Felix Salmon

Happy sixth birthday, Twitter! You’re the service which started off as a way for groups of friends to keep in touch with each other via text messages, and you’ve grown into a revolutionary platform for connecting and sharing with millions of people around the world.

And you’ve become more annoying, too.

For most of its history, Twitter was disliked overwhelmingly by people who weren’t on it, rather than people who were. It wasn’t enough not to join; if you weren’t on it, you had to kvetch incessantly about how you weren’t interested in what other people were eating for breakfast.

I’ve noticed a change, though, in the past year. The people who used to complain the most about Twitter have either capitulated and joined, or else they’ve quietened down — at least they know, now, how infrequently anybody tweets about what they are eating for breakfast. And now the primary source of complaints about Twitter is coming from people on Twitter, rather than off it.

During SXSW, for instance, there was a steady drumbeat of people on my timeline complaining about all the tweets from SXSW. (I was there, and even I got annoyed by the endless banal SXSW tweets; I’m sympathetic to their plight.)

We’re going to have to live with many more annoying tweets going forwards, if things like Amex’s “tweet your way to savings” campaign take off. The VentureBeat headline is “American Express transforms Twitter hashtags into savings for cardholders,” but another way to put it is that American Express is trying to make money by getting people to spam their friends with hashtags like #AmexWholeFoods which have no value to the reader whatsoever.

And then there are people like Porter Versfelt III, who will get annoyed if I dare to express a personal opinion on Twitter. For Mr Versfelt, I have a “core purpose” on Twitter, which is to provide him with financial news, and anything I do outside that purpose is annoying.

Going forwards, all of us are going to find Twitter increasingly annoying. The company has been in hyper-growth mode up until now, getting to its current astonishing scale. But it’s now getting serious about making money, which means selling us, the users, to people willing to pay lots of money to work their way into our timelines one way or another.

On top of that, Twitter is increasingly going to be a medium for following people you don’t know, rather than people you do. When that happens, it’s much easier to get annoyed at what they’re tweeting, especially when those tweets are somewhat personal in nature (check-ins, photographs, that kind of thing). We neither can nor should try to stop people from tweeting whatever they want — the way that Twitter works, if you don’t want to read someone’s tweets, that’s easy, just stop following them. But at the same time, nearly everybody’s follower count is rising steadily, and as one’s follower count goes up, the more that Twitter becomes a broadcast medium rather than a medium of conversation. And when you become a broadcaster, you have to be more careful about what you say, or risk annoying a large number of people.

Twitter’s still in its honeymoon period, but that won’t last forever. At some point, it’s going to be less of a wunderkammer, and more of a regrettable necessity. Which is probably the point at which it’s going to finally start making some real money.

Super Freakonomics came out in 2009, and Ezra Klein was not impressed:

The problem with Super Freakonomics is it prefers an interesting story to an accurate one. This is evident from the very first story on the very first page of the book.

Under the heading “putting the freak in economics,” the book lays out its premise: Decisions that appear easy are actually hard. Take, for example, a night of drinking at a friend’s house. At the end of the night, you decide against driving home. This decision, the book says, seems “really, really easy.” As you might have guessed, we’re about to learn that it’s not so easy. At least if you mangle your statistics.

Klein then does a very good job of explaining where and how Super Freakonomics mangles its statistics.

So far so normal: Klein is far from alone in his bashing of the book. Indeed, American Scientist recently ran a column by Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung attacking the book’s m.o. And the book’s co-author, Stephen Dubner, has now responded to that column at astonishing and mind-numbing length (7,500 words).

Dubner says at the top of his post that he tends “to not reply to critiques”. But buried further down you’ll find this:

Gelman-Fung write that our argument was “picked apart by bloggers.” Their American Scientist article includes only a cursory bibliography and no footnotes or endnotes, nor do Gelman-Fung cite any specific sources in this case, so it’s unclear who those bloggers were and what they picked apart. From what I can tell, this is the main critique; its author is reputable but he has also written things like this (NSFW!), so he too seems to be in the business of attacking at any cost.

To be clear: Gelman and Fung accused Dubner of some slightly intellectually-dishonest practices. And in his self-defense, Dubner engages in some of the most egregious and blatant intellectual dishonesty I’ve ever seen on a blog.

There are lots of ways that Dubner might have responded to Klein; most of them involve mentioning him by name. Only one of them involves exhuming a drunken and deleted tweet from January 2008. If you look at the URL of the tweet (which is actually a screengrab of the tweet, since, you know, the original was deleted), you can tell that Dubner got there from this post. But Dubner doesn’t link to the post, just to the image of the tweet. Maybe because he knows that if he linked to the post, his readers would find this comment from Ezra Klein:

You’re absolutely correct that this was patently offensive. It was a private text message to friends, an inside joke we have because it’s so over-the-top obscene. It was never, ever meant to be public, and I’m deeply apologetic that it crossed that barrier. It’s not the sort of work I publish as a writer, and not what I seek to contribute to the discourse. The other examples of my writing, those that appear on my site, were meant to be in the sphere, to be argued with, even mocked. But the Twitter was ripped from my private life, and it was never meant to be brought out of the bar-like context in which it was born. Guess those privacy settings are more important than I realized.

In January 2008, Twitter was not the broadcasting platform it is today: it still felt much closer to its roots as a way for groups of friends to communicate with each other via text message. Today, we live in a world where the Freakonomics twitter account has 415,000 followers despite following nobody at all. But when Klein put out the tweet that Dubner’s linking to, the Freakonomics twitter account hadn’t even been created. In no sense at all was Klein “writing” something for public consumption and thereby demonstrating that he is “in the business of attacking at any cost”.

Now it’s possible that Dubner is unaware of Wonkblog, or of Klein’s Bloomberg View column, and therefore is unfamiliar with his actual mode of writing. Possible, but unlikely. What’s impossible is that Dubner believes that Klein’s rapidly-deleted tweet is in any way representative of his work as a whole.

It baffles me why Dubner would engage in a low and dirty and deeply dishonest ad hominem attack on Ezra Klein at all — let alone in the middle of a post in which he’s trying to defend his reputation. The only reason I can possibly think of is that, to coin a phrase, he seems to be in the business of attacking at any cost. Even when the cost paid is that people are sure to take him even less seriously now than they did before.

Update, 3/24: Dubner emails to say that he agrees the link was “unnecessary”, and that he has removed it from the post. In fact, he’s removed not only the link to the screengrab of the tweet, but also the link to Klein’s blog post, with the result that he now pretends to have no idea what the criticisms of his drunk-driving chapter are, even though he linked to them in an earlier version of the post.

Blaine Harden’s astonishing account of the life of Shin In Geun — a man born into a North Korean prison camp, who has lived pretty much the worst life imaginable — has received significantly less attention than the fact that This American Life has retracted its story about working conditions at Foxconn, which was based on Mike Daisey’s monologue. (If you don’t want to listen to the hour-long retraction, which is a masterpiece of the form, the transcript is available here.)

Daisey has attempted to defend his actions, using an end-justifies-the-means argument:

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic ­- not a theatrical ­- enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China.

Kevin Slavin has defended Daisey, too:

His skill in telling the story he told is responsible for the phenomenal amount of media around Chinese factory labor practices. Not the New York Times’ China bureau. Not Bloomberg Businessweek. Show me some reporters who were able to generate the same cultural engagement with the issue, will you?

Stories aren’t made out of facts. Storytellers use facts to reveal truth but they use a lot of other things too. And if ever I have to choose between facts and truth, I’ll take truth. It’s always a great story, and stories are the life inside the human mind.

It’s a lot easier to tell a great story if you don’t also need to be factual about things. Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet are fiction; Richard III and Henry V are mostly fiction, albeit based on historical events. And it’s precisely because they’re fictional — because Shakespeare was always storyteller first and foremost — that they’re still performed so regularly, all over the world, and that they have had such powerful emotional resonance with billions of people over the centuries since they were written.

But here’s the thing: Shakespeare never lied. He never sat down in front of thousands of people to tell a first-person story, over and over again, about events which he had simply invented. He never ended that story with an exhortation which would carry no weight if his audience thought the story was fiction:

When Apple would call journalists who had spoken to me, and tell them, “You know, I don’t know if you want to be associated with him. He’s kind of unstable. You know, he does work in the theater.”

I would keep my head down. And I would tell my story.

And tonight—we know the truth.

At the end of Daisey’s show, every member of the audience is given a sheet of paper with the heading “CHANGE IS POSSIBLE”. It includes Tim Cook’s email address, and urges the audience to, among other things, “think different about upgrading”. And one of the reasons why Daisey’s show has proved so popular — his This American Life episode was the most downloaded in the show’s history, even more than the squirrel cop — is that it combined great storytelling with a feeling that this is happening now and we should do something about it. It’s exactly the same formula used by Kony 2012, a project which is equally problematic.

My friend and Reuters colleague Rebecca Hamilton has written a great book, Fighting for Darfur, which should be required reading for anybody who has been drawn in by the Kony 2012 campaign. Or, for that matter, by Daisey’s monologue. Here’s what she wrote to me:

To build a mass movement quickly, it helps to have an over-simplified, emotive narrative with a single demand. It also helps to tells people that by doing easy tasks – sharing a link on Facebook, buying a bracelet — they can save lives. Central to the formula is that the agency of local actors gets downplayed to hype up the importance of action by outsiders. But all those ingredients inevitably lead to eventual failure when the simple solutions can’t fix the complex reality. The movement walks away, disillusioned. And in the meantime untold resources have been expended on solutions that have been out of step with what local activists need.

The fact is that the chief beneficiary of the success of Daisey’s monologue has been Mike Daisey, much more than any group of factory workers or underground trades unionists in China. Similarly, the chief beneficiary of the success of Kony 2012 has been Invisible Children, a US non-profit which spends its money mostly on making movies.

And this is where the justifications coming from Daisey and Slavin really fall down — in the idea that if you get a lot of westerners riled up about what’s going on in some far-flung part of the world, then that is in and of itself a Good Thing. Daisey has managed to convince himself that his interests are perfectly aligned with those of the workers at Foxconn. Even when he presents himself as some kind of savior in a Hawaiian shirt, bringing wisdom to the workers just by asking the right questions:

I’m just ad-hoc-ing questions, I’m asking the questions you would expect: “What village in China are you from? How long have you been working at Foxconn? What do you do at the plant? How do you find your job? What would you change at Foxconn if you could change anything?”

That last question always gets them. They always react like a bee has flown into their faces and then they say something to Cathy and Cathy says, “He says he never thought of that before.” Every time. Every time.

Of course it’s ludicrous to believe that someone working 12-hour shifts at a Foxconn plant wouldn’t start thinking about how the plant might be better run. But that’s the power of theater: its conventions are designed to encourage us to suspend such disbelief. And so we walk away thinking that Mike Daisey is bold and wonderful, and really did ask that question of Foxconn workers under the glare of gun-toting Chinese guards. (We now know that no Foxconn guards are armed: that bit, too, was made up.) And we think that the Chinese workers are so beaten-down and resigned to their miserable fate that they never even stop to think about how things might be improved.

And this is why I believe the story of Shin In Geun, despite the fact that its format is inherently treacherous. Both Shin and Harden have every incentive to exaggerate and to make things seem worse than they are; what’s more, there’s absolutely no way of fact-checking the vast majority of what’s in the story. But what’s missing from their tale is the white man’s burden: the idea that a white American like Mike Daisey or Jason Russell (or Jeff Sachs, for that matter) is a selfless hero, doing good for the poor and exploited in other continents.

What Daisey should have done is what Dave Eggers did when he wrote What is the What: make no pretense that everything is true, and trust in the power of his storytelling to carry the audience along. Instead, he lied — both to This American Life and to his audience.

I am telling you that I do not speak Mandarin, I do not speak Cantonese, I have only a passing familiarity with Chinese culture and to call what I have a passing familiarity is an insult to Chinese culture—I don’t know fuck-all about Chinese culture.

But I do know that in my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who were fourteen years old,

I met workers who were thirteen years old,

I met workers who were twelve.

Do you really think Apple doesn’t know?

This had a lot of resonance for me, when I first heard it, not least because I understand statistics. In order to meet underage workers who are happy to talk about how old they are within two hours of turning up at a factory gate, there need to be a lot of those workers. Many more than the official numbers suggest. But in fact Daisey did not meet underage workers outside the factory gates. (He still claims that he did, but his translator, who’s a much more reliable source, says that he didn’t. And as Evan Osnos says, that whole episode defies credulity in the first place.)

Daisey’s m.o., it’s now clear, was to go to China, talk to some people, and then write a monologue in which he felt free to incorporate anything he’d read about the plight of workers anywhere in the country, presented as a direct piece of first-person reportage. And there’s a good reason why that’s an underhanded and unethical thing to do, which is that even if Apple did everything Daisey’s asking of them, he could still go to China and return with the exact same monologue. With hindsight, Apple was absolutely right not to engage with Daisey directly, because he created a game they could never win. The only winning move, for them, was not to play.

Jack Shafer, then, is right to come down hard on Daisey. He concludes with this, about fabulists generally:

I have my theory: 1) They lie because they don’t have the time or talent to tell the truth, 2) they lie because they think they can get away with it, and 3) they lie because they have no respect for the audience they claim to want to enlighten. That would be an ideal subject for a one-man theatrical performance.

The irony is that this subject has already been explored in a one-man theatrical performance — one by Mike Daisey, no less. Daisey, you won’t be surprised to hear, is gentler on James Frey and JT Leroy than Shafer is on Daisey, blaming in significant part “the demands of personal storytelling” for their sins.

In any case, it’s clear that theatrical events are bad places to look for unvarnished truth. And in the set of “theatrical events” I absolutely include things like TED talks. Many people have asked, of the hilarious TED 2012 autotune remix, whether it’s parody or not. The answer is that it’s not parody at all. Rather, it’s the work of someone who has been entranced by TED’s theater, and who hasn’t yet woken up to realize that statements like “we can change the world if we defy the impossible” are less stirring than they are just plain stupid.

Real life is messy. And as a general rule, the more theatrical the story you hear, and the more it divides the world into goodies vs baddies, the less reliable that story is going to be. I’ll be very interested to read Harden’s book about Shin In Geun, to see how the guards and teachers in the prison camp are portrayed — to see whether they’re monsters or whether they themselves are victims of the North Korean regime. As we know from Primo Levi, prison camps will twist and subvert the ethics of all concerned. And even in this excerpt we can see real moral problems: Shin himself behaves with astonishing heartlessness towards his own parents and brother.

One of the central problems with narrative nonfiction is that the best narratives aren’t messy and complicated, while nonfiction nearly always is. Daisey stepped way too far over the line when he started outright lying to his audience and to the producers of This American Life. But all of us in the narrative-nonfiction business (I’ve written such stuff myself) are faced at some point with a choice between telling the story and telling the whole truth, or the whole truth as best we understand it. Someone like Michael Lewis will concentrate with a laser focus on the story: what he writes is the truth, but it isn’t the whole truth. And when you have a storyteller like Mike Daisey who considers himself a monologist rather than a journalist, even outright lies can find their way in to the story very easily.

Ira Glass says that This American Life should have scrapped the idea of doing a Mike Daisey show the minute he told their fact-checkers that he had no way of contacting his translator. But maybe the mistake was made even earlier, when This American Life decided that a theatrical monologue could ever be held to standards of journalistic accuracy. This one certainly couldn’t, and in that I think it’s more the rule than the exception.

Like many people, I’m fascinated by lottery tickets. In many ways they’re the purest speculative investment in the world: a piece of paper which is all but worthless today might be worth $200 million tomorrow. Literally. Lottery tickets are a bit like SWAG assets (silver, wine, art gold) in that you can only make money on them by giving them up and exchanging them for cash. They pay no dividends, and they have an asymmetrical payout: the most you can lose on any one ticket is a modest dollar, but the most you can gain is enormous.

On top of that, lotteries can be gamed, as Jonah Lehrer spelled out in a fantastic Wired story last year. And casinos can be gamed too, as Mark Bowden explains in the the latest issue of the Atlantic. Beating the odds is a staple of great narrative journalism for good reason, and of movies, too. Which is why it’s so incredibly depressing to see this being hosted at CNN Money, under the headline “Boost your odds of winning the lottery”.

Richard Lustig is a get-rich-quick hack with no idea at all of how to beat any lottery. Yes, he’s won an impressive number of jackpots. But he also advises that one third of all your winnings should be “reinvested” into lottery tickets — which means that he’s betting an enormous amount of money every week. He never gives any indication of what his ROI is; indeed, he never actually comes out and says that he’s a net winner. Neither can I see any indication that all the money he’s gambling is his own. Certainly Lustig’s bare-bones website, which seems like it was designed in 1997 and which features an ad for 995SunGlasses.com, gives the impression of someone who’s on a very tight budget. And the less said about his all-caps twitter feed, the better.

Lustig’s advice is simply bizarre: he reckons that you should buy lottery numbers in sequence, and that you should never buy “quick-pick” (randomly-generated) tickets. In fact, if you’re going to play the lottery, the rational way to play the lottery is to do the exact opposite of Lustig’s advice. Never pick your own numbers; always accept random numbers. The reason is that when lotteries have big prizes, those prizes are parcelled out between everybody who had the winning numbers. For instance, in August 2010, Lustig had a winning ticket in a draw where the jackpot was $197,985.84. But so did someone else — so he ended up winning only half that amount. And if you want to minimize your chances of overlapping with someone else, you’re much better off accepting a set of random numbers than you are using some kind of human-generated method. Remember when 110 people all had the winning numbers 22, 28, 32, 33, and 39, just because those numbers were printed in fortune cookies?

I have no problem with people spending small amounts of money on the lottery — in fact, sometimes it’s a positively good idea. But I do have a problem with anybody who’s shilling the idea that you can make money this way. And I have a huge problem with respected websites like CNN Money giving that person extremely positive publicity, without any hint of skepticism about the claims involved.

Let’s be clear about this: if you buy a lottery ticket, you should expect to lose all of your money. If you still want to buy a ticket knowing that you’re not going to get your money back, then go right ahead. But spending $40 on Richard Lustig’s book is a very, very, very bad idea, not least because you’ll probably end up spending many times that much money on tickets. And it’s downright unethical for CNN Money to implicitly encourage people to do so, by running dreck like this.

Update: CNN has taken the video down. “The CNNMoney newsroom takes great pride in its journalism, with consistently high standards for reporting,” says a CNN Money spokesperson. “This video fell short of that mark and we’ve chosen to remove it from our site.”

Kevin Drum has an interesting take on the Matter debate: if Matter does great journalism, it will succeed, and if it doesn’t, it will fail, and the business model doesn’t, well, matter.

I don’t have much of an opinion about Matter because I suspect their delivery mechanism is beside the point. It does have the benefit of keeping overhead costs low, but that’s probably a wash since they also have no advertising revenue. Basically, if they’re able to consistently produce spectacular pieces of journalism that generate a lot of online buzz, they’ll succeed. If they can’t, they won’t. But that would probably be true regardless of what kind of delivery model they choose.

I differ with Kevin here — I think the business model matters a lot, precisely because niche publications can’t support themselves online through advertising.

There are two ways of looking at this: the quantitative, and the practical. The quantitative goes something like this: let’s say that there are 2 million science nerds in America — that Matter’s potential audience is 2 million people. And let’s say that if Matter publishes a great piece online for free, it reaches 200,000 of them. If it manages a respectable RPM (that’s ad revenue per 1,000 pages) of $5, then that story will bring in 200 x $5 = $1,000. Even if it reaches a million science nerds it still only has revenues of $5,000 for that story. And then you have to back out the ad network’s take, the ad sales guy’s salary and commission, the time spent trying to do biz-dev deals, and in general the enormous publishing-side infrastructure that all successful ad-supported websites require. By the time you’ve done that, there’s literally nothing left for editorial.

The practical level is even simpler: a niche long-form science-journalism website is never going to get the kind of scale which advertisers want. Big-name brand advertisers want to reach lots of people lots of times. They’ll advertise on blogs, which can get audiences in the millions, but they’re not going to advertise on a site which only updates once a month or even once a week. In general, the amount of inventory online is growing fast, and websites need to be able to keep up with that growth or start seeing their advertisers fall away, one by one.

With subscriptions, though, the math is much more compelling: if you get 20,000 people paying a buck apiece for that story, that’s $20,000, with no sales overhead; most of that money can end up going to editorial.

What’s more, if you’re writing for a small audience rather than a mass audience, you massively increase the opportunity space with regard to the kind of journalism that’s possible. Drum is right that the best writers and reporters in the business are expensive. But they will also nearly always work for less money if they get to chase down really juicy stories, or write exactly what they want to write, in a medium which will give them all the space they need. I’m sure that Christopher Hitchens didn’t charge the New York Review of Books or even the Atlantic anything like the kind of money he was being paid by Vanity Fair.

Matter has a compelling pitch as far as writers are concerned. You don’t need to dumb down your story, or make it accessible to a mass audience: instead, you can be obsessive and geeky and so long as you end up with a fantastic investigative narrative at the end, that’s fine. What’s more, we won’t cut out half your story unless doing so really makes it better: we don’t have any space constraints.

Professional-quality nanopublishing has never really worked online, because the ad-supported business model can’t make it work. In a world of micropayments, however, everything changes. Matter’s early to this game; one of the reasons I’m excited about it and hope it succeeds — and one of the reasons that 1,881 people have pledged $108,470 to make it work — is that if it works, then it will blaze the way for many other publications, in other fields.

There are lots of things which are yet to be worked out, not least how content behind a paywall can be effectively shared on the increasingly social internet. (Which is one reason I hope the Matter paywall is at least a little bit porous.) And I’m sure that Matter will make mistakes: all startups do. But at some point, a publisher somewhere is going to crack the nanopublishing/micropayments nut. And when that happens, it will be revolutionary for the world of online journalism.

Stephen Morse doesn’t Matter. In fact, he calls the journalism startup — whose Kickstarter campaign broke past the $100,000 level in just nine days — “Snake Oil Salesmen 2.0″ and “a scam”. And after getting a smart explanation of exactly how Matter’s business model is, he doubled down on his position and said he would keep it even if they manage to raise $500,000. So I invited him up to Reuters for a little debate.

We disagreed about a few different things. The first is Morse’s idea that there’s so much great content out there for less than 99 cents that no one’s going to pay that whopping sum to read Matter’s stories. I, obviously, disagree. I think that the success of the Kickstarter campaign is proof that there’s huge untapped demand for this kind of material — demand which is not being met by the competitors Morse cites, like Scientific American or Popular Mechanics. I think that the success of books for the Kindle — for that matter, the success of decades of magazines and centuries of paper books — demonstrates that there’s real demand for quality content, even from people who don’t necessarily have the time to read it all. I think that mobile devices like phones and tablets have revolutionized where and how we consume a huge range of written content. And, most importantly, I think that trail blazers like the iTunes Store and the New York Times are changing the willingness of millions of people to pay for digital material.

“If I were a content consumer,” says Morse, lapsing into a rather odd conditional, “I wouldn’t pay 99 cents for one article” when magazine subscriptions amortize out at a lower per-article cost, and besides there’s lots of great content out there which is absolutely free. Such things, he says, are “a much better value” than Matter. But here I think Morse misses the great hope of the 99-cent price: it’s low enough that substantially everybody in Matter’s target audience can afford to pay it without any real effect on their wealth or cashflow whatsoever. It’s less than the amount you tip a cab driver, or a bartender; in fact, it’s less than the cost of just about anything you might buy in the physical world. 99 cents is low enough that, for hundreds of thousands of people, worries about value disappear. They pay that on text messages all the time, which have much lower value. Why not pay it for something great, if doing so allows that thing to exist in the first place?

Put it this way: if Matter found a way for people to pay them after they read a story, rather than before, on a purely voluntary basis, I’d still be optimistic about their ability to make money doing this. Think of a world where you got the New Yorker delivered for free every week, and then clicked a button paying them 99 cents every time you really liked one of the articles. I think they could get a lot of revenue that way, and I think the success of the porous New York Times paywall is strong evidence of that. Yes, there will always be people who don’t want to pay, and there will always be others who somehow find free samizdat versions of Matter’s stories. But those people aren’t important. What’s important is the number of honest people who are more than happy to pay when they find something good to read. And that number is extremely large, and growing.

Matter’s Kickstarter campaign proves that people want to give them their money. The task facing Matter is to create material that’s so unique, so great, that readers around the country and the world will be eager to buy subscriptions, or individual issues, in the knowledge that their money is going straight to the creators of that content. It’s an exercise in doing something which has historically been extremely rare, in the world of journalism: selling stories to readers, as opposed to selling readers to advertisers. But the internet makes it so easy to reach millions of potential readers that a small and enthusiastic subgroup can be big enough to sustain this kind of publication. Nanopublishing didn’t work when Nick Denton tried it on an ad-supported basis. But Matter is effectively running a publication at a CPM of $1,000 — and a lot of math starts working when the numbers get that big.

In our debate, Morse snarked that no one down below us, in Times Square, had heard of Jim Giles or Bobbie Johnson, the co-founders of Matter. And in saying that he revealed his broader mindset: that of a would-be internet entrepreneur who raises venture funding by using the words “platform” and “scale” a lot while promising things like “explosive growth”. It’s no great secret that Giles and Johnson have talked to VCs, many of whom have been very supportive. But what they’re building doesn’t lend itself to the VC business model, where you either have monster, multi-million-dollar success, or else you die trying.

Morse uses the fact that Matter doesn’t have VC funding as a count against them, when in fact it’s a great count in their favor. VCs provide two things: money and advice. And Matter’s getting the advice; it’s just doing so without having to sell its soul to people wanting a monster return on their investment. All it needs to do, at least in the first instance, is pay for itself. And at the end of our debate, Morse finally came up with a number: if Matter can get 20,000 paying customers each week, he said, then he sees a sustainable model there.

Morse also said that “even if every science nerd out there pays a dollar, this is not going to be something that will get the critical audience needed to be a financial success”. Which I think is plainly wrong: there are a lot more than 20,000 science nerds out there. Scientific American has a circulation of 475,000. Popular Mechanics and Popular Science both have a circulation of over 1.2 million. Smithsonian has a circulation of more than 2 million. And National Geographic has a circulation of over 4 million. Can Matter reach 20,000 paying customers? Of course it can. Here’s Johnson:

We don’t think it’s going to be a mainstream smash; we don’t think it’s going to change the world; we don’t think we’re going to out New Yorker the New Yorker; we don’t think we’re going to be billionaires. But we do think, done right, we can offer something valuable and remain sustainable in the medium term.

There’s nothing pie-in-the-sky about that idea; to the contrary, it’s eminently achievable. I think so, and 1,806 of Matter’s Kickstarter backers think so too. With 17 more days to go.

In August 2004, Gothamist publisher Jake Dobkin applied for working-press credentials from the NYPD. An avid and ubiquitous news photographer, he clearly qualified for the credentials on any common-sense grounds. But the NYPD denied his request on the grounds that Gothamist was a website, and the NYPD didn’t consider anybody working for a website to be a journalist. (Seriously.) Thus did the saga of Gothamist’s press pass begin.

Eventually, in 2009, the NYPD was forced, thanks to a lawsuit, to start issuing credentials to bloggers. But it still clearly didn’t want to. And Gothamist still had zero press passes.

The story from then on in is a long one: Gothamist editor Chris Robbins’s post from last December on the subject runs to more than 2,700 words. But basically there are a few things you officially need a press pass for, including getting the NYPD’s “press wire” emails. And there are even more things that you unofficially need a press pass for, including being considered a journalist by the Mayor’s press secretary.

I’m with Dobkin on this one: the whole system of the NYPD making highly-secretive determinations as to who is and who isn’t press is broken, and the best outcome here would be to simply abolish the things altogether. But given that they do exist, Gothamist should clearly qualify for them: as Dobkin says, they’re a legitimate media organization with over 25 employees and more than 2.5 million unique readers in New York City. This isn’t some guy in his pajamas. “Next time someone accuses a blog of aggregating,” Dobkin tweeted the last time he was rejected, “ask yourself, how can they avoid aggregating without all the tools required to produce original posts?”

This story has a happy ending, of sorts. On February 28 — some 90 months after his initial application — Dobkin was told that his latest application had been approved. The pass arrived today.

Still, Dobkin’s fight is a timely reminder, as we remember one of the most influential online-media innovators of all time, that the real world can move astonishingly slowly by internet standards. Print still has a cachet that most online publications struggle to achieve, and uncontroversial news outlets like Gothamist get lumped in with provocateurs like Andrew Breitbart in the mind of information officers and PR people in New York and across the country. Breitbart and Dobkin both, in their own ways, made significant advances in terms of expanding the possibilities of online news. But Breitbart made a much bigger splash. And, in doing so, didn’t help Dobkin’s cause in the slightest.

Jonathan Stray has a great essay up at Nieman Lab entitled “Why link out? Four journalistic purposes of the noble hyperlink”. I basically agree with all of it; links are wonderful things, and the more of them that we see in news stories — especially if they’re external rather than internal links — the better.

It’s very easy to agree that if a story refers to some other story or document, and if that other story or document is online, then it should be hyperlinked. But Stray goes further than that:

In theory, every statement in news writing needs to be attributed. “According to documents” or “as reported by” may have been as far as print could go, but that’s not good enough when the sources are online.

I can’t see any reason why readers shouldn’t demand, and journalists shouldn’t supply, links to all online resources used in writing a story.

Tellingly, Stray provides no hyperlinks at all for his assertion that “every statement in news writing needs to be attributed”. Is this really true? It certainly isn’t in the UK, where I come from. What’s more, even before the WSJ got taken over by foreign marauders like Rupert Murdoch and Robert Thomson, it followed this rule mostly just by inserting the stock phrase “according to people familiar with the situation” into any story. That phrase, of course, tells the reader exactly nothing.

In recent days, a debate has emerged online on what I consider to be two very different subjects, which are getting unhelpfully elided. The first question, raised by MG Siegler, is whether outlets like the WSJ have an obligation to say who first broke a piece of news, when they report that news. The second question, which is often mistaken for the first, is whether outlets like the WSJ should link to outside sources of information.

To the second question, my answer is simple: yes. But look at the story by Jessica Vascellaro about Apple acquiring Chomp. There’s only one part of that story which obviously needs a hyperlink, if such a thing were available, and that’s in the first sentence, where we’re told that Apple said it has acquired Chomp. If there’s some kind of public press release from Apple saying such a thing, then the WSJ should link to it. But there isn’t, so the lack of any link there is forgivable.

What Siegler wants is for extra text to be added in to Vascellaro’s story, saying that he first broke the news. And I’m pretty sure that Stray would want the same thing — after all, Vascellaro’s own tweet does imply that she first got wind of the story online, before confirming it with Apple. If it was Siegler’s article which caused Vascellaro to call Apple, then Siegler certainly counts as an online resource used in writing the WSJ story, and should therefore, by Stray’s formulation, be fully linked and credited.

On the other hand, if Stray agrees with Siegler, that doesn’t mean that Siegler agrees with Stray. Siegler cited no source at all, named or anonymous, for his scoop that Apple had bought Chomp: he simply asserted the fact. “Apple has bought the app search and discovery platform Chomp, we’ve learned.” If every statement in news writing needs to be attributed, then Siegler just failed that test.

But I don’t think it does. If you attribute a statement like that to “sources familiar with the situation”, or something along those lines, then the attribution looks a lot like a CYA move. Consider the difference between (a) “Apple has bought Chomp”, and (b) “Apple has bought Chomp, say sources familiar with the situation”. Technically speaking, if the sale falls through, then (a) is false, while (b) was actually true. In that sense, failing to provide attribution is a way of sticking your neck out and asserting news to be a fact. Here’s Siegler:

I reported the Apple acquisition of Chomp as a fact for good reason — It. Was. A. Fact. If I had reason to believe it may not be a done deal or not 100% certain, I would have said that. I did not because I didn’t need to.

Not too long ago, I had a conversation with a journalist who was adamantly sticking up for her story in the face of criticism. The story included a statement of the form “X, says Y”, where Y was an anonymous source. Various other people were saying that X was not, in fact, true. But the journalist was standing firm. I then asked her whether she was standing firm on the statement “X, says Y”, which she reported — or whether she was standing firm on the statement that X. And here’s the thing that struck me: it took her a long time to even understand the distinction. A lot of American journalists stick the sourcing in there because they have to — but they very much consider themselves to be reporting news, and if X turned out not to be true, they would never consider their story to be correct, even if it were true that Y had indeed said that X.

Elsewhere, however, those conventions don’t hold. In a lot of political reporting, you have one person saying “X”, and another person saying “not-X”, and it’s left to the reader to decide whether one or the other or neither is telling the truth. And even facts can end up being attributed to people, which is even more confusing. Consider this, for instance, from a recent NYT article by Motoko Rich:

The home ownership rate has been falling from its peak of 69.4 percent in 2004, according to census data. By the fourth quarter of 2011, it was down to 66 percent. That means about two million more households are renting, said Kenneth Rosen, an economist and professor of real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

This is Rosen’s only appearance in the article, and he’s not being used to give an opinion, or an expert analysis: he’s being used to count rental households. And, at least on the face of things, he’s not particularly good at that. According to the 2010 census summary, there are 116,716,292 occupied housing units in America. So a basic back-of-the-envelope calculation would say that if the proportion of those units which went from owner-occupied to rented moved from 69.4% to 66%, then the increase in rental households would be 3.4% of 116,716,292, which comes to almost exactly 4 million. That’s double Rosen’s number.

Or, we can get more accurate, and go back to the 2005 American Community Survey, which showed 36,771,635 renter-occupied housing units in total. Contrast that with 2010, where there were 40,730,218 renter-occupied housing units. The difference, again, is almost exactly 4 million.

Most accurately of all, you can look directly at the Census Bureau’s quarterly estimates of the US housing inventory. According to that series, the number of renter-occupied houses in the US was 32,913,000 in the second quarter of 2004; it’s now 38,771,000. The difference there is not 2 million or 4 million but rather 5.9 million. (In the same time, the number of owner-occupied households has increased by 1.2 million.)

Now Rosen may or may not have good reason to believe that in fact the real increase in renting households is only 2 million rather than 4 million or 6 million. But if he does, that reason is not the drop in the homeownership rate from 69.4% to 66%. Not given the number of households in this country. (The homeownership data is here, by the way; it’s worth noting that Rich didn’t link to it.)

All of which housing wonkery is to say that even basic facts like the increase in US rental households can be non-trivial to pin down, and that both Rich and her readers would probably have been better off if she hadn’t bothered phoning Rosen at all, and had just got her numbers for the increase in rental households directly from the people measuring such things. Citing sources doesn’t help the reader at all, here: if Rich had been forced to assert the increase in rental households, rather than simply attributing the number to Rosen, then she would probably have got something closer to the truth.

The difference between linking and citing is the difference between showing and telling. I’m not a big fan of citing, mainly because it gets in the way: we might learn a lot about where the Haas School of Business might be, but at the same time we’ll learn nothing useful about the increase in the number of rental households. On the other hand, if Rich had simply said that “about six million more households are renting”, complete with hyperlink, that would have been shorter, more useful, and more accurate, even if there were no explicit citation.

Similarly, there’s a case to be made that Vascellaro could and should simply have put out a one-line story under the exact same headline (“Apple Acquires App-Search Engine Chomp”), saying “I’ve talked to Apple and they confirm this story is true.” Vascellaro had exactly one new piece of information: Apple’s confirmation of the news. In a world where TechCrunch is only a click away, why write out a lazy rehash of what Siegler had already written, rather than just linking to his story and moving on to breaking and writing something more interesting?

One reason is that the WSJ still has a hugely successful print product, and that therefore WSJ journalists’ pieces need to work in print as well as online. What’s more, as people increasingly read WSJ.com stories offline, on things like the WSJ iPad app, the need for those stories to be reasonably comprehensive remains. Even in the age of the hyperlink. Here’s Stray:

Rewriting is required for print, where copyright prevents direct use of someone else’s words. Online, no such waste is necessary: A link is a magnificently efficient way for a journalist to pass a good story to the audience.

The problem is that a journalist never really knows whether their work is going to be read online or offline, even if they’re writing solely for the web. The story might get downloaded into an RSS reader, to be consumed offline. It might be emailed to someone with a Blackberry who can’t possibly be expected to open a hyperlink in a web browser. It might even get printed out and read that way.

Besides, the simple fact is that even if people can follow links, most of the time they don’t. An art of writing online is to link to everything, but to still make your piece self-contained enough that it makes sense even if your reader clicks on no links at all. Cryptic sentences which make no sense until you click on them are arch and annoying.

What’s more, as Stray says, “online writing needs to be shorter, sharper, and snappier than print”; his link will take you to Michael Kinsley, moaning about how “newspaper stories are written to accommodate readers who have just emerged from a coma or a coal mine”. In that context, does it really behoove reporters to build a long list of sources into all of their stories? Does every news story need to link to the organization which first broke the news? Does every journalist need to hat-tip the friend of theirs who retweeted the nugget which ultimately resulted in their story?

My feeling is that commodity news is a commodity: facts are in the public domain, and don’t belong to anybody. If you’re mentioning a fact which you sourced in a certain place, then it’s a great idea to link to that place. And if you’re matching a story which some other news organization got first, it’s friendly and polite to mention that fact in your piece, while linking to their story. But it’s always your reader who should be top of mind — and the fact is that readers almost never care who got the scoop.

There’s one big exception to that rule, however. Often, a reporter spends a long time getting a big and important scoop, which comes in the form of a long and deeply-reported story. When other news organizations cover that news, they really do have to link to the original story — the place which did it best. Otherwise, they shortchange their readers. A prime example came last August, with Matt Taibbi’s 5,000-word exposé of the SEC’s document-shredding. Anybody covering that story without linking to Taibbi was doing their readers a disservice.

As a result, like most things online, it’s very dangerous to try to come up with hard-and-fast rules about such things. In general, it’s good to link to as many different people and sources as possible, because the more links you have, the richer your story is. On the other hand, the journalistic web is full of garbage hyperlinks — automated links to irrelevant topic pages, for instance, or links to an organization’s home page when that organization is first mentioned.

As for crediting the news organization which broke some piece of news, that’s more of a journalistic convention than a necessary service to readers. It’s important enough within the journalism world, at least in the US, that it’s probably a good idea to do it when you can. But most of the time it’s pretty inside-baseball stuff. And in the pantheon of journalistic sins, failing to do it is not a particularly big deal. What’s much more important is that your reader get as much information as possible, as efficiently as possible. Which means that if you’re writing about a document or report, you link to that document or report. Failure to do that is a much greater sin than failure to link to some other journalist.

So while sometimes the failure to link is unavoidable, I look forward to a time when journalists face much more criticism for not linking to primary documents than they do for not linking to some other news organization which got the news first.

Yesterday morning, a very exciting new journalism project was launched on Kickstarter. It’s called Matter, and it’s going to be home to long-form investigative narrative journalism about science and technology. “No cheap reviews, no snarky opinion pieces, no top ten lists,” they promise. “Just one unmissable story.”

They hit a nerve: as I write this, some 31 hours after the Kickstarter campaign was launched, it has already reached $44,395 of its $50,000 goal, with 569 backers. That’s an average of almost $80 each. “People are giving way more than I thought they would,” said co-founder Jim Giles when I talked to him today. “We have tapped into frustration with the way the internet has promoted quick and cheap journalism and bashed longer-quality stuff, or at least undermined the business model that used to support that sort of thing.”

Matter will surely exceed its $50,000 goal, which is great news, because the more money it raises the better. In the first instance, the $50,000 will be enough to get a nice website up and running, and should also pay for the first three stories on the site. With more money, Matter can get more ambitious: commission more stories, for one thing, but also start building an iPad app which would live in the iOS Newsstand. Or maybe something on Android, or both. There’s a lot of opportunity out there.

This is an old-school Kickstarter campaign, where people are raising the money they need to create something great. It’s not one of those campaigns where donors are essentially pre-buying the product in advance: this isn’t about buying stories before they’re published, or buying subscriptions before the publication even exists. “We’re asking people to make an investment in a sustainable platform for really good journalism,” says Giles, “not to buy a whole bunch of articles in advance.” (That said, anybody pledging $10 or more will get the first three stories, $50 gets you the first six, $100 gets you the first ten, $300 gets you the first 50, and $1,000 gets you a lifetime subscription.)

Once Matter has launched, readers will have the option of buying individual stories for 99 cents each — the Kindle Single model, basically — or buying a subscription. It’ll be monthly at first, and then weekly, assuming everything goes according to plan.

The stories themselves are going to be really good, I think. Matter’s founders, Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson, are both first-rate journalists, and they’ve quietly amassed a list of really good writers and editors they want to work with. They have a smart model: rather than soliciting detailed pitches, they’re more interested in writers coming to them with vaguer ideas. The writer then gets matched to an editor very early on — before the piece is even formally commissioned — and the final article comes together as a collaboration between the writer, editor, and publishers.

I like this model, because one big weakness of long-form narrative journalism is that it has failed to embrace everything the web is capable of. Writers get commissioned to write X thousand words on Y; they then hand in a document written in Microsoft Word, which goes through a few rounds of editing before getting laid out to a greater or lesser degree. (Ben Hammersley is really good at diagnosing this problem and suggesting how to begin solving it.) I’m optimistic that Matter’s editing process will help its stories be much richer than most of what we’re seeing today.

Matter is coming into a world where companies like The Atavist and Byliner have already broken important ground, and where willingness to pay for content is clearly going up. It’s entirely natural, online, to disaggregate things like magazines, and have a blog over here be really good at what would in a magazine be the front-of-book stuff, while a subscription site over there specializes in features.

And while Matter is quite narrow in what it wants to publish — chiefly long-form, narrative, investigative news stories about science and technology — it’s quite broad in terms of how it intends to distribute that content, and what kind of models it might embrace along the way. For instance, Giles is very keen to work with newspapers, who might help underwrite some of the cost of reporting these stories, in return for being able to break the news in them. Matter would then give those stories the long-form narrative treatment. Or maybe the same story could just appear in both places, if the newspaper covered the costs of the reporting.

In any case, this is a great project, and I’m pretty sure that a lot of the readers of this blog would love to support it. Most long-form journalism these days is political, with much of the rest being in the art-and-literature field. There are thousands of amazing stories in science and technology; I can’t wait for Matter to start uncovering them.

This chart, from the European Commission’s debt sustainability analysis of Greece, has been doing the rounds today. I posted it last night, and it got picked up by Joe Weisenthal as his chart of the day; it’s a very striking visualization of the degree to which the Greece bailout plan lies somewhere between optimistic and delusional.

I’m happy to say that Reuters was the first organization to get its hands on this analysis. At 4:21 EST, we ran our exclusive story, by Jan Strupczewski in Brussels, with the headline that Greek debt would still be 160% of GDP in the European Commission’s downside scenario. Jan took the 2,800-word analysis, and its wealth of charts and tables, and boiled it down into a 965-word story which was avidly read by news consumers around the world.

Later on, the FT’s Peter Spiegel also got his hands on the Commission’s analysis. His story ran at 6:15 EST, and was even shorter, at 566 words.

Necessarily, both stories cut out material from the original report, and as it happens neither of them mentioned the sharp uptick in future GDP growth. The first place I saw that was at Alphaville, with an anonymous post timestamped 02:44 GMT (someone was up late), which was 9:44 EST. “The baseline scenario in the report forecasts 4.3 per cent decrease in GDP this year,” said Alphaville, “followed by flat growth in 2013 and 2.3 per cent growth in 2014.” Clearly they had the analysis themselves, since those figures weren’t being reported anywhere else at the time.

But it wasn’t until 10:47 EST that the report finally appeared online, at Zero Hedge, allowing me to write my post. The Zero Hedge post has now reached 20,000 pageviews — a very big story by ZH standards.

Once the analysis was freely available online, it started propagating elsewhere, too: Alphaville (which, remember, had had access to it six hours earlier) finally posted it at 08:49 GMT, or 3:49am EST.

The analysis is very well written, clearly by a native English speaker:

There is a fundamental tension between the program objectives of reducing debt and improving competitiveness, in that the internal devaluation needed to restore Greece competitiveness will inevitably lead to a higher debt to GDP ratio in the near term. In this context, a scenario of particular concern involves internal devaluation through deeper recession (due to continued delays with structural reforms and with fiscal policy and privatization implementation). This would result in a much higher debt trajectory, leaving debt as high as 160 percent of GDP in 2020. Given the risks, the Greek program may thus remain accident-prone, with questions about sustainability hanging over it.

As such, I think it’s fair to say that the analysis itself was intrinsically superior to any of the news reports written about it. Given the choice between reading the Reuters story, or the FT story, or the primary document, virtually all market participants would plump for the primary document.

And yet neither Reuters nor the FT posted the document when they got their hands on it, preferring instead to simply write it up in their own words. Zero Hedge got the document more than six hours after Reuters did, but still gets all the glory of being the first site to post it.

There are three lessons here. The first is that reporters still don’t like posting primary documents, for various possible reasons. They might be worried about being sued for copyright violation, or they might have promised their source they wouldn’t post the document. More generally, reporters tend not to want to give away to their competitors information which they worked very hard to obtain. And as such, they’re often perfectly happy to promise not to post such documents: because they didn’t really want to in the first place.

The second is that legacy news organizations like Reuters and the FT still don’t think digitally: the unit of news is always the story, rather than, say, a primary document in PDF form. So if you obtain a primary document, the first thing you do is turn it into a story, rather than simply letting that document be the story.

Finally, it’s silly to assume that reporters are going to be particularly expert at extracting all the germane information from a report when they write it up. Especially when you’ve had a very long day, it’s late at night, you’re under time pressure, and you are looking at the document from a particular, inside-baseball perspective. Sometimes, reporters can add value when they write up primary documents, by putting them in perspective and in plain English. Other times, they miss important things. Either way, posting the document itself along with the write-up can only make the news story richer and more valuable. Even if doing so also helps the competition.

Back in November, Nick Denton put Gawker Media’s Fleshbot up for sale. The official announcement, here, is NSFW due to the ads surrounding it — which pretty much explains why Fleshbot was being sold: its customers — porn sites — are very, very different from the brand advertisers who supply the money to all the other Gawker Media properties.

In the end, Fleshbot LLC was sold, or “sold”, on February 1, to Fleshbot’s editor, Lux Alptraum; if money changed hands I’m sure there wasn’t much of it. Jolie O’Dell, writing about the news of Fleshbot going up for sale, said that “the day a porn site can’t make money on the Internet is the day we all pack up and go home” — but in fact turning a profit on a porn blog is not easy at all. There’s a virtually infinite amount of competition, and the cost of porn online has basically gone to zero at this point, which means there’s even less money than there used to be for ad campaigns on sites like Fleshbot.

Fleshbot is certainly not the iconoclastic site that Denton aspired to creating when it was launched in 2003 — rather than taking a fresh look at where porn and eroticism might be found in life and on the internet, it increasingly became a mouthpiece for, and captured by, the porn industry. To the point that when Gawker Media started looking at porn-industry scandals, that ended up happening on Gawker, rather than on Fleshbot.

Interestingly, the kind of site that Denton originally envisaged is nowadays very common on Tumblr, which has a thriving porn-reblogging community, based around as many different niches as there are porn specialities. (Which is to say, a lot.) Fleshbot tried to be all things to all porn consumers, both gay and straight, and that’s not how porn works: people tend to gravitate towards their own personal kinks, rather than going for the anything-and-everything approach.

So what’s going to happen now that Fleshbot is an independent entity? For one thing, it has already moved to the ubiquitous WordPress platform from Gawker’s custom publishing software, which makes serving up the porn industry’s advertisements significantly easier. “For a variety of reasons, Gawker was looking to completely separate itself from Fleshbot,” says Alptraum; “on our end, the restrictive nature of the Gawker CMS/layout wasn’t really conducive to our work. On our own, we’re more capable of focusing our layout/ad sales/tech strategies in ways that are optimized for an adult site, rather than trying to shoehorn Fleshbot into models designed for a broader, more mainstream stable of properties.”

Alptraum’s job is not an easy one. The guy who used to sell Fleshbot ads for Gawker Media is now the CFO of Fleshbot LLC; there’s a lot of work to do, and I don’t think the site has ever made money. And now, of course, they need to worry about things like health insurance and payroll and all the other burdens of being an independent company, which were previously picked up by Gawker Media’s operations crew.

Alptraum is optimistic: Fleshbot is “an incredibly valuable property that hasn’t been optimized,” she says, “and I’m excited about the possibilities for expansion.” That might mean more live events like the Fleshbot awards; it probably means even further alignment with the porn industry. “At its core, it’s a project about destigmatizing and celebrating sexuality,” says Alptraum. “I also think it’s played a powerful role in helping to mainstream the adult industry.”

Meanwhile, Gawker Media now runs on a single advertising platform, rather than having to make Fleshbot the exception to many rules. Nick Denton wanted to shake things up, with Fleshbot; in the end, he just created a headache for himself. He kept the blog much longer than most entrepreneurs would have done, and Alptraum only has good things to say about him. But the parting has been inevitable for a long time now, and both sides are surely happier now that it’s happened.

The most interesting part of Charles Duhigg’s story about corporate “predictive analytics” is the reaction of Target’s PR department when they found out he was writing it.

When I approached Target to discuss Pole’s work, its representatives declined to speak with me… When I sent Target a complete summary of my reporting, the reply was more terse: “Almost all of your statements contain inaccurate information and publishing them would be misleading to the public. We do not intend to address each statement point by point.” The company declined to identify what was inaccurate. They did add, however, that Target “is in compliance with all federal and state laws, including those related to protected health information.”

When I offered to fly to Target’s headquarters to discuss its concerns, a spokeswoman e-mailed that no one would meet me. When I flew out anyway, I was told I was on a list of prohibited visitors. “I’ve been instructed not to give you access and to ask you to leave,” said a very nice security guard named Alex.

I’m sure that Target didn’t get its name from the way that it sends marketing materials and coupons customized to individual shoppers. But maybe the name is part of the reason why the company’s so wary about talking about the details of its marketing operations. A bigger part, though, is what I’ve called the uncanny valley of advertising — the way that we feel that we’re being spied on, when a big faceless corporation seems to know very intimate things about us. Like, for instance, the fact that we’re pregnant.

“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”

It’s incredibly important to Target that it have the ability to tell when you’re pregnant, before you have your child; Duhigg goes into great detail about why that’s the case, but it basically comes down to pregnancy being one of a very few opportunities for retailers to gain market share in the zero-sum game that is your basic household expenditure. As such, you can be sure that this kind of targeting is going to become increasingly commonplace, as retailers engage in a targeting war, trying harder and harder to capture the shopping dollars of new families and families-to-be.

And truth be told, it’s good for consumers to have lots of corporations falling over each other to offer us great prices and great, personalized, service. But while we love the prices and the service, we also like a little veneer which allows us to kid ourselves that we still have privacy:

“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive told me. “We do that for grocery products all the time.” But for pregnant women, Target’s goal was selling them baby items they didn’t even know they needed yet.

“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

This is going to be a very fine line, for years to come. So long as we don’t know that iPhone apps have access to our address book, everything’s fine — but then it’s revealed that Path has that information, and there’s a huge kerfuffle, and Apple ends up changing its policies.

Richard Falkenrath is pushing for a “right to be forgotten”, whereby individuals could ask companies to erase all the data and metadata that they possess about them. He says that it’s “essential to protect personal privacy in the age of pervasive social media and cloud computing”, but I think he’s importantly wrong. We’ve never really had personal privacy, we have less privacy than ever before, and extra legislation, while making a difference at the margins, is never going to return us to some mythical prelapsarian state where Big Brother knows nothing about us.

And indeed, few of us would want to return to that state. I get a steady stream of books and press releases here at Reuters, most of which I have very little interest in. But at least they’re a little bit targeted: they tend to be about business or finance, broadly. And some of them I actually like a lot, and end up in a blog post somehow. If I just got a random subset of all the books being published, or all the press releases being put out, my situation would be far worse than it is now. Because the people sending the books and releases know something about me, they attempt to send me only things I might conceivably be interested in. (At least in theory. Does anybody know how to unsubscribe to the TMZ mailing list?)

We’ve always lived in a world of personalization and targeting, from the maitre d’ who knows your name and favorite table at the fancy neighborhood restaurant, to the way in which corporations pay more money to advertise in the Wall Street Journal than they do to advertise in the New York Post, on the grounds that the Journal is more likely to reach rich professionals.

Nowadays, computers have made it increasingly possible to fine-tune personalization down to the individual level, where it can sometimes get “spooky”. (Although I’m convinced that spookiness increases with age: that in general young people are much less fazed by this kind of personalization than old people are.) If sophisticated corporations manage to make their marketing materials less spooky, I don’t think there’s going to be much popular opposition to continued targeting — at least not in this country. Germany is different: Germans care a lot about their privacy, and fight hard for it.

Here, however, I’ve never received a good answer to the “why should I care?” question — and certainly Falkenrath doesn’t provide one. All he does is hint at a vaguely dystopian scenario, and leave the rest to the reader’s imagination:

Picasa has a tagging feature that can tell Google where and when photographs were taken, and an advanced facial recognition feature that allows Google to identify individuals it has seen in one photo in any photo in the user’s digital library. Integrating just these three services with Google’s core search function could allow Google to locate individuals in virtually any digital photograph on the internet, and so derive where each user has been, when, with whom and doing what. Add YouTube to the mix, or Android smartphones, or whatever other database Google develops or buys – the implications are breathtaking.

If you’re pessimistically inclined, the breathtaking implications are negative. On the other hand, there are lots of positive potential implications, too. And the fact is that companies like Target and Google have no interest in becoming some kind of Hollywood corporate villain; that kind of behavior tends not to be nearly as profitable as screenwriters might think. So my feeling is that if they do become evil, we should cross that bridge when we come to it. As News International is discovering, genuine invasions of privacy can be fatal to any company. In the meantime, trying to legislate a “right to be forgotten” would probably cause much more harm than good.

This week, Significance magazine (“statistics making sense”) reprinted a three-year-old article of mine about the Gaussian copula function. That story has had an impressive shelf life, and I’m incredibly happy that it will continue to be read for years to come. Sometimes it will be read in print publications, like Significance or book anthologies. But many, many more people will read it online. That’s great for Wired, both in terms of ongoing ad revenues (which are pretty small at this point) and in terms of its reputation for printing high-quality journalism with lasting value. (That value isn’t just journalistic, either: Wired’s parent, Conde Nast, is being very inventive in terms of monetizing old content.)

The fact that the internet has a long memory is wonderful for magazines online, as Tom Standage of the Economist recently noted.

After years of locking the search engines out, now suddenly their whole archive is available. A three year old article about Iran, he said, does just as good a job of advertising what they are about and why you should be reading them as the ones form this week. He said it was “crucial” that content could be “sampled and shared on social media.”

Matt Yglesias, however, sees a downside here, as more and more great magazine pieces are available online, for free, in perpetuity:

The existence of this deep back catalog is great for readers, but not necessarily as rewarding for the forward-looking production of longform pieces. Each day—each hour, even—all previous “newsy” items become obsolete and the demand for new newsy items is robust. But the existing stock of well-hewn blocks of substantial prose is already very large and it no longer depreciates the way it did in print.

I don’t buy it: the long-term upside, to any publication, of producing more well-hewn blocks of substantial prose is real, and, well, substantial. Meanwhile, Yglesias’s downside is that there’s already so much good stuff out there that it’s somehow satiating demand for such material.

In reality, of course, the supply of attention, when it comes to long magazine articles, is far from fixed. Nowadays especially, in the days of Instapaper and Longreads, people are reading more long-form journalism, from more outlets, than they ever did before. And there’s no indication that the rise in long-form consumption will level off any time soon. The more that magazines feed that demand, the more the demand will rise, in a virtuous cycle. Meanwhile, people will read less SEO-optimized crap from Demand Media. This too is a good thing.

One of Nick Denton’s less celebrated innovations was the creation, with Lifehacker, of a blog which lives more through its archives than through the new content that it puts up every day. Yes, Lifehacker has many loyal readers keeping an eye on its new posts. But the real value there is in what you might call the back catalogue — all those timeless posts which get steady pageviews for months or years.

It’s the difference between recording a throwaway pop song and recording a Beethoven symphony — the symphony is a much more laborious and expensive proposition, but it will sell for years to come. Orchestras don’t stop recording Beethoven symphonies just because lots of other orchestras have been there already. And the difference between new long-form journalism and old long-form journalism is a lot bigger than the difference between a new recording of Beethoven 5 and an old recording of Beethoven 5.

At about the same time that Michael Kinsley’s hilarious response to a blog post of mine hit the web, The Atlantic also uploaded to its website Kathleen McAuliffe’s excellent story about how parasites shape our behavior.

McAuliffe’s 5,873-word feature was written for the magazine, and went through multiple layers of commissioning, copy-editing, top-editing, fact-checking, and the like. It’s not, by any means, an easy read; it includes quite a few passages like this.

The neurotransmitter is known to be jacked up in people with schizophrenia—another one of those strange observations about the disease, like its tendency to erode gray matter, that have long puzzled medical researchers. Antipsychotic medicine designed to quell schizophrenic delusions apparently blocks the action of dopamine, which had suggested to Webster that what it might really be doing is thwarting the parasite.

And yet, within 36 hours of being uploaded to the Atlantic’s website, the story had already amassed half a million pageviews — and was “well on its way to becoming the most visited piece ever” in the history of the site, in the words of Alexis Madrigal.

Meanwhile, earlier in the week, Salon editor Kerry Lauerman had revealed some traffic stats of his own:

We ended 2011 on a remarkable high note, with over 7 million unique visitors for the first time, without any giant, viral hits that could be outliers. And now we’ve finished January in similar fashion, at 7.23 million.

There are concrete reasons for this… We’ve — completely against the trend — slowed down our process. We’ve tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We’re actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago (from 848 to 572 in December; 943 to 602 in January). So: 33 percent fewer posts; 40 percent greater traffic.

All of which would seem to imply that Kinsley is right, and that there’s something amiss with my more-is-more thesis of online journalism. Have we really — finally — reached the point at which quality is asserting itself in the form of monster pageviews? Especially given the fact that the New York Observer, the subject of my original post, is getting fewer pageviews now than it was in its much more assiduously edited days at the end of 2007.

If we have reached that point — and I hope that we have — it’s a function of the way that the world of the web is moving from search to social. Companies like Demand Media were created to game search — to take what people are genuinely interested in, and then exploit those interests to get undeserved traffic and ad revenues. Gaming social media, by contrast, is much harder: people tend not to share things  they don’t genuinely like.

The one thing that Kinsley got undeniably wrong in his piece was his assertion that I find the “more is more” formula to be “a wonderful development”. I don’t. Yes, I said that the Observer threw out the old and did something brave and new; I also said that I preferred things the way they were before.

What I do find to be a wonderful development is the way in which social discovery engines like Summify and Percolate surface much more relevant and much higher-quality content than search ever did. (Although I do worry, a lot, about the way in which Twitter seems to have bought Summify just to shut it down.) The more that we share stories and use such tools, the better the chance that great content will get an audience commensurate with its quality — even if it doesn’t have a web-friendly headlines like “How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy”.

That said, the downside to publishing subpar content is certainly shrinking. Once upon a time, if you read a bad story in a certain publication, that would color your view of the whole enterprise. That’s no longer the case: in a world where websites are insatiable, there are precious few publications of consistent excellence. As Kinsley says, almost no one achieves good writing most of the time — but once upon a time, editors could and did simply spike material which wasn’t good enough. Nowadays, less-than-great copy tends to get published anyway, since websites have no space constraints and the old excuse about how “we ran out of pages” doesn’t hold water any more.

The real cost of publishing dull content is not that readers will be put off your brand. Instead, it’s an opportunity cost: rather than getting Norman to churn out ill-informed blog posts on ostrich farming and fracking, might it not be better to put him to work honing and editing the work of someone else, helping to create the next viral story about how your cat might be turning  you into a schizophrenic?

The economics, however, still don’t add up. For reasons I don’t fully understand, high-quality edited journalism is not a little but rather a lot more expensive than more-is-more blogging. McAuliffe probably got paid somewhere in the region of $1.50 a word for her piece, which works out at $8,800; by the time you add in the cost of salary and benefits for everybody who worked on it, plus the expenses involved in flying her to Prague to report it, you’re talking enough money to get a thousand blog posts out of Norman. Ex post, McAuliffe’s article is worth it. But it takes a bold cash-strapped publisher indeed (and all publishers are cash-strapped, these days) to choose a single heavily-reported feature over a thousand blog posts.

We still live in a world where the brand value of a venerable print publication has clout on the web. McAuliffe’s piece would never have garnered 500,000 pageviews in 36 hours had she published it on her personal website; instead, it both benefited from and helped to burnish the reputation of the Atlantic more generally. That’s a nice virtuous circle. On the other hand, a boring blog post which would never get attention on a random blog can get a decent four-figure number of pageviews just by dint of being published on the website of a print publication like the New York Times or the New York Observer. As a result, such publications are faced with a constant temptation to put up as much content as they can and monetize those pageviews, even if doing so slowly erodes their brand. Immediate cashflows, these days, tend to trump impossible-to-measure concepts like the degree to which brand value might be going up or down.

My expectation, then, is that we’re likely to see a lot of more-is-more journalism from established names like the Observer, even as the most successful online franchises, such as the Atlantic, increasingly invest in expensive, high-quality content. It’s the difference between managing decline and managing for growth. In an industry which is undoubtedly in secular decline, the former makes a lot of sense. And the latter, if it doesn’t work, can be incredibly expensive.

So while I’m extremely happy to see high-quality journalism reach a very large audience online, I’m far from convinced that we’re about to enter a golden age where publishers get rewarded for spending lots of effort and money on commissioning, editing, and publishing extraordinary content. The web is still a mass medium, and cats-make-you-crazy stories are hard to scale, while commodity content is much easier to replicate. If you want to get to half a million pageviews, you’re always much more likely to get there with a thousand blog posts than you are with a single swing for the fences.

There are three main reasons that I like entering into bets with people. The first is, simply, that it’s fun. The second is that I love to win bets. And the third is that I love to lose them. I don’t ever trade the markets: all of my investments are strictly buy-and-hold, with a time horizon measured in decades. That rule has saved me a lot of money over the years, not that I ever had much inclination to trade in the first place. But it has also prevented me from learning the kind of lessons that all traders learn early and often.

For pundits, it’s easy to be wrong: in many ways, it’s what we’re paid for. If what you want is facts and certitude, stick to old-school journalism. But it’s much harder for us to learn from our mistakes, precisely because the cost of being wrong is in many cases negative. So when I get the opportunity to express a conviction in the form of a wager, I tend to jump at it, partly because it’s one of the very few ways for me to be forced to admit that I was wrong about something, and to ask myself what the lessons are.

All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that I’ve gone and lost another bet, much to the delight of Elizabeth Spiers. She’s firmly ensconced at the helm of the New York Observer, a year after being given the job; I said she wouldn’t be. I didn’t think that she was going to prove herself good at running a newspaper, and — more to the point — I didn’t think that her boss, Jared Kushner, would stick by her.

In point of fact, Spiers has not been all that great at running a newspaper. Over the past year, I can barely remember a single time I’ve even so much as seen a physical copy of the Observer; I certainly haven’t read one, and neither has anybody I know. And on the rare occasions that I’ve read an Observer story online, it’s seemed under-edited and rather lightweight, for a newspaper which fancies itself the house organ of the elite.

But the point of hiring Spiers was never to get a great newspaper editor, some kind of heir to Peter Kaplan who would burnish its reputation as the paper slowly dwindled in relevance and lost a few million dollars a year. Instead, making a virtue of necessity, Kushner decided to go as webby as he possibly could, with the newspaper quite explicitly in the position of an afterthought — the legacy brand upon which the new business was going to be built.

And Spiers — to her credit — has absolutely executed on that strategy. The Observer is now, first and foremost, Observer.com. (It’s a hugely valuable domain name, which, by some freakish accident of history, wound up getting snaffled by a dilettantish New York weekly before it could be claimed by the venerable newspaper in England.) There’s a slew of verticals, running the gamut of New York interests — Wall Street, media, art, real estate — as well as a bold attempt to break into the tech blogosphere with BetaBeat. Page design is sophisticated and effective, with all sites linking generously to all other sites, with the emphasis on dynamic headlines rather than bland navbars.

The Observer’s inimitable voice is gone, replaced by a barrage of bloggish posts by a group of writers so young that many of them can’t even remember a time before Gawker. (Which was birthed, by Spiers, in 2003.) The old Observer was edited, on a story-by-story basis, in a way that the new online Observer isn’t — Spiers doesn’t have either the time or the money to have a layer of experienced journalists reworking her bloggers’ prose before it’s published.

And so, in the proud tradition of good blogs everywhere, readers are left with a highly variable product. The great is rare; the dull quite common. But — and this is the genius of the online format — that doesn’t matter, not any more, and certainly not half as much as it used to. When you’re working online, more is more. If you have the cojones to throw up everything, more or less regardless of quality, you’ll be rewarded for it — even the bad posts get some traffic, and it’s impossible ex ante to know which posts are going to end up getting massive pageviews. The less you worry about quality control at the low end, the more opportunities you get to print stories which will be shared or searched for or just hit some kind of nerve.

Add in a few linkbait listicles, and you’ve got a recipe for a successful website — which can only be helped by its association with an honest-to-goodness print newspaper which, still, has extremely good name recognition with most New Yorkers and which we generally think fondly of. There are even nods to the old Observer’s buttoned-down worldview, here and there, if you look hard enough. For instance, there’s the way in which striking photos and videos are largely notable by their absence. The Verge this is emphatically not; while gorgeous design has its place in the Observer media empire, for the time being it seems to be confined largely to glossy magazines. Even hyperlinks are generally confined to web-first content: when stories from the physical paper appear online, they rarely have any at all.

Spiers’s Observer is not the one that her predecessor Tom McGeveran dreamed of when she was hired — one which serves to remind the rich of themselves, on which manages “to speak the patois that is being developed at Le Cirque at the table with Michael Bloomberg”. That kind of thing would always be too precious, too nichey, to work in a medium where the table stakes, in terms of reach and scale, are rising very quickly indeed. Instead, the new Observer is carving out new audiences, is aggressively embracing social media, and has much more attitude in common with HuffPo than it does with, say, the New York Review of Books. That’s something that Spiers is good at, and it’s something Kushner is happy to encourage.

I’m happy that I was wrong about the NYT paywall, and I’m happy too that I was wrong about the Observer. My mistake in both cases was to be too conservative: to think that change was probably going to be a bad thing, even in the context of a broader media world where change is the only possible alternative to death.

Both the NYT and the Observer threw out the old and did something brave and new; there are many people, in both cases, who preferred things the way they were. Myself included, truth be told. But it’s profoundly fallacious to believe that what you want is what should be, in some kind of normative sense. Spiers has come up with a formula which works, in practice, significantly better than its immediate predecessors. In the world of professional journalism, that’s something to celebrate. So, if she wants to join me and John Carney for our forthcoming lunch, she’s more than welcome. It’s on me.

Update: I should also have included the Observer’s traffic figures, which haven’t noticeably been improved much by Spiers’s arrival.