Tag Archives: New York Times

Time to Surf the Wave of the Personal Brand

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Politico’s version of the negotiations describes how NYT executive editor Jill Abramson and Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt fought hard to keep Silver at the paper because they saw his “brand within a brand as a wave of the future,”

Mathew Ingram’s recounting today of blogger Nate Silver’s leap from the New York Times into the welcoming arms of ESPN underscores a trend B2B journalists and editors ignore at their peril.

For the moment at least, editorial personal brands are growing more powerful primarily—or most obviously—in big media.

My sense is that most B2B journos are largely unaware of the trend, or largely unwilling to hop onto it. Sooner or later that will change, but whether most of the journalists who have the experience to take advantage of the trend will actually do so is an open question. Being an expert in your field is a requirement for a robust personal brand, but not the only one. If you don’t consciously cultivate your brand, it won’t take root in the new media age.

That means blogging, using social media, and—you may shudder to think of it—promoting your brand. And need I add, you must do this with enthusiasm?

And lest I seem to be piling it onto editors unduly, I should note that B2B media brands need to be as cognizant of this trend as individuals. As Jeff Jarvis said in a tweet Ingram quoted, they need to be thinking of themselves as platforms for building individual brands—something I see few B2B publishing companies doing.

Time is running out. The wave of individual branding will overtake B2B media soon, and the only question is whether you’re going to be surfing the wave or struggling in the wake.

Let’s Not Confuse Morality with Quality: Jonah Lehrer and Plagiarism

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Jonah Lehrer at PopTech 2009

Jonah Lehrer

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, I’ve been deeply bothered for the last few days by the uproar over Jonah Lehrer’s reuse of his writing in various publications. I know almost nothing about Lehrer other than what I’ve read in the many stories about his so-called “self-plagiarism,” and have no position on his work to defend. I also agree with the idea that reusing bits of your previously published work in new articles is pretty lame. But the suggestion many writers have made that his practice is akin to plagiarism is simply wrong. It confuses quality standards with moral ones.

The controversy began with the Romenesko story last week that in a number of blog posts for the New Yorker, Lehrer had reused some paragraphs he had written for an earlier article in the Wall Street Journal. Subsequently several more instances of similar recycling from other publications were uncovered. (Steve Buttry, in the course of reflecting on his own (transparent) habits of repetition, provides a good summary of the matter.)

These are interesting findings, well worth public discussion. But they are more the material of literary criticism than of ethical analysis. They tell us that Lehrer’s range as a writer is less broad than we thought, perhaps, and that he doesn’t always have fresh insights. But they don’t tell us he’s a thief.

And possibly no one is saying that, quite. In his Slate piece on Lehrer, for instance, Josh Levin uses the phrase “self-plagiarism” somewhat jokingly. “Writing the same words twice” may not be a moral offense, he seems to say, but “it will piss off your editors” and “disappoint your customers.” Such “self-plagiarism is bad for the brand,” he concludes—not, as we might expect from real plagiarism, bad for the soul.

Similarly, while using the P-word liberally, Poynter‘s Kelly McBride suggests that Lehrer’s sin is less than mortal: “Had he stolen words from someone else—plagiarized-plagiarized rather than self-plagiarized—we’d all be calling it quits.” Instead, his readers are merely disappointed; their “enthusiasm wilts.”

Fine. If I’d been a Lehrer reader, I might be disappointed too. But to use the word plagiarism even jokingly or ironically in connection with what he did veers perilously close to character assassination. The damage it does exceeds any done by Lehrer’s recycling.

When this careless or invidious habit spreads to the New York Times, which wrote that Lehrer “has become the latest high-profile journalist to be caught up in a plagiarism scandal,” you know it’s excessive. It doesn’t matter that Times reporter Jennifer Schuessler immediately added that the scandal included “a counterintuitive twist that could come right out of his own books: The journalist he has been accused of borrowing from is himself.” What many readers will take away from this overly clever sentence is the false notion that Lehrer is a plagiarist.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this story is how many of the commenters on these critics’ posts reject the association with plagiarism. Some don’t even object to Lehrer’s reuse of his writing. In contrast to the critics’ high dudgeon, their attitude seems to be, “big deal.”

Is the critical reaction to Lehrer possibly influenced by the fact that he is very young, very smart, and very successful? Well, consider this. If a journalist we’d never heard of, like Paresh Jha, accused of fabricating sources and quotes, had instead been accused of recycling his own sentences, would we be reading about it now on Poynter? I think not.

I’m leaving open the possibility that I just don’t get it. Maybe there is a portentous ethical and moral issue in repeating yourself. But even if there is, its magnitude surely falls well short of plagiarism, and the term shouldn’t be used even humorously or ironically to describe Lehrer. It’s reasonable, given what he did, to call him a bad writer. But that’s no basis for calling him a bad person.

Photo credit: Kris Krüg/Pop!Tech

Doubling Down on Print, for Better or Worse

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Photo of book sculpture. Image: Robert Burdock, Flickr

A nice specimen. Photo by Robert Burdock/Flickr

Over the weekend, New York Times reporter Julie Bosman described how book publishers have begun putting extra effort into making their print products more physically and esthetically engaging. Their rationale, says Bosman, is that if “e-books are about ease and expedience,” then print books should “be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning.” The strategy, they hope, will “increase the value of print books and build a healthy, diverse marketplace that includes brick-and-mortar bookstores and is not dominated by Amazon and e-books.”

As a book collector, I’m pleased that books will be more beautiful. As a lover of bookstores, I’m happy for anything that might help preserve them. But as a reader and writer, I’m quite indifferent.

The problem with the strategy is that it won’t, as hoped, “cut into e-book sales” in a significant way. Most readers aren’t antiquarians and don’t value the physical esthetics of the container. They just want the content.

In the same way, unlike book designers, most writers don’t care in a meaningful way about the physical presence of a book. They just want to tell a story, or convey information, or to create works of art out of their words. The physical format is not essential.

There are a few books for which the physical medium of print matters in an essential way. House of Leaves, for instance, just wouldn’t be so mind-blowing in a leafless e-book. And is there any effective e-equivalent of a pop-up book? Moreover, could anyone do this with an e-book?

But these instances and their like are minor eddies of activity that briefly pull print defenders upstream before they are hurtled back down, inevitably, towards the fatal digital waterfall.

The effect is simply amplified when it comes to magazines (and turned up to 11 for newspapers). The physical aspects of magazines can be nice indeed, but they are rarely treasured objects. Inveterate collector though I am, I have gradually whittled down even my set of classic Wired issues from several shelves to one shelf—and only the Neal Stephenson issue is safe.

I’m all for more beautiful books, but let’s be realistic. Like taxidermy, printing beautiful books may preserve glorious specimens, but it does nothing to save the species.

Goodbye, Newspapers; Good Riddance, Serial-Comma Killers

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The mighty comma will rise again.Though for me there is little schadenfreude in witnessing the decline and fall of newspapers, I do find one small cause for cheer in this otherwise unsettling spectacle: the potential resurgence of the serial comma.

The serial comma is that final one in a series of three or more items, as in the phrase “red, white, and blue.” (It is sometimes known by its detractors as the “Oxford” or “Harvard” comma, as if to imply that a preference for clarity is somehow elitist or purely academic.)

Most newspapers and their style guides have steadfastly resisted the serial comma. They prefer instead “red, white and blue.”

It’s often suggested that this resistance arose from a desire for typesetting efficiency, as New York Times editor Philip B. Corbett has said:

“I suspect that journalists’ aversion to the additional comma arose in the old days when setting type was laborious and expensive. If you already have an “and,” why bother with a comma, too? The practice persists, from habit and perhaps from the sense that fewer commas make prose seem more direct and rapid—qualities we journalists prize in our writing.”

As Corbett indicates, the argument against the serial comma boils down to this: You don’t need it, and it sounds fussy and ponderous.

Although I find that the serial comma sounds more natural, I can buy the argument that it often isn’t necessary for clarity. But even opponents of serialism recognize that, at times, the additional comma is essential.

And therein lies the problem. Many writers will fail to recognize those times, and clarity will suffer. Although the use of a serial comma can lead to ambiguity too, as Wikipedia evenhandedly points out,  I’ve found that ambiguities are more likely in its absence. So for me, consistent use of serial commas is the wiser policy. (For a longer and more convincing version of this argument, may I suggest the Grammar Girl?)

Opposition to the serial comma will not die out any time soon. Many newspaper writers and editor will hold on to their old habits, even as they exchange new media and venues for old. But the decline of newspapers as an institutional influence on writing gives me hope that the serial comma will make slow but steady gains in the new-media world.