Our financial crisis could be way worse.

We could be seeing riots in the streets over rampant pyramid schemes gone bad. Awesome.

Remember when I said I love Somali pirates? (By the way, those badasses stole a fucking 1,080 foot Saudi Arabian supertanker the other day.) I love Columbia for similar reasons.

Back to normal nonsense

Apologies for the boring inside-baseball aside, below.

So I came down with kind of a nasty cold this week. Thanks to Google's cool new tool, I know I'm not alone in DC -- apparently there's some kind of bug running around the city that's nasty enough to cause lots of people to Google "flu symptoms," or the like.

New York Times has a good story explaining how it works.

See, there's this guy Jeff Jarvis, and he's kind of an asshole...

Most people I know probably don't care much about the future of journalism as an industry, and I don't blame them; there will always be news, from somewhere, produced by someone, so from the point of view of a consumer, who cares who the someone is?

But those of us who work in the industry kind of obsess over crap like this:

I have heard about this dude Jeff Jarvis for a while, without really paying close attention to what he actually says. He is one of a growing body of "new journalists" who say, generally, that print is dead (probably true) and that all the old ways of doing journalism are defunct (not so sure about that).

People like Jarvis promote things like "citizen journalism," which basically involves news organizations recruiting people off the street to report for them. (For free, of course.) An easy example is CNN's "iReporter" thing, where they encourage viewers to send them video of car crashes or fires or whatever disaster happens to be going on in the neighborhood.

That's fine, as far as it goes. But it's no replacement for professional journalism.

Anyhow, I've long had an uneasy feeling about Jarvis and his acolytes. I wasn't sure why; it just seemed to me, a working journalist, that this dude Jarvis, a former journalist turned consultant, was more talking down to the industry than working with it. While he seemed to know what was wrong with journalism (people don't read papers anymore, duh), he didn't seem to know so much how to fix it, or what was still right with the profession.

"Citizen journalism" ain't the answer, put it that way. It ain't even part of the answer, best I can tell.

Ron Rosenbaum puts my uneasiness into sharp focus in this Slate piece.

My favorite part is this little bitch-slap:

It makes you wonder whether Jarvis has actually done any, you know, reporting. Particularly when he tells you that in doing his book on the total wonderfulness of Google, he decided it would be better not to speak to anyone who works at Google, that instead he's written about the idea of Google, as he construes it, rather than finding out how they—the actual Google people—construe it. What he's done, Jarvis claims, is to "reverse-engineer" the reality of Google. This means deducing how Google got to be what it is and do what it does by conjecturing about its effects from the outside.

Allow me to make a conjecture: Did Jarvis sound out Google informally and get rebuffed, prompting him to "decide" he wouldn't talk to them "on principle"? Of course, I could ask Jarvis about this, but that would be mere "reporting"; it's more fun to "reverse-engineer" his decision.

Jarvis has responded on his blog. And in the first paragraph, his response really crystallizes, for me, everything unlikeable about the man:

I am the honoree of an attempted hatchet job by Ron Rosenbaum in - what’s the name of that site? Salon? no, Slate (I always get them confused).

This crap is straight from The Politicians' Guide to Responding to Criticism.

Step 1: Adopt a haughty, better-than-thou attitude ("I am the honoree...")
Step 2: Dismiss the criticism as a personal attack, or "hatchet job."
Step 2: Denigrate the critic, in this case by pretending you don't know what publication he's from.

What an asshole.

P.S.:

Here's what's wrong with journalism today, in my view. Back in the early 90s, the geniuses who run most of the nation's newspapers -- still the primary source for most of your news, no matter where you think you're getting it -- made the fateful decision to give away everything they produce for free on the Internet.

Now, the entire public is conditioned to getting its news for free. And surprise, surprise, it turns out that giving away everything you produce for free isn't a very viable business model.

Here's my suggested solution: Every newspaper in the land should start charging one cent to read each article it publishes online, or perhaps even just a fraction of a cent. Condition people to understand, like they used to, that news isn't free; it's a product like anything else, and you've got to pay for it if you want it.

Otherwise, good luck with your "citizen journalism."

Update: This guy Simon Owens sent me a nice e-mail the other day with the subject line, "Alex, a news tip for your blog." I am sucker for any kind of tip, news or not. Anyhow, Simon has ripped Jarvis at his own blog and also sends along the work of a colleague, who wrote about something called "crowdfunding" for journalism.

I don't know about this "crowdfunding" stuff as a business model for an entire industry, but I do think that there's a strong possibility all the best journalism in the country will be produced by nonprofits in the near future.

Also: very cool that people other than my mom and sister occasionally read my blog. Not that I don't appreciate my most loyal readers, but still. Thanks, Simon.

My piece of history

I'll try to keep this as apolitical as possible.

So I'm in a bar called Lucky Strike tonight, watching the election returns. It's an upscale bowling alley/bar in Washington's Chinatown neighborhood, which is less China and more The Gap.

When I get there at seven p.m., it's a racially mixed crowd. The returns start rolling in. Every time Obama wins a state, there's applause. So clearly, there's a partisan bent to the place, as you would expect in Washington DC.

When CNN calls Ohio for Obama, there's loud applause.

When CNN calls Virginia for Obama, there's crazy applause.

I look around. Most of the white people have left. The bar crowd is 80 percent black.

I remark to my one of my friends: "I doubt these people have ever cared very much about election returns."

It's a generalization and maybe an unfair one. I don't know.

Shortly after Virginia is called, the polls close on the west coast. CNN calls the presidential election for Obama.

The place goes nuts. There is applause, screaming, an impromptu chant of "yes we can."

A friend of mine goes to the bathroom. He comes back and reports that two grown black men are in the men's room, crying over Obama's election. Crying.

As historic as this moment is, I wonder if something has gone under-noticed here. This is huge for black America. Probably bigger than the media has realized; certainly bigger than I realized.

I walk home from the bar, across the city, up the National Mall and past the Capitol. The Capitol is lit up and is as beautiful as ever. The Mall is quiet. But all around me, in the city, car horns are honking, people are cheering, and the city is alive; it is electric.

It is an amazing feeling.

Addendum: For what it's worth, I thought John McCain delivered one of the most gracious and touching concession speeches I've ever heard last night.

Addendum two: I deleted a piece of information from this post; someone I love and trust thought it might get me into trouble. I disagreed, but removed it anyway. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.