Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
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Required reading for anyone who has ever read a newspaper.
Originally published by Clay Shirky on his blog at Shirky.com.
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.
One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.
The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.
As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better? Shouldn’t we try a carrot-and-stick approach, with education and prosecution? And so on. In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.
The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
* * *The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.
“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
* * *Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.
What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”
Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?
During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.
* * *If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other. In a notional town with two perfectly balanced newspapers, one paper would eventually generate some small advantage — a breaking story, a key interview — at which point both advertisers and readers would come to prefer it, however slightly. That paper would in turn find it easier to capture the next dollar of advertising, at lower expense, than the competition. This would increase its dominance, which would further deepen those preferences, repeat chorus. The end result is either geographic or demographic segmentation among papers, or one paper holding a monopoly on the local mainstream audience.
For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.
The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.
The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.
* * *Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.
In craigslist’s gradual shift from ‘interesting if minor’ to ‘essential and transformative’, there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
Requiem for a 149-Year-Old Newspaper
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WELCOME TO THE REALITIES OF 2009
In 1859 much of Colorado still belonged to the Kansas Territory. Denver had yet to be incorporated. My great-great-grandfather had recently escaped Ireland’s horrifying potato famine and immigrated to the south side of Chicago.
In this backdrop, the Rocky Mountain News was born after being dragged hundreds of miles on an oxcart from Nebraska.
That first issue of the Rocky came at the beginning of a golden age in journalism. Over the next century, national and local newspapers popped up all over the map. Advertisers overwhelmed by the prospect of reaching huge audiences dumped billions of dollars into the news industry.
Bada bing, bada boom. Or so it seemed.
Fast forward 149 years to 2009, and the game has changed remarkably.
The rise of the Internet has connected anyone who has a computer and a decent Internet connection to the rest of the globe. People who had once seemed worlds away can be reached with the touch of a button. Even my grandfather can be caught chatting to friends and relatives on instant messenger.
It is in this backdrop that the Rocky Mountain News died last Friday. The Rocky, a staple of Colorado news and commentary for the last 159 years, closed its doors for the final time in response to a nose dive in advertising revenue, much of it lost to the Internet and a strapped economy.
Almost 230 reporters, editors and other newsroom employees will lose their jobs. A tragedy to say the least.
But the Rocky was only one of many news organizations nationally that have been hammered over the last few years by declining advertising revenues. All newspapers face similar fates in the coming months. Still the urgency of the situation has been cast off again and again.
Will it be a year before newspapers start closing up? Columnists and pundits ask week after week. Two years?
Rather than bask in the final rays of a setting industry, newspapers need to learn from the Rocky’s fate. Now. The time to leisurely discuss the future of the news business has come and gone. The news industry must invest in cournalism, news blogs, non-profit papers and the Internet before newsgathering as we know it disappears forever.
That means local papers like the Sentinel need to reach out to their readers and find out exactly what they want from their local daily.
That means big-city papers need to push neighborhood blogs as supplements to their regular papers, as the New York Times has recently done. They require little maintenance and the public can fill out their content.
It means newspapers need to refine their online presence and create a product that’s worth paying for if they think readers are going to dish out money for what has traditionally been free on the web.
The sad truth is that many papers will probably die even if every daily across the country begins renovating their century-old models tomorrow. But the damage will be minuscule compared to what will happen if newspapers turn a cold shoulder to innovation.
“Damn it! The Rocky’s journalists deserved a better fate,” wrote Dusty Saunders, a reporter and columnist for the Rocky for the last 54 years, in his final column on Friday.
What he left unsaid was that the fate of the Rocky is the fate of an archaic news industry that refuses to ditch the past and push into the future. Not so long ago, many feared the radio would kill the news industry. Instead, journalists embraced radio and began taking advantage of it. Similarly, they reacted to the rise of the television with video news programs.
As the Internet enters its second decade, it’s time for the news business to innovate once again. It needs to embrace the opportunities the Internet provides, not ridicule and ignore them.
Click here to read more of Daniel’s writing at his blog.
Reviving the Capitola Classic Skateboard Race
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John Hutson in the lead on Monterey Avenue
The Capitola Classic Skateboard Event is still many skaters all-time favorite event to date. The race was run on Monterey Avenue from the top of Depot Hill right into the village with the scenic palm tree and ocean view in the background. What started as a little local amateur slalom skateboard race turned into a large street course event with so many people that they city refused to give future events a permit, according to a close source who put the event on in the past. Over the years people have been asking if it will ever come back.
A few years ago with the help of some of the past supporters I started working on trying to revive it and went to a few meetings and got a warm response and a nice news article. I had a ton of interest from many of the action sports companies and local surf and skate retailers. But after going to a few Capitola skatepark meetings I thought things were going south. It seemed like the general concensus was that bringing a ton of skateboarders to town wasn’t a good thing, so I stopped working on it.
But to this day, I am still getting a ton of interest from the surfing and skating communities worldwide. Many locals continue to offer to volunteer their time to make the event work. I figure now is as good a time as any to try and bring back this event and to help generate some tourism and a fun skateboarding event for the younger generation that might not have even been born when the first skate event happened back in the seventies. Santa Cruz’s history is deeply intertwined with skateboarding and surfing history. Brands like Santa Cruz Skateboards, O’Neill Wetsuits and Surftech have all been born here. I think Santa Cruz is still the perfect location for an annual surfing and skating festival and other skateboarding events. Capitola just got some great press in the latest issue of Sunset Magazine, which named Capitola one of their favorite beach towns on the west coast. Yesterday after going to a Capitola Community meeting, I started a survey regarding the Capitola Classic to see how much interest there is in reviving the event and which events people would be most interested in. So far the response has been good and most would like to see the downhill race brought back. A few other possibilities are a skateboard art show, vintage skate and surf swap and a fair. If you have a moment please take the Capitola Classic survey and help decide what events would be best. After all, aren’t we the real Surf City?
Contact the author at slalomrankings@sbcglobal.net. Photography by Richard Oyama.
SF Chronicle packing its bags…
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This was an interesting week for three reasons. First, the San Francisco Chronicle, who has brought the Bay Area news for 144 years, announced it may be closing up shop. After losing more than three million dollars per month for the last year, Hearst Corp says it’s either time to close up, or sell. Prospects for a sale aren’t exactly great, for in these days there’s not much upside to buying a newspaper. This announcement came just days after Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., operator of the two largest Philladelphia dailies, filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.
The second reason this was an interesting week was because Rosie Spinks, journalist for City on a Hill Press, published an article about the Cournalist. She was shrewd enough to recognize the fact that a significant shift in daily local news is now occuring in Santa Cruz, and we’re at the cusp of it. So, she sat down with us to see what our plans were to maintain the inheritance.
Overall Spinks did a good job in her coverage, but I do have a few points of contention, starting with her opening statement. “Being a cournalist is a full time job,” is how Spinks starts her article. And yet already, right here, she has lost the idea of being a Cournalist. Being a Cournalist is not a full time job. In fact, every cournalist we have is either a full-time student or full-time employee with a your run of the mill dayjob. Being a “Journalist” is a full time job, but being a “Cournalist” is neither full time, nor is it a job. Being a Cournalist is about finding spare time to research and write about something you care about, and share it with the community. Cournalists do this with as much frequency as they feel like, and are rewarded not fiscally but by the audience and readership their contributions are given.
Second, Spinks states that “The site is based on citizen journalism, the idea that any informed citizen who is engaged in the community can and should have a platform for their voice to be heard — no journalism training required.” While technically this is true, that you don’t need training to publish on the Cournalist, I feel like she puts off the wrong idea. This isn’t amateur hour, and Daniel and myself informally train our Cournalists over a coffe, a burrito or a beer. We teach them about getting multiple sources, recording quotes, identifying personal bias and source bias, and structuring their pieces effectively. Training might not be required, but is an ongoing supplement to all cournalists, and is not optional.
Aside from those few points, Spinks’ was right on.
Moving on to the third thing that made this an interesting week, I must relate a presentation Daniel and myself gave at Cabrillo college today, to a class of journalism students. As the editors of the only true community focused Citizen Journal in Santa Cruz, Daniel and myself take it upon ourselves to talk to local students. It’s part of our job.
And why shouldn’t it be? Journalism students are the future of the field. They are in the preparatory stages to launching their careers in journalism and based on this fact you’d think that they would then be interested in how the landscape of journalism is changing. After all, once they’re done spending thousands of dollars for a degree in journalism, the logical thing to do would be to try to get a job in journalism, right? You’d think interest in this emerging piece of the pie would be high.
But this is not what I saw today. After presenting to a class of twenty or so journalism students, not a single one of them had a question. We briefly highlighted the problem, that newspapers are going out of business and that something needs to fill their shoes. We elaborated on the worse-case scenario of a community out of touch with itself. We talked about how we’re hoping to change this, and the success we’ve had so far. And then we fielded questions. Only there weren’t any. Not one single question.
It pains me to walk into a room of journalism students, amidst the collapse of the entire newspaper industry, to talk about what’s coming next and not one person has a question.
I told Spinks that the Sentinel, the Good Times, and the Metro are not our competitors. I told her that apathy is our only competitor, and that we lose when people just don’t care. She quotes me on this at the end of her article, and it is something I believe with all my heart. The only obstacle, the only barrier to citizen journalism, is apathy. Furthermore I always expected to run into apathy on this journey. but I wasn’t prepared to face it coming from college-level journalism students.
Because it’s going to take young, energetic people who actually care in order to make citizen journalism work (and when I say “work” I mean work up to a standard that it will be considered an acceptable replacement to the dying newspaper). Unfortunately, it seems that young energetic people who actually care about local news and communities enough to do something are in short supply.
Newspapers are dying and if college students don’t care, I see a bad moon on the rise.
Response to Squire’s Article in the Sentinel
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Jennifer,
Read your article this morning. You seem to have access to police records that ordinary mortals are denied.
Why not look over:
a. The tickets issued for violations of the Downtown Ordinances specifically: MC 5.43 (Forbidden Zones for display devices for musicians and political tablers), MC 5.43.020(2) (the Move-Along law for those display devices), MC 9.10 (Panhandling), MC 9.36 (Noise Ordinance used against musicians), MC 9.50.011 (Lying down on the sidewalk), & MC 9.50.020 (Forbidden Zones for Sitting).
Compare them from the years 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2008–since the major harshening of the laws happened in Sept 2002/February 2003 and then again early this year. Was there a rise or a drop in the number of citations? The point of this is to get a sense of whether these laws “worked” to reduce “bad behavior”, where the number of citations might indicate the “bad behavior”.
It would also be helpful in the future to get a breakdown of the citations to find out how many were written for ACTUAL bad behavior rather than innocent behavior redefined as bad behavior because it happens at a certain time or in a certain zone. Actual bad behavior would be under MC 9.10.040–coming within 3′ of a person with an unwanted requested, blocking someone’s path, following a person who walks away, using abusive language, or soliciting under the influence of alcohol or drugs. The other ordinances are all about technical violations of Forbidden Zones and such–innocent behavior which make the merchants nervous or annoyed.
b . The % of these citations written to those with “transient”, “homeless” or “115 Coral St.” addresses. The point of this is to see whether the ticketing mainly impacts (and perhaps targets) homeless people.
It would also be relevant to actually talk to some actual live homeless people, such as the people you savage in your article (Larson and Brown). Did you do that?
Do you know the difference between “drunk in public” and “open container”? Did you research how many of these citations were actually a function of specific complaints, and how many generated by the PD? Did you get the victim’s side of the story on these citations and how certain officers use these laws punitively to punish “bad attitudes”?
Did you ask how many of these people actually were allowed to take a Breathalyzer test to determine if they actually met the legal definition of “unable to take care of themselves”?
Did you ask them how many were released at 3 AM in the morning without their property or bedding, and told to check the police station in a few days during the 1 1/2 hours per day that the property room is open (on weekdays)?
Have you researched what kind of drug and alcohol programs actually exist in town as alternatives?
Are you aware that two counts of any of these offenses has been–for decades–a misdemeanor already when the chapter is cited for twice within 6 months ? You don’t have to wait until the tickets are ignored or torn up. The second citation is an automatic misdemeanor with misdemeanor penalties. MC 5.43.040 and MC 9.10.060 provide for misdemeanor charges for the second charge within 6 months for display device, and panhandling in the wrong place at the wrong time. MC9.50.070 provides similar penalties for repeating a violation twice within 30 days.
The same now already applies to sitting on a bench for more than an hour, sitting and/or spare changing within 14′ of a directory, trash compactor, or public bench–under the new ordinances. You don’t need three offenses, just two.
The difference, of course, is that a sleeping ticket (previously an infraction) is now made a misdemeanor offense if not “taken care of” and and three citations for which you don’t pay bail or “community service fees” from anywhere in the entire municipal code can land you in jail for up to six months (MC 4.04.010).
At the January 27th City Council hearing on the worsened Downtown Ordinances, Vice-Mayor Rotkin repeatedly ignored or falsified this fact at City Council in what seems in my opinion to be a cheap attempt to pander to a mob merchant hysteria mentality (and not address real bad behavior at all—which the Forbidden Zone expansions and increasing penalties does not).
After paragraphs of police and merchant PR, you write “The homeless say they’ve been unfairly targeted…” Don’t you think that would be a pertinent fact, if true? Instead of any exploration, you sound like you grant the fact (“and police acknowledge the problem is limited to a relatively small number of recidivists.”) but suggest that there is no targeting of the homeless just of “recidivists”.
For you to have an honest and unbiased understanding and convey that to the public, you really need to do more research and talk with a broader range of folks.
You might also be unaware that the last time there were truly open hearings around the issue of Downtown Problems (2002), Sentinel reporter Dan White reported that “police harassment” and “selective enforcement” were the top two contenders: (“Odds Stack Up Against Downtown Committee” 7/3/02“)
You have been enlisted as part of a PR campaign which heightens tensions downtown, scapegoats poor people, and does nothing to resolve real problems.
Sort of like drug or prostitute sweeps before elections.
Except this kind of “get tough on the poor” creates ever-more real problems for real poor people, generates more vigilante hostility, and does nothing to bring together the folks who need to be talking with each other to solve these problems.
Take a step back.
Please let me know the results of your investigation into the actual citations.
It might also be interesting to know how many times merchants have actually used existing laws to affect citizen arrests (i.e. call the cops, sign a ticket, and take it to court). This might be an actual measure of how serious they are about the ‘bad behavior’ involved. As an establishment journalist, you have more access to these records than ordinary folks do. It might make you sleep a little easier while others are getting humiliated, fined, arrested, and jailed for what you are allowed to do every night in the comfort of your own home.
New Poll Looks at Inappropriate Behavior on the Pacific Garden Mall
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New Poll Looks at Inappropriate Behavior on the Pacific Garden Mall.
By John Thielking
2-15-09
This week’s survey (Feb 14, 2009) focused on inappropriate behavior in downtown Santa Cruz and weather or not the revised downtown ordinances have had a positive effect on aggressive behavior as Mike Rotkin claimed at the last City Council meeting on Feb 10 where the revised downtown ordinances were passed unanimously at their second reading. More than a few people polled said they had not experienced any significant behavior problems while visiting downtown. Some of these people visit downtown quite frequently. Other people said that they don’t visit downtown as much as they used to, with one person saying she was visiting only because she couldn’t find a music store anywhere else.
Many people refused to color within the boxes on the survey. Over 50% answered “other” to the question of “What steps should be taken to address aggressive behavior such as aggressive panhandling and violence?” There were many brilliant suggestions, including one person who thought that the mall should be converted into a walking mall similar to Santa Monica Place and a couple of people who thought the homeless should be helped to get off the street. One person said that while she had not experienced any aggressive behavior on the mall, she did not feel welcome parking her car near the drum circle at the Farmers’ Market on Wednesdays.
Only 15% of those polled thought that Mike Rotkin’s assertion that aggressive behavior had been reduced after the ordinances revisions were passed was true. Zero % thought that peaceful panhandling or performing were particularly annoying problems. A few people listed public intoxication as a significant problem, possibly occurring when bars let out after 10 PM. A few people thought that rather than call the police when they are aggressively hassled for spare change, they should just deal with it themselves. In all, 34 people were polled, including about 6 or so from indoors at Sub Rosa, as it was getting too cold to stand outside on Pacific Avenue all afternoon on Saturday.
Cournalist survey #2
Has there been a reduction in aggressive behavior on the mall since the City Council passed the revised downtown ordinances on Jan 27, 2009?
Yes 15%
No 24%
don’t know 56%
don’t care 3%
What area of the mall has the most problems with aggressive behavior?
Metro center and south 26%
just North of Metro center 12%
Borders Area 12%
Area near O’Neil’s 0%
Bookshop Santa Cruz 3%
clock tower 0%
there are no problems 29%
every area is the same 12%
don’t know 12%
don’t care 0%
What steps should be taken to address aggressive behavior such as aggressive panhandling and violence?
increased police patrols 12%
enforce existing laws against aggressive behavior 35%
support new laws restricting panhandling and performance space 9%
don’t know 6%
don’t care 3%
other 53%
If other, what?
These ordinances are total BS. There are more important things than the financial interests of the downtown shop owners.
Stop hitting on people for spare change.
Stand up and say “Don’t follow me.”
I haven’t experienced aggressive behavior.
Put people through counseling.
Arrest the criminals and leave the rest alone.
Nothing
Just don’t give aggressive people money.
Have festivals and dancing.
Make the mall into a walking mall instead of allowing cars. This has been very successful in other cities.
We should have more empathetic police.
Let homeless know about services.
Copwatch
As they happen, the complainant should call police.
Destroy downtown businesses.
Have community meetings on the problem.
Rewrite fair laws.
Help these people so that there will be no more violence and panhandling.
What type of inappropriate behavior do you find the most troublesome?
panhandling 0%
yelling 44%
musical performers/singing 0%
violence 20%
aggressive panhandling 35%
stalking 15%
other 29%
don’t know 15%
don’t care. 0%
If other, what ?
Drunken behavior
2 people said “None”.
The hypocrisy of the City Council
Sitting drinking coffee for 10 hours straight
Refusing food and asking for something you don’t need.
Drunken people yelling.
Foul language, antisocial behavior.
Pedophiles
Everything is equally abominable.
Hard drugs on South Pacific.
Not much during the day. Alcohol at night?
Getting citations for sitting or standing near sculptures.
Cops and businessmen.
Police misconduct, over-policing, selective enforcement.
What question should be asked next week?
Task force to listen to shop owners about how to clean up downtown
When will we stop trying to be the next Santa Monica?
Don’t allow dark colored clothes at soup kitchen. People should come to grips with what is causing their problem.
The farmers market is a problem because car drivers aren’t welcome near the drum circle.
Rules of etiquette that aren’t new that people should follow.
Appropriate punishment for inappropriate behavior.
Where can they go?
Look at corner near Taco Bell.
Are shop owners losing money because of panhandling or because of poor customer service?
Where is Santa Cruz going to be in the next five years with today’s economy?
Who is Robin Hood?
Some positive things.
How is downtown affected by the economy?
Do you think that car exhaust ruins the taste of a good cigarette?
Are street musicians just bums looking for spare change or are they legit?
Police harassment of the homeless.
Are people uncomfortable seeing homeless people?
How should rowdy drunkenness be handled after 10 PM outside of bars?
_______ citation _______ enforcement _______ warnings
What can be done about police violence?
Have the police been more militant because of the new ordinances?
Rent control and renter protections and real estate speculation.
How to end homelessness?
Will you be watching porn on Valentine’s day?
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I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about porn for three reasons:
1.) It’s Valentine’s day and I don’t have a date.
2.) Not enough people talk about this issue.
3.) I’m in Borders reading a new book on the subject. After I happened across “Pornified” by Pamela Paulson in the Sociology section, I found myself seated at table reading intently. The subject is fascinating.
Let me start with some alarming statistics to paint the picture for you:
- over 70% of males age 18 – 34 report using porn at least “monthly”
- the average age a child is first exposed to internet porn is 11
- 47% percent of families said pornography is a problem in their home
- 9 out of 10 children aged between the ages of 8 and 16 have viewed pornography on the Internet, in most cases unintentionally
In addition, the issue is further illustrated by the fact that many men who identified themselves as regular consumers of internet porn reported a waning sexual interest in their girlfriends and wives to Paulson as she researched her book. She points out that on the internet, a man can have his choice of blondes, brunettes, all ethnicities, sizes and shapes. What, then, is to keep him interested in a single solitary woman for the rest of his life?
And there in lies the problem. It is an issue so deeply rooted in evolution, so intrinsically linked to the male biological drive to spread his seed, that nearly the entire population of adult internet-using males consume pornography online. It is so pervasive that you ultimately find yourself asking whether or not it can be fought at all. Whether to resist it, or to accept and embrace it. Is the battle over? Are we entering a new era?
My answer is yes. America has officially been Pornified. Condolences. What strikes me is how recent of a phenomenon this is, and yet how quietly it swept the nation. Why just fifteen years ago, Britney spears looked like this:
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As many of you know, Britney Spears was a member of the Mickey Mouse club, a singalong fun time put on by Disney for little kids to watch as they grew up on the weekends, eating big bowls of cereal and watching TV. But Britney Spears, an icon for our culture, has changed. She doesn’t wear loose jeans and poofy pirate shirts anymore. In fact, she doesn’t wear much at all anymore.
Britney Spears is absolutely adored by every little girl in America. She is their hero. The new face of the feminist movement, of women empowered. Britney Spears is America’s daughter. And she has a message for America.
Maybe then, considering that she is our country’s daughter, we should be concerned that she goes out on a Friday dressed like a complete hooker. To be fair, she’s not the only girl we can submit as evidence that America is Pornified. Christina Aguilera was also a Mickey Mouse Club girl, and look what happened to her.
I guess it’s no surprise when girls grow up playing with Bratz dolls that mimic their celebrity heroes / role models. Really, no one should be surprised that so many girl have exposed their breasts on camera for the likes of Joe Francis and his Girls Gone Wild crew for nothing more than a t-shirt. . We’re pretty much training our girls to do that since birth. Yet simply understanding this does nothing to quell the feeling that something is wrong here. That we aren’t teaching our children to deal with sexuality in a healthy way.
See, sooner or later while browsing the internet, you come across porn. That goes for pretty much every man woman and child using a computer. It would be impossible to consciously choose never to stumble across it. It’s tentacles slither into every corner of the net. And from there, the few men I’ve talked to about porn all say the same thing, “Once you start using it, you never stop.”
Pamela Paulson recounts in her book the stories of wives who’s husbands use internet porn, and the rifts it has caused in their relationships. She tells the story of one woman would get ready with her husband for bed at the end of the day. They’d brush their teeth, floss, and so forth. Then, as the wife was getting into bed, the husband would go into the office next door, close and lock the door. She knew he was using internet porn, but didn’t know how to confront him about it. In similar ways, many marriages are falling apart due to internet porn.
Many women find themselves bothered by the fact that their boyfriends / husbands view other naked women having sex on a daily basis, and yet are unable to confront their loved ones about it. As Paulson writes, “there is a social pressure of acceptance, for a girl to be “cool” with their boyfriend viewing pornography.”
The whole situation is reaching epidemic proportions. Porn sites are littered throughout the upper echelons of the most popular websites worldwide. Nationally, the divorce rate is about 50%.
If President Obama created a Department of Marital Security this year, the alert would be on RED. Not orange, not amber, but RED. Our family fiber is tearing at the seems, and at the heart of the issue appears to be, among other things, the abundance of pornography and the ease with which it is accessed online.
And it is quite true that every social schema has been sexualized from the politician to the professor. Observe, for example, what happened when Sarah Palin ran for Vice President with John McCain. We instantly saw Youtube videos like the one below, the work of many aspiring videographers around the nation.
One thing is certain. Our country has officially been pornified. And as much as I’d like to, I’m not going to advise you against porn, because it wouldn’t do any good. The forces of nature have spoken, and we the people have chosen pornography to be our salvation.
So get ready folks, because we’re in for a bumpy ride. I don’t know where it’s going to lead, whether the net result to our civilization will be positive or negative. One can only guess that skyrocketing divorce rates, relationships increasingly focused on sexual attraction, and the pervasive materialism broadcasted over the air waves into our living rooms spells trouble ahead.
So why not take today to think about what a loving, healthy relationship is supposed to be. After all, that red heart adorned to every greeting card and logo you see isn’t supposed to represent a hooker or a deflowered pop princess. Hell, even Hallmark will tell you that. It stands for the purer form of romantic love that we are supposed to be able to show one another. It represents the careful thought we must give to our relationships with the people who are important to us.
In a bygone era did men hold doors for us ladies. In those days, they would cuddle up with us in bed at night instead of going off to the computer, their electronic mistress, to finish the day with their nightly ritual of digital voyeurism.
So here’s a shocker. I’m hoping that I will one day find myself a man, right here in Santa Cruz who doesn’t look at porn. Not because he’s “disgusted” by it or “not into it” -I’m not that naive. After all, it’s that biological click in the male brain that makes porn the prosperous industry it is. No, I’m looking for a man who enjoys porn like all men, but has the will power and the discipline to make a conscious decision to sacrifice it porn from his life because he cares enough about having a strong family, a strong relationship, and a strong marriage.
So, maybe we should make valentine’s day a day to give up porn. Men, why not promise your special ladies, the ladies out there that you care about, the women you want to spend the rest of your life with, why not swear off porn for them. In honor of Valentine’s day.
My opinion: new ordinances, city council
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As this is an opinion piece, I’d like to put forth at the start my own view that my sympathies are, for the most part, with the city council and not those opposing the limits of use on public space just legislated.
Santa Cruz city council
A small downtown area of Santa Cruz is trying to remain economically viable against a coming wave of human misery which may engulf it. The actions of the city council have, as their end, a noble goal. Shopkeepers, the best of them, want to do all that they can to attract a diminishing discretionary dollar. Many of them feel their cultural or personal values are a part of the retail experience. A hungry patron happily downing a couple of tacos can make the chef’s day. Further, the costs and hazards of doing business in a retail venue such as downtown Santa Cruz are great. Other businesses, while less visible to the public, feel that their image is somehow reflected in the mirror of their surroundings, and wish to feel that the taxes they pay contribute to a positive public experience. These companies are trying to build bridges, to be good neighbors. Lastly, Santa Cruz, like other towns across the state, has built its budget in part upon such foundations. As the terminator unfolds upcoming economic pandemonium, local dollars will count more.
While both sides of the issue recognize the economic importance of the downtown area, the relative importance differs. It is much more demanding to raise a family, to meet the contingencies that arise when something in your house breaks, or when something goes wrong with the health of a child. These are things we have little control over; indeed less as time goes on with health insurance drying up (Hello, Barack! Are you listening? Remember the campaign?) as I say drying up faster than the snow pack that feeds the San Lorenzo River. In pursuing a better business climate, the city council is also pursuing something that all residents of and visitors to Santa Cruz would welcome, a clean, safe, and culturally vibrant downtown that is a pleasure to see and experience. When I visit downtown Santa Cruz, I wish to be unhindered by aggressive panhandlers. And I would like to enjoy both the spontaneous musical arts and the more permanent public works of art.
That having been said, the way in which the legislators sought to achieve their goals was puerile. It scored a 12 on my Bozo-meter, which had to be recalibrated to register the unexampled stupidity and awkwardness. The previous high figure of 10.2 was the legacy of W, to wit: “If we don’t get paid, we must invade!” A body of international law, recent experience in Vietnam, and his own advisors’ advice notwithstanding, he stuck us in it and we can’t get out! Sorry. I had hoped for a better effort from tiny, beautiful Santa Cruz. We all need love. But respect must be earned.
Here, the public should have been advised, existing legislation reprised, and enforcement issues discussed. A more cogent case for the modifications to existing ordinances should have been presented, as well as guidelines for lawful conduct. As it now stands, I cannot play the violin in front of a statue if my case is open, but I can display my oratorical skills in condemning capitalists, socialists, and anyone born after the crucifixion to enduring fire and brimstone. Wow. That’ll attract the tourists.
But I’m being disingenuous. I believe that the city had in mind a kind of credit card legislative agenda, this being the first payment. As subsequent innovations in public deportment developed, so too would the statutes evolve. The public would be perpetually nagged by its legislators. Legislator A is the patsy this time, and legislator B takes the fall next time. This can rise to the level of “acting under color of law” when a hidden legislative agenda is at work and is highly illegal. When one legislates, one must be clear and complete. We do not outlaw stabbing one week and strangulation the next.
What happens next? Well, the legislative history, I believe, does not forebode success for Santa Cruz’s ordinance package. To improve and expand existing ordinances. One has to tread lightly here. In Chicago v. Morales, 527 U.S. 41(1999), the Supreme Court of the United States found a Chicago ordinance unconstitutional for not giving clear guidelines for acceptable conduct in the use of open space that Chicago was trying to restrict in the again laudable quest for safer streets.
That’s a high hurdle to meet: What guidelines are there to allow users of open space to know that their actions or deportment are lawful? But, said the court, in the absence of such guidelines, it will view even specific restrictions as arbitrary or unfair. If this, or similar, is found to be appropriate case law, then the ordinances so amended will likely fail upon judicial review.
Did I say judicial review? Pursuant to high-handed, bungled, or controversial legislative initiatives, activists often seek to draw a test case by violating a newly enacted statute. Sometimes there is advance publicity, which may occur here. Sometimes the violation can take the form of an act of compassion or the execution of a work of art (i.e., to perform it, not to shoot it). These events are well worth attending, as they often become the stuff of local legend. And surely, in a vibrant democracy, we must allow a gentle request for judicial review.
It would be premature, however, to call this civil disobedience. Civil disobedience evokes images of civil rights marches and bridge blockades. Those acts are peaceful but are, intentionally, inflammatory, and not usually directly related to the offending law. And civil disobedience occurs after the courts have affirmed the offending law. And it is persistent. Here we are just talking of drawing a test case. The rest can come later.
In closing, I would hope that the city council does not expend too much time or money in defending its recent actions. A simple meeting in which the downtown problems are open for discussion can have a very positive effect. By including people on all sides of the issues, we may all wind up being more mindful in our actions and considerate of others. This would result in the few noncooperative ones standing out, drawing public attention to either get them into programs for the homeless or addicted, or dealt with as otherwise appropriate.
Peter Lindener Stands in Defense of Freedom of Expression, Talks of Civil Disobedience
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Peter Lindener is not happy about the city council’s recent ruling that music and art cannot happen together. You probably don’t know Peter Lindener by name. You probably know him as “that saxophone guy from downtown”. Or maybe you’ve never taken notice, save for a brief moment walking down Pacific when you hear his bluesy notes and see him smiling back at you. That’s the Peter Lindener that downtown Santa Cruz used to know. But now Peter is rather upset because working musicians have been caught in the crossfire over the battle for a safe and respectable downtown. The Santa Cruz City Council recently passed a package of ordinances that places greater restrictions on where musicians can play their instruments and use a “display device”, such as a hat or guitar case to collect tips.
Among the most questionable restriction found in the ordinance package bars local musicians from performing within 10 feet of public sculptures and other works of art. In a recent email to city council (passed on to the Courant Times) Lindener expresses his outrage:
” …Don [Lane] pretty much spotted the concern of somehow art installations somehow being declared as incompatible with Musical performance… if the Musician happened to put out a place to put tips. …I chose to relocate to Santa Cruz because Pacific Ave has the potential to be one very nice place for musical collaboration with others one might meet on the avenue… I am concerned enough to feel like I would want to speak up for others who might feel more effected by this evenings revision of places considered suitable for making music in the City Of Santa Cruz.
I do feel it a bit ironic that somehow amid it’s not all so clear rationals for where musical performance might be considered permissible, Public Art and Music will not be allowed to coexist withing ten feet of one another, for exactly what reason, perhaps might in the end escape most all of us….”
Musicians have a right to raise concern over the ordinance, which explicitly labels as incompatible musical performances (for tips) with our many great public works of art. These are not the people urinating in public, panhandling aggressively, verbally accosting those walking by. Musicians are not the vagrants that these ordinances are designed to target. These are the people who are being unjustly caught in the crossfire. These are the very people who bring Santa Cruz its unique and wondrous charm and provide free entertainment to all of the downtown shoppers.
And so, I am inspired to hear Lindener announce to city council (via an email shared with the Courant Times) his intentions to explicitly disobey this new ordinance which he feels is an infringement on his constitutional rights:
…I am currently considering explicitly making music within the ten foot exclusion zone where Art and Music are not legally allowed to coexist, and to do so while placing a receptacle for tips, just to make my point…… I will be expecting to be cited, for that matter I will notify the authorities of this infringement myself, when cited, I will refuse to sign, and expect that the full consequences of the violation will then unfold. I will then expect prompt due process as I will decline any terms for release on bail. Then before the court I will question the constitutionality of these ordinances and then rest my case after submitting a copy of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience also into evidence. One option the city would have could to refuse to cite me for my infringement, if so, we would document such, and the issues of selective or perhaps non enforcement would likely then at some point also follow………
These charged words bring to my mind the image of Rosa Parks, who refused to sit in the back of a bus for her belief in equality of life. She is widely regarded as a hero for standing up for the equality she believed in. And it is by the same logic, the same token of heroism that if art and music cannot co-exist legally in downtown Santa Cruz, Peter Lindener is preparing to act in defiance, to stand up for his basic beliefs about freedom of expression. And all he asks for, his one request of city council, is that art and music can co-exist legally, in the same place at the same time. He asks this of the same city council that never fully explained why they were banning musicians from public art.
In fact it was Ryan Coonerty who justified the the public ordinance 5.43.020, which bans working musicians from downtown sculptures. He stated at the city council meeting on Jan. 26 that this was a necessary ordinance so that the public can comfortably approach and enjoy the public works of art, which they can’t necessarily do if working musicians are performing in the immediate vicinity.
But are the musicians themselves not creating works of art, live and on the spot? Is the live music not more enjoyable than the sculptures themselves? Whereas the latter is subject to personal taste, the former is undeniable. And so, to draw the argument full circle, it is by the same logic that one could arguably contend that public sculptures should not be installed within 10 feet of performing musicians.
Some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life I’ve heard downtown, from incredibly skilled and talented musicians. I understand the need for a safe, enjoyable downtown experience. But street musicians are the very reason that I and many others enjoy downtown Santa Cruz. Why were they targeted in the recent package of ordinances? How many people complained that they didn’t have access to sculptures because of musicians? How many would trade the musicians for the sculptures?
I have to hit the streets now, to find out the answers to all these questions. In the mean time, keep an eye out for Peter Lindener playing his saxophone in musical defiance of a city council who ruled that art and music cannot happen together.
High Fructose Corn Syrup anyone?
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Mere words cannot do justice to my feelings of outrage and contempt at a series of commercials advocating the consumption of High Fructose Corn Syrup that I saw on TV this morning. I don’t turn on the TV very frequently, and I guess this is what I’ve been missing:
The story begins with a middle aged white mother questioning a middle aged black woman’s decision to feed her children an anonymous purple concoction that contains high fructose corn syrup, artificial coloring and god knows what else. Unfortunately, the first mom is a completely uneducated moron incapable of even the most basic argument construction. She’s aware that high fructose corn syrup is bad, but goes mute when asked why. She can’t seem to find the words to articulate the fact that high fructose corn syrup will increase the risk of her children developing obesity and diabetes, that it’s a completely artificial ingedient engineered in a laboratory, and that with its complete and utter proliferation in the marketplace it would be impossible to completely avoid corn syrup even if your life depended on it.
The black woman in this commercial is even more of an idiot. In fact she’s the worse kind of idiot: the know-it-all idiot who spreads misinformation. She claims it’s made from corn, which is true, but then a million chemical processes are applied along with additives that break down bonds, reform them and shuffle the molecules around like a game of russian roulette. She then claims it contains no artificial ingredients, but seeing as it IS an artificial ingredient, by definition, she is a complete dumbass. The first mom, now convinced that Bug Juice is good for her, takes a hearty swig and laughs the afternoon away.
I consider this corporate terrorism; this is a direct attack on our people. It is a gunshot fired at the last decent moms our country has left, to make them look stupid and thwart their attempts to raise healthy children. It is an attempt at social control, to get other moms to push the health-conscious moms into the fringe of society and into isolation. It is an attempt at brainwashing, to convince you that something bad for you is good. If we let this crap continue, we’re going to see a lot more of it, that I promise you.
Now let’s look at the second commercial. It starts with a boyfriend and girlfriend on a blanket in the park. The guy hasn’t been educated past a third grade level and the girl is the archetype of Satan, taking on the form of a human female. The wicked witch of the west hands the dumb bastard a poison apple, and at first he doesn’t want to bite. He objects, “it contains high fructose corn syrup,” and then threatens her “well you know what they say about it.” “What?” asks the girl. This is when the guy chokes up. The poison is already starting to set in. His throat is closing as he asphyxiates from the pesticides used to grow the massed produced corn used to make high fructose corn syrup. Then her swirly eyes start hypnotizing him as she tells him, “that it’s made from corn? that it has just as many calories as sugar? that it’s fine in moderation?”. Mwa ha ha.
Look people, ANYTHING that companies are required to tell you to is ok “in moderation” on their commercials is bad for you.
I was kind of scared about high fructose corn syrup before I saw this commercial. I had noticed it in almost every product imagineable, but thought that there were much worse things to worry about. Things like sodium pyrophosphate and monosodium glutamate, or MSG for short. But after seeing this commercial, after witnessing such a low-brow, classless attempt to shift the public perception of corn syrup, I am now convinced that this stuff should be avoided at all costs. If they’re pushing it this hard, it must be really cheap, nasty shit. Don’t put it in your body. I know I won’t be putting it in mine.
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