Aram Zucker-Scharff

Bankers Who Commit Fraud, Like Murderers, Are Supposed to Go to Jail | Beat the Press: Individuals are profiting by breaking the law. The point is make sure that these individuals pay a steep personal price. This is especially important for this sort o…

The hardest part of doing better on the internet (at least for me, and in my experience for many others) is following these rules. I don’t always get there, but I’m always trying. 

1: You could always be wrong.

2: Remember that people criticizing a group of which you are a member are not criticizing you personally.

3: Do not deploy knee-jerk defenses of organizations or groups you enjoy, people can defend themselves until you do the research. Sometimes they can continue to defend themselves after you’ve done the research.

• 3b: The following can almost always defend themselves and are likely not worthy of you excusing them. Consider carefully before penning defenses of these folks:
   – Multi-million dollar corporations 
   – Government officials
   – Societies of significant size
   – High profile people acting in insulting ways.
   – Groups in which you are a member of a minority when the majority is acting badly. Everyone already understands it’s Not All … whatever.
   – Groups in which you are a member of a silent majority and the minority is acting badly. If you’re silent about them acting badly, you are in the wrong, or at least not right. 

4: When listening or reading others, believe their experiences and statements first, doing research where you have doubts second.

5: Inaccuracies don’t imply conspiracy or attack in every situation. Nor do some inaccuracies in a larger work invalidate the whole.

6: All personal experiences have validity, even if their experience of something is different than yours. 

• 6b: You may disagree with their conclusions, but the experiences happened.
• 6c: No one knows your context, you don’t know anyone else’s context unless they outline it explicitly. Act accordingly. 

7: Always follow the principle of least harm. If there are two options and one could potentially hurt someone’s feelings and the other doesn’t, and both get your point across, use the one that isn’t harmful. 

8: Criticism of your speech or work, no matter how snarky, is not an attack. Don’t take it personally.

• 8b: Criticism of your work, or others, does not take away your ‘free speech’. Nor does moderation by others. Nor does others refusing to amplify you.

9: It’s never ‘well, that’s the way it is’. Positive change comes from challenging the status quo.

• 9b: People who challenge the status quo are not attacking you for not doing so.
• 9c: People who don’t challenge the status quo are not explicitly attacking you for doing so.
• 9d: Only you are responsible for your attempt to challenge ‘how it is’ and you should encourage, though not require, others to do so.

10: It doesn’t have to be about you, your group, your interest or your beliefs. Not everything is about you.

• 10b: A conversation that has nothing about you need not also cover you or your particular group. People not talking about you are not automatically inviting you to add on a conversation about you. 
• 10c: Talking about ‘not you’ or yours is not a statement that no one should talk about you or yours, nor is it an attack on you or your interests. 

11: Whenever possible, amplify other voices instead of paraphrasing, repossessing, or repeating. 

12: Everyone deserves the benefit of doubt. Every person deserves your respect of them as a person. 

Extra(obvious) rule: treat others as you would wish to be treated. 

Jumping to conclusions, from The Phantom Tollbooth. 

Just attaching ‘gate’ to the end of every controversial thing that pops into the news is bullshit, historically blind, and beyond insulting. There’s no way for the audience to understand that they should be concerned about something unless you attach ‘gate’ to the end of it?

The repeated use and assumptions involved in ‘*-gate’-ing things is like the ultimate media-to-audience insult. By doing so, media outlets assume you don’t know what Watergate was and you’re too stupid to understand why a topic should make you furious unless they ‘gate’ it. Even worse… it implies that unless someone attaches -gate to the end of something, it’s not really a big deal. Too bad there’s no finance-crisis-gate, gun-deaths-gate, or ebola-gate, apparently, they’re not worth caring about.

Adding -gate assumes your audience is idiots, robs them of any need to understand history, and devalues other coverage. It’s incredibly condescending. Don’t do it.

Newspapers made money through classifieds, stock listings and real estate listings. Advertising was big, because newspapers were the only easy-to-read, widely-consumed, mass communication in the pre-web age, other than TV. But it wasn’t just advertising. Newspapers were really a collection of products being distributed between articles. Classifieds, real estate listings, announcements, police blotters, brand awareness, etc… Because they owned their communities and because they were zebras without tigers, they could glide along without innovation and with sub-standard products.

Then came the web and it was a tiger that took nibbles off the zebra. With the internet’s global reach it suddenly became immensely profitable to do ONE thing REALLY well. So newspapers lost their coupon business because Groupon just did that ONE thing and did it really well. They lost classifieds because Craig’s List did that ONE thing and did it really well.

Newspaper companies looked at their shrinking portfolio of products and made the mistake of deciding that their business was producing journalism. Ads would support them, because where else would people advertise? Then web advertising became easy. Then SEO made it so people would search for a how, and companies could provide the answer without the middle man.

Suddenly, the market crashed and companies that had just kept buying newspaper ads had to look at their budgets and ask themselves… is this really worth it? They saw newspaper ads, which were flat, boring, and provided no metrics, and they saw web ads and declared: print advertising is useless!

And lo, the newspapers saw their advertising dry up. Local papers discovered that when a tight-budgeted owner had to choose between a coupon ad and being able to delete negative Yelp comments, they chose Yelp comments.

Then the newspaper business said: but we Do Good and we Make Journalism and surely people will pay for that. But no, the people did not pay for that. It turned out that the people probably NEVER paid for that. No they paid to get news (because it was the only way to get it with them on their train rides and lunch breaks) and they paid to get their stocks (because they didn’t have Yahoo Finance) and they paid to see how much the houses around them were worth, because that was how much they were worth (but there’s a real estate website for that now). Yes, those subscribers did pay for coupons, and finding people to wash their cars for $5 and anonymous sex, but the internet did all that better now.

Indeed, there were ‘national’ newspapers, that made large sums, but WSJ built their business of printing a ton of ticker prices first, and WaPo was really a local paper that everyone in DC paid for because everyone in DC has a higher level of self-interest than the average Donald Trump, and NYT made their money because New Yorkers obsess over real-estate like they’re addicted to sweet sweet cocaine. Yet, even the national papers suffer because they don’t do that one thing really well, other companies do.

So we must ask the question: Is journalism an actual business, one that makes money? Did we ever pay for articles? Who is the customer of the print newspaper? Is it really the readers or is it the advertisers? If it was for the advertisers, and the real estate agents, and the classifieds listers, then what’s left when they leave? Pretty much nothing, and a nice fantasy about the Good We Do. 

Inspired by: The newspaper crisis: by the numbers