Map Flap

Okay. I really want to save the Los Angeles Times. I really do. Look, I have even tried to give them some polite suggestions for how they could save themselves. As much as I love having a wealth of material to blog about when it comes to the Los Angeles Times and its profound stupidity about Internet journalism, I really do think my hometown should have a decent newspaper, and I care about the fourth estate in the digital age.

But when it comes to "interactive content" I can't help but think that the LA Times is hopeless, truly hopeless. The most recent example I can point to is the paper's "Homicide Report," which takes the form of an interactive map, in which readers can browse photos of murder victims, check out the history of murder near their zip code, or activate pinpointed spots of crime scenes on the map. For really morbid crime enthusiasts, you can also browse by "age, gender, cause, day of the week, jurisdiction, neighborhood, race/ethnicity, circumstance or crime scene."

The LA Times has had some prior history with map-based initiatives. Mapping LA Neighborhoods became a laughingstock among geographers and cartographers. They also published a map of local pot dispensaries called -- I kid you not -- "Where's the weed?," which may have been in questionable taste. After criticizing the accuracy of the LAPD's crime map, the newspaper launched a crime map of their own.

But once you drill down into the information, you can see how truly terrible their homicide map is. Beyond its lowest common denominator ghoulishness, it indicates an utter misunderstanding of either interactivity or user-generated content. It makes sexual predator maps look good by comparison. Let's click on one of the photos in the gallery of death -- one of Ryan Gonzalez -- to see some of its weaknesses.

The reader is invited to tweet the posting on Twitter or share it on Facebook, because really that's what everyone wants to do with a murder story. Right? The citizen policing/neighborhood watch/social surveillance/public shaming aspect of the site gets even more complicated when you look down the page to where the reader is encouraged to "share a memory" about the deceased, who in this case was killed after intervening in a law enforcement officer's messy dispute, one which would seem to invite some actual investigative journalism by the paper that is sadly lacking.

Of course, asking for reader comments on a crime story is often asking for trouble, whether it is a rape case or a knife fight. All kinds of agendas come into play in which moderating public comment can be ethically tricky. In this case, however, the reader asks a pithy question that one would have hoped that the writer would have asked, even if the tone has less of the somber decorum that characterizes most online memorials that developed out of "memory gardens" and other forms of remembrance in cyberspace.

Wait, so he was holding a gun, grabbing the marshal AND punching him at the same time? Amazing he could do those three things at once, yet not get one round off before the marshal draws, aims AND fires a half dozen times. Nice investigation by both the LAPD and the LA Times.

Cutting Remarks

A Halloween Los Angeles Times newspaper story "Two Highland Park neighbors killed in a knife fight" shows how the paper's gravitas can be undermined by online comments from the public, many of whom used this forum as an opportunity to champion gun rights or marijuana legalization, make generalizations about the ethnicities of the victims/perpetrators, and lampoon the gruesome fight-and-revenge scenario with the subversive context of the trick or treat holiday in mind to suggest that it was only a pumpkin carving party gone wrong.

Many of the comments have since been deleted, but one reader wrote that "I think it is very insensitive of the L.A. Times to allow anonymous cowards to post insensitive comments mocking dead people. The L.A. Times has really sunk to new lows."

The Moving Ledger

The Los Angeles Times is offering an interactive feature about the California State Budget to its readers in which they can play policy maker and move specific budget items into the "cut" column.

Try your hand at closing California’s budget shortfall, estimated at $24 billion. It’s not easy, but it can be done. Cut spending, raise taxes and/or borrow to get the state out of the red. For each choice -- drawn from proposals from across the political spectrum -- we’ve tried to give some sense of the effects. As you craft your proposal, the Deficit Meter will show your progress.

This online feature joins the gallery of other budget-related games, such as Budget Hero from American Public Media, the New York City Budget Game, the Massachusetts Budget Game sponsored by the Boston Globe, "How Would You Cut $591 Million From the D.C. Budget?" from the Washington Post, the Kentucky State Budget Game for classrooms, and the Cyber-Budget Game from the French government.

Thanks to Brian Oglesby for the link!

A B C PhD

The Cato Institute has published a full page ad with what looks like an impressive roster of "undersigned scientists" who dispute President Obama's claim that when it comes to climate change, as he says, "The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear."

It's interesting how the institute uses the authoritative frame of the newspaper, where readers may be far from their Google search boxes, to make their assertion that there has been "no net global warming for over a decade." Some of these characters, like petroleum advocate Brian Valentine or Gerd-Rainer Weber, who is described in the ad as "Reviewer, International Panel on Climate Change" but is also a representative from the Association of German Coal Producers have already been outed by SourceWatch, "Your Guide to the Names behind the News." Many already have sizable web presences, such as Joseph D'Aleo at ICECAP.

Others, like Edward T. Wimberly of Florida Gulf Coast University require a little more sleuthing to reveal a c.v. that shows he may not belong on a list of climate "scientists," since his advanced degrees are in public administration, mental health, and theology. Even among the scientists, one of the things I marveled at, while looking at their curriculum vitae documents posted on the web, is how obviously out of touch they are with the norms of academia, even if they were one of the few currently working at a university. Specifically, I couldn't help but notice how many of them, like Wimberly and MIT's Richard Lindzen, actually list the fact that they are married and post their children's names on their professional c.v.s, a mark of an old-school, pre-discrimination-conscious faculty member broadcasting his heteronormative sexuality.

Antonio Zichichi, an emeritus professor of nuclear physics rather than climatology, is listed as president of the impressive-sounding World Federation of Scientists, but the group's website reveals itself to be a group devoted to fighting "planetary emergencies" rather than advocating scientific research. He's not the only one with a background in nuclear physics, Stanford's Howard Maccabee worked with Edward Teller and went on to be a radiological oncologist.

Given that many scientists who had attended during the Bush administration stayed home during this year's conference for climate change skeptics, it is understandable that Cato wants to try to contradict the appearance of dwindling numbers within an already fractional minority. I expect that they will try a web-based persuasive campaign as well, given the diminishing number of newspaper readers, even among policy makers and regular voters.

Town Crier

Yesterday President Obama held a live "Town Hall" style meeting in which the nation's Chief Executive answered questions submitted by supposedly typical Americans on the Internet. 103,512 people submitted 76,031 questions and cast 4,713,083 votes on which issues should be highlighted. The event was streamed live on the web, where over sixty-four thousand people watched it, and also broadcast on television. Although the event opened with a traditional introduction and presidential speech, attention then shifted to interaction with the content on two large flat-screen computer monitors, which included both text and webcam queries.

In response to a question about outsourcing jobs, which came from the disembodied and distorted head of one webcam citizen, Obama referenced the importance of ubiquitous computing, which he described as represented by "all the gizmos that you guys are carrying . . . all the phones, the Blackberries, the this and the that, plugging in all kinds of stuff in your house." He argued that a future "smart grid" to monitor and optimize energy consumption would be analogous to the construction of the Continental Railroad in its scope, although it would also function at the level of domestic economies that are visible on "smart meters" in the home. Around minute sixty-six, Obama also described a conversation from "yesterday" with "Bill Gates" about educational uses for technology in which he they discussed how good teachers could be videorecorded while interacting with their students and how those digital files could be used in mentoring other teachers "like a coach might be talking to his players" with play-by-play footage.

In this rare case, coverage of the town hall in the usually media illiterate Los Angeles Times was actually better than that of its New York counterpart, particularly when it came to providing Internet journalism with historical context and a critical lens. In "Obama connects from on high, online," the Los Angeles Times compared the event to an "infomercial" and pointed out that this kind of event actually had a history that went back to Carter fielding a hundred phone calls or Clinton answering sixteen questions online. Most significantly perhaps, this article also noted that the Open for Questions site at Whitehouse.gov used Google Moderator to tally votes about which questions Obama should answer. Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything, might argue that this is yet another example of what he calls "The Googlization of Government," even if Whitehouse.gov is now using platforms other than YouTube in response to complaints from privacy advocates and public sphere critics about the company's more questionable policies.

In contrast, the New York Times reported in "Obama Makes History in Live Internet Video Chat" the more obvious fact that groups dedicated to legalizing marijuana nudged pot-related questions to the top of the queue. Although the White House was careful to repeat during the webcast that questions online were not "pre-screened" and were ranked based on up and down Digg or Reddit style voting, around minute 33 Obama did "interrupt" the proceedings to acknowledge that such questions were popular and that one that "ranked fairly high" was about "whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation." To this, he got a laugh with following punchline answer: "I don’t know what this says about the online audience." He continued to say, "The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy," although the Times actually misquotes his line.

Note also that around minute forty-four, Barack Obama almost finishes naming a well-known fast food chain before realizing that their brand name might be sullied by being associated with low-wage labor and subversion of young people's goals for higher education.

Update: BagNewsNotes provided some analysis of the visual rhetoric of the coverage of this event.

Hey Batter, Batter

In "Real baseball players' moves are captured in video games," the Los Angeles Times explains how motion capture suits are used to give videogame players the sense of individualized action in simulating play.

For titles based on football, baseball, basketball, golf and even skateboarding, that means suiting up pro athletes and putting them through the intricate movements they have spent their lives honing.

With baseball, however, there's a twist. Major league players have unique signature moves. Many go through elaborate rituals, often fueled by superstition, just before taking a swing or throwing a pitch.

"People who play our game really notice when the angle of the bat is 5 degrees off," Clements said.

On OperationSports.com, a fan-created website dedicated to athletic video games, readers dissect the minutiae. They point out when a player's jersey isn't quite the right color, or when an athlete's hat is positioned incorrectly.

But they also notice when developers get it right. They praise the realism of Matt Holliday's signature leg kick, Albert Pujols' gait or Jim Edmonds' toe lift.

"Baseball, without question, is the most challenging game to make because so many players have signature styles," said Stephen Park, motion-capture coordinator for 2K Sports, a game publisher in Novato, Calif., that also makes basketball, hockey, boxing and tennis games.

As a Dodgers fan, I was of course reading the article in expectation of a mention of famed shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, who has a legendary at-plate ritual sometimes known as the "Nomar dance." Sure enough, I was rewarded for my diligence, as I read on about how the 1300 animations in the MLB videogame database were made.

There are more than 750 players in Major League Baseball, so it's both impossible and impractical to hook up each one to motion-capture machines. Minor league players are often hired to impersonate stars. The stand-ins sometimes require dozens of takes to nail more complicated rituals, such as the elaborate glove adjustments and toe taps by former Dodger Nomar Garciaparra, Park of 2K Sports said.

"Nomar does about 15 or 16 things, and he'll do it exactly the same way every time," Park said. "The talent has to memorize all things exactly."

Off the Map

I rarely think of myself as living on an island. After all, although not entirely landlocked in my coastal city, I could walk on terra firma in most directions for many a mile on dry land. But when I look at Mapping LA, I'm conscious of how Santa Monica, the city in which I live, is a kind of island, because it is surrounded on all sides by the city of Los Angeles.

Thus, I am apparently excluded, since the Los Angeles Times is seeking user-generated content from the city's actual inhabitants, eventually -- one would assume -- to populate their map of LA neighborhoods with data.

We’ve built these shapes from census tracts and blocks so that we can use census data to profile them. And because we know that no single authority can dictate where communities are, or will be in years to come, we are asking you to tell us what you think. Scroll down to leave a comment or draw your community the way you see it. We’ll listen.

Yet digital mapping initiatives that claim to reflect any granularity about the complicated dynamics of the city have often created hostility in the past, as the newspaper should remember from having covered a scandal involving those who planned to map Muslim neighborhoods in a soon-aborted law enforcement scheme.

Comments indicate that Angelenos are generally grousing about where the Times's would-be cartographers drew the boundaries between their neighborhoods, and they are responding with the irritation of a backyard fence dispute. I've culled four representative comments from the many irked visitors to the site, which demonstrate the types of information representation strategies that have made them unhappy with the newspaper's aerial view.

The Southern boundary of Westwood is Olympic Boulevard. You have drawn the map to EXCLUDE both the Westwood Charter Elementary School and the Westwood Hills Congregational Church. The church has been at its location (with the same name) since 1928. Based on the boundaries you have drawn, nearly every child attending Westwood Charter Elementary School lives outside your "Westwood."

What am I missing? The Times' remapping of Eagle Rock makes no sense -- how can you profile a neighborhood that doesn't actually exist? Eagle Rock is already complicated as it has 3 zip codes and even jumps across York at one point -- let's keep things simple and stick with what we know. The ENRC map is well-established and is probably accepted by 99.9% of the residents here. I doubt Eagle Rockers will take kindly to this new-fangled map based on some blather about shapes, census tracts and blocks.

The area between Riverside Drive and the L.A. River is Elysian Valley- NOT Silver Lake. Your map is calling a good chunk of Echo Park Silver Lake. The border should be at Waterloo Street.

Like other commentators, I don't know where "Crenshaw" is. A "Crenshaw Neighborhood" doesn't exist, and if it does I don't think two people could tell you it's boundaries. The only area I've heard referred to as the "Crenshaw District" is Baldwin Village. So is it Crenshaw Manor and Baldwin Village?

It will be interesting to see how the newspaper handles such reactions to their crowd-sourcing effort if they continue to reflect majority opinion and if any of the borders will be redrawn in response.

A Newspaper without Writers

I suppose I should be pleased to see the Los Angeles Times trying to improve its abysmal Internet coverage, but the fact that the newspaper so rarely breaks a real technology story can be disheartening to longtime subscribers like myself.

Often what runs in the paper are stories that are weeks or months old, which generally represent summaries of reports or accounts of cybercrime trials. Almost never do they spot a trend in online culture first, much less encourage any serious reflection about the cultural impact of the hardware and software that we use every day. Instead, far too frequently, the newspaper highlights hackneyed stories about cyberpredators, cyberbullying, identity theft, piracy, and mass susceptibility to moronic Internet memes. Sadly, this trend that has only gotten worse since recent rounds of mass firings cut the newspaper's professional writing staff.

Yes, "Greatest Internet threat to teens may be teens themselves" avoids the sensationalism of much of their coverage, but it is still sort of embarrassing to read. Let's just take a sample paragraph, which presents the main "news" in the article, almost two weeks after the New York Times covered the issuing of the same report:

In an authoritative report almost a year in the making, a Harvard University-led task force on Internet safety, ordered by the nation's attorneys general and meant to expose the full extent of the danger, found instead that kids trading gossip, photos and plans on social networking sites such as MySpace are relatively safe from adults cruising online for sex with minors.

I won't even get in to what's wrong with prose like "authoritative report," but to think that the reporter thought that the Berkman Center at Harvard "meant to expose the full extent of the danger" shows a kind of comical naïveté about what that institution represents and how one might, as an academic, grant a proposition legitimacy for purposes of argument before setting out to demolish it methodically by means of empirical proof. Although the story doesn't stoop to the level of "Facebook journalism," it presents no additional commentary from the researchers in question about their reflections about the study, which is only cursorily summarized, and follows this summary with summaries of other studies from the predator-panic era with little attempt at coherence in characterizing the report's significance.

The article also links to tips for "Tightening Internet security for kids" promoting the same predator panic that the Harvard report explicitly debunks. I could not believe that the advice came from the same reporter and was dated on the same day as the accompanying news story, unless a) the reporter has multiple personality disorder or b) the reporter suffers from short-term memory loss involving the paragraphs that she herself has recently written, as well as reports that she herself has read and cited. It even links to advocacy pages for a local parent paranoia group.

At the same time, Newport Beach Internet safety coach Suzanne Stanford has launched a lobbying effort for federal legislation requiring sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses with Congress. Stanford calls her proposed bill the Parents Against Predators Act (www.supportpapa.com). "It's obvious that it needs to be a federal law," Stanford says.

In Poor Taste

Southern California news consumers have been engrossed with the story of the Christmas Santa slayings, in which a recently divorced man in a Santa Claus suit took out his rage by killing nine members of his wife's family in an elaborate scheme for revenge that included strapping seventeen thousand dollars worth of cash to his body and making travel plans to Canada.

There is one very interesting revision of the historical record that has to do with the response of the killer's brother to the carnage and with conventions involving electronic communication. In the original version of the story that was posted online, the distraught brother's response is described as follows: "He said he and his wife would be sending e-mails later today to the victims' families, expressing their sympathy." By the time the story appeared in print form on doorsteps this morning, the copy had been revised to say this instead: "He and his wife planned to write letters of condolence to the victims' families." Obviously, "sending e-mails" was seen by readers of the Los Angeles Times and the would-be sympathy writers as too callous a response and a modification was made in the name of epistolary propriety.

As the LA Times continues to play out its endgame as a publishing venture at the close of a once proud history in which the paper justifiably garnered Pulitzer Prizes at one point, the rhetorical missteps continue to aggregate as they reduce their staffs to minimum wage mentality workers. Last night, as much of the newspaper's text was occupied with the horrific Santa suit killing spree, the user-generated content page for holiday photos was topped with an image titled "Scared of Santa."

Fighting the Not-So-Good Fight

I'm interested in the rhetoric of online tutorials for corporate employees, and I have written quite specifically about the ways that users can game the UCI sexual harassment prevention tutorial on this blog here and here and have argued that it is an interesting case of what Ian Bogost has called "procedural rhetoric" in the "What is Digital Rhetoric?" chapter in the forthcoming Virtualpolitik book from MIT Press.

However, UCI biologist Alexander McPherson has garnered a considerable amount of media attention for formulating a very different set of objections to this training. In a confrontational Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, called the "The sham of sex harassment training," Professor McPherson throws down the gauntlet and declares that he will refuse to participate in this employee-mandated training.

First of all, I believe the training is a disgraceful sham. As far as I can tell from my colleagues, it is worthless, a childish piece of theater, an insult to anyone with a respectable IQ, primarily designed to relieve the university of liability in the case of lawsuits. I have not been shown any evidence that this training will discourage a harasser or aid in alerting the faculty to the presence of harassment.

What's more, the state, acting through the university, is trying to coerce and bully me into doing something I find repugnant and offensive. I find it offensive not only because of the insinuations it carries and the potential stigma it implies, but also because I am being required to do it for political reasons. The fact is that there is a vocal political/cultural interest group promoting this silliness as part of a politically correct agenda that I don't particularly agree with.

As someone who has completed the training, I think that McPherson is probably putting forward a problematic argument, since many female colleagues who have been personally subjected to harassment in the workplace and yet were required to finish the tutorial hardly considered themselves guilty by association just by interacting with the software. Furthermore, as a feminist, I might argue that this training isn't actually "politically correct" enough, since it focuses on blatant harassment rather than more subtle and pervasive forms of discrimination based on gender and sexuality.

Now McPherson's own university web page for his lab has become a designated site for his fiery online rhetoric, where he posts selective reader comments from a story in the Orange County Register, "UCI prof risks job by refusing sexual harassment training," and rebuts an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that addresses his case, "New Lessons in Dealing with Sexual Harassment."

McPherson's whole site is an interesting expression of what has been the traditionally hands-off campus policy about faculty website discourse in the name of academic freedom at a university in which faculty members have posted controversial personal materials that run the gamut from obscene acronyms to heart-rending stories of personal tragedy on their .edu sites. One possible unintended consequence of this case might be calls for more decorum -- or censorship, depending upon your perspective -- on officially sanctioned UCI sites.

I Love the Smell of Newsprint in the Morning . . . It Smells Like Victory?

Whatever results are announced late tonight or tomorrow, this election has certainly provided an indictment on The Los Angeles Times, which has completely ceded the ground on political journalism for the West Coast to the twenty-four hour cable news cycle and periodicals with viable web presences that manage to create stories that merit circulation in the blogosphere.

Firing most of the staff of their editorial section was probably the beginning of the end, but the decline has continued throughout the presidential race. After a week incongruously devoted to covering a multipart series about gangsters in 1930s noir LA, perhaps to promote a certain big box office film, the bizarre dissociation of the newspaper from the electoral process didn't slow down even as the polls opened.

Today's paper featured cover stories with big photos showing scantily clad models in hotel windows and brothel prostitutes pimping for johns. I saw more substantive coverage of the state's controversial anti-gay marriage initiative, Proposition 8, on cable news channels and the online editions of East Coast newspapers than I did in the paper that lands on my stoop each morning.

It's true that the candidates probably could have done more to support print culture, and it is unconscionable if there is any truth to the Reuters item picked up from the Drudge Report that reporters from newspapers that had not endorsed Obama were forced to give up their seats on the plane to those who had. How sad at the end of the trail to see the Obama campaign fundamentally violate the public trust in precisely the way that they have criticized the sitting president for surrounding himself with lackeys in the press. (Please not, however, that one of the papers involved, The Dallas Morning News, reports that the story is more complicated.)

Special Delivery

For one of my faculty colleagues, today's edition of the Los Angeles Times on her doorstep included a disk of the movie Obsession: Radical Islam's War against the West. Since my copy of the LA Times did not include the controversial film, which -- according to the New York Times -- is "the latest flashpoint in the bitter campus debate over the Middle East, not just because of its clips from Arab television rarely shown in the West, including scenes of suicide bombers being recruited and inducted, but also because of its pro-Israel distribution network," I am assuming that this was a fluke, particularly since my colleague is Israeli, and I could not find any mentions of this form of distribution from sources at the paper. According to the website, creators of the film are assuming that at least some of the film's audience will watch it online for $4.95 rather than pay ten dollars more for the DVD.

Nonetheless, this conjunction of print media and digital video raises an interesting possibility, that political causes that now pay for full-page ads may choose to use digital media packaged with the newspaper to get their points across in ways that seem sanctioned by our formerly Pulitzer Prize-winning institution of local journalism.

Update: I saw the actual DVD, which turned out to have been packaged with The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A Need for Screed

The print edition of today's Los Angeles Times ran a remarkably one-sided piece about copyright and digital video titled "Waltzing around the piracy issue," which appeared under the more search-engine friendly headline "YouTube and the irrepressible dream of Video ID" in the online version of the paper.

Variations of the word "pirate" appear no fewer than five times to describe what seems to be largely innocuous fan behavior and no mention is made of fair use for educational or critical purposes of film clips or the fact that these clips from network news often constitute an important part of contemporary political speech or parody, which is Constitutionally protected. Nor is any mention made of the problems that always happen when automated bots do the work that human beings normally handle in recognizing context, interpreting intent, etc.

About the only interesting bit of actual news in the story involved how owners to the rights to the film Dirty Dancing were allowing clips like this one on YouTube to test the waters. Of course, the reporter totally missed the role that fan homages play in the YouTube universe and the fact that it is this version of Dirty Dancing shot at a British wedding that has received far more views. Should this be called "piracy" because it uses copyrighted music or "homage," since it had a transmedia life of its own that included the appearance of the couple on Oprah dancing with the film's original star Patrick Swayze?

Much of this tiresomely sarcastic article is strangely taken up with complaining about the reporter's travails in attempting to present multiple points of view about the issue.

I called around to major media companies, thinking everyone would be excited to talk about this equitable and innovative solution. But no one seemed to want to discuss it. CBS declined to comment, as did Viacom (perhaps understandably, given its $1-billion lawsuit against YouTube).

Although content from Fremantle Media (“American Idol”) and World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. often pops up on YouTube, neither company said they had anything to contribute. Even EA, an early adopter of the technology, did not return a string of e-mails and phone calls — all the more strange considering that YouTube offered a direct contact there.

YouTube also recommended I contact NBC Universal for its thoughts. But when I reached the conglomerate’s general counsel, Rick Cotton, he didn’t seem to have heard about any revolution.

The reporter also seems to be in serious denial about the future of online news:

Sites such as latimes.com are not complaining about the growing waves of monetizable traffic Digg is sending their way free. Who wouldn’t buy into a model like that?

I've been debating about whether to cancel my subscription to the Los Angeles Times after many decades of loyal readership in the face of their tabloid tactics, Facebook journalism, lousy technology coverage, firing of reporters and closing of foreign bureaus, terrible online edition, invasive e-mail spam from advertisers, and contemptuous treatment of subscribers (thanks guys for trying to charge my credit card without my permission and for leaving papers on my lawn during a week-long vacation hold). Maybe this will be the final straw.

Shake, Rattle, and Roll

Today's 5.8 temblor showed how one-to-many broadcast media may still be more helpful to the public than websites in the case of a disaster. As this screenshot shows, the server of the Los Angeles Times went down completely just after the earthquake, and Cal Tech's Media Relations: Earthquake Info and the Southern California Earthquake Data Center were also inaccessible. While online information couldn't be garnered, radio and television broadcasts were full of news about the event.

Best Web Generator Ever

Okay, Tell Zell: Go Down in Flames, Hack!* may be the most wonderful online form that I have ever encountered, since it combines two of my favorite obsessions: 1) web generators and 2) the stupidity of the managers of The Los Angeles Times. From, "Ink-Stained [W]Retch," it provides an electronic form letter for writers wishing to resign from the Times in rhetorical style. (Click to enlarge.) I particularly like that the subject line reads "You Mean Twisted Leprechaun" in the resulting e-mail document that is addressed to the current head of the newspaper, who is known for his four-letter vocabulary and contempt for public service journalism.

Thanks to the little bird who sent out the link, who may -- or may not -- still be working for The Los Angeles Times.

Losing at Musical Chairs

After speaking grimly about the fate of The Los Angeles Times in the Internet era with former longtime LA Times board member Susan Babcock at our Polytechnic reunion dinner, it was striking to read the online version of Vanity Fair this month to see how even a print publication known for its attention-getting photographic covers, long prose articles, and ad layout can adapt stories to Internet formats. For example, "The United (Altered) States of Jenna Bush" uses a Google maps interface to chart the drunken escapades of the First Daughter. The incorporation of online audio clips in "9/11 Live: The Norad Tapes" makes the narrative of the decision-making about whether or not to shoot down United Flight 93, which had been overtaken by hijackers bent on urban destruction, even more dramatic alongside the transcripts. "Web exclusives" with Internet slideshows, such as "The Heartbreak Campaign" about Robert Kennedy's 1968 run for the White House, are also appealing to the growing digital audience. If other news rack publications are creating good online content, why is the Los Angeles Times so incapable?

Update: To get a sense of why I say The Los Angeles Times has totally failed to create a compelling Internet edition, check out today's online version of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It is much more web-friendly and contains more original digital video content (although these clips are mostly about local news, unlike the online versions of The New York Times and The Washington Post, which specialize in footage from compelling national and international coverage to complement the accompanying stories).

Him and His Big Mouth

Even though The Los Angeles Times featured VP pal Barbara Bestor on the cover of its Home section today, there's clearly a lot going wrong in the other divisions of one of the nation's largest newspapers and one of the last to still have a bureau in Baghdad. Thanks to the ubiquitous presence of digital audio recording devices, journalists from other news organizations have revealed embarrassing confrontations involving the controversial owner of the Times Sam Zell.

NPR media-reporter David Folkenflik explains how a "Recording Shows Tribune Owner's Fiery Side" in one story, while Gawker uses video footage that shows how "Sam Zell Says 'Fuck You' To His Journalist."

Of course, no one's listening to my suggestions for how to save the LA Times.

Why I Hate the Term "Cyber-Stalking"

On the opinion page of today's Los Angeles Times, Meghan Daum put forward a cretinous and contradictory argument that yet again not so tacitly accepts the equation of common digital practices with criminality.

"Are you a stalker too?" opens with an eye-catching celebrity news reference and the assertion that the behavior of the female stalker of actor John Cusak was "oddly quaint," given the fact that in the "nearly 20 years since California made the physical act illegal, the concept of stalking has become so ubiquitous" that "the trendy new incarnation is all about honoring personal space" and spying on unwitting victims with search engines and social networking sites.

Whereas traditional stalking is about getting attention, about declaring yourself, it's now about remaining invisible. The idea is to learn as much about a person as possible without asking him any direct questions or, in some cases, even meeting him face to face. The idea is to know everything about that person without giving him any sign.

I am, of course, talking about the kind of stalking that involves not restraining orders but Internet search engines. It is often referred to as cyber-stalking . . .

Indeed, the slick materials of many "cyber-safety" parents' and citizens' groups emphasize the danger of "cyberstalking" to justify the use of proprietary screening software in the home, cutting off children's access in public places like schools and libraries to the Internet, and increased government surveillance of the Internet in general.

My problem with this argument is that decades ago I was actually stalked myself, and I can assure you that it bears absolutely no resemblance to having someone Google someone else in search of titillating private details posted in the public areas of cyberspace. It involved a college ex-boyfriend who was violent in every way that he could be violent without actually risking jail: psychological abuse, physical abuse, destruction of personal property, theft, extortion, threats to friends and family. Today it would have all been put together and called “stalking,” but in 1987 there didn’t seem to be a word for it; it was just a series of separate incidents, none of them serious enough for an arrest. Once he left a casual note amid the wreckage of a room full of my smashed belongings. “Just stopped by to kill you,” it said. The court approved a restraining order on him, which was terminated by an unwitting judge who declared us to be a "attractive couple," but -- when the harassment continued -- a second restraining order went into effect. Eventually, my stalker moved on to other targets and even ended up in prison for a short time, but it was an extraordinarily disquieting experience while it was going on and hardly "quaint" from my perspective.

Even as Daum asserts that she doesn't want to "make light of stalking" with her claim that "average citizens" are manifesting comparable forms of "fixation," her trivialization of Cusak's legal claims indicates that she doesn't think he has a legitimate right to being called a victim of a crime.

After all, Googling John Cusack turns up close to 3 million search results. We know that reading every one of them is less potentially dangerous than loitering outside someone's gate, but who's more obsessed -- the person who spends countless hours wading through Web entries or the person who tosses a bag of letters, rocks and screwdrivers over the fence and calls it a day?

When she talks about how "our insistence on applying violent terminology to an activity that essentially amounts to a very nerdy, needy form of gossip suggests that we might be a bit more embarrassed about our Internet activities than we'd care to admit," I wonder why she necessarily includes all her readers in this "we." As for me, I don't take the term "stalking" lightly.

More April Fool's Day Fun

You can also check out Mark Marino's news item about how the "LA Times Switches to All-Wiki Format in 11th-Hour Battle for Life."

In a desperate attempt to stop the involuntary leakage of its readership, the slightly less-old gray lady has tried the Depends of new media, embracing a technology that almost spelt its d-e-a-t-h in bright blue hyperlinked Arial.

The Los Angeles Times has consolidated with the Chicago Tribune and the New Stanton Occasional Telegraph to form The Los Wikiless Timespedia, a wiki-based newspaper entirely created by its readers.

Enjoy stories with titles like

* Serial [Comma] on the Loose (Below)
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* You Suck

I Don't Care If He Is a "Fervent Dodgers Fan" . . .

You know that friend of yours who is always doing stupid things? The one who is constantly making really dumb decisions? The one who you've actually decided not to bother getting mad at anymore and just to laugh whenever the consequences of that person's mistakes become obvious?

I feel that way about The Los Angeles Times.

I stayed a subscriber after the Times made the switch to a moronic "faster format." And I'm still a subscriber despite their Facebook journalism and sloppy reporting.

But now the Times has done something extra-special idiotic. You can read all about it in "Stanton named editor of the L.A. Times." As the announcement itself tactfully puts it, "Stanton doesn't have the same range of experience as many of his predecessors, who before moving into the editor's chair had won Pulitzer Prizes and other accolades for their own reporting or coverage they supervised." The paper admits that "assignments covering wars or Washington traditionally have been steppingstones to the top job at The Times and other large newspapers."

Look, I have nothing against Stanton personally. I'm a local too and also a "fervent Dodgers fan." And I've never been shot at in Iraq.

But what's amazing to me is that he was picked because of his role in "invigorating its website." The Times has a terrible website, without question the worst of any national newspaper. I suspect that my seventy-five-year old parents who still have dial-up know more about the Internet than Russ Stanton.

Of course, their website has been terrible for a long time, long before Stanton got involved.

For example, Internet subscribers constantly get spam ads from the LA Times in their e-mail inboxes. What's hilarious is that they obviously know nothing about their users based on the ads that arrive. Fine jewelry? Plastic surgery? I am positive that I never clicked through on any items featuring those topics. Here's the particularly funny part: they've never sent me a single electronics ad, even though I shop for gadgets all the time. Clearly, as an online consumer, I'm nothing more than my gender to them.

They also don't properly maintain their "interactive features." For example, one Flash developer showed me all the bugs in website done for a story that received a Pulitzer Prize. Shameful electronic hygiene that indicates that they don't get web development at all.

And they don't have the kind of archiving and tagging power that would make electronic subscribership valuable rather than just representing the hassle of memorizing another password. Come on! You guys must have seen the online version of The New York Times. Why don't you at least have "save" and "share" as options on your stories?

Besides, their online video sucks! It is little more than clips from local news and the AP. Compare that to the kind of smart use of witness journalism coming out of The New York Times or The Washington Post. Today, the LA Times has a weather story, a campus shooting story, a missing persons story, and a story about a car that could drive under water at the top of its video roster. Compare that to the NYTimes "The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto" or WaPo's "Pakistan on the Brink."

And then there was their disastrous experiment with an editorial wiki. OMG.

The new owner of the Times Sam Zell and publisher David Hiller were apparently pleased with the fact that "Latimes.com, the paper's online edition, has been adding readers at about a 20% annualized clip" and credit Russ Stanton with a development that would have taken place without him, given the country's changing literacy habits.