Rav Casley Gera’s Blog

For all its horrendous qualities, you do have to admire the Sun’s ability to catch the emotive details of a story.

The Mail’s “Great to be British” headline kind of neatly sums up the essential attitude of the newspapers these days. When bad things happen (crime, global economic downturn), it’s always the Government’s fault, never society’s. When good things, happen, it’s all the country’s achievement, and never the Government’s, despite all the important work DCMS have done behind the scenes to get us this far.

The Chandra Levy series, on Page 1 for 13 days, has provoked these kinds of comments: Lurid! Appalling! A waste of time! And these: Fascinating! Totally hooked! Riveting!

No investigation in my 2 1/2 years here has provoked such sharply opposing reader comment as the series on the seven-year-old unsolved murder of the Washington intern, who was having an affair with a congressman.

All but two of the approximately 75 readers who called or wrote to me were critical of the project; by Friday, in the online comments posted with stories, critics outnumbered fans about 410 to 70.

Yet it was clear from e-mails to the reporters — Sari Horwitz, Scott Higham and Sylvia Moreno — that many readers were engrossed. The series was phenomenally popular online, outpacing other recent investigative series. And, for the first time, Post reporters engaged with readers in an online dialogue through a daily Reporter’s Notebook; the comments (more than 500, but with many repeaters) were mostly positive.

- Washinton Post reader’s ombudsman Deborah Howell

I’ll stay out of the row over whether the 13-part epic was a wise or worthwhile move for the WaPo, largely because I can’t be bothered to trawl through the whole thing myself. But the description of the tone of the comments is instructive. From the comments on the piece itself, you’d think it was a disaster. But the comments on the reporter’s log were nicer, and those via email glowing.

The lesson? Knee-jerk comments are almost always nasty. Casual readers won’t generally bother to comment to say how much they liked a story or agreed with its view; only the enraged are engaged enough to click. Those who really like it are more likely to email in their praise. It’s sad, but most of us feel more comfortable slating something online - which makes us feel superior - than praising it, which feels a bit like weakness. If we have something nice to say, we prefer to say it in private.

Bloggers depressed at epic posts that generate nothing but sneering comments, take heart!

“A lot of people say that the Internet is the future for newspapers. Well, I say bullshit.com.”

- Paul Dacre, Editor in Chief, Daily Mail Group, 1999

Are electronic newspapers just a load of bullshit.com? - New Statesman, 1999

Online sales of Domino’s pizza have surged ahead of its forecasts, as its half-year profits and sales were boosted by diners shunning restaurants in favour of eating at home…[CEO Chris Moore says] ”a lot of that is due to trading down. People are eating at home and eating out at restaurants is on the wane. Previously, this was a suspicion but there is [now] evidence that is happening.”

-Domino’s Pizza beats slowdown as diners choose to eat at home [Independent, today]

Is it time to get this “crisis” in perspective, perhaps? We’ve seen doom and gloom everywhere, we’ve seen entirely irony-free references to “austerity” and “a return to the postwar years”. And what form, exactly, does this take? People ordering Pizza instead of going out to eat. God forbid that people might get so destitute they might actually have to cook.

Astonishingly, we have to look to the Standard (of all papers) for some sense:

Going 15 years without a recession does have a downside - and one that is becoming ever more obvious.

People have forgotten, or never learned, that economic slowdowns are perfectly natural, that they are not necessarily to be feared and for the most part make very little real difference to most people’s lives.

- Recession? We’ll cope just as we did before [Anthony Hamilton, Evening Standard, yesterday]

I know, but seriously, the papers are just shit. Here’s a cracker from the New York Times, “reporting” on the deaths of two bloggers from heart attacks:

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

Right. Possibly because the fucking New York Times rang them up and asked them whether the deaths of their friends had them thinking about the dangers of their work style. I also like the way they describe one’s death of a heart attack and the other’s being from a coronary. Because, you know, they’re not exactly the same thing or anything.

Prize of the day, though, goes to Metro. Ah, god bless London’s shitty freesheets. Thanks to the gossip page, for “informing” us that Mariah Carey has dismissed rumours she spent a fortune on doughnuts, saying, “my trainer would hunt me down.”

The source for this minor revelation? An interview with the nutter herself? Cribbed from some obscure US showbiz blog, even? No. She said it on last week’s The Friday Night Project. On Channel 4. Watched by at least, ooh, several million people.

The Guardian’s take on the Hillary archives

ABC’s take on the Hillary archives

In other news, Chris Crocker gets meta

I’m not going to mock Norman Mailer by pretending I can write anything sufficiently meaningful, passionate or truthful to do him justice. Suffice to say that reading his books, I realised for the first time I could care as much about American literature as deeply as I did about American popular culture. [Read more →]

So I submitted an edited version of my column “Democracy 2.0” to the London Paper’s “the columnist” feature. And they printed it today! Hooray!

Does the rise of blogging and the decline of newspapers mean that Thomas Wolfe's "new journalism," originally expected to displace the novel, will soon be the only journalism left?

October 1, 2006 in Asides, Rav Idly Wonders | 0 comments

Things I have learned this morning following an hour foraging around on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free website:

1. The Doha round has been suspended
2. The Doha round has been abandoned
3. The collapse of the Doha round is a disaster
4. The collapse of the Doha round is the best outcome for the world’s poor
5. Abolishing agricultural subsidies in the global North is the answer to development
6. Northern agricultural subsidies make little difference to developing countries
7. It was all the US’ fault
8. It was all the EU’s fault

And so on. [Read more →]

The end is in sight. One Prospect and a Harper’s to go. Neatly, this almighty tidying-up exercise seems to have coincided with the lapsing of all my subscriptions, which I’ve made a point of not renewing. So I’m beginning to feel a touch of sadness at the end of my odyssey. Fortunately, some of the best stuff has come right at the end. [Read more →]

At it again. I’m now bedded down for a long haul. After tonight, there’s no time until Sunday, so better get on.

22:11pm. A writer from Harper’s “would like to hunt down George W. Bush and kill him with my bare hands.” Or possibly not, it’s a little ambiguous. Apparently Jose Maria Aznar’s government was toppled by a flash mob.

22:45pm. Marvellous story about a Mexican death race. One driver swerved to avoid a child in the road and flew, almost heroically, off the road into an 80-metre gully below. Unfortunately, at the bottom, he hit the crowd of people who had rushed into the road to look at the car in front of him, which had just flown into the next gully down. [Read more →]

OK. We’re back, as rested as a day at work can make a guy. I’m not going to bed until I’ve at least demolished an Atlantic and two Harper’s.

21:48pm. Apparently most presidents become mentally ill in the White House, and Wal-Mart is the biggest private employer in the history of the world.

22:11pm. The overturning of Roe vs. Wade would apparently lead to thirty years’ Democratic hegemony, abortions for everybody, and fivers growing on trees. Apparently.

22:32pm. Blood hell! They can make broadband come out of power sockets!

23:36pm. One in five American grocery transactions takes place in a Wal-Mart. Good grief.

And it’s time for sleep - and then, groan, work - again. Only one Atlantic and half a Harper’s tackled. Tomorrow, the hill of ignorance will be conquered once and for all.

Magazines. There are hundreds of the bleeding things, and I sometimes think I’ve subscribed to most of them. They attack me like some multi-headed monster; as soon as you’ve slogged through one, another two have plopped onto the doormat. From initially reading them cover to cover, then just the most interesting articles, I’m now reduced to skimming - and still there’s so much of it that the thought of reading anything, ahem, more substantial goes out the window.

Well, enough is enough. It’s Sunday, and I’ve put the entire day aside to clear out my magazine drawer before it gets any more overfull. And you, dear reader, can share the journey with me, in stream-of-consciousness style. [Read more →]

So I got into a couple of arguments over Guardian leaders, over, of all things, the BBC and (less of a shock) international development policy.

I still think it’s very wierd that the world’s second-most popular online newspaper lets any user place unmoderated comments straight on the webpage of its leader articles, but it’s kind of fun, too…