May 2010
Earlier this year, the Texas Board of Education went all “we’re the deciders” on U.S. history textbooks, demanding a decisively conservative slant on certain aspects of our nation’s history. More recently, Arizona went all “stuff white people don’t like” on Latino immigrants. The good people over at We Are Respectable Negroes have taken these gestures at face value and turned the implications of Texas and Arizona’s decisions into a Tea Party timeline: What Would U.S. History Look Like If It Were Written By Texas and Arizona? The sarcasm is kind of obvious awesome:
1941–Patriotic Japanese Americans volunteer to place themselves in gated communities so that America will be safe from Imperial Japan.
Source: We Are Respectable Negroes
- Michael Rowe
Economist and author Juliet Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College, is out to “plant a stake in the heart of the Business-as-Usual economy and its bankrupt politics.” Dig into a taste of Schor’s compelling thinking, adapted from her recently published book Plenitude, in this week’s issue of The Nation.
Journalists have been complaining lately about the pressure to generate page views. Such pressure is not new. But it’s intensifying. It’s now a luxury for a reporter to write a story about an obscure but important topic. That used to be a job requirement. Now it’s a career risk.
Example: let’s say an interesting startup has a new and different idea. Many reporters now won’t touch it because (a) the story won’t generate page views, and (b) few people search on terms germane to that startup. Potential SEO performance is now a key factor in what gets assigned.
Two reporters from two different publications this month both told us the same thing: if you want to write a story on an interesting but obscure topic, you had better feed the beast by writing a second story about the iPad or Facebook or something else that delivers page views and good SEO. It’s almost like a musician who has to play weddings and bar mitzvahs in order to play something more satisfying. It has come to this.Seriously! Writers never had to whore out to pay the bills before the internet came along!
True Fact: Before the Web, newsmagazine writers only did stories about things that no one had ever heard of (or even cared about!).
That was a golden age, my friends.
Sara Faye Lieber, writing at Guernica
From Utne.com: Bedbugs, Books, and Bohemians
