Davos Newbies

Dan Gillmor: “Keller’s statement also reflects one of journalism’s most egregious modern tendencies: uncritical regurgitation of what people say instead of deeper truth-telling. When we get ‘both sides’ of issues where one side is essentially (or wholly) telling the truth and the other is not — and then fail to say so in plain words — we betray our principles and insult our communities.”

Michael Wynne: “Having had a couple hours to ponder it, I can’t help but wonder if part of the defense strategy is to suggest Jeff Skilling is partly delusional. I wasn’t sure as I watched him today why he was still trying to sell the company, referring to ‘powerful’ systems and saying ‘we never looked back,’ claiming at one point he had control programs in place that were ahead of their time and ahead of Sarbanes-Oxley. An interesting attempt to turn the sequence on its head. What we’re seeing is a very aggressive attempt to rewrite history. You want someone to shake him and remind him that Enron was a failure.”

Wynne is part of the team providing a legal commentary blog on the Enron trial for the Houston Chronicle. I’ve read the Enron coverage in all the usual suspects (New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal) and I have to declare: accept no substitutes. The local paper’s blogs put everyone else to shame. It’s clear why Blue Plate Special ranked the Chronicle the number one blogging paper in the US.

Felix Salmon: “One of the reasons why there are so few financial blogs is that there are very few free sources of financial information online. Think what would happen if the FT gave up on online subscriptions and put all of its stories online for free and forever like the BBC and the Guardian. It would immediately become a bloggers’ darling, its traffic would go through the roof, and it quite possibly would spawn dozens of websites around the world linking predominantly to it. FT stories would start rising up the Google rankings to where they belonged, and the site would become the first place to go for anybody looking for any kind of global financial information.”

I’ve just about given up kvetching about FT.com. I love the newspaper, but the website is, and always has been, woeful. If the FT could get its website right, I suspect Felix’s analysis is correct.

The problem the FT faces as a business, however, is more complex. Its circulation is tiny, both in the UK and globally. To make matters worse, virtually all of its ad revenue comes from the UK, even though its circulation is largely outside the UK (and it is only growing outside the UK). Lots of business publishers have run aground on the Scylla of global advertising. There may be (and I think there is) a worldwide market of globally aware corporate executives, but there is a desperately small group of advertisers willing to court them as a group. The FT is aimed at those globally aware readers, but it’s very hard to convert that to significant revenue.

Dave Winer on shared-discovery blogging:

I blog to share discoveries, large and small, mundane and profound and everything inbetween.

Then search engines can pick up my observations, and make them available to others.

The better search gets, the more valuable blogs become.

Daniel Gross on why it’s unlikely that any heavy hitter from Wall Street would deign to take over from the hapless John Snow at Treasury:

Treasury offers only downside. The Bush presidency is hobbling to the finish line. Republicans may lose control of the House or Senate this fall. In the 1980s and 1990s, when Wall Street types like Donald Regan, Nicholas Brady, and Robert Rubin eagerly served, the Treasury secretary had a great deal of policy power. By contrast, the Bush theory of Cabinet government is that secretaries take dictation from the White House. Snow has survived as long as he has largely because of his willingness to stifle any thoughts that stray beyond the confines of White House talking points.

Peter Stothard on La Trahaison des Clercs: “The first fantasy is that there exists intellectual activity which is entirely divorced from the world, the flesh and the devil. The second fantasy is that even the purest thought can be operative in the world without being at all corrupted or compromised.”

I did my tax return last night, using the well-designed, online TurboTax from Intuit. The one mystery to me was a screen that asked whether I was a beneficiary of the Ottoman Turkish Empire settlements.

Since we’re a long way from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, what on earth was this about? Of course, a Google search for “Ottoman empire tax California” provided a helpful answer: “In 1999, a class action suit against New York Life Insurance company was filed by the descendents of those that survived the unfortunate events of 1915 under the rule of the Ottoman Empire during WWI. The company was sued specifically for not being forthcoming in paying up for policies of those killed in mutual massacres. The suit was settled in 2004 for $20 million, and payouts began to individuals and some Armenian charitable organizations.”

The other day I read a good article in The Economist about Now, the Hong Kong television service delivered over PCCW’s broadband lines. Its success is being taken for a model by broadband companies around the world.

But there was this curious statement: “Another partner is China Netcom, which plans to launch TV services based on Now’s model in two Chinese cities with populations of 6m or so, comparable to that of Hong Kong. China has 100 more such cities, notes [PCCW finance chief Alexander] Arena.”

I know China has a lot of big cities that I haven’t heard of, but 6 million inhabitants is a lot even on a global scale. There must be something wrong in that statement. Sure enough, a quick Google search reveals there are 32 Chinese cities with populations greater than 2 million. I recognize that some of these statistics may be outdated in fast-moving China, but some subeditor on St James’s Street should have caught that howler.

Scott Rosenberg:

When we hear an editor complain that “There seems to be no end to any argument in your world,” we are hearing the reflexes of a professional who has spent a lifetime deciding, “It’s time to move from this story to that story.” It’s the voice of someone whose whole expertise lies in assessing when one news cycle is ending and another is starting.

When such an editor surveys the blogosphere, he hears a multitude of voices who do not operate in such a zero-sum world — and who stubbornly refuse to give up talking about this issue or that story even if the cycle has rolled on. For the old-school editorial mind, engaging with such voices isn’t just an exercise in futility — it’s an act of self-torture. The world of “no end to any argument” isn’t just a world that challenges specific choices editors make; it’s one that eliminates the very editorial occupation of argument-ending.

As a dedicated autodidact, I love the idea of the best introduction to…. Scott Kaufman is trying to marshall the crowd intelligence available through the Web to compile a list of the best introductions to various domains of literature and literary theory. I agree with one of the comments which suggests the best introduction is the primary literature, rather than the secondary, but Kaufman’s goal is decidedly worthwhile.

In other domains, such as history or scientific fields, where the primary sources are less accessible to lay readers, finding the best introduction would be particularly helpful.

For similar reasons, I think Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series is wonderful. A Kaufman-like list would be the natural next step for the curious.