evolution

This time, the person not getting it is Paul Mulshine, writing in the Wall Street Journal. This is not the first time a WSJ writer has expressed these attitudes in print; although the condescension is much more veiled this time around.

I’m going to quote large blocks of this piece, and I feel I’ll be within the limits of the “fair use” doctrine in so doing. I want to stress, however, that this post is not at all about Mr Mulshine or his opinions. Instead, it will represent my suggestions to journalism to improve the industry, protect it from nationalization or collapse, and perhaps make its participants a little money in addition.

And I’m going to try to do it in the least sarcastic and condescending tone that I can muster, although I’ll admit it’s getting difficult these days. I really don’t want to see factual reporting destroyed as a profitable career in this country.

Suggestion #1: Get over yourselves. Journalists do not and should not hold a sacrosanct place in our society, although I dare say most believe they do. Journalism is a job, like plumbing, being an electrician, and teaching are jobs. Journalists produce a product that — like it or not, guys — a large number of people could reproduce given sufficient time and dedication. Mr Mulshine disagrees, dismissing half of his own customers as illiterate morons in the process:

The problem is that printing a hard copy of a publication packed with solid, interesting reporting isn’t a guarantee of economic success in the age of instant news. Blogger Glenn Reynolds of “Instapundit” fame seems to be pleased at this. In his book, “An Army of Davids,” Mr. Reynolds heralds an era in which “[m]illions of Americans who were in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff.”

No, they can’t. Millions of American can’t even pronounce “pundit,” or spell it for that matter. On the Internet and on the other form of “alternative media,” talk radio, a disliked pundit has roughly a 50-50 chance of being derided as a “pundint,” if my eyes and ears are any indication.

The type of person who can’t even keep track of the number of times the letter “N” appears in a two-syllable word is not the type of person who is going to offer great insight into complex issues. But the democratic urge expressed by Mr. Reynolds is not new. Someone is always heralding the rise of “the intellectual declaration of independence of the American people,” as H.L. Mencken once put it.

There are several assumptions in that passage, not the least of which is the assumption that his profession’s product is indeed “a hard copy of a publication packed with solid, interesting reporting”. If that were widely thought to be the case by the people who consume that product, it would be more in demand than it is. (We’ll deal more with the subject of journalists and economics later.) Mr Mulshine’s attitude of sheer condescension toward those people — who, I’ll remind him, directly or indirectly finance his career and lifestyle — as evidenced by this article is sadly not uncommon in journalistic circles. Many journalists hold the belief that only they are smart enough, savvy enough, and literate enough to digest events and distill them down for the rest of us zombies into a format that we can, with considerable mental effort, gum down our stupid, stupid throats.

Finally, some journalists will argue that since “the press” is mentioned by name in the Constitution that journalism does indeed hold a sacrosanct place in society. I argue instead that the “freedom of the press” should be taken literally — it simply means that the freedom of speech that applies to us all extends to people who print their words rather than speak them. That protection is not unique to journalism.

You’re not special. Stop acting like it.

Suggestion #2: Police your own. I’m not talking about exposing the Jayson Blairs of the world when they come along. I’m instead talking about taking a greater interest in exactly who becomes a journalist and how. Journalists have essentially handed that task off to academia, which may or may not be suited to the task in all cases.

Specifically, I’m talking about a tightly-knit professional organization with some real teeth in it. One extreme example of such a thing is none other than the professional organization I am trying to become a member of — the Society of Actuaries. Those looking to call themselves actuaries must pass a grueling series of exams, requiring several thousand hours of study over a period of several years — years during which people are also working in the field and possibly also raising families — for certification.

This series of exams has two components. One is the mathematics — most of which is covered by a good mathematics college education that forms the basis for teaching oneself the rest. The second is the coverage of the niceties of the insurance and financial industries, in which actuaries most often work.

Journalists should do something similar. I’m not talking about a grueling series of exams similar that for actuaries. I don’t think that would be appropriate for the profession. I’m talking about separating the broadly-applicable core skills, such as what constitutes cohesive writing, from the journalist-specific ones, whatever those may be; perhaps they will include a survey of the profession as it’s really like at the moment (i.e., yes, you are going to have to sit through some of those boring City Hall meetings), and a survey of standards of professional conduct. This may help to weed out those who do not want to do journalism¹ but rather “opinion journalism”² or grinding the axe for one’s own cause.³ Academia may be well-suited for the first, but is probably less well-suited (with some exceptions, no doubt) for the latter.

As with actuaries, the upside for employers of both journalists and actuaries under such a system is that the employer can reasonably expect journalists and actuaries to act according to a certain model of professional conduct and the understanding that continued employment or advancement will hinge upon the ability to get or maintain such a certification. Actuaries have this part down; junior analysts such as myself work under the direct supervision of certified actuaries, and the Society drums out anyone who violates its rules, illegal or not, through incompetence or maleficence. Such a person will have a very hard time finding employment in the field. The same probably holds on some level for journalists, but perhaps much more loosely than it should be.

Implementing this suggestion will also help you implement…

Suggestion #3: Understand your industry and your profession and its position in the market. In other words, do something to develop your business sense! Specifically, understand the effects of supply and demand on your profession and your industry. Again the Society of Actuaries is an extreme example of this. Membership in the Society — i.e., the supply of people who get to call themselves actuaries — is tightly controlled. Demand has increased in modern times with the prevalence of insurance and the expansion into other financial services; therefore, experienced and credentialed actuaries command a steep premium on the market. As for that supply — well, there are at most 100,000 fully-credentialed actuaries⁴ in the entire world, and that is a generous estimate. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that the number is closer to 50,000.

Journalists have not done this at all. Put simply, there are just too damned many of you.

In other words, a professional organization can not only help journalists improve the integrity of their profession by keeping out undesirable elements but the economics of their profession for those who remain in it by restricting supply and highlighting demand as well.

In addition, implementing #2 might have made the following suggestion unnecessary, which is…

Suggestion #4: Set your old folks straight about the Internet and what it can do for you. People like Mr Mulshine — which I suspect are numerous among the 50-and-up age bracket of the profession — don’t really like⁵ that the stupid, misspelling people he’s forced to sell his product to have the right to spout their opinion as to its quality. He should remember that unless you’re a really tony club, you don’t get to choose your customers.

Your goal for the Internet is the same as it was in print — produce content that’s either superior to or different than anyone else’s. You can now do so at a much faster rate — and if you were to take control of your product as I’ve suggested above, you could indeed do it better than anyone else. Make sure that you are not in the opinion, the “framing”, or the “shaping of opinion” business, for you now have tons of competition on the Internet and you’ll get⁶ creamed. If you, as an individual journalist, want to be in those businesses, fine. Separate yourself from journalism. I suggest above that journalism should separate itself from you.⁷ It is much harder to make the current model work on the Internet than I think it would be for the model I have described. A few companies are trying it; but I think someday soon the novelty will wear off if it hasn’t already.

A journalistic outfit that can produce the kind of content that I’ve described in this post — the hard news — reliably, according to a documented standard, by tightly-knit, trained, and (perhaps) certified professionals, and deliver that content and reliability on the Internet can cream the Internet competition. In addition, I think it can turn a profit for itself and its employees. There is little doubt in my mind of that. I’m not a sentimental person, though; I won’t cry at all if the current journalism industry’s business model collapses as seems likely. They will learn someday.

It might possibly be the hard way — but journalism will “get it”. It will have to.

UPDATED: Deborah Howell, the Washington Post’s outgoing ombudsman, is more gentle about it than my Suggestion #1, but says essentially the same thing.

UPDATED AGAIN: Coturnix rounds up reaction to Mulshine’s article, writing the post that I probably would have written had I had alcoholic beverages in stock at the evolution compound.

I have also updated this post to correct some grammatical mistakes and to clean up some unwieldy sentences. I have also added a couple of supporting links.

1. which I define as the gathering, distillation, and dissemination of fact [↩]
2. which is really just “writing” - that is not a value judgement, by the way [↩]
3. again just “writing”, and also not a value judgement [↩]
4. ”Fully-credentialed” means Fellowship; there is a lesser credential called the Associate that many more people have, but in total it’s still not more, I’d bet, than 250,000 [↩]
5. I suspect that more than a few young ones share this opinion as well. [↩]
6. read: are getting [↩]
7. and I’m not talking about the “wall”; one of the biggest farces in journalism that I can think of. I’m talking about a hard separation. [↩]

Grauniad: Saudi girl, eight, married off to 58-year-old is denied divorce.

Lawyer Abdu Jtili said the divorce petition was filed by the unnamed girl’s divorced mother in August after the marriage contract was signed by her father and the groom. “The judge has dismissed the plea because she [the mother] does not have the right to file, and ordered that the plea should be filed by the girl herself when she reaches puberty,” lawyer Abdullah Jtili told the AFP news agency…

[A Human Rights Watch spokesperson] dismissed the idea that the girl would be able to file for divorce once she reached puberty since there was no standard definition of this. In addition, Saudi judges often insist that even adult women speak to them through a male guardian or lawyer.

[title reference. If someone wants to redub it with the music below, be my guest.]

Let’s talk about sex, baby Grandma:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – When Kansas State University sent researchers into nursing homes to find out how the topic of sex was being addressed, they initially found silence.

“Nobody was talking about it; it was a really hush-hush subject,” said Gayle Doll, director of the university’s Center on Aging. “I guess it’s hard enough for people to think about their parents having sex, let alone their grandparents.”

In response, the researchers have produced seminars and training aids to encourage nursing home caregivers to discuss and accommodate sexual desires.

The effort brings Kansas into a national discussion that advocates say will only grow as baby boomers age and take their beliefs about sexual freedom and civil rights into the nation’s nursing homes.

I of course posted this for the juvenile gross-out factor, but let me use this opportunity to deliver a message to my parents’ generation, my own, and the succeeding one: Remember how you deal with this when it’s your turn to be old and you want those who have come after you to take care of you. You might find that attitudes toward “civil liberties” may have changed by the time you get there.

Somebody call Alan Rupe. And while they’re at it, could that someone call a journalist in this state? It is utterly impossible that there isn’t at least one who saw this, especially after the news school funding made a couple of years ago.

[inherited from: Bob Weeks, bless his heart. I think it's less an embarrassment to Sebelius than it is further proof that no matter how much wishing makes it not so, the same economic patterns in a free society -- or at least the thing that we live in that we're calling a "free society" these days -- that hold for other goods and services must hold for education as well.

I mean, we could just take money from others¹. We can print more up². But then that's something less than a free society, isn't it?]

1. and we do, by the bushel-basket-full [↩]
2. which is the same thing, and we do it a lot too... Hey, wait a minute... [↩]

I view Spike TV in much the same way that Mexicans must view Speedy Gonzales.

Discuss.

UPDATE: Leave it to Wikipedia to crap on my thought:

Also, it should be noted that, despite the misconception that Speedy enforces negative stereotypes, Speedy also possesses a large number of positive qualities: he is overwhelmingly altruistic (many of his cartoons feature him selflessly helping others), he does not drink alcohol (unlike many of his friends), he is friendly to even total strangers, he rescues those in need, he is very intelligent, and has a kind disposition to all.

teH buSh speaks:

WASHINGTON (AFP) — US President George W. Bush said in an interview Tuesday he was forced to sacrifice free market principles to save the economy from “collapse.”

“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” Bush told CNN television, saying he had made the decision “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.”

My reaction to this is a little like Seinfeld’s in that episode when Elaine asks him to have sex with her to “save their friendship”. Except, you know, not in a good way. Or was it something about omelets and eggs?

Believe it or not, that brain twister is not the biggest whopper in this piece:

Bush’s comments reflect an extraordinary departure from his longtime advocacy for an unfettered free market, as his administration has orchestrated unprecedented government intervention in the face of a dire financial crisis.

I would like to check the immigration papers of this writer, to make sure that he emigrated legally to the United States from whatever freaking planet he or she was from.

“I am sorry we’re having to do it,” Bush said.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what years of possessing power will do to you. I hope there is no fool yet remaining who thinks Barack Obama will sound any different after eight years in the machine.

If you want a plausible scenario of what the immediate future will be like, start here and keep scrolling.

Sucks.

Fortunately, I only have five more years of it before I get my Fellowship credential. Currently at bat is an eight-week corporate finance course. On deck in May is the Society’s Exam MLC¹; this summer it’s regression analysis, and in November it’s the Society’s Exam C.

UPDATE: Sorry folks: I was jacking with the blog settings, and realized that the Daylight Savings Time setting was not set correctly. In Wordpress, you have to tweak it manually when the appointed day comes, and I forgot, so I just did it. The first and second comments on this post should actually be the fourth and fifth. Fixed.

1. assuming, of course, that I passed Exam MFE in November; I’ll find out January 2. [↩]