57th Street

I have no motivation to post anything. My brain is fried and I really have been trying to get our staff writers here to write something, obviously to no avail. Anyway, check out an online news and culture magazine that I write for! The Beachwood Reporter. It’s Chicago based! I love it. It may seem a little strange at first but it’s really cool.

Once upon a time, rich people used to give back to the public. A lot. There once was a noble breed of the wealthy that believed in a role of the elite as servants of society, using money to improve the world, even when there was no clear profit in the investment. It was the gratification that mattered.

Not all of this was selflessness. The donors got to one up their fellow richie riches and also often got their name stamped on something big (the Shedd Aquarium, Marshall Field’s, Pritzker School of Medicine). But over all it was a win win. The City of Chicago was practically built on philanthropy.

Sometimes the wealthy bought newspapers because of the potential for profit and back in the day newspapers and journalism in general was indeed profitable. Four wealthy families were regarded as the stewards of quality journalism: the Chandlers of The Los Angeles Times, the Sulzbergers of The New York Times, the Grahams of The Washington Post, and the Bancrofts of The Wall Street Journal. Today there are half as many Stewards —the Sulzbergers and the Grahams and there are early hints of another halving possibly. But there’s still hope.

Herb and Marion Sandler are backing an audacious media venture called Pro Publica. According to an article in The New York Times Magazine,

the venture would employ around 25 reporters and editors and would conduct the kind of ambitious investigations that only a handful of the country’s most prominent news organizations do as a matter of course.

The Sandlers are the old style kind of wealthy. According to the article,

they want their money to go to organizations they feel are well run and led by people they can count on to keep them that way.

It’s the most pure kind of philanthropy.

What the Sandlers want, clearly, is investigative journalism that leads to change in public policy or finds, as Herb put it to me, “the next Enron.”

What’s replaces this era of admirable returns to the public are a tiny group of media owners hungry for more money. Today Samuel Zell, Rupert Murdoch, and James L. Dolan are descending on the Long Island paper Newsday. I think the very name Newsday hints at the aspirations of what it could become: a quality tabloid serving an area larger than just Long Island. For a while in the 80s and 90s, the paper was going that way. It had an undeniably excellent New York edition. Since then the paper has fallen a bit in quality but it’s still respectable. I don’t know who will take it but it can’t be good. The bidder with the best record is Rupert Murdoch who hasn’t lowered the quality of The Wall Street Journal “yet” as an editor told me recently. I think all of them are more likely to do something bad to the paper. The New York Times article on the Newsday sale said

The News and The Post are fierce competitors for readers and advertisers in New York City, and the pursuit of Newsday could become a high-stakes battle between Mr. Zuckerman and Mr. Murdoch. Thus, the jockeying for control of Newsday could decide the fates of three of the nation’s largest newspapers, and dominance in Long Island, with nearly three million people.

Basically making Newsday into the usual kind of tabloid: full of yellow journalism and sensational gossipyness. It’s the kind of journalism that really hurts everything. Here’s what a lot of people don’t understand about the media. People like me aren’t fogeys who don’t like change —well I am that but not in this respect; rather, we understand that the information chosen for certain platforms really does impact people. Think about it. How much of your political stance is fueled by the information you get in news outlets be it tv, radio, online, or print? Now consider that some of these news outlets feel your political view should consider that Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein making him unfit to be president which has nothing to do with any indication of what kind of Commander-in-Chief he would be. It’s all out there.

The goal of many successful and some not so successful media outlets has been turning a profit. None of it is really educational or informative. But informativeness is more important than ever right now. In Michael Miner’s Hot Type column this week he interviews Richard Longworth, author of Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism. Longworth, a journalist himself, attributes the economic problems in the Midwest partially to a general ignorance by the public thanks to the decline in quality informativeness and relevance of newspapers. Longworth says that

Newspapers are failing” at their task, Longworth writes, and one reason is a report issued by the “once responsible journalism school at Northwestern University, urging papers to draw readers by stressing local news. . . . All over the Midwest, local news, no matter how trivial, is squeezing out the global coverage that readers need to make sense of their world.

“Increasingly,” Longworth told me, “decision-makers get their news from elite sources and too many voters don’t get any news at all.”

Longworth goes on to explain that Midwesterners need to understand the world globally and how that is relevent to them if they are to survive in an age of outsourcing. He proposes for Chicago a new kind of newspaper that would also serve the Midwest.

So in Caught in the Middle, Longworth makes a proposal: “If the Midwest is to act as a region, it needs a trusted publication to set the regional agenda.”

The Tribune could launch a Midwestern newspaper, a sort of regional [Financial Times] that covers both the Midwest and the globe with true quality journalism, and would work hard to link the Midwest to the globe. It would be smaller in size, with considerably higher newsstand and subscription prices, less reliant on advertising, devoid of the kind of Dear Abby features that bring in readers now. . . . This would be an elite paper, sure. But it would inject global knowledge into a region that desperately needs it. And who knows, it might be read by local editors and reporters who could be inspired to do some of the same sort of reporting on their own back yards.

But right now there’s the Chicago Sun-Times and the Tribune which don’t really serve this purpose. The Sun-Times, like Newsday to a more extreme degree, has fallen from its past accolades of greatness. At this point, that may not be such a bad thing. Time to end it. A BusinessWeek article remembers the days when the family of Marshall Field III was at the helm, the Sun-Times flourished.

Under the Fields, the paper spent freely to give readers a lively, liberal, and hard-hitting alternative to the stodgy, Republican Trib. In 1977, for instance, the Sun-Times shelled out enough money to open its own tavern—the cheekily named Mirage—for four months so its undercover reporters could snare city officials seeking bribes. The home of columnists Mike Royko and Eppie Lederer, aka Ann Landers, the Sun-Times was “a very serious newspaper,” recalls former managing editor Gregory E. Favre, now a fellow at the Poynter Institute, a Florida journalism school.

So as tabloids vie for dominance in giving us the latest gossip, and as the Sun-Times dies out, there’s really just one proper reaction to this.

Oh Marshall where art thou?

It seems like every publication is putting ample space aside to commemorate the death of William F. Buckley, the founder of the magazine National Review and a widely respected conservative. So I figured we at 57th Street might as well do the same.

Nobody here knew Buckley personally. We didn’t go to school with him. We weren’t friends with his parents. We didn’t write a mocking column about him which eventually got us a job. He was never our editor. Hell, I had no idea who he was until he died and both liberal and conservative media outlets wrote obituaries on him. I don’t think my ignorance is unique. The closest link I have to him is that JadedHack/Ben goes to the University of Chicago where Buckley spent his undergraduate years. I’ve also lived in Chicago for a number of years, within spitting distance of the U of C campus and never heard about Buckley. So I’m still trying to figure out what the world has lost. From what I’ve ascertained so far, the loss isn’t small.

Yesterday night, while reporting on a Michigan Student Assembly meeting for The Michigan Daily I picked up a copy of the National Review lying around. Lately I’ve been in search of new reading material to accompany The New York Times, The New Yorker, a number of blogs (some of which are from the previously mentioned newspaper and magazine) and sometimes the Chicago Reader. So I was open to the Review, especially because of a certain imbalance of political bend toward liberalism among my periodicals. I flipped through it and admit, it wasn’t bad. The issue was of course a commemoration to its founder, Buckley, and I really didn’t feel like reading too much on him. Still, I was somewhat impressed by the magazine. Nice column lengths, nice writing style, nice design. I say somewhat because it probably won’t make my list of regular reads. Earlier today (or yesterday because it’s almost 2 a.m.) I was checking out The New Republic’s site when I saw a little something from its editor, Franklin Foer. Foer is one of the three Foer writers, a rare family of extraordinary journalists and authors. I haven’t read his brother —Johnathan Safran Foer—’s book Everything Is Illuminated but I’m going to. So I figured my increasing stack of school work could bare another 20 minutes of inattention and read Foer’s piece. Guess what it was on? That’s right, Buckley. But like this blog post, it wasn’t a reminiscence of that time Foer and Buckley were at the old boy’s club smoking cigars and doing…whatever. It started out with a problem Foer has at TNR: the abbreviations are the same as the National Review’s.

I, for one, have never gone out of my way to compound this misapprehension by posing as a writer for the National Review. But I haven’t always disabused the impression that I work for the other TNR, either. It can be a great boon while reporting. When interviewing the grassroots of the conservative moment at, say, a Christian Coalition Road to Victory conference or a gathering of the College Republicans, I’ve found myself occasionally swept into the sweet embrace of comradeship. “Oh, what’s David Frum really like?” When I reply that I consider him to be a gentleman, the filters that might normally preclude honest conversation with representatives of the mainstream media are lifted.

Also unique to the many pieces of Buckley, Foer reveals that

The rap on Buckley’s magazine was that it served as a self-promotional vehicle on the road to television, a quixotic mayoral bid, and the creation of a persona, or, to put it less charitably, a personality cult.

I agree with Foer. It’s a fair magazine. It doesn’t quite suit my palette but I wouldn’t openly scoff at the idea of my friends reading it —actually I’d probably adore them because a subscription to the National Review is very anti-establishment at Michigan. I also empathize with Foer, the name thing is always an issue. I have to admit, I’m still a little unsure about part of 57th Street’s name. If we just shortened it to 57th Street as it’s bound to be called, it might get confused with the bookstore or the actual street. But what should go instead of ‘Company’? Should it stay ‘The 57th Street Company’? What’s in a name? The last thing anyone really needs is yet another name change because of me.

It turns out that back in the day, The New Republic and The Nation magazine had so much in common that the prospect of a merger was given some serious thought. Foer writes

During the early ’50s, The Nation and The New Republic seriously considered merging, there was so little space between them. The new magazine would have been ponderously and unpromisingly called The Nation and New Republic.

The idea was eventually tabled of course and TNR remained TNR sharing much with The Nation but also something significant with a deeply conservative magazine called the National Review.

I guess the outcome of my little exploration of the Review resulted in an admiration for The New Republic. I’m very impressed with Foer’s column and I’ve seen the magazine on friends’ desks lately. So Buckley’s death has affected me too. Because of him, I now have an growing interest in The New Republic. I hadn’t touched it before actually, because the movie Shattered Glass will forever stay associated to the magazine in my mind. That movie is about Stephen Glass, a journalist who fabricated stories while working at The New Republic. I can overlook that though. After all, raging liberals overlooked the wide expanse in political outlook when commemorating Buckley.

Wallace and Gromit fans have likely gone into hibernation since the release of “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” in 2005. Like them, I recently got itchy for some news and started to poke around. That’swhere I found out about Aardman Animation’s new hit children’s show, “Shaun The Sheep.” Fans will remember Shaun as the mute, besweatered sheep from the Wallace and Gromit short-ish film “A Close Shave.” He’s since moved on to greener pastures, in a quite literal sense.

The premise of “Shaun the Sheep,” is simple. Shaun lives on a rural European farm, complete with dry stone buildings, with the other sheep in The Flock. Their keeper, The Farmer, lives in ignorance of the fact that Shaun and his friends behave quite like humans — lounging, ordering pizza, playing soccer (sorry, “football”), and getting into mischief. The episodes are completely self-contained stories that operate under one basic rule: that The Farmer can never know about what his animals are getting up to behind his back.

While the premise seems fairly boiler plate the show has a lot of unique features which separate from the flock of mediocrity which is children’s programming. First off, it is done with all of Aardman’s standards for quality in animation. There’s not many cartoons animated with stop motion animation (robot chicken and the excellent Pingu spring to mind) and the look is quite refreshing. The show looks fantastic, and as a result is more satisfying to watch.

It’s also completely silent, at least in terms of intelligible words. The Farmer often grumbles, Bitzer, the sheepdog, barks, and the sheep bleat. This allows the show to neatly side-step that fatal pitfall of children’s entertainment: insipid dialog. The show looses nothing from the lack of dialog, it’s fun to let the faces and exasperated bleats of sheep say what words simply can’t convey. (It also means that it is easily transferable, and is currently running in 73 countries — from Iceland to India.)

The quality of animation in the show, coupled with the cleverness of silent comedy makes for a terrific fusion in Shaun The Sheep. Like a haiku, the restrictions of the show — seven-minute episodes, no dialog, etc. — seem to have created fertile creative ground in which the show has flourished. At times it can be witty and clever, and other times juvenile and silly, but at no time does it ever stop being entertaining. It has become the highest form of children’s entertainment: one that adults aren’t ashamed to watch, and might even enjoy.

Bright, light, and utterly charming, Shaun the Sheep is the kind of show that everyone, regardless of age or nationality, simply must see.

Unfortunately, the powers that be have seen fit to remove all the episodes of the show from YouTube — which is most unfortunate for anyone in North America. Thankfully, there are some clips available from Shaunthehseep.com, though they are woefully truncated. A good ol’ Google Video should turn up a few more.

Watch Shaun The Sheep At MetaCafe

The New York Times blogger Stanley Fish wrote an endless post explaining the purpose of his inflammatory Think Again blog. He says that the purpose of it is to analyze the arguments but not make them.

I am analyzing arguments rather than making them; or, to be more precise, I am making arguments about arguments, especially ones I find incoherent or insufficiently examined.

He tries to take a completely neutral stance on the issues behind the arguments he analyzes. Instead, his goal is to point out the failings or strengths of opinions that interest him. Even if only a fraction of readers actually read his blog for the arguments, that’s still a substantial amount of people. (This particular post that I write about got over 300 comments.)

The most respected newspapers, even before they were tainted with the self-imposed scandalous errors to come, believed that pure objectivity is unattainable; that although someone can always push to try not to take a side or preference, achieving that is impossible. Striving to be objective is reasonable, but not gaining it. Fish ignores this. He says

I am agnostic on those issues and interested only in the way they are playing out in our present cultural moment. When, for example, I wrote three columns criticizing the atheist tracts written by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, I was motivated not by a belief in God — which I may or may not have, you’ll never know — but by what I took to be sloppy, schoolboy reasoning that was passing itself off as wisdom.

But what’s the point? Why argue just for the hell of the argument? A number of people (including our very own Ben/JadedHack) consider this recreation. It’s a weird sensation, argument is. After I argue, win or lose, I always have this sort of adrenaline rush. I don’t like it, some people do. But Fish isn’t catering to only these bicker junkies, albeit unintentionally. He’s touching topics that passionately inflame people.

Now that I think about it, maybe the purpose of this particular post is to deter readers who actually think Fish has a preference in the issues he’s critiquing. They’re right though. There’s no real way in avoiding the creation of an opinion when analyzing another opinion…or if there is, it’s not unavoidable. Fish’s preference has to become a factor sometimes. Is it really possible to always denounce any stance because of the way the argument is presented rather than the depth of the facts for one side or the ridiculousness of the proposal? More importantly, is it even worthwhile to argue about arguing? Perhaps as a way of keeping all arguments sharp. That seems like too massive a task for one blog.