Yet, having that better design may not matter all that much for the organizations that are producing them because a mediocre (and sometimes horrible) design might not really interfere with those organizations’ main mission. Heck, I can work magic on that clip-art filled, comic sans-dotted flyer for painting service in my mail box, but will it really add much business for the painter? Probably not, and hence the painter doesn’t even think about hiring a designer to create a nicer looking flyer. That, I think, is the quandary that newspaper designers are increasingly finding themselves in.

The SND’s open letter said that “If designers are used solely as decorators or mechanical paginators, their publications are not leveraging their full value.” However,  mechanical paginators might be all that news organizations need or want going forward as the print component of the organizations becomes more and more de-emphasized and the focus shifts to online. This shift will mean we won’t get print news products that are as well-designed as they used to be, but it likely won’t mean we’ll be getting less or worse news, which is the primary mission of a news organization. Perhaps a well-designed print news product will be — and may have always been — more a luxury than a necessity, and that all the fantastic skills a good designer has to offer a news organization will just make him or her over-qualified for the job. That’s one reason I left newspapers — I could see that the things I enjoyed most about my job — the things that went beyond mere pagination — were probably going to start disappearing from my job and my position could be increasingly reduced to little more than a smart monkey who knows how to use InDesign. That’s not what I went into visual journalism to do, nor is it a good direction for my professional development.

As for that SND letter, I’m sad to say that given the current climate, it comes off more like a desperate plea or a toothless battle cry on the retreat than a defiant stand. Really, would any company listen to a “you’ll miss us when we’re gone” cry from the people they are ushering out the door? The letter’s call for news companies to restore training investments to help print designers broaden their skills is unrealistic at a time when budgets are tight and journalism schools are dumping thousands of younger, cheaper workers who have more updated skills — skills obtained at no cost to the newspapers — into the labor pool every year. The letter also raises the issue of a “creative brain drain,” the idea that in losing designers, newspapers also lose their creative and adaptable thinking that could positively influence the organization in areas other than just the design of the print product. I can see some merit in that, but no one gets to hang around just to contribute creativity. You still need to perform a certain function, and that gets back to the fact that the importance of the print design function at a news organization is in decline. Also, who’s to say that if news organizations swapped print designers for more multimedia reporters and Web developers that the latter two won’t bring creativity with them?

As much as I appreciate designers and as much as I know that many of them can adapt and expand their skills to do other things (in fact I think that’s what they need to do to survive in journalism), if I were a news organization looking for a multimedia reporter or a Web programmer, my first choice would likely not be retraining existing print designers to do those things, not when I can go out and find people who would cost less and come in already with that training.

I haven’t posted anything to the blog since we got back from Atlanta, and part of the reason is that I’m still wading my way through the approximately 800 photos I took on the trip (plus another memory card from Courtney), toning them, and uploading them to Flickr. I was kind of concerned about running out of memory cards when I ran through an 8 GB card (which holds about 370 photos) before the end of our first day in Atlanta. Fortunately, my pace slowed somewhat the following two days. Still, after spending a couple hours on this every night for the past week, I’m only about halfway through my photos.

I did, however, find enough time to throw together an “If You Go …” guide for Atlanta for those who might be interested in visiting the city, with pointers on lodging, attractions, dining, and transportation. Also check out Courtney’s post on our food blog about our dining experience in Atlanta, which was, for the most part, fabulous.

Here’s a slideshow of our photos, which is sure to get longer and longer in the coming week(s). Maybe I’ll actually get done sometime in mid-July.

The 1996 Olympic Games exhibit at the Atlanta History Center.

We kicked off our final full day in Atlanta with a visit to the Atlanta History Center, which was only a few minutes away from where we are staying. The center has several parts — a history museum, an old farm house from the 1800s, and a stately mansion built in the 1920s — all surrounded by lush gardens and woods.

The history museum housed several exhibition halls focusing on, among other things, the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, the Civil War, and Native American influence on Georgian culture. The most interesting one was the Olympics collection, which spanned two floors. The first floor featured exhibits on topics such as the construction of Atlanta’s Olympic facilities, replicas of torches and medals from every Olympic Games, and a day-by-day look at the 1996 Games. The second floor featured a variety of hands-on activities, such as exercise bikes and rowing machines on which you can try to match Olympian performances. We also found the pottery exhibit in the Native American collection quite interesting, especially a video that demonstrated how a couple of good ol’ boys are carrying on a unique tradition of pottery-making that involves using mules to turn a wheel to mix the clay and making glaze with a glaze mill.

The two preserved houses were also pretty interesting, though old preserved houses kind of all run together once you’ve seen a few of them. The farm house was relatively simple, and its furnishings bore a strong resemblance to furnitures we’ve seen in other old houses from that era, such as rope beds. The Swan House mansion was beautiful (unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures inside the house), and again, some of it architectural styles and interior furnishing reminded me of other mansions that we’ve visited.

The Swan House fountain at the Atlanta History Center.

In between and after our history lesson, we treated ourselves to fine patio dining all around the neighborhood of Buckhead. It started with lunch at Anis, a French bistro where we had wild mushroom ravioli and steak frites. The ravioli were delicious but a little on the skimpy side (only four), and the steak frites were excellent. The patio theme continued at dinner when we hit up Eclipse di Luna for some tapas action. We ordered seven items and loved almost every one of them, in particular the goat cheese-stuffed peppers and braised pork bellies.

The patio area at Anis, where we had lunch.

Finally, we concluded the night at Cafe Intermezzo, which is a whole story unto itself. We had actually gone searching for Cafe Intermezzo the previous night after finding it on Yelp. We were in the mood for some sweets and this place had good reviews and some appealing choices on its menu. Yet, even with the help of Google Maps and GPS, we couldn’t find it. The place where it was supposed to be, according to Google Maps, was a strip mall and the cafe was nowhere in sight. We circled those couple blocks but found nothing. We weren’t about to give up, however, and we went back to the area again today after our visit to the history center. Yet again our search was in vain. Finally, we asked our hosts about the place, and with the directions they provided, we finally located Cafe Intermezzo after dinner tonight — several blocks down from where it was located on Google Maps.

Finding the place, however, was just the first part of the adventure. We circled the place twice in search of parking. It wasn’t that we were too cheap to pay for parking, but rather that we didn’t have cash with us to pay the $3 parking fee for the lots around the cafe, which did not accept credit cards. Eventually, we backtracked a mile to find an ATM and got cash to pay for parking. After all this trouble, we were thinking that this place had better be worth the trouble.

Fortunately, Cafe Intermezzo did not disappoint. We were seated — where else? — on a large patio that was dimly illuminated by candlelight, with cool breeze being provided by the surprisingly mild night and the numerous fans humming away on the ceiling. The drink menu was impressively thick, and the cafe also had quite a selection of pastries. Customers were invited to go inspect the sweet offerings in the display cases and make their choices. We went with a slice of cookie dough cheesecake and a crepe Suzette. Both were delectable, though the combination of the warm sweetness of the crepe and the cool sweetness of the cheesecake proved overwhelming. We needed a pot of green tea to help us offset the sugar overload and finish the desserts. We left the cafe with our sweet tooth thoroughly satisfied and our bellies bloated with cheesecake, crepe, alcohol, and tea. After this, I don’t think I’ll be craving sweets for at least two weeks.

That was the case for me today when we visited Zoo Atlanta. While standing outside the reptile house, we heard a loud bellowing from the stick-pole-fence exhibit to our right. I looked over and saw that it was an enclosure for giant tortoises, and I immediately knew what was about to happen:

I was no stranger to this scene, however. A few years ago, while in Washington DC, I witnessed a similar ritual at the National Zoo. Just like then, it was funny to watch people’s reactions, especially those with kids who aren’t quite old enough to know about the birds and the bees and the tortoises. A young woman with little kids thought at first that the male tortoise was bellowing because it was stuck. Upon a second look, though, she quickly deduced, “Oh, he’s not stuck.” An older lady in her party, perhaps her mother, still was a bit confused, but instead of explaining what is going on, the young woman just repeated, “He’s not stuck,” until the older lady made the connection and immediately told the kids, “Alright, into the reptile house. Let’s go,” and rushed them away.

With such frisky business going on at the zoo, it was no surprise that we saw a number of baby animals today: warthogs, monkeys, golden lion tamarins, orangutans. We also found out from a zoo keeper at the giant panda exhibit that the female panda, Lun Lun, is pregnant, something they only discovered a couple days ago. The zook keeper, however, cautioned that it’s too early to celebrate, as miscarriages are common in pandas.

The abundance of cute baby critters was only part of what turned out to be a great day at the zoo. For the second day in a row, we were blessed with mild, overcast weather, which not only made it more comfortable to walk around but also induced the animals to be more … lively (especially the tortoises, apparently). We also didn’t run into much of a crowd, which was a bit of surprise considering that the Fourth of July weekend is upon us. We happily accepted our good fortune and enjoyed what was by far the least-crowded giant panda exhibit we’ve ever seen.

The zoo was pretty well designed in terms of giving visitors a good view of the animals despite some sizable exhibits. Every large exhibit had multiple viewing areas, allowing you to see the animals no matter what corner they may be hiding in. The lemur house, for instance, had pedestrian walkways up in the canopy, where the primates lounged. At another exhibit, we were at eye level with an adorable red panda that was snoozing in the trees. She was lying on a branch only about 15 feet away from us, making us wonder how she hasn’t leaped from the branches and escaped.

We were particularly impressed with the number of great apes at the zoo. There was a big pack of gorillas in an expansive exhibit, and a good number of orangutans in another sizable enclosure that could be called their Club Med without much exaggeration. It had multiple “huts”, playing areas, hammocks, and even giant fans blowing cool mist in the direction of the apes. In this idyllic environment, the orangutans apparently are free to let their inhibitions fall by the wayside and let it all hang out:

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Courtney trying to fend off an offering of corporate brainwashing at the World of Coca-Cola.

Just for the heck of it, we decided to visit Atlanta around the Fourth of July. I had been there a couple times before, but those trips were more than a decade ago and well before some of the city’s newer attractions were built.

Because we were disembarking after work, we broke the six-hour trip up into two days, overnighting in Anderson, S.C. (whose sole purpose seems to be serving as a home base for people attending Clemson football games), so that we only had to drive two hours to reach Atlanta this morning, giving us ample time to see some of the sights. We spent the bulk of the day in downtown Atlanta, visiting the Georgia Aquarium and the World of Coca-Cola. Here are some of the highlights and lowlights of the day.

The Good

• The enormous shark tank at the Georgia Aquarium: If you’ve followed our travel blog posts, you probably know that we’re suckers for zoos and aquariums, and we’ve seen our share of shark tanks. However, I don’t think any of the ones we’ve seen can compare to the one at the Georgia Aquarium in terms of size, both of the tank and of the residents within. That tends to happen when you have three whale sharks gliding through the water in your tank. These animals were truly magnificent, and they weren’t the only giants in the tank. There were huge manta rays and quite a few giant groupers that made us salivate.
• Beluga whales: These guys were the other top attraction at the aquarium. They were extremely playful and flexible, effortlessly twisting through the waters and casting beautiful reflections when they approached the surface of the water.
• Sunfill: If you haven’t heard of it, this is a soda made by Coca-Cola and sold in the African nation of Djibouti. It was our clear favorite from the tasting room at the World of Coca-Cola. It was very minty (think mint Sweet Leaf iced tea, but mintier) and did not have much carbonation.
• Monks: When we were visiting the World of Coca-Cola, we noticed several Buddhist monks in our group, clad in their orange robes. They soon became an attraction in themselves as other tourists quickly took notice as well. The monks rolled with it, too, posing for pictures with a couple people. And there’s something hilarious about seeing a monk wearing 3D glasses.
• Meehan’s Public House: After a long day with relatively little food, we were walking around downtown Atlanta in search of a place for dinner when we saw the sign outside this Irish pub advertising lobster ravioli, which is one of our favorite dishes. Courtney ordered that daily special while I got the beef short rib, and both were delicious. The beef was extremely tender and juicy, with a nice layer of fat in between the meat, and it came with a sweet blackberry demi that made for an excellent sauce. The prices were quite reasonable, too, considering the location (we ordered the two most expensive items on the menu and the bill came out to be $33).
• VRBO and our lodging: Instead of a hotel, we opted to stay at a vacation rental that we found on Vacation Rentals By Owner. It’s the first time we had gone that route, and so far, we’ve been thrilled with our choice. We are staying in a carriage house in the neighborhood of Buckhead. We had originally booked a studio at the house, but a couple days before the trip, the owners informed us that after some shuffling, they had upgraded us to a one-bedroom apartment that they had finished building on the lower level of the house. We were totally knocked out by the apartment when we walked in: dark wood flooring, granite countertops, marble bathroom, and tasteful and somewhat eccentric decor. In addition, our hosts are super friendly. Oh yeah, did I mention that this place cost us significantly less than a hotel room? I think we’re going to go the vacation rental route instead of hotels as much as possible in the future.

The Bad

• Atlanta traffic: Our drive was smooth the whole way, but the traffic entering Atlanta was surprisingly congested considering it was 11 a.m. on a weekday. Thank goodness for the MARTA, which spared us from having to drive into downtown.
• The ticket line at the aquarium: Remember this tip: Buy your tickets in advance online before you visit the aquarium. One look at that meandering mass of humanity at the ticketing queue and you’ll be very glad you did. We bought a combo pass for the aquarium and the World of Coca-Cola in advance and were able to walk right past that long line of people waiting to buy tickets and head almost immediately into the aquarium.
• The other lines in the aquarium: We might’ve dodged the line outside the aquarium, but there was no escaping the lines inside. Every exhibit had a mini-queue of people in front of it. Imagine if we had gone closer Friday or Saturday, with the holiday crowd out in force.
• Corporate propaganda overload: From having gone to the old World of Coca-Cola, I knew that the new one would be one big commercial for Coke, but it proved even worse than I thought. The tour started with an impossibly cheery staffer pointing out various pieces of paraphernalia and telling the crowd to ooh and aah at certain items (I think she secretly hates her job, because it’s impossible to get this enthusiastic over soda). That intro was followed by a short “documentary” — a 3D animation flick showing various strange alien-looking creatures making a bottle of Coke in the most wasteful, least efficient, and probably least green way possible, and then talking about how much they love Coke. Then the staffer was back for a few more lines of corporate brainwashing. “We’re all from different places around the world, but we all have one thing in common? What is it? We all love Coca-Cola!”
• The 4D experience at Coke World: As if the constant barrage of “Coke is great. We love Coke” programming wasn’t enough, we were treated to a “4D” movie in which a scientist and his assistant travels all over the world to study what makes Coke great (and incidentally, show off the company’s massive distribution network). Aside from the over-the-top acting by a couple actors who will probably be forever haunted by this screen credit, the segment also featured some not so gentle rocking of seats to “enhance” the experience. I was expecting the rocking and I’m not stranger to thrill rides, but this ride was rough. I was feeling an ache in my head and neck by the end. Oh, and they also squirted water on us several times to coincide with scenes in the movie where there was a splash. It was only a few drops each time, but I didn’t appreciate not being told that we would get wet, as I would’ve put my camera back in its bag if I had known.

More Photos

I’ve written before about Heston Blumenthal and his cooking show, In Search of Perfection. The chef became the target of my ire and snark a couple weeks ago when we watched an episode of his show where he tried to make Peking duck. Apparently the crispy skin of the duck had him befuddled, as he spent three months and went through 40 ducks and still couldn’t figure out a way to make the skin crispy while keeping the meat juicy. It wasn’t even that the skin wasn’t quite crispy enough for his high standards. He couldn’t get the skin to be crispy on the duck, period. In the end, he cut the skin off the raw duck, crocheted it to a cookie rack, and cooked it separately from the rest of the duck. Considering that real Peking duck is supposed to be roasted whole, with skin on, and carved up tableside, what Blumenthal did was flat-out cheating, and 40-some ducks gave their lives in vain!!

After watching that sacrilege, my wife and I set out to make Peking duck without having to cutting the skin off. You can read about our experience and get links to the recipes we used on our cooking blog, Chicken Feet and Clam Chowdah. The process involved the beheading, crucifixion, scalding, and hanging of the duck. However, the story had a happy ending: We succeeded where Blumenthal failed. Maybe I should get a half of Blumenthal’s three Michelin stars for doing something he couldn’t.

Here’s the video of us making Peking duck:

Yesterday, I finally got around to reading the Rolling Stone profile of Stanley McChrystal that led to the general’s downfall. After digesting the piece, what really struck me was that the controversial remarks by McChrystal and his aides about the administration, which ended up costing McChrystal his job, were actually a relatively small part of the story and, I would argue, not even the best journalism in the piece.

On the Rolling Stone site, the article is split into six pages. If you break it down, the parts of the article that actually deal with the now infamous snipes only make up about one page. The more interesting parts, at least to me, were the last three pages of the story, which paint a picture of a general struggling to win the war and, more disconcertingly, struggling to deal with his troops’ increasing anger and frustration over the counterinsurgency policy he’s pushing. For someone like me, who doesn’t follow the developments of the war in Afghanistan very closely beyond what tidbits I pick up on NPR on the evening commute (usually stories about the latest casualties), it was an informative and revealing look. Unfortunately, that has gotten nary a mention amid all the hoopla over the remarks about the administration.

As for the badmouthing of the administration, my main reaction to it was more or less a shrug. Considering the stakes, the amount of power involved, and the stature of the players, one would be surprised if there weren’t clashes, and there already had been reports about past tensions. The surprise in this isn’t that the general and (quite reasonably) his aides don’t like certain members of the administration and talk smack about them behind their backs, but just that they would be so careless as to say those things within earshot of a reporter in their traveling party.

And then there’s the matter of the fallout from the report. In this interview with MSNBC, Michael Hastings, the author of the article, said that the soldiers he had been talking to after the firing say they are glad about the change in leadership. But note the reason for which they were glad — they weren’t glad to see the general get canned because he had a strained relationship with the administration, but rather because they disagreed with his policy.

Was McChrystal fired for the ineffectiveness of his policy? For his role in previous scandals? For losing the support of his troops? No. He was fired for a couple careless remarks to a reporter about certain members of the administration (and really, his aides said much more and far worse things in the story than he did). Basically, he got fired for being a bad media manager, for letting a political pissing match slip into public view. What’s more, it’s not even a new pissing match. It’s hard to imagine the president and his team were unaware of the general’s opinions of certain members of the administration before this report, so the administration was obviously willing to more or less let such clashes go … until they spilled into public view.

Though the firing was necessary since those remarks painted the president into a corner publicly, I wish it was done for better reasons than what basically amounted to a few tabloid moments by people in high places. Considering the reason McChrystal was fired, it doesn’t seem likely any of the real concerns about the war effort raised in the Rolling Stone story will be addressed (and Hastings himself said as much in this interview). And it’s a shame that the story has so far managed to primarily incite only a national “OMG, he said what?!” response. I can only hope that the attention surrounding this story will eventually shift to its more worthwhile components.

Related Thoughts

The Rolling Stone Headline

After reading the story, I couldn’t help but be a bit ticked about Rolling Stone’s headline on the story:

The Runaway General

Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House

For one thing, that subhead says pretty much the opposite of what the story says. If anything, the story conveys the idea that McChrystal has been struggling to seize control of the war and in fact is having problems convincing even his own camp that what he’s doing is the right path. And then the “the real enemy: The wimps in the White House” part just strikes me as being sensational.

The Reporter’s Reaction

I also found Hastings’ reactions to the responses to his piece interesting. In the MSNBC interview above, he said he really didn’t expect the general to lose his job over the story. Also, in an NPR interview, he seems to get agitated when the NPR anchor asked him whether the general admonished his staff when they were making fun of the vice president (you have to listen to the audio clip to get the full effect):

NORRIS: When that joke was made, did McChrystal admonish that aide in any way? Or did he go with the flow?

Mr. HASTINGS: No, they were laughing. Have you hung out with the military much?

NORRIS: I certainly haven’t spent the kind of time that you have spent with the military. In that statement, I guess…

Mr. HASTINGS: I know. I mean, these guys – that’s who these guys are. That’s why I’m so shocked. These guys have been living these wars for the last nine years, you know? They don’t see their families. They hang out with a bunch of other guys and then, you know? You know, they’re in fights. They lose their people they love. I mean, they (unintelligible) some of this humor.

The “(unintelligible)” part in the transcript actually says “it’s a release valve, some of this humor.” Hastings certainly doesn’t seem surprised that the general and his aides make such remarks among themselves and seems to be almost defending them a bit by pointing to the stress they are under. Between this and the MSNBC interview, it seems that Hastings assigned less significance to those remarks than seemingly everyone else has.

Reporters and Access

The story has also sparked a discussion about reporters and access to sources. Many have argued that beat reporters would not have written about the inflammatory remarks because they want to preserve future access to the sources, whereas Hastings, a freelancer, has no such concerns. I think there’s certainly a level of truth to that sentiment. However, I would point out that even as a freelancer, Hastings would not have been able to gather the inflammatory part of his story in the first place without — that’s right — access.

The issue here isn’t whether the desire for access is bad. Much of journalism, no matter who’s doing it, depends on access, on sources being willing to engage the reporter on some level. Preserving access isn’t a yes or no issue, but rather a balancing act — how do you balance future access to a source against reporting everything you encounter through the access you currently have? The guiding principle isn’t so much “Don’t write anything bad about a source so you can keep access,” but more like “Is this story important enough to burn this bridge?” Consider what Hastings himself wrote in this GQ piece about covering the 2008 elections:

The dance with staffers is a perilous one. You’re probably not going to get much, if any, one-on-one time with the candidate, which means your sources of information are the people who work for him. So you pretend to be friendly and nonthreatening, and over time you “build trust,” which everybody involved knows is an illusion. If the time comes, if your editor calls for it, you’re supposed to fuck them over; and they’ll throw you under a bus without much thought, too. (I should say that personal friendships can actually develop, despite the odds.) For the top campaign officials and operatives, seduction and punishment of reporters is an art. Write this fluff piece now; we’ll give you something good later. No, don’t write it this way, write it that way. We’ll give you something good later.

“If the time comes,” and in this case, Hastings obviously believed it was important enough for him to burn this particular bridge (and as Rachel Maddow said in this segment, other reporters would, too).

As some have pointed out, the fallout from the Rolling Stone story likely will mean less access for reporters in the future. I think that’s an accurate assessment. Jon Stewart, in lampooning some of the media’s reaction to the story and how it affects future access, said of access, “I don’t need it anymore. I got this amazing story.” Of course, that doesn’t answer the question of what will you do when you need access to help you nail down that next amazing story. And while we may feel the temptation to say, “A good journalist can get that without access,” consider that had Hastings not been allowed to follow McChrystal around for a month, the general would most likely still have a job right now. The concern going forward isn’t whether Hastings has ruined it for hacks who coddle their sources to curry favor, but rather how much more difficult will things be for the next Michael Hastings as officials clamp up even more after seeing what happened to McChrystal. This is something that will affect all journalists, whether they are beat reporters or freelancers.

So was this a worthwhile tradeoff? I’m ambivalent on that question. On one hand, his story has certainly generated a huge response and led to big changes. On the other hand, the response and the changes more or less missed the more important points the article was trying to convey. I do think Hastings has written a good story, but I don’t think the things for which he burned potential future access were the best part of his article. In fact, he may have burned his bridge to write about the aspect of the story that ended up making the biggest splash, but in making that splash, that aspect also seems to have pulled attention away from the more crucial issues he was trying to shine a light on.

I’d be the first to say that techniques and knowledge have a lot more to do with taking good pictures than expensive equipment, but I had my eyes set on a wide-angle lens for a while, especially since we have a pending trip to England that we hope will offer plenty of views of the beautiful English countryside. After saving up some money and deliberating and researching for months, I finally pulled the trigger on a Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM lens last week when I saw it on sale for $45 less than the sticker price. The lens had gotten strong reviews from both the reviewers on Amazon.com and the Digital Photography School website as a good, not-too-expensive option for a wide-angle lens (it’s actually classified as an extra wide angle lens because it goes under 20 mm).

The lens arrived yesterday, well ahead of schedule, and I couldn’t wait to try it out, so I snapped a few pictures in and around the house. At a focal length of 10 mm, lines do start to look distorted, but that’s to be expected. The maximum focal length of 20mm is a bit on the short end, and I found that I had to stand pretty close to the subject. But hey, it’s a wide-angle lens, after all. Overall, I’m very satisfied with the lens after my brief experience with it so far, and the image looks pretty sharp. I’m looking forward to taking it out for a real field test this weekend.

Some samples:

Living room, shot at 10 mm. So that’s why those houses in real estate listings look so spacious.

Rabbit lawn figurine at 20 mm.

Rabbit lawn figurine at 10 mm.

Courtney in the kitchen, shot at 10 mm with me standing a foot away.

Bingley, right before he took a swat at my new lens as I was getting up in his face.

And finally … our two stuffed primates.

Scott Rosenberg has a post at MediaShift Idea Lab today in which he wonders, “Why do so many journalists find it so hard to handle public criticism?” It’s a good thing that Rosenberg isn’t one of those, because I’m about to offer some public criticism of his piece.

A Matter of Context

The part of Rosenberg’s post that bothers me more than anything else is where he cites a passage from the New York Times editor Clark Hoyt’s farewell column:

One passage in Hoyt’s column jumped out at me as a fascinating window onto the psyche of the working journalist today:

Times journalists have been astonishingly candid, even when facing painful questions any of us would want to duck. Of course, journalists don’t relish being criticized in public any more than anyone else. A writer shaken by a conclusion I was reaching told me, if you say that, I’ll have to kill myself. I said, no, you won’t. Well, the writer said, I’ll have to go in the hospital. I wrote what I intended, with no ill consequences for anyone’s health.

“If you say that, I’ll have to kill myself”? Even in jest, the line suggests a thinness of skin entirely inappropriate to any public figure. “Journalists don’t relish being criticized in public any more than anyone else,” according to Hoyt. Yet the work of journalists so often involves criticizing others in public that it is something they must expect in return. Surely they, of all professionals, ought to be able to take what they readily dish out.

In itself, this passage seems ok, until you actually go read Hoyt’s column. Here’s the passage immediately after the paragraph that Rosenberg cited (emphasis added by me):

Those histrionics were extreme and unique. The rule was thoughtful engagement. Take Steve Berman, a respected veteran photo editor, one of several journalists who failed to check out the obituary of a photographer who for years had claimed, falsely, that he took the iconic picture of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his slain father’s casket. After a column pointing out all the missed warning signs, Berman came to thank me. He said he believed in accountability and had learned from the experience. I was surprised but came to know that I should not have been.

Bill Keller, the executive editor, once joked as we walked down the passageway to his office for an interview that he was heading for his weekly proctological exam. But throughout my tenure, Keller was gracious and supportive. When we had what was certainly our disagreement of greatest consequence — over the Times article suggesting that John McCain had had an extramarital affair with a young female lobbyist — Keller showed great equanimity. I said The Times had been off base. Though the story gave ammunition to critics who said the paper was biased, and it was no help to have the public editor joining thousands of readers questioning his judgment about it, Keller said mildly that we would just have to disagree on this one.

That certainly paints a different picture than “if you say that, I’ll have to kill myself.” Whereas Hoyt cites that example as “extreme and unique”, Rosenberg uses it as evidence that such behavior is the norm, calling it “a fascinating window onto the psyche of the working journalist today.” In introducing the excerpt from Hoyt’s column, Rosenberg wrote of New York Times journalists:

It seems the process of being critiqued in public in their own paper continues to be alienating and dispiriting to them.

That’s quite a claim based on one example, an example that the Hoyt himself said was the extreme. When placed in its original context, that passage from Hoyt’s piece is less a window and more a periscope — a tunneled vision showing what lies in one narrow direction — and the way Rosenberg uses the passage, he’s avoiding panning the periscope to see what else is around, since what he would see would conflict with his narrative.

The People Who Are Better Than Journalists at Handling Criticism

Rosenberg starts his piece by pointing to professional athletes, artists, government officials, and businesses as examples of other fields that receive a lot of public criticism and says, “In all these cases, the seasoned professional learns to deal with it. But over and over today, we encounter the sorry spectacle of distinguished reporters losing it when their work is publicly attacked — or columnists sneering at the feedback they get in poorly moderated web comments.”

Yes, it’s a good thing that professional athletes are so much better at handling public criticism …

and government officials …

not to mention artists …

and of course, businesses …

What’s that? I’m being unfair by pointing to a few instances and drawing blanket conclusions? Well, what do you think Rosenberg was doing? As evidence for his argument, he offers up two links — a “bloggers in pajamas” comment from James Risen (which Risen quickly apologized for and yet still got razzed for it) and a “look at the ideologues in my comment section” column by Dana Millbank. He provides a third link later in the post — back to the Risen piece again (and I know there are enough instances of journalists responding badly that you don’t need to recycle links). The fact is, for every spectacle of a journalist behaving badly in response to criticism, there are countless instances when journalists do take criticism in stride and respond thoughtfully. Of course, those don’t get blogged and retweeted because they don’t fit the “old-media curmudgeons in their crumbling ivory tower raging at the world outside that they do not understand” narrative. I think this comment on Rosenberg’s post sums it up pretty well:

I wouldn’t disagree that some journalists can be thin skinned. But the categories of folks you mention at the start all hire armies of public relations people and spend huge sums of money to counter any negative portrayals and massage their reputations with buckets of spin. They hardly take criticism in stride.

On the other hand, the press is one of the most self-flagellating industries I know.

I would argue that when you consider the amount of criticism and the dynamics between the critics and the criticized compared to that in other fields, journalists as a whole handle public criticism about as well as any other professions and are better in some ways and worse in others. Consider:

• How many other professions invite and publish criticism of their work? And traditional media has been doing it for a long time. Newspapers’ publication of letters to the editor look antiquated and outdated as a means of dealing with criticism — and it is, when compared to the kind of transparency and interaction pushed by the Internet — until you consider how many other professions don’t even bother going that far.
• Having worked in and out of the news media, I can say that it is, as the commenter above stated, one of the most self-flagellating industries. How many companies in other industries hire somebody specifically to publicly criticize all the ways in which the company screwed up?
• How many athletes, CEOs, artists, or politicians can you call up directly and berate about their performance? And how many actually have to sit there and listen to you berate them? Journalists do, because a critic is also a consumer of their work — a customer — and hence they cannot simply brush the critic aside.

That said, I do think Rosenberg has a point when he wrote “the typical blogger has more experience dealing with criticism — measuring a reasonable response, managing trolls and restraining the urge to flame — than the typical newsroom journalist.” However, I think this isn’t so much about dealing with criticism as it is about responding to criticism in the blogosphere. I would suggest that a more accurate way of putting it would be “the typical blogger has more experience interacting in a blog setting than the typical newsroom journalist,” which only makes sense.

From seeing fellow journalists respond to criticism over the phone or via e-mail day in and day out for a decade, I get the sense that they know how to do that relatively well and that for most of them, they don’t instinctively lash out when faced with criticism. Sure, they are flabbergasted after the fact when they encounter criticism that they feel makes no sense. But when a critic raises a valid point, most of the journalists I’ve worked with respond in a reasonable manner. The problem is that just as they’ve learned how to calm down an irate caller on the other end of the line and settle into something of a reasonable discussion, some traditional journalists need to learn how to respond to a critique in the blogosphere without pouring gasoline on the fire. There are different rules for different mediums. They need to learn rules such as, “No matter how  much the blogger snarks and generalizes about traditional media, you CANNOT snark and generalize about bloggers because it will only enhance their claim about you being out of touch. It may not be fair, but it is what it is. JUST DON’T DO IT.”

Also adding to the bad appearance is the fact that traditional journalists often seem to face a no-win or hard-to-win situation in responding to criticism from the blogosphere because some of the rules don’t favor them. A snarky and angry blogger is just showing personality and voice, and a little tiff between him and another blogger is just good entertainment. A snarky and angry traditional journalist, on the other hand, is accused of losing it, and a tiff between him and a blogger becomes a battle of old vs. new, good vs. evil, rebel vs. establishment. Sometimes it’s like being in a boxing match where all you can do is deflect the other guy’s punches, and the minute you punch back, you’re disqualified.