The Last Post

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The Washington Post has a new Editor, Martin Baron, formerly editor of the Boston Globe. Jack Shafer has an interesting column about what has happened to the Post — which in a way is just a more dramatic example of what has happened to the old city-monopoly newspapers.

Baron arrives at a paper much diminished from its salad days under Bradlee and Downie, when the Post was the leading mass-advertising vehicle in Washington and corpulent with profit. Under Bradlee’s and much of Downie’s tenures, the paper’s biggest problem was finding something to spend all that money on. It established domestic bureaus in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, Denver, and Miami. It expanded its business pages into a freestanding section in the early 1990s. It created local bureaus to serve the suburbs that circle Washington, filled them with reporters and produced zoned editions. It experimented with new weekly sections covering consumer tech and lifestyle.

Today the domestic bureaus are gone, as are the suburban ones, and business coverage has been reduced to a couple of pages running in the A section. The tech and lifestyle weeklies are long gone. The $130 million College Park, Maryland, printing facility the Post built in 1999 was closed by 2009. It lost its free-standing book review. It killed comics, the chess and poker columns, and one crossword puzzle. In 2000 the paper had 800 print journalists and 100 in its digital newsroom. Last summer the total number of full-time journalists was down to about 600. (In hindsight, the journalistic innovation the Post should have pursued was the building out of a politics website, which Posties John Harris and Jim VandeHei proposed to the paper but ended up launching as Politico with a local TV station owner.) The Post has so wound down local coverage that ombudsman Patrick B. Pexton published a column last Sunday complaining about the paper’s skimpiness.

How to get a life

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Lovely blog post by Sean French who — like me — spent far too much time thinking about the US Presidential election.

I’ve spent way too much of the last year checking up on the latest Ohio polls, debating inside my own head whether Florida has decisively switched into the Romney camp, whether Obama’s decisive victory in the foreign policy debate will have any effect in the battleground states. 

I sometimes wonder what I would think if I heard of someone roughly like me sitting in somewhere like New Zealand, constantly checking the UK opinion polls for the swing seats, wondering whether Ed Miliband was a plausible leadership candidate and what the effect of the improved employment figures was. I know what I’d think: that he should get a life.

Does anyone read Dr Johnson’s wonderful novel Rasselas any more? There’s a character, an early meteorologist, who has been observing the weather for so long that he believes he controls it. I suppose I’m a bit like that, except that I’m not even observing my own weather, I’m observing American weather.

Ouch! Just when I had decided that I must read this, I will have to postpone it to read Rasselas. Sigh. That’s the trouble with blogs: they give you ideas.

It’s the data, stoopid

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This morning’s Observer column.

Which brings us to the Obama election campaign. In 2008, it was obvious that his people were significantly more internet-savvy than the McCain-Palin crowd. (Not that that would have been too difficult.) Obama harnessed the internet to crowdsource fundraising, for example, and used social media to get the vote out. And he used YouTube to bypass the TV networks and get his message directly to voters – as with A More Perfect Union, his Philadelphia speech tackling the problems raised for him by the inflammatory views of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. A More Perfect Union is a long (37-minute), serious speech which would have been reduced to a set of soundbites by the TV networks. By using YouTube, Obama ensured that millions of US voters heard his unexpurgated version.

But none of this was rocket science. The interesting question this time was what the Obama crowd would do next. Now we know, thanks to a fascinating piece of reporting by Michael Scherer in Time, published just after the election result was clear. Basically, it comes down to numbers…

Harvard 2.0 or just another tech bubble?

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Interesting piece by Lee Gomes in MIT Technology Review.

Harvard, by many measures the most prestigious college in the U.S., has been at it for nearly 400 years. Ben Nelson, founder of an online education startup called the Minerva Project, says he can do equally well in just three.

Minerva is one of the least-publicized but also most well-funded and audacious of the current crop of online education startups. Funded with $25 million from Benchmark Capital—one of the well-known venture-capital firm’s largest-ever investments—Minerva says it will begin accepting applicants in 2015 for an entirely Web-based college program. The resulting undergraduate degree, it promises, will have all the prestige of anything the Ivy League can offer, but at half the cost.

Many people would dismiss Minerva’s notion of some sort of instant online Harvard as the fever dream of someone who had sat through one too many TED talks. But the for-profit company’s assumptions about how the Internet will change education can be found, to varying degrees, in most of the scores of startups now getting venture money to do instruction online.

The level of venture-capital investments in education has nearly doubled in 2011, and now rivals figures last seen during the dot-com boom. Representative of the crop is Coursera—formed by two Stanford computer scientists—which offers a growing list of free online classes (see “The Technology of Massive Open Online Courses”). Even though Coursera has no clear plans for how to make money, an investor involved in its initial $16 million financing said other top VCs pleaded by phone and e-mail to get in on the deal, regardless of the price. It’s the sort of enthusiasm that often signals a tech investing bubble.

Hmmm… I think I’d read this as Round Two of the 1999-2000 fantasies about online education. It smacks of Fathom.com. But the movement started by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrunn will eventually have a disruptive effect on Higher Ed. The $64B question is how MOOCs will eventually start to disrupt conventional, lower- and middle-range HE providers. The Harvards, Stanfords and Cambridges of this world will be largely untouched by these developments, largely because they are really selling positional goods as much as an educational experience.

How the news came to Colorado

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What is wrong with these people?

DENVER, Colo — “Welcome to Hell!”

The shout broke a brief quiet inside a lounge of Denver’s Sports Authority Field, where the Colorado GOP held its election-night watch party. Fox News had just officially announced that Obama won Ohio, and with it the nation. Karl Rove was another thing, but it was a short moment of quiet, as supporters here processed the fact that not only had the president won the race, but after millions of dollars of advertising and weekly traffic jams from the candidates’ nonstop visits, Colorado ultimately did not matter in the final count.

“What is wrong with America?” one supporter murmured under his breath.

Debbie Cohen, 56, wept.

“I am deeply, deeply distressed. I have two grandbabies, and I look at this and I know there is no turning back,” she said, through tears. “How can America pick a man like that? I have been through many, many elections, but I have never known the desperation that I know now. I feel devastated. I feel hopeless.”

Cohen, a teacher, said she’ll probably feel better tomorrow, but for now, she needs to grieve.

“I don’t know where to go, except on my knees to God,” she said.

The Real Real America

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Paul Krugman sums it up.

Tomorrow — or I guess today — comes the cleanup; when thousands, perhaps millions, of right-wing heads explode, it makes quite a mess. Also, notice that the polls were right. I wonder if I can get invited when Nate Silver is sworn in as president?

OK, somewhat more seriously: one big thing that just happened was that the real America trumped the “real America”. And it’s also the election that lets us ask, finally, “Who cares what’s the matter with Kansas?”

For a long time, right-wingers — and some pundits — have peddled the notion that the “real America”, all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people, to which both parties must abase themselves. Meanwhile, the actual electorate was getting racially and ethnically diverse, and increasingly tolerant too. The 2008 Obama coalition wasn’t a fluke; it was the country we are becoming.

And sure enough that more diverse and, if you ask me, better nation just won big.

Notice too that to the extent that social issues played in this election, they played in favor of Democrats. Gods, guns, and gays didn’t swing voters into supporting corporate interests; instead, human dignity for women swung votes the other way.

A huge night for truth, justice, and the real American way.