Cardiff de Alejo Garcia

"Movies deserve journalism"

A smart, funny passage on the relevance of film criticism from Anthony Lane's collection of essays, Nobody's Perfect:

The primary task of the critic, (and nobody has surpassed the late Ms. Kael in this regard), is the recreation of texture — not telling movie-goers what they should see, which is entirely their prerogative, but filing a sensory report on the kind of experience into which they will be wading, or plunging, should they decide to risk a ticket.  You may object to the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski, but, with their heavy filtration and cloud-bursts of sudden music, not to mention the wounded emotions that drift across the faces of their heroines, they could have been made by nobody else.

All of which is a way of saying that movies deserve journalism.  This may sound obtuse, not to say indefensible, in the light of those unusual thinkers whose most fervid desire is to have their words reproduced on billboards across the land.  Broadcasting from radio stations so local that the presenters might just as well ditch the microphones, stand on the roof, and shout, these superbly untroubled beings scorch the earth with indiscriminate goodwill.  However hellish that Adam Sandler fiasco you just saw, don't worry; there'll be somebody in Delaware who is prepared to stand and tell the world, "Hands up for the flat-out funniest comedy since Father of the Bride!  Adam Sandler is a laugh riot, hands down!"  And there will be people at Universal who will plaster it on a wall; by an appealing coincidence, they will be the same people who flew the guy from Delaware to a junket in Atlantic City and then inquired gently for his assessment of Mr. Sandler as the new Jim Carrey.  I once went to a junket and heard the assembled hacks complaining to each other about the water pressure in their hotel jacuzzis.  I am as corrupt as the next man, but, I must admit, the notion that you could trim your critical opinions to accord with the fizzy water in which you recently dipped your ass had, until then, never occured to me, and it still strikes me as impractical today. 

Nevertheless, I repeat: movies deserve journalism.  Both involve a quick turnover, an addiction to the sensational, and a potent, if easily exhausted, form of communal intensity; books written about film are often devout and scholarly, but, unlike journalism, they bear almost no stamp of what it actually feels like to go to the movies.  A review should give off the authentic reek of the concession stand; it should become as handy as that finest of nocturnal inventions, the armrest-mounted soda holder.  This holds especially true for readers who have every intention of staying in, cooking dinner, and skipping the film altogether.  When people tell me, as they frequently do, that they can't be bothered to see a subtitled picture (because it's too much work) or the latest and loudest blockbuster (because they know in their bones that it will be junk), what happens to the role of the movie critic?  It should by rights be diminished; in practice, the reading of reviews, like a careful tracking of the weekend's grosses, seems to be growing into a perverse substitute for the act of moviegoing itself.  The sheer, overhanging mass of cultural offerings is now so forbidding that the essay — literally, the attempt, like the attempt that a climber makes on the north face of the Eiger — has, if anything, reasserted its claim to be the sanest and most proportionate response.  I know that sanity is not the first quality that one associates with film critics — one thinks more readily of of our Styrofoam complexions and, as for our hairstyle, Fie, 'tis an unweeded garden — but the fact remains that a reviewer who does his or her job, and who steers you away from bad art, is sane enough to save you eight bucks.

PJ O'Rourke introduces the pre-obituary

One bright idea isn’t going to solve the problems of the American newspaper industry, but it’s one bright idea more than the American newspaper industry has had in 40 years. What I propose is “Pre-Obituaries”—official notices that certain people aren’t dead yet accompanied by brief summaries of their lives indicating why we wish they were.

The main advantage of the Pre-Obit over the traditional obituary is the knowledge of reader and writer alike that the as-good-as-dead people are still around to have their feelings hurt. ...

Let us wait no more. With the Pre-Obituary we can abandon pusillanimous constraint and false hope and say what we think about the lives of public nuisances when their lives are not yet a dead letter. And we won’t be stuck in the treacle of nostalgia and sentiment. We won’t find ourselves saying of some oaf, “His like will not pass this way again.” Or, if we do say it, we can comfortably add, “Thank God!” The precept of Diogenes isn’t “Do not speak ill of the living.”

Click here for more, including examples.  Not for the easily offended.

Department of still doesn't get it, Ted Koppel edition

Ted Koppel, asked about a Pew Survey showing that a majority of news executives think journalism is going in the wrong direction, says:

I think it's even worse. I think it's a disaster.

I think we're living through the — I hope — the final stages of what I like to call the age of entitlement...We now feel entitled not to have the news that we need but the news that we want. We want to listen to news that comes from those who already sympathize with our particular point of view. We don't want the facts any more.  

I'm pretty sure what Koppel meant is that it's a disaster for someone like him — that is, someone who thinks people should continue deferring to his judgment about what qualifies as "news that we need" rather than developing their own such judgment.

As for Koppel's point that on the Internet we only look for sites that already agree with us, here is a new research paper that shows we actually get more diversity of ideological viewpoints from online news than we get from our family, neighbors, and coworkers.  That is certainly my experience as well — at least half of my favorite blogs are written by people whose views are to my left on economics.  According to the paper:

Visitors of extreme conservative sites such as rushlimbaugh.com and glennbeck.com are more likely than a typcial online news reader to have visited nytimes.com.  Visitors of extreme liberal sites such as thinkprogress.org and moveon.org are more likely than a typical online news reader to have visited foxnews.com.

The problem with expertise (for a journalist)

Lane Wallace:

The journalists at the press conference didn't have a bias as the term is normally used; that is, I didn't get the sense that they were inherently for or against the company or its product. They just appeared to think they knew the subject well enough, or had a set enough idea in their heads as to what this kind of story was about, that they pursued only the lines of questioning necessary to fill in the blanks of that presumed story line. As a result, they left the press conference with less knowledge and understanding than they otherwise might have had. And while nobody could have said the resulting stories were entirely wrong, they definitely suffered from that lapse.

A friend of mine who's an editor at the New York Times said those results don't surprise him at all. "If you watch a White House press conference," he said, "you can tell who the new reporters are. They're often the ones who ask the best questions." I must have looked a little surprised. "Seriously," he said. "I actually think we should rotate reporters' beats every two years, so nobody ever thinks they're too much of an expert at anything." 

Wallace's article describes what is probably a common dilemma for many journalists.*  On the one hand, you obviously want to know as much as you can about your beat: nobody enjoys being ignorant, and it's easier to get spun by a source if you don't know what you're talking about.

On the other hand, if you're an expert who deeply understands all aspects of an issue, then on a given day you might find it harder to single out which one to emphasize in your reporting and writing.  The danger is that as your knowledge deepens, you lose the ability to distinguish between what you find interesting and what your readers want to know.  And as Lane points out, the hubris that often accompanies such expertise makes this problem worse.

So although nobody would actively encourage reporters to stay ignorant about a subject, there's no sense denying the very real advantage to being a newcomer.  Because your depth of knowledge is more similar to that of your readers, you're more likely to recognize which questions are the right ones to ask and how you should explain the answers in your stories. 

As for how to deal with the problem, Wallace's article reminded me of an old post by Chris Anderson about The Economist's policy of rotating its foreign correspondents every three years, which is a lot like what the New York Times editor in the story above suggested.  Based on his observations, it looks like a pretty good idea:

The first year after arriving to your new assignment was terrifying and exhilarating. It was a vertiginous learning curve, but you could ask dumb questions without fear and note that the emperor has no clothes.

In the second year, after the emperor had invited you in a few times to explain the subtle political dynamics that require him to go garbless for the ultimate good of the nation (but surely there were more important things to write about, such as his new elevated rail project), you would find yourself writing sophisticated analyses, traveling easily through the region, admiring your bulging rolodex and otherwise feeling very productive.

In the third year, you'd find yourself returning to stories with a certain cynicism and worldweary accounting of endless process. The elevated rail project has been delayed once again because of infighting within the opposition party. The emperor has no fiscal discipline. You understand everything all too well. It's time to move on. 

* This seems to be an issue mostly for journalistic organizations that both target a general audience and whose reporters work on relatively short deadlines.  Specialized blogs and niche publications, in contrast, are expected to geek out and sometimes to focus narrowly, or go off on tangents.  Some exist to do precisely that, as many of their readers are themselves experts.  And I would guess that book writers and long-form journalists tend to avoid this problem simply because they have more time to find out what really matters, and also because expertise in a subject is kind of a minimum requirement for writing a book about it.

Scattered quotes and thoughts about writers vs editors

Most writers I know have tales to tell of being mangled by editors and mauled by fact-checkers, and naturally it is the flagrant instances they choose to single out -- absurdities, outright distortions of meaning, glaring errors.  But most of the damage done is a good deal less spectacular.  It consists of small changes (usually too boring to describe to anyone else) that flatten a writer's style, slow down his argument, neutralise his irony; that ruin the rhythm of a sentence or the balance of paragraph; that deaden the tone that makes the music.  I sometimes think of the process as one of "desophistication".

That is by John Gross, from the introduction to the ninth edition of the The Economist Style Guide. 

Next is a quote from this recommended essay in The Millions about the famously troubled relationship between Raymond Carver and his heavy-handed editor, Gordon Lish:

As we know now, Lish got his way by ignoring Carver’s pleas. Thus, the point of contention among the old friends: What We Talk About transformed Carver into a darling of the literary world, and despite his last-minute reservations and desperation, he didn’t deny himself the glory the book won him, and he remains one of the most revered writers of the 20th century.

Finally, from a hilarious piece by Michael Kinsley, who throughout his career has spent plenty of time as both writer and editor:

If you're lucky, your editor will have lost all interest in your article by the time you produce it, and on the way to a fancy expense-account lunch, he will pass it along unmolested to the copy editors (apprentice fiends, with intense views about semicolons). If you are not lucky, your editor will take a few minutes to ruin the piece with moronic changes and cloddish cuts before disappearing out the door.

Writers and editors will always have a complicated relationship.  Writers bitch that editors ruin their glorious prose, and editors respond that writers are a bunch of ungrateful egotists whose original drafts, always submitted ten minutes before press time, are so turgidly written they wouldn't pass a kindergarten English test.

Editors have more control over a publication's final product than most readers know.  Before I became a journalist, I was quick to condemn the writer whenever I disagreed with anything in the story or encountered an error, or if I thought an article poorly written.  By the same token, I was too quick to praise the writer for stories I loved.

Now that I've experienced the kinds of substantive changes, good and bad, that editors have made to my own articles, I know it's much harder to assign responsibility.  A great editor can save a bad writer's ass; a bad editor can massacre even the finest work. 

Of course, one motivation to start blogging again after a two-year hiatus was the lack of any filter between me and the reader (assuming anybody actually starts reading this). 

Not that I'm complaining about the editors at my day job, but it's nice to have a place of my own---where you'll know exactly whom to blame for the crappy writing.  As Kinsley writes:

On the Internet, they don't have editors. Or they don't have many. Writers rule, and a thought can go straight from your head onto the Net. That used to sound hellish. Now it sounds like heaven.