The Death of the Editor and the Rise of the Circulation Manager

A 1923 critique of everything that’s wrong with media today.

Recently, The New York Times asked me to weigh in on SOPA. Partly under the pressure of an impossibly short notice, and partly because I was hesitant to reduce such a complex problem to the slim word limit, I didn’t go into what makes SOPA just one manifestation of a deeper, wider, much more worrisome issue, which is this: So long as we have a monetization model of information that prioritizes the wrong stakeholders — advertisers over readers — we will always cater to the business interests of the former, not the intellectual interests of the latter. SOPA exists because we have failed to create an information economy in which editorial integrity and reader experience are the only currencies of media merit. Instead, we have a value system based on advertising metrics, and the reason for this can be traced to our chronic tendency to fit old forms to new media — the funding model for media and journalism today is a near-exact replica of the funding model of early newspapers.

Last week, David Skok over at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab unearthed a 1923 essay titled “Our Changing Journalism” (original text below) by Bruce Bliven, former managing editor of The New York Globe and eventual editor of The New Republic. In it, Bliven exquisitely encapsulates the brokenness of this media model, as reflected in the newspaper industry of the era, identifying eight deformities of journalism that map onto some of their contemporary equivalents — SEO-centric headlines a la Huffington Post, linkbait infographics, click-grubbing slideshows — with astounding accuracy. Among them:

…a steady tendency to condense newspaper articles into mere tabloid summaries. This is due to the great increase in the physical volume of advertising, and the desire to hold down the bulk of the paper.

This, of course, is a perfect summation of the strategy behind today’s content farms, as well as the increasingly prevalent and increasingly worrisome practice of over-aggregation. (Something I myself frequently grapple with as Brain Pickings articles are regurgitated by the Huffington Post and others of the same ilk.)

…a wider and wider use of syndicated material, so that newspapers all over the partially identical from day to day in their contents. This is true not only of telegraphic news, obtained from one of the three great news-gathering associations, but also of ‘feature’ articles, drawings, even editorials.

The homogenization of curiosity is something that keeps me up at night, as does the thickening of the filter bubble, from mainstream churnalism to smaller and niche publications’s propensity for regurgitating MetaFilter or Reddit headlines — our modern-day newswires.

…the great invested capital and earning power of a successful paper to-day. Because of this fact — the result of the increase in advertising — ownership has slipped out of the hands of the editor, whose type of mind is rarely compatible with large business dealings, and has passed to that of wealthy individuals or corporations. This means that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the editorial attitude of the paper reflects the natural conservatism of these ‘capitalistic’ owners, or is of a wishy-washy type which takes no vigorous stance on any subject.

…and…

…[newspapers’] race for added sales is reflected editorially in the production of journals which more and more represent, not an editor’s notion of a good paper, but a circulation manager’s notion of a good seller.

This, precisely, is the fundamental folly of media today. (And is the reason why, for the past six years, I’ve been running Brain Pickings as a donation-funded, advertising-free, and thus unconcerned with “circulation” — or, in modern terms, pageviews — editorial project.)

Whether it’s Hollywood, as in the case of SOPA, or the pageview overlords, as in the case of content farms and over-aggregators, today’s “circulation managers” still dictate the editorial direction and vision for most of the information we consume. Until we, as an information culture in general and as media producers in particular, figure out a way to reinstate the editor as the visionary and the reader as the stakeholder, the Internet will remain a dismal landscape for intelligent, compelling media.

Excerpt from Bliven’s essay follows.

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An Animated History of Human Communication: 1965 Educational Film about the Telephone

Barely a decade into the age of the social web, it’s already difficult to remember — or imagine — how the world operated before it. As difficult, perhaps, as it was for kids in the 1960s to imagine a world before the telephone.

We Learn About The Telephone is a 1965 educational film that traces the history of human communication, from the messenger runners of the Ancient world to Native Americans’ smoke signals to the invention of the telegraph and telephone, and explores the science and technology of how the phone actually works, from the anatomy of speech production to the physics of sound waves. Animated by the legendary John Hubley, the film is as much a treat of vintage animation as it is a priceless piece of cultural memorabilia from the golden age of media innovation.

Bonus: At around 10:56, you get a detailed tutorial on how to dial a rotary phone — for your collection of obsolete life skills — followed by some phone etiquette lessons. (“You should let the phone ring 8 to 10 times.”)

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The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: A Story of Passion and Possibility

What bamboo poles and bicycle chains have to do with sparking the spirit of entrepreneurship.

When he was only 14 years old, William Kamkwamba dreamt up a windmill that would produce electricity for his village in Malawi. The trouble? As Malawi was experiencing the worst famine in 50 years, William had to drop out of school because his family could no longer afford the $80 annual tuition. This meant he not only had no money to purchase the parts, but also no formal education to teach him how to put them together. Determined, he headed to the local library and voraciously devoured its limited selection of textbooks, then gathered some scrap parts — a bicycle dynamo, bamboo poles, a tractor fan, rubber belts, a bike chain ring — and brought his vision to life, building a functioning windmill. He spent the next five years perfecting the design and went on to found the Moving Windmills Project in 2008 to foster rural economic development and education projects in Malawi.

In 2009, Kamkwamba shared his moving story of perseverance, curiosity, and ingenuity in the memoir The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope. Now, this modern-day entrepreneurial fairy tale is being adapted for young hearts and minds in the beautifully illustrated children’s book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Young Readers Edition. Kamkwamba’s story shines with all the more optimism and tenacity in the hands of 27-year-old artist Elizabeth Zunon, whose rich, lyrical, almost three-dimensional oil-and-cut-paper illustrations, reminiscent of Sophie Blackall’s, vibrate with exceptional whimsy and buoyancy.

Coupled with the launch is a wonderful literacy effort — for every book parents, teacher, and children read online on We Give Books, the Wimbe community lending library, where Kamkwamba’s journey began, gets a new book, up to 10,000. Despite serving some 1,500 pupils, the library currently has no picture books.

Beautiful, moving, and immensely inspirational, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Young Readers Edition tells the kind of story that helps budding entrepreneurs relate to the world through a lens of infinite possibility — the kind of message that might, just might, empower them to harness if not the wind the future itself.

Thanks, Tom

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Why We Like the New and Shiny: A History and Future of Neophilia

What five-year-old Albert Einstein can teach us about serendipity and the filter bubble of information.

A newborn baby would stare at a new image for an average of 41 seconds before becoming bored and tuning out on repeated showings — that’s how hard-wired our affinity for novelty is. In New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change, behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher — whose treatise on the myth of multitasking you might recall — explores the evolutionary, biological, psychological, and cultural forces that drive our deep-seated neophilia, our tendency to ceaselessly seek out the new and different. From how our ability to respond to change saved us from extinction some 800,000 years ago to neophilia’s basic mind-body mechanisms to the profound ways in which the information age has altered our relationship with novelty, Gallagher examines the past and future of the quintessential tug-of-war between our need for survival, which relies on safety and stability, and our desire to thrive, which engenders stimulation, exploration, and innovation.

At this point in our warp-speed information age, our well-being demands that we understand and control our neophilia lest it control us. We already crunch four times more data — e-mail, tweets, searches, music, video, and traditional media — than we did just thirty years ago, and this deluge shows no signs of slackening. To thrive amid unprecedented amounts of novelty, we must shift from being mere seekers of the new to being connoisseurs of it.”

To be sure, Gallagher is careful not to paint a binary picture of good and evil in discussing neophilia, recognizing instead its dimensionality and balance of threat and benefit. She begins by citing a near-mythological anecdote about young Einstein:

A wonderful little story about five-year-old Albert Einstein, who was very slow to speak and whose parents feared he was none too bright, shows us how neophilia works and what it’s for. One day, when he was sick in bed, the boy was given the compass to fiddle with to keep him occupied. The new plaything made him wonder about magnetic fields, which got him interested in physics, and, well, you know the rest. Few of us are Einsteins, but all of us have the same capacity to be curious about something new that sparks the learning and sustained interest that lead to achievements great and small.”

Young Albert Einstein, 1882

From that perspective, neophilia can be a facilitator of serendipity, which can in turn be the gateway to discovery and creativity. The three affective foundations underpinning neophilia — surprise, curiosity, and interest — are referred to as “knowledge emotions,” Gallagher says, because they resemble thoughts in how they spur us to learn. Coupled with the capacity of the brain to act as a “surprise detector,” this makes neophilia a uniquely human adaptive advantage. In fact, as Gallagher points out, the failure to replicate this mechanism in artificial intelligence is the reason why robotic self-driving cars are still less able to detect and react to rapidly changing traffic conditions, and why the Internet is wired to give us more of what we are already looking for, rather than surprise us with something we didn’t know existed but might find infinitely interesting — in other words, why the filter bubble exists.

To survive, you must be aroused by the new and different. To be efficient and productive, however, you must focus your finite mental energy and attention on those novel sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings that somehow matter and screen out the rest. Just as arousal alerts and orients you to new things, the complementary process of adaptation helps you filter out the unimportant ones.”

(Cue in Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet.)

This, of course, is a double-edged sword. As far as the compulsion for novelty goes, a lens of particular urgency to me is that of information neophilia. As the editor of a site that features mostly evergreen content, whose interestingness quotient, meaningfulness, and relevance aren’t correlated with a date stamp, I am constantly troubled by the newsification of the web. The new floats to the top of our collective conscience, leaving boundlessly fascinating, timeless yet timely older “information” — old maps, archival photos, pioneering cinema, vintage design, out-of-print books — to rot away at the bottom, in obscure archives, away from the public eye and thus from our collective imagination.

My hope is that we, as a culture, as a society, and as individuals, will find ways to transcend this voraciousness for novelty and learn to celebrate the layered richness that lies beneath the surface foam of the new — something underlying Gallagher’s rhetoric in New, as she urges us to stay true to neophilia’s evolutionary purpose: to help us adapt, learn, and create new things that are meaningful and purposeful, discarding vacant stimuli as distraction.

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