What I find most outrageous about this report (done in my hometown, by the way) isn’t whether it’s biased against eating dogs and cats, but that it treats the fact that people in China eat these animals as some sort of new revelation. The first 1:30 of the two-and-a-half-minute report isn’t even about the ban, but instead takes a gawking, “look what we discovered: people here eat cats and dogs!” angle. It’s 1) sensationalist, and 2) presenting old, old news as something new. Seriously, there have been plenty of images about dogs and cats being eaten in China, so what’s the point of sensationalizing the report by having the reporter gawk at that?

Other thoughts:

• Interesting to note that the argument by the Chinese animal rights activists, as cited in the CNN report, is that even though cats and dogs are routinely raised to be sold as pets, there’s always a chance that one could be somebody’s lost pet. Notice why they are advocating for banning eating cats and dogs — not because they feel it’s fundamentally wrong to eat them, but because it’s wrong to mistakenly eat someone’s pet. Also note the other argument cited by the report — quoting a professor as saying that this ban would demonstrate that China has reached a new level of civilization — the implication that the benefit of the ban is not so much that it’s wrong to eat these animals, but that it’s good to show the rest of the world that China is hip to the new ways.
• As for my personal view on eating cats and dogs, see most of the comments on the BoingBoing post about the CNN report. I’ll just say that I can’t wait till the day China takes over the world and imposes its own culinary taboos on other countries. Buying frozen packs of long-dead chicken instead of picking out a clucking hen from the market, taking it home, bending its neck back and running a knife across it, draining its blood, plucking it, and cooking it? What disgusting barbarian ways!!

Disclosure: I’ve never eaten cats, but I have eaten dog meat in China on a couple occasions in my youth. It tasted, well, not like chicken. However, too many years in the United States has corrupted me and I can’t bring myself to eat either now. But there’s plenty of stuff that Cantonese people eat that Westerners might find bizarre or revolting. All I can say is, it’s your loss. Trust me.

Bloggers are increasingly credentialed as “press,” but that means we need a reliability index even more that we did before.

I responded that perhaps instead of a reliability index, it might better serve the users to present them with a trust index broken down by demographics. I want to expand on that thought here. I should clarify up front that I don’t think this should be the only tool we use for determining reliability of a story or source, but I do think it can be an effective one.

What would it look like?

Such an index would be compiled from votes by users on whether they trust a particular source or story. It would show an aggregate trust rating, but more importantly, it would also have multiple tabs showing different demographics and what percentage (and how many) within each group trusts that story or source. Here’s a quick-and-dirty mockup of what such an index would look like. Imagine something like this on every piece of journalism you come across online:

By demographics, I certainly mean basic categories such as age, education, or political affiliation (for stories where that’s relevant), but I also envision categories that are more specifically relevant to a particular story or source. For instance, the trust index on a science-related story would include a breakdown by voters who are scientists. A story about a particular neighborhood would include numbers for voters living within a certain proximity to that neighborhood. The index on an iPad review would include trust levels among people who own Macs vs. people who own PCs. A story about health-care reform would include a tab that shows how closely the voters in the index have kept up with the health-care debate, or how many of them work in the health-care industry, or how many are happy with their health care, or how many are from each income level.

How would this work?

Anyone would be able to sign up to use this trust index, both as a voter and as a source. The way I envision it, when you sign up, you would need to provide some basic demographic information, such as birth year, zip code, level of education, etc. All stories and sources are categorized, and users can pick which categories they want to vote on, such as politics, science, medicine, technology, or news about Chapel Hill, N.C.

From the other side, a user who is a source can also choose to add his/her story or site to the index for others to vote on. The index graphic will be displayed on the story or site, along with a “Trust/Don’t Trust” button for users to vote. When adding a story/site to the index, the source would have to pick which categories it falls into.

In order to vote on stories/sources in a particular category or to add a story/site to a category, users would first have to answer additional questions that provide more category-specific demographic data. For instance, if I want to to vote in the science category, I would have to first answer questions such as:

• Do you work in a job where you conduct scientific research?
• Do you hold an undergraduate/advanced degree in a science field?
• How many science-related stories do you read in a typical week?
• Where do you come down on evolution-vs.-intelligent design?
• Which organelles are the power plants of cells?
• What is the process by which cells reproduce?

Such questions would not only ask the users about their backgrounds as it is related to science, but also actually gauges in some elementary way their basic science literacy. The same goes for other categories. In the political news category, you might get tested on basic knowledge of how the government works; in news about a particular location, you might need to tell us how much time you’ve spent there. Now, considering that not all users would want some of these details associated with their names, I think the index must allow pseudonymous participation. Yes, that would open it up to being gamed, but then again, the same can be said of any open rating system. A hotel owner might sign in under several different names on TripAdvisor.com to give his own establishment five-star ratings. However, if you get enough participation, the numbers offset individuals’ attempts to game the system.

In addition to the questions users must answer when they sign up to vote in or add a story/site to a category, a source can also add one or two questions on a specific story that asks for demographic information specifically relevant to the subject. But these questions would be purely optional for the users who vote. After all, how many hoops are we willing to jump through to vote on something (and that may be one of the reasons this idea won’t work. It might be simply too much hassle to gain widespread participation)?

Why would sources use it?

Legitimacy. If this index catches on and gains widespread use, then the downside of not displaying it on your site would outweigh concerns about using it and getting mediocre ratings. Think about it: When you’re looking at gadgets on Amazon.com or hotels on a travel site, how likely are you to pick one without any reviews? Having a rating on your blog could be in effect saying, “Hey, this blog is participating in this index, which shows, at the very least, that we take ourselves and our content seriously enough to put an accountability meter on our site.”

Why would readers use it?

For the same reasons they leave comments on blog posts and rate products they’ve purchased: to make their opinions known and to help fellow readers. The key, as I mentioned above, is to not make them jump through too many hoops to do it, and it’ll be a balancing act between user convenience and getting enough demographic data for the index to be useful.

Why do it this way?

There a few reasons I favor doing a trust-by-demographics breakdown voted on by users over a one-number rating determined by one or a few editors running the index. First, it harnesses the power of the crowd, and in this case, I think that’s a good thing. Like product ratings at an e-commerce site or hotel reviews on TripAdvisor.com, the more participation you get from people who are actually using a particular piece of journalism, the more useful your rating system is to someone trying to decide whether to trust a source or a story.

My second reason has to do with the way I think people react to journalism versus the way they react to, say, a hotel room. On Twitter, Daniel Bachhuber responded to Jay’s and my tweets with the suggestion that reliability be derived from the quality of the content. My feeling on that is, while there is some kind of baseline, when you’re talking about how people view journalism, “quality of content” is usually a very subjective concept, in part because the subject matter journalism deals with often speaks to (or against) people’s deeply held beliefs and values. Think of it this way: Regardless of whether you are a Republican or Democrat, you are likely to have the same values when it comes to judging the quality of the hotel room you stayed in last night (cleanliness, comfy beds, nice toiletries, etc). The same cannot be said for the values you use to judge government policies or stories about them. Thus, in the case of journalism, the baseline for quality that most people, regardless of their individual backgrounds and values, can agree on would be extremely basic and deal mostly with form and structure, such as not having any typos or using good grammar. The quality of the substance of a story, however, is something much more divisive and subjective.

Therefore, if a reliability rating is handed out by only one person or even just a few people, it’ll invariably raise the question among users of the index: “What makes their judgment any more legitimate than my own?” While I agree with Daniel that the rating may be less subjective if the metrics are transparent, I don’t think it’s possible to have an objective rating system or for a rating system to escape the (correct) perception of subjectivity. In fact, which metrics you pick to evaluate a story is a subjective decision in itself.

That doesn’t mean rating systems can’t be useful if they are subjective, but I think it does mean that instead of taking the tone of, “This story/source is reliable,” a reliability index would be more effective and more widely accepted if it focuses more on telling people, “Here is how much trust this story is getting from different groups of people, classified by background attributes relevant to this story. Use this information to help yourself decide whether you trust it.”

Certainly, I think the breakdown-by-demographics index can, and perhaps should, be complemented by a rating handed down by one or a few editors, much like how e-commerce sites have their own ratings for a product as well as a rating by users. However, personally, I’ve always found the user ratings to be much more helpful, due in no small part to the simple fact that there are more of them, giving me a wider range of opinions and a better idea of how people generally feel about a product. In that context, how much value is there in a numerical rating by one editor when it is compared to the ratings of tens, hundreds or even thousands of users? For that reason, I think an editor’s job should instead be to provide objective metrics about a story or source — how many factual errors there are, how many times this source has interviewed the same person in stories about the same subject in the past three months, etc. — and to point out any important relevant facts people should know when determining the trustworthiness of the story or source (i.e.: A source writing about health-care reform moonlights as a lobbyist for for insurance companies).

Most Importantly

To talk about what I feel is the most important strength of a breakdown-by-demographic index, let’s use an example. Let’s say someone writes a piece that presents intelligent design with equal scientific legitimacy as evolution. It would probably spark the usual back-and-forth in the comment section, which is all fine and dandy for the spirit of free debate, but for someone who hasn’t made up their mind about whether this story is trustworthy, that back-and-forth is basically he-said-she-said.

In that scenario, a reliability rating handed out by one or a few editors does relatively little to help the reader, since that’s just one or a couple voices in the crowd, and regardless of whether the rating is favorable to the story or not, it’s not that hard for the other side to call into question the legitimacy of the rating since it’s merely “the biased opinion of just a few people.” However, if you have a rating that’s a composite of hundreds if not thousands of users, then it begins to 1) attain more legitimacy, and 2) give you a better idea of how this story is viewed by the public. Furthermore, and more importantly, the breakdown by relevant demographics would play a crucial role here. Imagine how it would influence your decision on whether to trust the story if, say, you can see that 99 percent of every voter who has an advance science degree don’t trust this story, or that despite an 85-percent trust rating, you see that 300 of the 400 people who voted believe in intelligent design but that of the 35 voters who are scientists, none trusts the article.

That last point illustrates what I believe to be the greatest value of such an index: It’s not just an index on the reliability of the story or source being rated; it’s also an indirect index on the reliability of the people doing the rating. I believe the latter might even trump the former in significance in how someone decides whether to trust a story or source. If the news is social, then it is the people who discuss a report and the frame in which they pass it on that give it context and weight. Therefore, information about those people are crucial to our understanding of a story. If the story in the example above appeared in a forum that attracts a mostly pro-intelligent design crowd (but doesn’t clearly label itself as such), the composite reliability rating and most of the comments might favor the article, and someone who hasn’t been thoroughly informed on the subject might be misled by that seemingly lopsided discussion. However, if there’s a breakdown right there showing that most of the people who voted have a poor understanding of science, but that the few scientists who voted all distrust the article, that puts the discussion in a new context. In this way, the breakdown-by-demographics index alerts us when we stumble into echo chambers and acts as a check-and-balance mechanism for composite ratings and discussions that are skewed simply because the story is being presented to a skewed audience.

Are the examples the writer gives to back up his claims legit? Sure. But that’s akin to someone pointing to the inane portions of the Internet and saying there’s nothing good on the Web, or someone pointing to the harlequin romance novels section as evidence that bookstores offer nothing but crap. Like any medium, there are plenty of crap on Twitter, but there are also a lot of good stuff, too. You just need to know where to look, the same way that you know when you walk into a bookstore to stay away from the trashy romance section and head straight toward whichever section you’re interested in. However, the way Twitter is set up, it’s kind of like heading into a bookstore where the books are all mixed up and scattered about, with little signage within the store itself to tell you where to find the best-sellers and classics.

Hey, if you don’t like Twitter because you’re just not into the concept of sharing or social media, that’s totally fine. To each their own. But if you don’t like Twitter because you feel like there’s nothing of substance on there, then your disdain is unwarranted because you’re just not looking in the right places. So here are a few ways that I’ve found to be effective in locating the good and avoiding the crap on Twitter:

• Pick topics that you’re interested in, and look for people who tweet about them: I’ve found that Twitter often works best as a tool for immersing yourself in a particular topic. For instance, being a former journalist, one of my interests is obviously journalism, and I’ve tailored my Twitter feed to include a large number of good sources who share insights and links to interesting pieces about that topic. I’m literally flooded by a deluge of information about journalism through my Twitter feed every day. The same with my other interests, such as zoos, photography, and traveling. And it’s much easier to find good Twitter sources if you’re searching by what they are tweeting about rather than who they are. Until I realized that, I didn’t really get the appeal of Twitter either because I just didn’t know whom to follow.

Be sure to check out the people followed by the people you follow.
• Whom do the followed follow? Be sure to check out whom the people you follow are following, and the people who send tweets to the people you follow (to find people who are sending tweets to JaneDoe, search on Twitter for “@JaneDoe”). Also, look at their Twitter lists. These are great ways to find people who share a particular common interest. It’s like a trail of breadcrumbs that can lead you to good sources.
• Follow RTs to the source: RT on Twitter means retweet — retransmitting something originally tweeted by someone else. When retransmitting, it’s common courtesy to put RT and then the user name of whoever originally tweeted it. If you find a retweeted link or insight interesting, following it back to the originating source and see if they’re worth following.
• Use Twitter directories such as WeFollow: You can search for topics that interest you and see who in each category has the most followers. Depending on the category, the ones with the most followers may not necessarily have the best, or even good, Twitter feeds, but it’s a starting point. Pick some of those accounts, and repeat the steps outlined in the previous bullet points. Again, this is searching for Twitter users based on what they are tweeting about rather than who they are, which gives you a much better chance of finding useful feeds.
• Do your favorite bloggers have Twitter accounts? Go on their blogs and look for links to their Twitter feeds.
• When all else fail, Google: Just go to Google and search for “[topic of interest] on Twitter”. You’ll be surprised how often that turns up something interesting. Aside from turning up individual tweets, the Google search could also find lists of good Twitterers compiled by others. That’s how I found a comprehensive list of zoos that are on Twitter that otherwise would have taken me a long time to track down.
• DON’T FOLLOW CELEBRITIES: The only “celebrity” I follow on Twitter is William Shatner, and that’s just because I’m a Star Trek geek. I’ve found a lot of celebrity Twitter feeds to be of the inane, narcissistic, “here’s what I had for lunch” type that critics of Twitter mock. They’re also more likely to have ghostwriters penning their tweets. I guess when you can get legions of followers just based on who you are and not what you tweet, there really isn’t much motivation to tweet stuff of substance, especially when the mundane, everyday details of a celebrity’s life is probably what the people who follow them are after.  If you’re looking for more substance, however, look for non-celebrities who mindcast instead of lifecast.
• Followers come and go: Tweak your feed to suit your needs. For instance, I’m planning a trip to England, so I went and looked for people who tweet about traveling in England and followed some of them while organizing the others into a Twitter list. When my trip is over, chances are I’ll just go ahead and stop following them or paying attention to the list.
• Quality counts, but so does quantity: Obviously, you should follow only Twitter accounts that offer content that interests you. However, if you’re only following a handful of people, chances are your Twitter feed won’t be all that interesting to look at. It wasn’t until I was following about 100 accounts that my feed began being consistently interesting. It only makes sense: A lot of people contributing to a feed beats a few people contributing to a feed, and since you get to decide who contributes to your feed, you can cut out the crap and distill the feed into something where a high percentage of what comes across is substantial and interesting. Most of the people in my feed send only a few tweets a day, and not a single one of those feeds are interesting all the time, but when put together, they form a steady stream of interesting information, insights, and links.

Children of the Chen clan, circa 1909.

Courtney and I standing on the same grounds as those Chen descendants in 2009.

Note: This entry is cross-posted at http://thezhus.tumblr.com, the blog focusing on my book-writing effort.

Meredith makes some very good points in the presentation, but I’m also impressed with the way he makes his points. The presentation was obviously tailored specifically for scientists. He cites examples and issues that matter to them, and shows them that he understands some of their reluctance to use social media. He gives them reasons for using multimedia and social media that are specifically incentives for scientists.

As for the points Meredith makes, I’m a big fan of using multimedia to communicate science, and I think Meredith is dead on in encouraging researchers to think visually when looking at how to present their research. Having worked in different fields, in both design and non-design roles, it’s amazing to me how often thinking visually is one of the keys to effective communication and the failure to do so creates problems.

I came across this piece by Mimi Johnson yesterday about her husband’s decision to leave newspapers and wanted to share it. Many of the sentiments expressed within it are no doubt familiar to anyone who has worked in newspapers. Yes, newspapers are like a demanding mistress. Yes, newspapers never love their journalists back. Yes, walking away is like ending a relationship. And yes, it sucks to have to move every time you changed jobs in this profession (one of the reasons I got out).

Personally, I’m very glad I walked away from the business before my relationship with it got to the state described in this piece. My decision to leave came in 2005. There had already been a couple waves of layoffs at newspapers around the country, including one at my paper, though nothing like what has transpired the last couple years. I was a month shy of 26, and it was the first time I had gone through a layoff. That early January night when I found out two of my colleagues in the sports department (along with many others at the paper) — both excellent and dedicated journalists — were laid off was the only time I’ve ever found myself struggling to concentrate at work, so much so that at one point I had to go outside and clear my head just so I could focus enough to get the paper out.

Wounds heal, as those wounds did, to a degree, over the course of that year. But it was obvious that it was only a matter of time before fresh wounds would be inflicted, in the form of more layoffs and budget cuts. As news of the shakeup at my paper made the rounds in the journalism circle, other papers started pilfering our talented journalists who were looking for an out. I got a few inquiries myself from good papers. Yet when I looked out over the newspaper landscape, I could see that the same tsunami was coming for every port-of-call. It wasn’t a matter of “if”, but merely “when”. When recruiters from other newspapers told me, “We don’t lay off people,” my unspoken response was “Yeah, but you will.”

I had always known that I wanted to try my hand at other fields before settling on one, yet I loved journalism and newspapers so much that when I rejoined my first paper at age 25, I honestly could see myself working there until I was 30 — well beyond my original career plans — and I could see myself possibly coming back to newspapers someday after adventures afield. But a year later, I knew that when I walk away from the business, I wouldn’t be coming back, at least not full-time and not with anywhere near as much blood, sweat, and tears as I had poured into it over the previous six years.

Four years after I walked away from working at newspapers full-time, I’ve had absolutely no regret about the decision. I have regrets about the fact that I had to leave and about watching once-great papers torn down, but never about the decision to leave. I actually still go into my old paper every now and then and help my friends out a bit. The little extra money is nice and it’s always good to get back in the saddle again, however briefly, but mainly I do it out of a sense of loyalty to friends who are still in the biz. Those little glimpses into the newsroom today — walking into a building where 4/5ths of the cubicles are unoccupied, seeing people bust ass just to get the paper out when in the past they were busting ass to put out a great product, and seeing the products get thinner and thinner and the workloads get heavier and heavier — remind me that I walked away at the right time, before a once-beautiful relationship had degenerated into bitterness, frustration, and scorn. I can still at least look back at my time with newspapers with more fondness than anguish, without feeling the need to demonize, villainize, or ridicule them for what they did to me, and for that I’m thankful.

Note: I’m going to start cross-posting some blog entries about my book-writing process on both my primary blog, Matters of Varying Insignificance, and the Tumblr blog I set up specifically for the book.

A major figure in my book will be my paternal grandfather, who was a renowned practitioner of Chinese medicine in his hometown. The first time I sat down and talked to my dad about grandpa for the book, our talk quickly turned into an hour-long crash-course introduction to Chinese medicine, and I thought I would share a couple of the interesting points here.

My dad, who read a lot of my grandfather’s writings about practicing Chinese medicine, explained some of the basic fundamental differences between Chinese and Western medicine. The biggest is that while Chinese medicine has terms such as lung, heart, kidney, and liver, they refer to functions rather than specifics organ. Also, in Chinese medicine, a disease within one function is viewed as a result of problems in another.

Therefore, the approach to treatment is quite different. One of the basic principles of Chinese medicine is “Pouring water from above to keep a pot from boiling over is not as effective as pulling out firewood from below.” In that saying, the boiling pot is a local symptom, whereas the fire is the true cause of the ailment. Therefore, simply pouring cold water into the pot to cool it off doesn’t solve the problem, as the fire still rages and will boil the pot again soon. On the other hand, if you remove firewood, it’ll reduce the fire and cool off the water, treating the ailment at its root.

My dad gave me an example to illustrate how this philosophy is practiced: If someone is coughing up blood, Chinese medicine would say it’s caused by “fire” in the liver rising upward through the body, meaning that the liver function is too strong. However, instead of applying treatment to the liver or the lung, where the cough is coming from, a Chinese doctor might prescribe medicine that affects the kidney function. Why? Because in Chinese medicine, there are five elements: gold, water, fire, wood, and soil. The liver is classified as “wood”, the lung is classified as “gold”, and the kidney belongs to “water”. So when the wood (liver) catches on fire and gets too hot, it will melt the gold (lung), hence the coughing up of blood. The wood is catching fire because it is too dry, therefore the treatment would be to add water (strengthen the kidney function).

To a Westerner, this might sound like rubbish, not to mention backward, Dark Ages-esque pseudo-science, but as someone who grew up being a beneficiary of Chinese medicine, I can say that it does work for a surprising array of ailments. A part of my book will discuss my grandfather’s view toward the roles of Chinese and Western medicine — a relationship that hasn’t always been smooth in Chinese history.

My family and I celebrated the coming of the year of the tiger by dining out on Chinese New Year’s Eve and talking to some of our relatives in China the next morning. They said that they are off until the ninth day of the new year, which made me insanely jealous.

Every Chinese New Year, my mom always makes turnip cake and New Year cake. It’s been a tradition since I was a kid, but from what my relatives in China tell me, many in China don’t even make these dishes anymore. Instead, they just go out and buy them from vendors.

I also got in a nice 2.5-hour chat with my dad to help me gather information for the book I’m working on about my family’s history. Oh, and the Tar Heels actually won a game. All in all, a pretty nice weekend.

Oh, and if you’re interested, check out performances from the New Year Gala on CCTV. It’s kind of like the equivalent of bringing in the new year with Dick Clark.

And finally, a clip of fireworks to bring in the new year:

I’ve started working on a book about the history of my father’s side of the family. It’s an idea that I’ve been toying with for a few years now, and our trip back to China in 2008-09 convinced me to do it. I’ve started a Tumblr blog to post updates about my progress with the book, and I’m hoping having to post to that blog on a regular basis will help keep me on track with the book. I don’t know if the book will have mass appeal or not, though I’m writing it for a broader audience than just my family. In any case, even if my family and I are the only people to read it, I would still want to do this. I’ve put up an introductory post on the Tumblr blog giving more details about the book and why I want to write it. I’m going to add a widget on the side of this blog to pipe in the updates from that blog. Stay tuned for more.

I wrote three weeks ago that the Tar Heels were looking more like an NIT team than an NCAA Tournament team after their drubbing at the hands of Wake Forest, and they haven’t changed that impression in the last four games. In fact, if anything, they’ve reinforced the idea that this team is not going to the Big Dance this year. They ended a three-game skid with a win at N.C. State, but promptly reverted to their woeful ways with another three-game skid. With the ACC season halfway over, they are at 2-6 in the league, 13-10 overall.

The good news for UNC’s NCAA hopes is that the league has shown itself to be thoroughly mediocre this season, so there’s a good chance to move up the standings, which currently look like this:

I think if the Heels go 8-8 in the ACC, they will end up with solid NCAA Tournament credentials since that would give them a 19-12 overall record, plus they would have gone 6-2 leading up to the postseason, with at least one win over either Duke or Wake Forest, both of whom are in the top three in the league right now. At that point, even if they don’t win a game in the ACC Tournament, I would say they have a solid shot at an NCAA berth.

If they go 7-9 in the league, however, I think they’re going to be in trouble. The only way I can see them getting into the Big Dance with that record would be if they knock off Duke and make a strong run in the ACC Tournament (probably as in getting to the title game). And even at that point it would be iffy. I can’t see the ACC getting more than six NCAA bids this season, and if you look at the standings, even if the current top five teams in the league all go just .500 the rest of the way, they would still be out of UNC’s reach unless the Tar Heels go at least 7-1 (in which case there would be no worries about UNC’s tournament  hopes anyway). So in essence UNC is fighting for the last bid from the ACC. While UNC certainly can win more games, the problem is that there are currently four teams between it and the sixth spot in the standings. Even if a couple of the top five teams tumble, chances are at least a couple of those four teams in the middle of the standings would rise as a result and keep UNC out of the top six spots in the league. So if UNC goes 7-9 in the league and finishes outside of the top six, it would be hard to give a bid to the Heels over another team that’s ahead of it in the league standings without some additional compelling reason, such as a big run in the conference tournament.

How UNC Will Get in the NCAA Tournament

Of course, the Tar Heels would have to actually start winning games before it has any reason to be scoreboard-watching. On the bright side, UNC’s schedule does get easier than the first half of the season, as it plays the two teams below it in the standings — Miami and N.C. State. UNC also has three games against Florida State, Georgia Tech, and Boston College, three of the four teams in that glut in the middle of the standings, so the Tar Heels do have some control over their own destiny as they play some of the teams they are trying to catch. All of those teams have shown themselves to be inconsistent and beatable for UNC. It’s no easy task to run the table against these teams, but it’s something UNC must do to have any shot at getting into the Big Dance.

That leaves the two games against Duke and the road game at Wake Forest. Duke has looked vulnerable, especially on the road, and is ripe for an upset. The question is whether this UNC team can pull it off. I think it’d be asking too much for these Tar Heels to win in Cameron, so the upset would likely have to come this Wednesday night in Chapel Hill.

So here’s what I think UNC needs to do to more or less secure an NCAA berth: Upset Duke on Wednesday or win at Wake Forest (which I think is tougher to do than beating Duke in Chapel Hill) and go 5-0 against FSU, Georgia Tech, Boston College, Miami, and N.C. State. That would assure them of no worse than 8-8 in the league, with quality wins over top-10 opponents Duke and Michigan State and a tough strength of schedule.

If UNC goes 0-3 against Duke and Wake Forest, then I really think it would need to make a run to the ACC tournament final to have a legitimate shot at an NCAA berth. If they make it that far, they would have naturally picked up a couple quality wins along the way in the ACC tournament while beefing up their overall record.

All these scenarios aside, my gut feeeling is that UNC will play better in the second half of the season, but will likely finish no better than 7-9 (and 6-10 seems more probable), and end up in the NIT. Hopefully, it’ll leave such a horrible taste in the young players’ mouths that they will never want to experience it again.

Looking Back at the First Half of the ACC Season

UNC’s road woes haven’t helped its cause, but if you look at UNC’s three road ACC losses in the first half of the season — at Clemson, Virginia Tech, and Maryland — I think they were to be expected anyway even if UNC was playing better. You knew Clemson’s pressure defense would be a tough matchup for the Heels’ young backcourt, and I expected that one to be ugly. I also expected UNC to struggle at Maryland, considering the Terps and Greivis Vasquez gave last season’s Tar Heels fits, much less this season’s team. And Virginia Tech has become one of the tougher places to play in the league, so I was figuring that game to be a toss-up, which was exactly what it ended up being, going down to the final minute.

The problem has been how the Heels have fared in Chapel Hill since league play began, going 1-3 in ACC games in the Smith Center, with the losses being a last-second defeat to Georgia Tech and drubbings at the hands of Wake Forest and Virginia. Even in the two blowouts, UNC was in a competitive game at some point in the second half. If the Tar Heels could have won two of those three, they would be right in the middle of the conference standings and in decent position to make a second-half run to secure an NCAA bid instead of the backs-against-the-wall situation they find themselves in.

As far as how the team is playing, I think the Heels are performing a little better now than back when they were losing to Clemson, Georgia Tech, and Wake. I can see some of the younger players making progress again, whereas a couple weeks ago they seemed to be regressing. The problem is that this team has not just one, but three big weaknesses — ball-handling, defense, and half-court offense — and two of those three seem to crop up in each game to doom the Tar Heels. Also, their key players are taking turns disappearing each game, and this isn’t a team that can overcome that.

A few other observations:

• I don’t know if anybody is keeping track of such stats, but Marcus Ginyard must have one of the worst touches-to-turnovers ratio in the league. Forget the shooting woes that the TV announcers keep mentioning or the less-than-stellar defense that he has been showing in part because of his injuries. What the Heels need from Ginyard more than anything else is sound decisions with the ball, and he’s not giving them that, not by a long shot. It seems like half the time he touches the ball, he ends up turning it over. Most of the time it’s not even due to good defense, but rather his own mental lapses, whether it be not cleanly handling a simple pass on the perimeter or making terrible passes up court in transition. In many ways, he has shown worse judgment with the ball than the less experienced players.
• I’m getting sick of watching Larry Drew II drive to the basket only to whip an impossible pass every time to an unsuspecting teammate that usually leads to a turnover. The frustrating thing is that he would do this even when he has his man beat and has a decent shot at a driving layup. That’s the main advantage Dexter Strickland has over Drew — Strickland isn’t afraid to drive to the hoop and finish, while Drew is.
• If the Tar Heels are going to make a second-half run, I have a feeling Jon Henson is going to be a big part of it. He has come on strong in the last couple games and seems to be getting more comfortable offensively. His long frame already makes him a good perimeter presence on defense, and he has started aggressively taking the ball to the hoop, something this team has sorely lacked. Even with his lanky build, I think he’s getting closer to becoming a consistently valuable contributor.
• One trend to watch for in the coming weeks: Opposing players getting back on defense trying to poke away from Dexter Strickland from behind. Strickland had his pocket picked from behind a few times while flying up court in the loss at Virginia Tech and showed similar unsteadiness at Maryland. It doesn’t take long for other teams to pick up on the fact that he’s kind of loose with the dribble in transition.
• Ed Davis may be averaging 14.5 points and 9.5 rebounds, but that’s got to be the least impactful near double-double in the country. He just never seems to be a factor when UNC needs a basket, and despite his rebounds and blocked shots, he too often gets muscled into bad position on defense, allowing opposing big men to score easily in the lane. On offense, he doesn’t establish himself enough in the post, and he doesn’t convert enough of the easy first and second chances he gets around the basket.
• Watching this team play, I’m reminded of the 8-20 season back in 2002. I don’t mean this team is as bad as that squad. But I remember watching that year’s team and thinking, “Any moment now, they’re going to have a key play or spurt that flips on the switch and this team is going to figure it out and turn things around.” Of course, they never did. That season taught me that 1) no program is too big to fail, and 2) there is no switch to flip. A team gets better incrementally, and a squad playing horrible basketball with multiple gaping holes isn’t going to become a winning team overnight. The difference between this year’s team and the 8-20 team is that the 8-20 team was bad because it didn’t have good players, while this season’s team is bad because it’s playing with it head in its ass. It’s not being out-talented; it’s killing itself with horrible mental lapses, often on the simplest of plays, such as making a basic entry pass or covering the other team’s best 3-point shooter.
• Going into the season, many people were expecting this squad to play like the 2005-06 team, which had a good season despite losing most of their top players to the NBA after a title year. Here are some surprising stats: This season’s team is actually averaging more points, more rebounds, and more blocked shots than that 2005-06 squad, with an essentially identical assists-to-turnover ratio. Of course, that 2005-06 teams played better defense and shot much better from the free-throw line. By the way, that team was 3-3 in the league before winning nine of its last 10 regular-season games to finish 12-4 in the ACC.
• If you are wondering whether this UNC team is closer to the middle or the bottom of the league in terms other than wins and losses, consider this number: It has lost four ACC games by double digits — more than anyone else in the league, even the two teams below it in the standings. That doesn’t bode well, and is another sign that this isn’t a team that’s on the verge of a turnaround. I would say that right now UNC has a better chance of finishing last than it has of finishing sixth.

Since its introduction, the iPad has drawn a fair amount of criticism, a significant part of which centers around its limited content-creation features and lack of ports that have become computing standards. Defenders of the device have often said that this is a device that’s meant for “normal” consumers, not geeks, and that from the average consumer point of view, the device does what most of them need to do on a computer, without the headaches that a computer brings. One article on TechCrunch said that this device is for older, non-tech-savvy people like our parents. That got me thinking: What do my parents use their computers for, and can the iPad meet those needs?

Meet my dad:

• 60 years old
• A scientist
• Knows how to use a computer but is not tech savvy.
• Has a couple of Dell desktops that he and my mom (who’s definitely not tech-savvy and doesn’t use a computer that much) use in some form or fashion everyday.
• Has a plain vanilla cellphone, and that suits him just fine.
• Twitter? Facebook? What’s that?
• Doesn’t have a laptop and really has no need for one as he rarely does computing on the go.
• He drives to work, so there’s no reading during the commute.
• Rarely watches videos on his computer. Prefers movies on his big-screen TV. The only online videos he looks at are the occasional YouTube clip.

Here are some of the things my parents use their computers for:

• E-mail, Internet.
• Word processing, spreadsheets.
• Frequently upload photos from their camera to Flickr.
• On a semi-regular basis, my dad has photos of cell cultures from work that he needs to crop, tone, caption, and save. Currently, he does this with an old copy of Photoshop, which I installed for him and showed him how to use.
• Occasionally make photo books from their pictures using the book-layout program from Blurb.
• An ongoing project of converting old home videos to digital files and burning them to CDs/DVDs.
• Another ongoing project of scanning in old family photos so they can be stored digitally.

Looking at that list, the iPad handles the first two items fine (though you have to shell out for their iWorks apps). The third item — uploading pictures to Flickr — is manageable as well, though, again, you have to buy the special camera adapter kit (it’s such a crock that you need a cable other than the one your camera came with). As for the fourth item — toning lab photos — I suppose he can download a Photoshop app or use a low-end online editing program, though he would be missing some more advanced features that he uses occasionally. As for the last three items, I’m guessing he’ll be SOL if he wants to do them on the iPad.

While e-mail and Internet make up by far the biggest slice of my parents’ computer usage, they are by no means the only things they need a computer for. The other items on the list, while not daily needs, are important enough to them that they would never replace their computer with a device that can’t do those things. And not being computer geeks, it’s much more likely that they will just buy one machine that meets all those needs rather than buying an iPad and another computer. The same likely holds true for my father-in-law, who mostly uses a computer for e-mail and Internet, but also for one other relatively minor thing that happens to be very important to him — scanning in his watercolor paintings and turning them into postcards to sell when he goes to an art show. Again, an iPad might meet 80 to 90 percent of his computing needs, but that last 10 percent is pretty darn important to him, and he’s more likely to buy one computer to meet 100 percent of his needs rather than an iPad to meet 90 percent and another computer for the other 10 percent. If the iPad were no more than a couple hundred bucks, my parents and in-laws might consider getting it as a toy, but for the same cost as a desktop that can do everything they need, I don’t see them getting it in addition to a computer.

That’s one reason I think the “this is for the average consumer, not geeks” argument doesn’t hold up — it seems to assume that the average consumer has no computing needs other than Web surfing and basic word processing/spreadsheet. While the average non-geek consumers might use their computer primarily for e-mail and Internet, chances are that most of them will have a handful of other minor but important computing needs that crop up from time to time. You don’t have to be a geek to need content-creation features, the ability to have more than one program open at a time, or a USB port. While they may be infrequent needs, they are important enough for the average consumers to take into account when purchasing their next computer. And if they aren’t “geeks” and aren’t tethered to a computing device all day long, then what are the chances that they would spend double the money to buy two devices when they can fill all those needs with just one device?

I don’t doubt the iPad will sell a ton of units when it becomes available, but I think the majority of those sales will be to people who are closer to the geek side than the average consumer. A lot of the praise for the iPad so far has been about its potential, and I definitely recognize what it, and other tablet devices, can become. However, from a consumer point of view, the question is not “What can the iPad do in two or three years?” It’s “What can the iPad do right now, and should I spend money on the version that’s available?” The potential of a gadget is something geeks worry about. Your average consumer doesn’t buy a device for the profound technological shift it symbolizes or what a future incarnation of it might be able to do. Even if you can build rocket ships and perform open-heart surgery with future generations of the iPad, it doesn’t change the fact that the Gen 1 version that you’re looking at right now can’t do those things. I’m pretty sure I, or my typical-consumer dad, won’t want to buy the iPad as it is now. Maybe we’d reconsider by the time Generation 2 or 3 comes out and the device actually lives up to its potential (and possibly get even cheaper).

Sound familiar? It should. It’s basically a dead-on impression of that abomination of a Star Trek film last year, and what makes it even funnier is that this came a couple years before that Star Trek film, and then J.J. Abrams went and did exactly what Stargate was making fun of. You can’t even make up stuff like this. To call this clip a parody of the Trek movie would be to deny the eerie resemblance between the two, except one was meant to mock and the other actually thought this was a good idea.

One of the other reasons that we love Stargate is how it constantly rips off old Star Trek plots and admits as much with not-so-subtle tips-of-the-hat to Trek (not to mention a procession of former Trek actors as guest stars on the show). In the same episode as the previous clip, they also did a Star Trek parody:

Once again, the portion after the parody clip makes fun of so many of the things that made the last Star Trek movie so horrible. I wonder if the planning meetings for that Trek movie were anything like this, except not in jest.

We also took some video of the snow, including a couple clips of our cats tentatively venturing to the edge of the snow:

A clip of our yard covered in snow and a giant icicle that formed on our gutter:

Thanks to Telltale Games, Guybrush Threepwood is back, with a vengeance!

While I was growing up, I became a huge fan of adventure games. The love affair began with me typing “Push rock” and seeing a giant boulder roll over and crush Sir Graham. And then I discovered LucasArts’ adventure games and was immediately hooked. Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, The Dig, the entire Monkey Island series, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Grim Fandango. I played them all and loved each one. This was an era when a great game meant a great story rather than flashy graphics, and LucasArts was the master of that craft, serving one delightful mix of great stories, irreverent humor, and creative puzzles after another. They were such enjoyable gaming experiences that even after I’ve beaten the game, I’ve gone back and played each one multiple times over the years, just to experience the games again.

And then, sometime around 2000, after the release of the fourth Monkey Island game, LucasArts apparently decided that the only games worth its time were Star Wars games. It canceled sequels to Full Throttle and Sam & Max, and just like that, an amazing lineage of adventure games came to an abrupt end. The rest of the adventure-game genre was drying up as well. After yearning for years for a new adventure game from LucasArts, I had given up hope and presumed the adventure game genre to be dead.

Then, last year, we discovered a new Sam & Max game. We played it and loved it. In many ways, it was the classic LucasArts game, displaying the many traits of its impressive pedigree that made adventure games great. However, it wasn’t made by LucasArts. Instead, it came from a company called Telltale Games. Then, a couple weeks ago, I discovered that they made a fifth installment in the Monkey Island series — easily my favorite computer game franchise. My wife and I have been playing it for the last couple weeks and love it. Again, it’s right in line with its predecessors — great storytelling (I guess that’s to be expected from a company called Telltale Games), hilarious puzzles and dialogues, and an array of eccentric characters.

While downloading the game from the company’s Web site, I poked around the site and found out that Telltale Games was actually founded by a couple of former LucasArts developers who wanted to bring the story games that LucasArts turned into an art form back in vogue. Their games are slightly different from the traditional LucasArts adventure games in that they are episodic and released on a monthly basis. I actually kind of like the episodic format, as it divides a game up and gives you a clear goal for each stage of the game. And from what we’ve seen, each episode is chocked full of puzzles, making for at least a few hours of play on their own. It’s just great to see somebody finally breathing life into adventure games that understand how to be entertaining by engaging the player’s mind instead of just serving up a boatload of cool graphics. Here’s hoping another golden age dawns on the genre.

Group shopping tuangou from Marketplace on Vimeo.

Bongo decided to flop down in front of the door after his walk one afternoon and refused to budge. Our walks were always … adventuresome.

A week before Christmas, I found out that my friend Ryan’s beagle, Bongo, had lung cancer. I found out last night that they had to put him down on Wednesday. Bongo wasn’t my dog, but Ryan and I shared a townhouse right after I had graduated from college when he adopted the beagle, so I helped raise him for a couple years, and I certainly had a strong attachment to him.

One of my earliest memories of Bongo was the morning after Ryan brought him home. I had gone to work shortly after he brought Bongo home the evening before, so I saw little of the beagle. The next morning, while I was still fast asleep, the beagle pushed open my door, darted into the room, jumped onto my bed, and stuck his nose in my face to say hi. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, though it took some doing for the beagle and me to get comfortable with each other. Bongo was the first large pet I lived with, and it took a while for me to adjust to him. Before that, my strongest memories of dogs was being snapped at by one on my first night in the United States and being chased by two of them while at a garage sale when I was young. After we got Bongo, I had to learn to beagle-proof the house (he loved getting into trash cans and looted the pantry on multiple occasions when we didn’t close the door all the way). He wasn’t exactly the smartest dog, he frequently tried to steal food from your plate when you weren’t looking, and we didn’t exactly get off to a great start as he was quite territorial for a while while trying to declare himself second-in-command of the house behind Ryan.

Our walks were almost always adventuresome, as ol’ beagle tended to follow his nose and pay heed to little else. On one of the first times I took him out for a walk, someone had thrown out a Bojangles bag in the middle the road with a biscuit still inside, and the moment Bongo caught whiff of that crack-seasoning goodness, he made a bee line for it with such determination and will that he dragged me with him, and I simply couldn’t pull him away from the bag. Eventually all I could do was stand there and greet passing vehicles — which had to veer into the other lane to go around us — with a sheepish grin. Yet, over time, Bongo and I grew close, and even years after I had moved away, he was always excited to see me whenever I visited.

Finding out that Bongo had cancer left me stunned, and though I had accepted that the probable end was likely soon to come, it still doesn’t make it any easier to lose an old friend. I hadn’t had a chance to touch base with Ryan since the holidays, and now I wish I had gone to see Bongo sometime in the last couple weeks. At least I can find a little bit of comfort in knowing that he is no longer suffering from his ailment, and that he led a very pampered life after he was adopted. Ever since I lived with Bongo, every time I see someone walking a beagle while I’m driving/biking/walking, I can’t help but smile and think of my old beagle pal, and it’ll be even more so now.

A few more Bongo pictures from over the years:

From left: JC, Ryan, Bongo, and me after a few drinks, circa 2006.

Bongo loved his  milkbones.

Now, more than halfway through the season, I’m getting to the point where I would be thrilled if the Tar Heels, mired in a funk in which they’ve lost three in a row and four of five, just make the NCAA Tournament. Wednesday night’s drubbing by Wake Forest left UNC at 12-7 (1-3 in the ACC) with 12 games left:

Jan 26    @N.C. State
Jan 31    Virginia
Feb 4    @Virginia Tech
Feb 7    @Maryland
Feb 10    Duke
Feb 13    N.C. State
Feb 16    @Georgia Tech
Feb 20    @Boston College
Feb 24    Florida St.
Feb 27    @Wake Forest
Mar 2    Miami (Fla.)
Mar 6    @Duke

If the Heels are to get to 20 wins in the regular season, they’ll need to go 8-4 the rest of the way. Looking at that schedule, I can only see one game that I can honestly say the Heels should win — at Boston College. Every other game is at best a toss-up, and this team hasn’t shown the traits you need to win the close games — taking care of the ball and being mentally tough. Seven of the remaining 12 games are on the road, and aside from N.C. State, none of the other road opponents has lost more than one game at home. UNC, by the way, has the worst road record in the league, going 1-5 away from Chapel Hill so far. The schedule also includes a game against league-leading Virginia; two against second-place Duke, which is playing the toughest defense I’ve seen from Duke in a while; a game at Maryland, whose Greivis Vasquez always gives the Heels fits; and rematches at Georgia Tech and Wake Forest, both of whom have already beaten UNC in Chapel Hill.

The Heels certainly have the talent and the ability to hang with just about anybody in the league, but they haven’t played like an NCAA Tournament team lately. Looking back, this team might’ve played its best ball in the early part of the season, when it held its own in that brutal stretch against Michigan State, Kentucky, and Texas. The Heels went 1-2 in that stretch, but honestly they played better — against tougher opponents and in more hostile environments — than they have in the past two or three weeks. Even when they were winning games around the holidays, they weren’t playing that well. They blew most of a late 17-point lead before pulling away from Rutgers. They routed Albany but ended the game on the wrong end of a 23-2 run in the last seven minutes. Even when they pulled away from Virginia Tech in the second half, that was mostly because they caught fire at the right time and hit five straight 3-pointers. Aside from that, the Heels have frankly been very mediocre. Their big men have been outplayed every night for the past couple weeks despite their preseason hype, and everyone on the team have been timid and careless with the ball. The outside shooting has been missing except for a few spurts. Marcus Ginyard and Deon Thompson have not shown the kind of leadership or experienced play you would expect from two battle-tested seniors. Throw in injuries to Tyler Zeller and Ed Davis, and you might have the makings of a perfect storm that keeps UNC out of the tournament.

Certainly, if the Heels have 19 or 20 wins by the end of the season, their tough schedule will get them into the NCAA Tournament. But that means getting at least seven more wins, and they’ve really left themselves little margin for error.  Strength of schedule only helps you if you actually win enough games to merit NCAA consideration, and right now it’s not a sure thing that UNC can even go .500 the rest of the way. If this team finishes with, say, 17 wins, which would put them at 7-9 in the ACC, I’m not sure if they will get into the Big Dance (or deserve to), regardless of reputation or schedule strength.

All season long, people have been saying that this team will be better in February. Well, February is right around the corner, and UNC has actually played progressively worse. What’s even more worrisome is that while this is a team that’s more talented than its record would indicate, it’s not a team that has played better than its record would indicate. The Heels haven’t lost close games that they should have won. Instead, they’ve lost games they should have won and in other games have actually been fortunate to have lost by as few points as they did.

Right now, this team looks more like the 19-16 NIT team in Matt Doherty’s final season at UNC than the David Noel-led 2006 team that surprised everybody and went 23-8. I’m holding my breath for that Roy Williams magic to kick in any second now and turn this team around. But what worries me most is that, as Roy would likely tell you, there is no magic wand a coach can wave to make a team start playing well all of a sudden. If there were, he would’ve waved it a week ago.

We love to travel, and for us, planning the trip is half the fun. Here are some of my favorite tools for planning a trip, as well as some approaches that help me make the planning easier and keep things organized.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study of a news ecosystem yesterday. The study examined the coverage of six major storylines by traditional and new media over a one-week period in Baltimore. There were a lot of interesting findings, and the one that has generated the most buzz is that 95 percent of the stories that contained new information came from traditional media, most of them newspapers.

The study, and that point about the 95 percent in particular, has spurred  a lot of reaction online. Traditional media, as one can imagine, has held up the study as reaffirmation of the important role they still occupy in the media landscape, while much criticism has emerged from the new media quarters about the study’s limitations and flaws. After reading some of these critiques, here are my suggestions for how to fix those flaws:

1. Instead of Baltimore, pick a market with a much, much bigger online media presence.
2. Instead of the six storylines that were studied, pick six subjects that new media tend to focus on and old media tend to ignore.
3. If the results still do not come out in new media’s favor, place findings into hat, wave magic wand, and — POOF! — pull out new-media-friendly results.

The reactions to this study are a perfect demonstration of the reasons why I’ve become increasingly jaded with the online media discussion. I’ll get to that in a second, but first, a couple thoughts on the study itself:

• I thought the study was fairly even-handed in its reporting of the findings. Upon reading the whole report, it didn’t strike me as being skewed in favor of traditional media. In fact, many of its findings are more condemnation than praise — such as the fact that 83 percent of the stories were essentially repetitive or that 62 percent of the coverage originated from the government.
• I love the detailed way in which the study tracked how a particular story developed. It’s the kind of in-depth study that we haven’t seen enough of.
• The scope of the study is indeed fairly limited (six stories, one week, one market), but I suppose such confines are necessary to make the study more manageable. I would definitely like to see more of such studies, with different stories in the same market and in different markets as well. However, I felt that the study was upfront about its limitations. In fact, it said (emphasis added by me):

This study is only one attempt at trying to understand who is producing news and the character of what is produced. Additional reports could tell more. But this snapshot was in many ways a typical week—marked by stories about police shootings, state budget cuts, swine flu, a big international soccer game in town and a mix of fires, accidents, traffic and weather.

The array of local outlets within this snapshot is already substantial, and as times goes on, new media, specialized outlets and local bloggers are almost certain to grow in number and expand their capacity, particularly if the Sun and other legacy media continue to shrink. New outlets such as local news aggregators, who combine this increasingly mixed universe into one online destination, have cropped up in some other cities such as San Diego. There is a good deal of innovation going on around the country, much of it exciting and promising. But as of 2009, this is what the news looks like in one American city.

To me, that passage there, along with other parts of the report that clearly state its limitations, is a pretty obvious caution for its audience to not draw overly broad conclusions from the findings. Alas, best of intentions …

The Reactions

Predictably, the new-media camp mostly did not take too kindly to the findings of the report and didn’t waste much time trying to discredit it. For instance, Jeff Jarvis reacted with “no shit!” (but it’s a detailed and nuanced “no shit”). Steve Buttry says the study “has too many flaws and limitations to be taken very seriously.” Granted, Jarvis and Buttry both said the study had some value, but in the context of their posts, that compliment was akin to when Homer Simpson, in his brief stint as a food critic, blasts a restaurant and then ends with “P.S.: Parking was ample.”

My responses to some of the criticism:

The Issue of Scope

Much of the criticism centers on the limited scope of the study. However, aside from the fact that the study readily admits this, I also wonder if its findings were more favorable to new media, if we would be hearing this complaint at all. Don’t believe me? Let’s hop in the time machine and go back to March 9, 2009 (I know, almost Pre-Cambrian in Internet time). Jay Rosen posted this tweet:

I wrote more about this back then, but the point that’s relevant here is that what Rosen cited were basically two people each counting one day’s worth of stories in one paper — a far narrower scope than the PEJ study. Yet that didn’t stop people from citing those numbers numerous times in the ensuing months as they tried to show newspapers’ declining relevance. Where were the critiques about narrow scope then? Virtually non-existent, of course. Do I really have to connect the dots as to why? And this is hardly a one-time occurrence.

No Shit? Well, Actually, Yes Shit

Jarvis may try to say that we’ve all known all along that most original reporting still come from major media, but I’m not so sure about that. Can somebody please point to evidence of that acknowledgement in the online media discussion? In the example I cited above about the number of local stories in a newspaper, what do you think people were implying (or just flat out claiming) about major media’s role in the changing news ecosystem? Where were the frequent “… but traditional media still produces the bulk of original reporting” reminders then, or in any recent media discussion? And if the idea that traditional media produces the bulk of original reporting is commonly acknowledged, then why the strong reaction to a report giving data to back up that idea? My guess: It’s precisely because that idea isn’t commonly acknowledged among most in the new media camp, even if they know it. And this report puts that idea in a public spotlight and draws attention to it, and that is the threat, from the new-media perspective, because hey, if people are reminded of old media’s importance by numbers from a study rather than just self-serving proclamations from journalists, they might believe old media is more relevant than has been portrayed.

Jarvis also criticizes the study for defining “news” as it has been traditionally defined — in terms of “articles”. However, as I pointed out in the comment section of his post, that’s just not true. The study, in fact, tracked not only articles, but also tweets and links to and from other sites — parts of the news ecosystem that Jarvis advocates. In his post, Buttry does make a good and fair point that the study should have included how news breaks on Twitter via the public, not just Twitter feeds from news organizations and “official” sources like the police department.

Story Selection

Another major criticism of the report is that its selection of stories focused on things like government, crime, health care — subjects that are inherently tilted toward traditional media. My main reaction to that is while that criticism may be true and valid, those are also some of the core subjects that the search for new journalism models is supposedly most concerned about, so why not focus on them? Yes, new media may own other niches like technology, entertainment, and sports, but I haven’t really heard anyone voice concerns about who’s going to cover those beats in a new media model, and since they are already well-covered by new media, why would we even need to worry about them?

And again, I question whether this would’ve been an issue had the findings turned out more in favor of new media. If the study picked six subjects that are new media’s bread-and-butter, would we see that point brought up, dwelled on, and hammered home? The ultimate issue here, I fear, may not be methodology, but rather ideology, and that’s the most disappointing thing about this for me.

Sick of It

In many of these new-media reactions, including the ones I cited above, the first and foremost thought seemed to be: “This is going to give old media new ammunition to use against us.” It was first among the concerns that Jarvis raised, and it was the opening to Buttry’s post. It just begs the question: Why, why, why? Why the heck does a study that reports so many findings about a news ecosystem immediately gets framed in the context of not just old vs. new media, but also as a weapon to be used against one side or the other and therefore must be immediately neutralized? Why must everything be turned into a microcosm of an old-vs.-new media conflict that we keep saying is over, a war we keep telling ourselves we aren’t going to fight anymore, an argument that we’ve supposedly moved beyond?

This underscores exactly why I’ve been becoming increasingly frustrated with the journalism discussion online. The debate has become so polarized that “insights” on any issue or new data have become pathetically predictable, and interactions between the two sides have frequently degenerated into little more than a repugnant game of gotchas, snarks, nitpicks, and mutual strawman accusations.

I sympathize with those in traditional media for the massive job losses, and from having worked with many of them, I know that they are actually much cooler people than the egomaniacs that some have tried to paint journalists to be. However, I am discouraged by the denial that some of them still cling to and the combination of individual and corporate intransigence that stymies attempts at change. Their industry is falling apart and yet some of them are still grasping at straws, such as that 95-percent figure from this study. Even if the study’s findings were undeniably correct, what good does it do to produce 95 percent of news when you are in danger of going out of business?

On the other side, I love the fountain of ideas bubbling up from the new-media camp, but am frequently turned off by the fact that the camp often exhibits simultaneously symptoms of a superiority complex and massive insecurities, creating the need to shout down any shred of evidence that might prove contrary to their beliefs. Time and again, it just feels like their focus is more about being (or appearing to be) right than about improving journalism, and that despite statements to the contrary, they relish the verbal sparring against old media a little too much. Did anyone tell these guys that they are already winning, that time and momentum are on their side? Lose that Mt. Everest-sized chip on your shoulders for crying out loud!! Honestly, if someone stumbled upon the surefire path to a successful new journalism model tomorrow and that path runs counter to what some of these guys have been pushing, I question whether they can bring themselves to embrace it.

Buttry opened his post about the study by saying that the reactions to the findings may tell us more about the state of the industry than the study does. Well, apparently the reactions have also held up a mirror to the face of the online discourse about journalism, and I for one am disgusted by what I see. This is part of the reason I’ve been blogging less about the subject lately. Staying away from the journosphere for most of Christmas break was such a pleasant break from the ceaseless cycles of kvetching, self-promotion, back-patting, ego-stroking, and hypocrisy. And that’s how a former journalist who’s still damn passionate about journalism comes to find it more enjoyable to read and write about Victorian costume dramas and fried chicken ads than journalism.

Mashable has a nice summary of the controversy, including clips from the talk show “The Young Turks”, which took a very strong stance that the ad is racist. After drawing an avalanche of negative reactions from Australians for that opinion, TYT did a follow-up show in which it stuck to its stance. The hosts’ main points were basically:

• We’re not saying Australians are racist, just that the ad is.
• We understand that from the Australian perspective, the ad is not racist; but Australians should understand that from our perspective, it is.
• Despite the different perspectives, the ad is bad because it propagates American stereotypes to other cultures.

I definitely agree with the first two points, but I disagree with TYT that the ad is bad because it’s propagating American stereotypes. Here’s my question: Why should Australia, or any other country, kowtow to American sensitivities? The TYT hosts are correct that from our perspective, the ad is clearly racist, and if it were an ad intended for an American audience, I would be first in line decrying it and wondering out loud how anyone could have thought this was acceptable. But the key phrase  in that statement is “our perspective”, and while the TYT hosts were busy being so concerned about American stereotypes being exported to other cultures, they seemed to have no problem with pushing their own American attitudes — in this case, America’s hypersensitivity to anything remotely pertaining to race, which makes us immediately scan for racial undertones in everything we see — onto other cultures. Instead of West Indies fans, we see black West Indies fans. And instead of cannibals (in another chicken ad that TYT points to in its follow-up show), we see black cannibals.

If the same racial undertones that Americans immediately detect in the ad stand out for Australians as well, then I would agree we have a problem. However, if within their cultural framework the imageries don’t suggest racial stereotypes (that they don’t see it as a commentary on black people), then who the heck are we to demand that they adopt our attitudes toward race? In their follow-up show, the TYT hosts acknowledge the difference in cultural perspectives, yet immediately disregard it and essentially say, “Yes, there’s a difference in the way the two cultures view race, but ours is the right way.” Can there be a clearer display of ethnocentrism? TYT tries to make the argument that KFC is an American company and therefore beholden to American values. That’s a weak argument, however, since in this day and age, the likes of KFC are really international corporations, serving a wide array of markets, each with its own culture and attitudes. For all but the most extreme cases, it would be asinine to demand that all those markets conform to the sensitivities of one culture, and extremely arrogant and ethnocentric to demand that that one culture be ours.

Let’s put ourselves on the flip side of that equation: Imagine how we would react if people in India demanded we pull ads encouraging the consumption of beef from American TV because it’s offensive to Hindu beliefs. Hey, if we demand another country adopt our race-phobia, why shouldn’t another (and one with a much bigger population than the U.S. no less) demand we adopt their food phobias?