Neuron Culture

The Washington Post, in a story fairly typical of other coverage, says that Obama’s pick for Secretary of Education will “reach out to unions, school reform gorups” and “bridge the divides among education advocates, teachers unions and civil rights groups over how to fix America’s school.” Or as another syndicated WaPo story put it, “Duncan is embraced by the teachers unions, which have been concerned about high-stakes testing and worry about merit pay being tied to test scores, as well as reformers, who favor charter schools and tougher standards.”

Apparently at least some from the teachers’-union end of this debate are offering an embrace not exactly friendly:

To portray Arne Duncan as anything other than a privatizer, union buster, and corporate stooge is to simply lie.

That’s George Schmidt, editor of Substance News, in an essay posted at Schools Matter.

Catalyst Chicago, which claims it offers “independent reporting on school reformi,” offers a rundown of Duncan’s track record as CEO of Chicago’s schools.

Forgive if I’m obsessed with this death-of-journalism thing — Andrew Sullivan has a nice piece in the Times of London about dying newspapers. Like Surowiecki, he fears the loss of the deep reporting that newspapers are already doing less of, and for which so far we have no real replacement venue.

Stunning stat from the story: The Baltimore Sun, a pretty big and renowned paper (and the basis for The Wire) gets about 17.5 million page views a month. Sullivan’s blog at Atlantic gets 23 million:

The operation largely run out of my spare room reached many more online readers than some of the biggest and most loss-making papers in the country. The economics are remorseless: as news goes online, the economic model for papers cannot survive. If advertising follows page views, the game will shortly be over.

The terrifying problem is that a one-man blog cannot begin to do the necessary labour-intensive, skilled reporting that a good newspaper sponsors and pioneers. A world in which reporting becomes even more minimal and opinion gets even more vacuous and unending is not a healthy one for a democracy. Perhaps private philanthropists will step in and finance not-for-profit journalistic centres, where investigative and foreign reporting can be invested in and disseminated by blogs and online sites. Maybe reporter-bloggers will start rivalling opinion-mongers such as me and give the whole enterprise some substance. Maybe papers can slim down sufficiently to produce a luxury print issue and a viable online product. There’s always a hunger for news, after all.

Technorati Tags:
Andrew Sullivan, journalism

I won’t replicate the Word-of-the-Day email every day, but this was too good not to pass on. “The Dingle duo are seriously concerned that Jasmine’s about to go doolally.”

doolally

PRONUNCIATION:
(DU-lah-lee)

MEANING:
adjective: Irrational, deranged, or insane.

ETYMOLOGY:

After Deolali, a small town in western India. It’s about 100 miles from Mumbai with an unusual claim to fame. It’s where British soldiers who had completed their tour of duty were sent to await transportation home. It was a long wait — often many months — before they were to be picked up by ships to take them to England. Consequent boredom, and heat, turned many a soldier insane, and the word doolally was coined. At least that’s the story.

More likely, soldiers who were going soft in the head were sent to the sanatorium there. At first the term was used in the form “He’s got the Doo-lally tap”, from Sanskrit tapa (heat) meaning one has caught doolally fever but now it’s mostly heard as in “to go doolally”. In Australia, they say “Calm down, don’t do your lolly”.

USAGE:
“The Dingle duo are seriously concerned that Jasmine’s about to go doolally.”
Mike Ward; What’s Hot to Watch Today; Daily Star (UK); Dec 5, 2008.

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James Surowiecki gives us the bad news and the bad news about newspapers. After noting that ad revenue dropped 18 percent in the third quarter alone, he gets on to causes and ultimate effects:

People don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product….

For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.