I’m a little ashamed that I contribute so unabashedly to the massive pools of ink bits spilled over the death of traditional journalism and what it means for our democracy, but in truth it’s a crucial question. As a young writer who has more or less committed myself to reporting the news for the rest of my life the topic fascinates me. To paraphrase a quip heard from the CEO of a big media company, “journalists can’t resist reporting their own demise. The story is too good.”
I’ll also admit that I’m the first to gush uncontrollably when I hear about big magazine companies and newspapers developing interactive reading formats for the iPad. I think there is a huge potential source of revenue there, but I also know that this doesn’t go very far towards solving the day to day problem of getting the local news reported. The beneficiaries of the iPad will be Conde Nast and the New York Times. What about the struggling SacBee, which does some of the best reporting on California state politics? If it goes under you lose the top watchdog over the government running the world’s fifth biggest economy.
Which brings me to a book near the top of my to-read list. The Death and Life of American Journalism by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols is out now from Nation Books. Over the last year, the authors have written a few sobering cover stories on the subject for The Nation ultimately arguing that the only way to save journalism as we know it is through government subsidies. Despite the knee jerk reaction most people have about this solution, McChensey and Nichols point out that it’s a solution with historical precedent. In the early republic, the government considered the voice of the fourth estate so important that they funded it as a top budget priority. According to their research it was funded at modern day equivalent of about $30 Billion a year. Yikes.
Will the government and the people be willing to pay this much? It’s hard to say.
While I’m on the topic, I’d like to point out one of the more salient points from McChensey and Nichols’ book excerpt in The Nation because I think it does a nice job of dispensing with one of the central myths about democratized media:
The main source of great journalism is compensated human labor, and as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. We’re long time advocates of citizen journalism and the blogogsphere, but our experience tells us that volunteer labor is insufficient to meet America’s journalism needs. The digital revolution has the capacity to democratize and improve journalism, but only if there is a foundation of newsrooms all of which will be digital and have digital components with adequately paid staff who interact with and provide material for the blogosphere.
The dangers of failing to see that the volunteer contributions touted by citizen-based models of journalism like The Huffington Post is apparent in “The Story Behind the Story” by veteran reporter Mark Bowden, which appeared in the October 2009 issue of The Atlantic. Bowden traces the origins of the “wise latina” attacks levied against Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomyor last spring after her nomination was announced by President Obama. “[The Reporting] was not the work of journalists, but of political hit men.” These hit men, of course, were citizen journalists who’d done the hard work of sifting through hundreds of hours of speeches to find the political weaknesses of an otherwise moderate and qualified judge. Did these citizens have the right to do this? Of course. But professional journalists should have seen this information as the irrelevant propoganda that it was. Bowden moves quickly to polemics similar to those of Nichols and McChensey:
…those giant presses and barrels of ink and fleets of delivery trucks were never what made newspapers invaluable. What gave newspapers their value was the mission and promise of journalism⎯the hope that someone was getting paid to wade into the daily tide of manure, sort through its deliberate lies and cunning half-truths, and tell a story straight.
Citizen journalists work for free, and as such, their only payoff is advancing the largely biased reasons that made citizens want to be journalists in the first place. Bowden concludes, “Unless someone quickly finds a way to make disinterested reporting pay, to compensate the modern equivalent of the ink-stained wretch… the web may yet bury [the profession].”
I went to see Safe, AKA Chris Edley play a few week ago at ATA. You can’t exactly tell from my blurry photography, but Chris was singing over beats recorded onto a VHS, which also contained a video of him kneeling shirtless in front of the camera singing along. It ain’t easy to stand up in front of a seated audience to sing along with a tape so props to him for entertaining the shit out of a tired audience. How do I know it was a tired audience? Because most of us were at the same party the night before.
I met Chris a few months ago, and I was realy excited because as my friend Jesse put it, “Everyone seems to know who he is.” And I guess, I know Chris now too. Does that make me cool?
Speaking of Jesse, he organized the event as part of his monthy Deap Leap Microcinema series, which features some amazingly curated expirimental video. How he watches/ makes so much of that stuff without having a seizure, I’ll never know. More blurry photography after the jum.
A few months ago, I went to interview/ photograph Owen Pallett (the artist formerly known as Final Fantasy) at Different Ear Studios in San Francisco. Photos didn’t get used, but I think they’re pretty cool.
I picked up a QSC 1400 at a tag sale in Oakland a few years ago for 20 bucks. I didn’t really ask too many questions. It’s an old, solid-state Series One amp from the 1980’s, but I’ve worked with a a few newer model QSC amps in live settings, and I know they’re work horses–even if this QSC wasn’t in total working order, it’s definitely worth the money. Should have a ton of power: 200W per channel at 8 ohms. Pretty sweet.
Unfortunately, until recently I’ve tried pairing the amp with a few different speakers to pretty middling results. A while back I was playing with a show, and I thought I’d take advantage of Guitar Center’s no questions asked rental return policy and with some Peavey SP-12’s, and found that I wasn’t able to get any power. I also recently picked up some vintage Polk 5B Monitors (with sweet Peerless tweeters), and similarly haven’t gotten very much power out of them. So I decided to open up the QSC and see what was going on since at the very least I could tell she was dusty and needed a clean.
In spite of this hasty, desperate desire to dismantle and debug, I took a look at at the manual, and realzied the problem is mostly likely an impedance matching issue. So far, I had tried running the signal off my MacBook, iPod and a low-impedance mic to crappy results. Since this is a high-performance amp that usually runs with at least a mixer in the chain, it’s got 10K (high-impedance) inputs. When you plug the low-Z signal into the high-z input the resulting voltage that get’s amplified is too weak to really drive the speakers. Unlike the consumer receivers you buy at Radio Shack, the QSC has no preamp stage.
I called my homie (and fellow audio nerd) Caley who plays in Extra Life and asked him if my hypothesis was correct. (I only mention this because the advice he gave me was spot on.) While he suspected that the output from a computer or iPod should be enough to match the input requirements of the QSC 1400, a good test would be to insert a mixer or preamp into the chain. If the QSC was clipping and the output was still weak, the there’s a good chance the amp was at fault.
I picked up the condescendingly-named, super-budget M-Audio Audio Buddy mic preamp ($50), which says it’s output impedance is 500 ohms. While this means it’ll bridge at 5K (and not 10K), it should be more than enough impedance to make the QSC sing. Presto. The Polk’s were pushing air nicely at all frequencies with almost no gain out of the Audio Buddy or QSC. I already pissed off my roommate.
I’ll actually go through this chain with a voltage meter and test this hypothesis for real. More to come.
Anyway, photos of the QSC’s guts after the jump, including shots of some resistors that could use replacing …
Esquire launched their monthly iPhone App. I have to say, it’s real slick. Too bad I just spent a whole eight buckaroos to subscribe for 14 issues. I wonder if they’ll offer the app to subscribers in some sort of packaged way (i.e. get the digital subscription and the print for x amount), because I’m not going to want to pay $2.99 a month for the privilege of squinting at my phone when I can get the mag in print for about 50 cents and issue.
Anyways, kudos to Hearst corp for doing something forward thinking.
So I didn’t get a San Francisco Panorama. They were sold out everywhere and generally inaccessible. This means I’ll have to fork over sixteen bucks for it instead of five because the fine folks over at Mcsweeny’s either 1) didn’t want to sell that many for only five bones, or 2) because they radically underestimated demand.
