About a year and a half ago, I canceled my daily print subscription to the New York Times. My decision was economic — $665 a year buys a lot of handcrafted organic farmstead cheese — as well as occupational (working from home eliminated a newspaper-consuming morning commute). But also, the moment seemed ripe. Though I work on the Web and get my music, movies and TV in techy ways that weren’t possible a decade ago, the old-fashioned print newspaper has long been, for me, a matchless vehicle for the news. It’s portable, easy to use, highly functional, and it comes to you every morning without complaint, like the sun.
But in the spring of 2006 the Times redesigned its Web site, dramatically improving navigation to stories beyond the front page. Considering that I’d been reading half the day’s paper there for at least five years anyway, the redesign was just the nudge I needed to go digital-only. (I was not the only one.)
Living paper-free has worked out well enough. My wallet is heavier and my recycling load lighter, and I’m delighted at the Times’ and other newspapers’ constant efforts to improve their Web sites (e.g., killing TimesSelect, adding videos like these by Mark Bittman and David Pogue, and building interactive graphics like this one on the Virginia Tech shooting).
But I still miss newsprint. Though I will never go back, more and more, these days, I find myself longing for the paper and the unique, perhaps irreplaceable role it played in shaping how I understood the news of the day.
Consider this column a paean to an antiquated technology, in the manner, say, of an ode to hand-churned butter. Hey, hand-churned butter had a lot going for it, and even today, some folks swear by it. That the stuff was superseded by an economically superior product can’t erase its charms.
The same holds for newspapers. Print’s ultimate demise is a fate foretold by as many indisputable line graphs as Al Gore wields to prove that Knut and his kin are in trouble. But before it disappears forever, let’s pause to remember what’s beautiful and useful about the newspaper — if mainly for the sake of posterity, also to point out what about it we should aim to replicate digitally.
The newspaper, first and chiefly, is easy to skim. Any single day’s news is a motley collection of barely related events, many of which even the most wild-eyed news junkie finds quite boring. The newspaper’s genius is putting them together in a way that highlights connections and implicit categories, and that shows off enough of each to quickly tell you what you need to know.
It’s like a shopping mall of news; you don’t have to enter every store to have any fun. Just peering in the windows — scanning the pictures and captions, passing over the headline and pull-quotes and the lead sentence, noting the story’s placement — can be worthwhile.
Say yesterday brought a new development in the ongoing nuclear disarmament negotiations with North Korea, and you, a sophisticated parser of diplomatic niceties, have a real but not especially deep interest in the story. You’d like to follow the big events but are content to watch the small ones from afar.
The print paper perfectly accommodates such shallow regard for certain stories. As you flip through it, you’ll see the piece there on the International page and will be able to quickly glean from its design whether it merits your further attention. Even if you decide it does, you still don’t have to read the whole thing to get what you need from it — just look at the caption and the photograph, or quickly cast your eye over keywords in the first few paragraphs. There, now you know all you need. Next story!
In this way, I can go through the whole front and business section of the Times in about a half-hour, reading a few stories in full, skimming most.
It’s well-nigh impossible to pull off the same sort of skimming trick on the Web. On the Times site, stories not big enough to make the front page end up in one of the various inside section pages — World, U.S., etc. — as well as in Today’s Paper, a long list of every story published that day.
But these collections show just a headline and a short description of each story, and thus aren’t nearly as useful as a page of newsprint, where many stories are printed in full. On the Web, in order to determine if a piece is important, you’ve got to click on it — and the more clicking you’re doing, the less skimming.
Earlier this year, the Poynter Institute, the South Florida journalism think-lab, outfitted more than 600 test subjects with eye-tracking goggles to see what people actually look at when they “read” newspapers and newspaper Web sites.
Poynter found that people who peruse stories on the Web read far more text than do people looking at a print newspaper. On the Web, once a reader has chosen a story, she’ll usually stick with it. Poynter found that on average, people read 77 percent of Web stories they’ve chosen. Readers of broadsheet newspapers were far more fickle. Once they’d picked a story, they would read, on average, 62 percent of it before skipping to something else. (See more on the eye-tracking study here.)
You might argue that reading more of a specific story — what the online readers were doing — is better than reading less of it, what the newspaper readers were doing. Don’t forget, though, that print readers are skipping around only to other news stories, and thus getting a wider take on the news: They’re trading in depth for breadth. And don’t forget this, also: Reading the news online in the real world, if not in Poynter’s lab, introduces many dangerous avenues to sacrifice both depth and breadth, to leave the paper altogether and go to Wikipedia, e-mail, blogs, Amazon and beyond.
Mostly that’s OK. Even with all those options to procrastinate, the Web guarantees you’ll never miss a big story. Wherever you click, these days, people will tell you what to read. With the help of online aggregators like Google News, Techmeme and Digg, as well as of bloggers, Matt Drudge, newspapers’ most-popular lists, and helpful e-mailers, you’re sure to spot every big story worth your time.
But there’s much more to newspapers than big stories. Every day, a paper is chock-full of news that, while kind of interesting, doesn’t quite rise to the level of Drudge.
Not long ago I picked up a copy of the Wall Street Journal to take with me on a short plane ride. On Page B6, I saw this little story about the drug company Genentech’s efforts to strong-arm sufferers of wet macular degeneration, an eye disease, into use its $2,000-per-month drug rather than its $40-a-month drug. I was fascinated by the story — and surprised that I’d never heard of it. Later on, I found that the controversy had been bubbling on the business pages of many newspapers for many weeks. It had just never made the front page of any online newspaper I read.
Not all is lost, certainly. The New York Times’ Reader software represents a valiant effort to mimic the print newspaper online — it’s worth checking out, but not perfect yet, and not worth its $165-per-year price tag.
The online newspaper is an infant; in time designers and engineers will surely find a way to give us a perfectly skimmable electronic broadsheet. Until then, there’s a lot I’ll miss — and mourn.
It isn’t necessary to explain how, in the pilot episode of “MacGyver,” our mulleted, Midwestern hero gets himself trapped inside a top-secret research bunker overflowing with sulfuric acid. Suffice it to say, he needs to find a way out, and probably soon (because government agents are fixing to fire a missile at the bunker to prevent the acid from spilling into a nearby aquifer). Plus, he has to save the people he has found inside (among them a gun-wielding climate scientist who wants destroy the bunker in an effort to set back research into an ozone-layer-ruining weapon of mass destruction). Fortunately, MacGyver has a few chocolate bars, a scrap of sodium metal, a cold capsule, a pair of binoculars and cigarettes.
He uses the chocolate to plug up the leaking tank of acid — sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to form a kind of glue. The sodium, scraped into the shell of the cold capsule and splashed into a sealed bottle of water, makes for a handy time-delay bomb, which proves useful for blowing through a wall that blocks the group’s escape. The smoke from the cigarettes illuminates the bunker’s laser-beam security system that he has to get through to move through the bunker (no secret underground research lab is complete without lasers); MacGyver uses the binocular lens to aim the laser at its own control unit, shutting down the security system.
But how does he get out of the bunker? Oh, that’s the easy part: MacGyver finds a switch that controls the lights in an above-ground control tower. He flashes the lights on and off to send an SOS message in Morse code. The guys in the tower, realizing Mac’s in the bunker, alive, call off the missile — and for the first of 139 times during the show’s seven-year run from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver saves the day.
This first episode is nearly perfect. It neatly telegraphs MacGyver’s soul: A laid-back fellow oozing can-do heartland ingenuity, MacGyver is handsome but dorky, charming but self-effacing, a friend to orphans and children with disabilities, tolerant of people from foreign lands, and though he has every opportunity for indiscretion, he’s always a gentleman around women. MacGyver, played by the affable Richard Dean Anderson, works as a secret agent for a vaguely defined defense contractor whose intentions are always of the best sort. His gigs are of the usual action-hero variety — find stolen missiles, escape assassins, rescue civilians, humiliate dictators. But his near chastity, along with his staunch opposition to guns and capacity to solve every problem through the judicious application of chemistry and physics, sets him apart from other action stars. MacGyver is the thinking man’s hero.
Though, actually, when you go back to watch his adventures two decades after they first aired, you discover Mac’s target audience probably consisted mainly of boys, not men. I started watching the 139-episode DVD boxed set a few weeks ago, shortly after gadget blogs gleefully reported that Lee David Zlotoff, the series’ creator, said he was thinking of making a “MacGyver” movie. This jogged in me memories of boyhood, especially of how, after watching each MacGyver trick, I’d feel a bit invincible: I was small, but I was clever. Like MacGyver, I could take them.
But to adult eyes “MacGyver” is often too goofy by half. It’s not just that his tricks are improbable. At times — like when he interprets a deaf friend’s dreams to find clues to an impending missile theft — they seem to violate the show’s premise, that science beats brawn. In these instances, MacGyver doesn’t use science; he uses magic.
Then there are the children he befriends and the liberal orthodoxies he defends — tendencies that bump the show’s preachiness dial. Mac’s always popping up in foreign countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar — and running into kids and peasants who are oppressed by unsmiling overlords. In just about every second episode, he’s teaching kids about the dangers of guns, a position that, we learn in one episode, he came to as a boy, when a friend of his was killed by a gun. The antigun thing is a little specious, though: MacGyver’s got nothing but nothing but love for explosives, painful booby traps, fire extinguishers rigged up as projectiles, and enormous boulders that he sets up to fall on villains. The real reason he doesn’t use guns is obvious — he’d be able to shoot his way out of most traps, and that would be too easy.
I don’t mean to get down on “MacGyver.” There’s something in its flaws worthy of re-viewing, a particular moment in America preserved on TV. MacGyver is meant to exemplify a certain noble strain of American power. He doesn’t take the easy way out, and when in a jam, he uses what he finds around him to ingenious effect. If you strain you see a greater American story here too — that his ingenuity is frequently too good to be true, and leads to pat, uncomplicated endings that call for no greater reflection.
There’s also something striking about “MacGyver’s” moment in TV. Watch this show as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come. Even the simplest dramas today — I’m looking at you, “CSI” — are complex and multilayered next to “MacGyver,” which underlines and explains everything, gums up all dialogue with exposition and introduces new, throwaway characters in each episode. There’s much hand-holding here: Even in foreign countries, everyone speaks English, every villain is one-dimensionally evil, and every tender moment is helped along by a swelling score.
But that’s why I hope someone makes a “MacGyver” movie. Mac needs a makeover. Lift him up to big-budget action standards — give him a story line that can span a couple of hours; give him a girl to love, but who may also cross him; give him a more complex mission (maybe to find out who’s putting all the salmonella in our salads?); and give the whole package fast, Paul Greengrass-style editing. Also, make sure one of his crazy solutions involves Mentos — people online go crazy for tricks with Mentos. Do all that and we might yet have a lasting American hero.
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Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.
Today much of the tech world is sad that the iPhone 3G’s launch is going so miserably. But I’m sad that it’s my last day at Salon.
I’ve accepted a job at Slate, where, starting next week, I’ll be writing a twice-weekly technology column. Machinist will go on a break for a week, after which a guest blogger will bring you the latest tech dish.
I joined Salon in 2002, and since then I’ve written about, among other things, Smart Cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, muffin toasters, voting machines, architecture and 9/11, Tower Seven, Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, Florida’s elections, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” Malcolm Gladwell, Linux, Daniel Levitin, the copyright industries, Lawrence Lessig, The New York Times, Martha Stewart, a mnemonic to remember the Solar System’s planets, Google, garlic, stem cells, Comcast, Apple, Speedo, taxes, Social Security, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, the robots’ plan to take over the Earth, Howard Stern, Stringer Bell, Current TV, campaign finance reform, MoveOn, Howard Dean, Nintendo, Total Information Awareness, Java, Alice Waters, “The West Wing,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Washington Post, Judy Miller, and Hurricane Katrina.
I’m pretty sure there’s no other news outlet on the planet which would have given me such latitude, and I thank everyone here at Salon for that. I also want to thank all the readers who’ve read my work, not to mention praised me, hounded me, kept me up late at night swearing at the screen. Don’t ever change.
– Farhad Manjoo
As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I’m getting ready to depart this space; I’ll have a fuller explanation tomorrow, sometime before or after I get in line to buy the new iPhone.
In the meantime, I thought I’d add a note about one of the more fun events related to my book’s release — the opportunity I had, in May, to speak at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.
It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.
Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk, have at it:
Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 17.
If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and spin in the digital age, do stop by.
Update: This post has been updated with comments from Viacom.
In the fall of 1987, a freelance reporter named Michael Dolan learned that judge Robert Bork kept an account at Potomac Video, a D.C. rental shop. This was at the height of the contentious and ultimately failed Senate confirmation hearings for Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court — so naturally, Dolan thought there was a story here, and he went to work on getting a peek at Bork’s video rental history.
It wasn’t hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork’s movie file. “There sure are a lot of them,” the assistant manager replied. “Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?”
That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork’s rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.
Bork’s taste in movies was itself unremarkable (“First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there’s not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R,” Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left — including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork’s nomination.
In 1988, Congress, spurred by the fear that the press might now easily unearth all politicians’ movie habits, passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which remains one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation. The law prohibits stores from disclosing video histories unless ordered to do so by a court — and even then, customers must be given “the opportunity to appear and contest the claim” of any party seeking to learn what you watched.
I tell you all this as a historical wind-up to yesterday’s shocking news: In the ongoing copyright battle between Viacom and Google, a judge ordered Google’s subsidiary YouTube to hand over an enormous trove of data identifying who watched what and when on the video-sharing site.
Viacom’s lawyers argued that they needed this data to prove that “infringing” videos — e.g., clips of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — were more popular than non-infringing user-generated videos. Presumably, if it proves this, Viacom might prevail in its argument that YouTube’s bread-and-butter was illegal videos, and thus owes some of its success — and billions of dollars — to media companies.
The database in question is astonishingly broad: Viacom asked for 12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.
Google objected to Viacom’s request on the grounds that producing the database would be expensive, time-consuming, and would invade YouTube users’ privacy. The judge — Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York — Judge Stanton dismissed all Google’s arguments. The company’s “privacy concerns are speculative,” he wrote. (PDF here.)
Such pat reasoning should give you a general sense of the depth of bone-headedness in Stanton’s ruling. As Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Robert Bork-inspired Video Privacy Protection Act applies not just to video cassettes but to “audio visual material” in general. Clearly it should apply here, and clearly, millions of YouTube users ought to have been given a chance to fight this invasion of our privacy.
But the real villain here isn’t Judge Stanton — it’s Viacom. I’ve previously raked the company over the coals for suing, rather than enjoying the fruits of, YouTube’s success (for instance last year, when it sacrificed potentially millions in ad dollars by pulling down the popular MTV clip of Britney Spears’ poor performance at the Video Music Awards).
But now Viacom’s sinking lower: Not content to fight just Google, the company looks to be manning the deck against us all. Sure, Judge Stanton might call this “speculative,” but think on it a bit: If Viacom’s willing to take on Google, what qualms will it have in suing you or me, recording industry-style, now that it knows what we did on YouTube? (Update: Viacom says it can’t use this data to sue you.)
All’s not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request.
But our real hope here is legislative or regulatory action. Indeed, optimistic sorts might see a silver lining here.
As privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen has written, “The politics of privacy tends to be largely reactive, fired by heartstring-tugging anecdotes that capture the public imagination.” Just as the airing of Robert Bork’s video history was the kick-start Congress needed to fix a clear privacy hole born out of then-new technology, this ruling might backfire on copyright holders, pushing lawmakers, finally, to curb the privacy-invading reach of copyright fights.
What we watch on YouTube is every bit as personal as what one rents from a store like Potomac Video. Indeed, it might be more private, and more salacious — imagine the fun you’d have if you were looking for unsavory data about a future Supreme Court nominee in 12 terabytes of YouTube logs!
In his floor speech in favor of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy argued that new database technologies capable of tracking private behavior called for new privacy regulations. That was two decades ago — and it remains true, still.
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Update: A representative for Viacom e-mailed me to say that I’m overreacting. “We have no ability (and absolutely no desire) to use this data to sue end-users,” he argued, pointing out that all discovery documents in the case are bound by this confidentiality agreement.
Under this agreement, no one at Viacom will get to see these YouTube logs — only Viacom’s outside lawyers and experts, as well as court personnel, will have access to the data. The agreement also restricts the data to this case alone, which would seem to prevent the company from using the logs to sue users individually.
Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s counsel, told the New York Times, “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.” He added that the company is looking into ways to “anonymize” the logs “to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”
