That’s what Christopher Hitchens says in an interview with New York magazine:
I know something which is known to few but is not a secret. Karl Rove is not a believer, and he doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, “I’m not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.”
Assuming it’s true … I never would have guessed that.
Link.
Just kidding. I’d love to have your ads (maybe, we can talk).
But for advertisers wary of placing ads in places where the content may be unpredictable and perhaps inappropriate, Feedburner has introduced AdClimate. The tool enables advertisers to identify key words that are problematic and keep their ads off posts that contain those key words.
By way of example, let’s say you have an aversion to the word, “wingnut” and the thought of your ad for pinenuts showing up in a publisher’s blog post about the history of wingnuts would be totally unacceptable (hey - who are we to judge?) AdClimate to the rescue. In addition to screening a multi-language default list of inappropriate language, advertisers can submit their own list of keywords next to which they don’t want their ad to appear - wingnuts and all.
Do other online ad providers, like Google, do this? I don’t know. I bet this will be popular, though.
Link.
Brock Meeks writes:
This process of side-stepping MSM I like to call “hacking the media.” It is surprising easy and you have all the tools right at your fingertips. You don’t need a journalism degree; you don’t need a press pass; you don’t need to have the power of a big news organization behind you. You need a curious mind, the desire to get answers and the simple ability to open your mouth and ask a question.
This sounds good, but … here’s what really happens. Guy’s sitting on a beach with a laptop. Guy sees some photos on Flickr. Guy emails MSNBC, which then does a story. This is not “hacking” the media, and it’s certainly not sidestepping the mainstream media.
Give credit to the guy who took the photos originally, who perhaps was engaged in some citizen journalism. And give credit to Meeks for emailing his former colleagues at MSNBC about a good story. But this is not “hacking” the media, this is just tipping the media off, which people have been doing since long before the Internet was ever conceived.
Citizen journalism is real, but this isn’t the best example. I will give Meeks credit for identifying one important thing, though: news value.
How do you recognize a story? It’s anything that makes you double-clutch during your day; something that causes you to mentally backspace. If that happens, it’s probably a story.
Yep, it probably is. And worth pursuing, even if you’re not in the MSM. Link.
Journalist Michael Pollan explains how U.S. government agricultural subsidies affect the health of Americans, immigration and the environment. The farm bill is a massive a piece of legislation that comes around every five years or so and sets how $25 billion in government subsidies are doled out to farmers, especially those raising corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton and rice (a wag might dub this “socialized farming”).
To speak of the farm bill’s influence on the American food system does not begin to describe its full impact — on the environment, on global poverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities — or to the United States. The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico’s eaters as well as its farmers.) You can’t fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico.
And though we don’t ordinarily think of the farm bill in these terms, few pieces of legislation have as profound an impact on the American landscape and environment. Americans may tell themselves they don’t have a national land-use policy, that the market by and large decides what happens on private property in America, but that’s not exactly true. The smorgasbord of incentives and disincentives built into the farm bill helps decide what happens on nearly half of the private land in America: whether it will be farmed or left wild, whether it will be managed to maximize productivity (and therefore doused with chemicals) or to promote environmental stewardship. The health of the American soil, the purity of its water, the biodiversity and the very look of its landscape owe in no small part to impenetrable titles, programs and formulae buried deep in the farm bill.
Link.
Creative writing teachers across the country are now trying to grapple with the question, more important than ever, of what to do when students write disturbing prose. You might think that you could somehow tell the truly disturbed students from those who merely want to be the next Stephen King. But maybe not.
“Lots of great literary works are deep and dark and disturbing — that would be Kafka,” says Deborah Landau, director of the creative writing program at New York University, who plans to discuss university protocol with her staff in the wake of Monday’s massacre. Yet teachers increasingly are being expected to distinguish between students’ pushing their creative boundaries or showing frightening warning signs. That’s a tall task, especially when students routinely hand in twisted texts dripping with bloodshed, cruelty, perversion and extreme sex scenes, say teachers.
Link.
Dinesh D’Souza asks the somewhat silly question “where is atheism when bad things happen?” A Virginia Tech atheist professor replies:
You can find us next week in the bloodied classrooms of a violated campus, trying to piece our thoughts and lives and studies back together.
With or without a belief in a god, with or without your asinine bigotry, we will make progress, we will breathe life back into our university, I will succeed in explaining this or that point, slowly, eventually, in a ham-handed way, at risk of tears half-way through, my students will come to feel comfortable again in a classroom with no windows or escape route, and hell yes we will prevail.
You see Mr D’Souza, I am an atheist professor at Virginia Tech and a man of great faith. Not faith in your god. Faith in my people.
Link.
G.D. Gearino, a columnist and longtime N&Oer is leaving that newspaper for self-employment. Newspapering is best left for younger folks, he says, and newspapering is getting tougher.
For a long time, newspaper owners had a sweet gig: Money rolled in and their papers had a voice-of-God authority. These days, the money is harder to come by, and that authority is under siege. I still believe newspapers are important, but the job of adapting to the new information age needs to be done by people wiser than I.
So he’s freelancing, apparently, working on another novel and writing a daily online column here.
Greg Lindsay interviewed four magazine writers about the nuts and bolts of organizing and writing long stories. I very, very rarely write at the lengths he’s concerned with, but when I have I’ve always struggled with the process of organizing all that material.
Every journalist working above the metaphorical tree line of 2,500 words or so — where it’s hard to catch your breath and where telling the story demands scenes, dialogue, judicious compression, and philosophical expansiveness — must inevitably cross the chasm positioned squarely between reporting and writing. This is the point where everything that has been seen, heard, taped, and scrawled into notebooks must be reloaded into memory, weeks — even months — after the moments in question… and this critical point in the process is almost never discussed among journalists.
One tip I’m surprised wasn’t here: Write as you report — snippets of the story, different potential ledes, etc.
Link.
Tom Friedman, in a long piece in the Sunday New York Times magazine, argues that reducing CO2 emissions is not only an environmental necessity, but also vital to national security.
President Bush’s refusal to do anything meaningful after 9/11 to reduce our gasoline usage really amounts to a policy of “No Mullah Left Behind.” James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, minces no words: “We are funding the rope for the hanging of ourselves.”
No, I don’t want to bankrupt Saudi Arabia or trigger an Islamist revolt there. Its leadership is more moderate and pro-Western than its people. But the way the Saudi ruling family has bought off its religious establishment, in order to stay in power, is not healthy. Cutting the price of oil in half would help change that. In the 1990s, dwindling oil income sparked a Saudi debate about less Koran and more science in Saudi schools, even experimentation with local elections. But the recent oil windfall has stilled all talk of reform.
That is because of what I call the First Law of Petropolitics: The price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in states that are highly dependent on oil exports for their income and have weak institutions or outright authoritarian governments. And this is another reason that green has become geostrategic. Soaring oil prices are poisoning the international system by strengthening antidemocratic regimes around the globe.
Link.
One of the Poynter Institute’s Naughton Fellows, Pat Walters, is blogging “48 Tips in 48 Hours” from the National Writers Workshop in Hartford, Conn. I went to one of these workshops years ago in Charlotte, and it was quite good. Pat has nine tips up so far.
Link.
p.s. Hey Poynter Institute — where’s the RSS feed?