“What actual reporting can you possibly do that delivers anything of value more than the infomercial—light on the info, heavy on the ’mercial—that the conventions have become?” he asked haughtily. To Mr. Jarvis, sending so many reporters to cover an event—one that nominated a major contender for the President of the United States of America—was a self-indulgent waste. He marveled at the many other, more meaningful things they could have covered instead. His question: “Can we in the strapped news business afford this luxury?”

No, I suppose we can’t. And if we can’t, perhaps we should also strike a far more egregious expense from our news budgets: covering Apple press events. You know, the twice or often thrice yearly events that bring everyone out to Cupertino, where they stand in line and contribute a few licks to the collective rim job the press loves to give Apple. This three-decade-long media mainstay has reached its frenzied apogee in recent years. That may explain why Apple’s Wikipedia page is now tattooed with well over 50 variants of “announced” and “introduced” (compared to Microsoft’s 7, and Dell’s 19).

Which is why I find it so funny that Mr. Jarvis—a technology enthusiast to put it mildly—is critical of the “commercial” coverage of politics. When you look at how many words the tech-savvy media pours out in honor of every new Apple product launch you can almost be forgiven for forgetting what really happens at them: nothing. At the company’s breathlessly covered conference last week, Apple announced that it, a corporation that sells smartphones, would be selling a new version of its smartphone in a few weeks time.

Wow!

What is an Apple press conference really? It’s a staged pseudo-event where the lazy media and a powerful corporation conspire to pad each other’s coffers. Which is what makes it so hypocritical when bloggers and critics like Mr. Jarvis complain about the kabuki nature of political conventions—because they seem to have no problem with the actual commercials that pass for news content. It’s as if Apple says to reporters: If you promise to cover it with endless credulity, we’ll stage a party you’ll never forget. And the media says: Hey, could we do it a few times a year? It’s great for pageviews.

 And, goddamn if its not incredibly lucrative for all concerned. Apple, for its part, is able to spend a fraction of what its competitors spend on advertising each year because it’s granted so much free press. For instance, Microsoft spent more than $1.9 billion dollars in 2011 on advertising, and Coca Cola spent more than $3 billion. Apple? They made billions more than both, with an ad budget of just $933 million—or less than 1 percent of the company’s revenue.

Apple doesn’t have to pay to tell people about its products, because the media dresses up the company’s product messages and presents them to the public as “news.” As the Huffington Post properly described it, Apple’s marketing strategy these days is essentially “hold off on the advertising, just sit back and let the media go hog wild.”

Meanwhile blogs and newspapers make no secret of the fact that Apple announcements are responsible for some of their biggest traffic days. Ars Technica, owned by Conde Nast, put out a press release last week bragging that its liveblog of the iPhone 5 launch "shattered traffic records.” In fact, Technica developed a proprietary blogging platform just to handle this spike (more than 15 million pageviews, or 500 percent greater than an average day). And when traffic, tweets and searches jump, every other publisher rushes to ride what an editor at the Christian Science Monitor once called the “Google wave.”

The result is fawning, marketing schlock that passes for news, online and off. And nobody, particularly blogs, wants to point it out because it’s all too lucrative. Democrats or Republicans look too rehearsed on stage? Let’s pounce. Apple? Let’s sweep it under the rug. Of course readers click posts about shiny new technology—these days it’s the only game in town.

The recent book Millennials, News, and Social Media: Is News Engagement a Thing of the Past? by University of Texas-Austin journalism professor Paula Poindexter studies how millennials perceive the news today. The words they used most often: “useless,” “boring,” “biased,” “propaganda,” “lies,” “garbage,” “crappy.” I can’t think of a better set of adjectives to describe the type of coverage we see each time Apple calls in a chit and the media rushes out to do the the company’s bidding.

To be fair, this doesn’t begin or end with Apple. We see the same fawning, online news-manufacturing over commercial events each year with CES, SXSW, and a host of other sponsored conferences put on by everyone from TechCrunch to the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsDigital.

Why do reporters love these commercial dog-and-pony shows? Why do they inflate the significance of such events through excessive coverage? Because attending a two-day conference might rack up a few weeks worth of easy stories about sexy new gadgets, plus with every investor, celebrity, brand and executive temporarily in one place, bloggers can grab interviews or prep puff pieces without having to do any legwork. (Plus who doesn’t want a free trip outside the office?) In other words, reporters know full well that everything has been staged for their benefit, but since they have traffic and post quotas to meet, they gladly accept the subsidy

The media and the public are supposed to be on the same side. The media, when it’s functioning properly, should protect the public from marketers and their ceaseless attempts to trick people into buying things.

But that’s not true today. As a marketer, I can tell you, the media is working with and for people like me—not against us. PR flacks and journalists are generally on the same team—when the reader is tricked into giving up their attention we both win. What’s worse is that most readers hardly even know what’s going on because the content they get has been dressed up and fed to them as news.

So before critics follow Mr. Jarvis’ lead and jump on political reporters for spending precious resources actually covering political events that include real nominations and real voting and that have a real impact on our democracy—and for having the gall to do it in person—we should reconsider how much time their colleagues spend covering trivial product announcements the same way. We should consider how much free advertising press outlets give to corporations in exchange for photogenic stunts. And ask ourselves: which is the more insidious and damaging to our culture?

Because look, I like Apple as much as the next guy. I wrote this article on a Mac and I researched it using my iPhone, but as far as I’m concerned, Apple and its multi-billion dollar cohorts should have to pay to market those products. They can afford it.

Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator and a PR strategist for brands and writers.

Sarah Phillips (Courtesy Deadspin)

The self-obsessed world of online journalism came close to a singularity moment early this month, when an up-and-coming young sports columnist was exposed as a garden-variety con artist. Over at the Gawker sports site Deadspin, John Koblin reconstructed the luridly fascinating saga of ESPN.com writer Sarah Phillips, who had landed a plum perch in the enormous, vastly profitable industry of sports journalism without benefit of a single in-person job interview. Ms. Phillips’ career path was largely a con job—she had previously set up shop as a sports-betting columnist at the betting site Covers.com, with no discernible background in either sports fandom or wagering—so perhaps it felt natural for her to set about gulling impressionable sports-minded writers and web proprietors out of piles of money on the promise that, together, they would all come into tidy fortunes by cracking wise about the sports world on the Internet. “I’m a writer for ESPN.com. And I have a plan to take over the world,” is how Ms. Phillips succinctly put things to one of her marks on Gchat.

The plan, such as it was, involved reviving a version of ESPN’s lapsed Page 2 franchise, and bulking it up into a network of sports-comedy blogs. “By my ESPN.com senior director estimates,” she explained in her world-conquering Gchat pitch, “each of the five of us [contributing content to the network] will be making over $100K. My ultimate goal, being that I work for ESPN, is to sell the site to ESPN and become a blog on ESPN.com.” But inevitably, there would be some strategic hitch along the way—photo rights to purchase, seed money to collect, advertising to pay for—and once Ms. Phillips had that stake in hand, she’d typically vanish.

The deal on offer probably sounded vaguely plausible in Ms. Phillips’ own head—the key to carrying off an effective scam, after all, is for scammers to project confidence in their own ornate fantasies; that confidence is what they are selling to their clientele. And since the managers at ESPN had already hired Ms. Phillips without even a minimal semblance of due diligence—so certain is the mass appeal of a comely young woman writer in the online sportswriting world—well, who’s to say what’s possible? (Mr. Koblin reports, by the way, that Phillips was not merely an online con artist, but also something of a sock puppet: She had a history of channeling sports forecasts and betting odds by a longtime male confrere named Nilesh Prasad; the two had attended high school together in Oregon, and worked at the same T-mobile store until they’d both been fired for allegedly perpetrating another online scam there, involving the resale of company phones on Ebay.)

But like all cons, the Sarah Phillips episode is more interesting for what it reveals about the marks than about the perpetrator, whose motivations almost always turn out to be sad, venal, and banal. But since this con was aimed squarely at the great enabling myths of the rapidly monetizing world of social media, it speaks volumes about the ultimate end-uses we envision behind the frantic connectivity of our online lives.

Just consider the inner workings of the Phillips pitch. There was the testimony of the geektrepreneur who had swiftly monetized her own online brand—her identity, that is—and who was now extending the same bounty to a corps of web-savvy self-starters, just like her. There was the credibility of major online brands dangled before the marks as a classic inducement-cum-distraction.

And there was, most of all, the the illicit allure of a hot-seeming twenty-something woman reaching out to shut-in geeks with the promise of easy money explicitly rewarding them for their pet obsessions—in other words, the very fantasy of transcendent personal specialness and irresistibly attractive genius that keeps most young men transfixed before the Internet for hours on end in the first place.

From the demand side of the equation, the Phillips scam also had to seem invitingly credible in a broader sense, as well. After all, the standard come-on of Web business prophets is that the self-generated marketing of your personality online is the hidden secret of online prosperity. “The new American Dream is to go viral,” burbles the cyber-visionary hack Jeff Jarvis. The interactivity of the Web has enhanced all manner of enterprise, announces the NYU digital cheerleader Clay Shirky, precisely “because there is no way to filter for quality in advance: the definition of quality becomes more variable, from one community to the next, than when there was broad consensus about mainstream writing (and music and film and so on).” Lay these entirely representative specimens of pat and content-free managementspeak side-by-side, and you have the high-theory version of Sarah Phillips’ business plan.

The ever-elusive quest for the optimally self-marketing kind of personality was also why my former corporate superiors at Yahoo News would obsess over the intangible magic of the online “voice” in the site’s coverage of the news cycle—even though the occasional appearance of a strong voice in a Yahoo-branded platform was also guaranteed to send them into operatic bouts of managerial fretting. One of the more curious sidelights of the Phillips affair, indeed, was a scam whereby the young hustler would purchase individual Twitter accounts outright to boost her own social media profile. This may be the saddest footnote to the Phillips saga: Madly seeking to monetize a Web-branded personality, the con artist is reduced to subcontracting the illusion of an appealing online persona.

It used to be an elementary job requirement for charming hucksters that they at least be colorful—but in today’s social-media-verse, all that evidently matters is that you seem popular. And that you don’t get caught.

]]>  

Sarah Phillips (Courtesy Deadspin)

The self-obsessed world of online journalism came close to a singularity moment early this month, when an up-and-coming young sports columnist was exposed as a garden-variety con artist. Over at the Gawker sports site Deadspin, John Koblin reconstructed the luridly fascinating saga of ESPN.com writer Sarah Phillips, who had landed a plum perch in the enormous, vastly profitable industry of sports journalism without benefit of a single in-person job interview. Ms. Phillips’ career path was largely a con job—she had previously set up shop as a sports-betting columnist at the betting site Covers.com, with no discernible background in either sports fandom or wagering—so perhaps it felt natural for her to set about gulling impressionable sports-minded writers and web proprietors out of piles of money on the promise that, together, they would all come into tidy fortunes by cracking wise about the sports world on the Internet. “I’m a writer for ESPN.com. And I have a plan to take over the world,” is how Ms. Phillips succinctly put things to one of her marks on Gchat.

The plan, such as it was, involved reviving a version of ESPN’s lapsed Page 2 franchise, and bulking it up into a network of sports-comedy blogs. “By my ESPN.com senior director estimates,” she explained in her world-conquering Gchat pitch, “each of the five of us [contributing content to the network] will be making over $100K. My ultimate goal, being that I work for ESPN, is to sell the site to ESPN and become a blog on ESPN.com.” But inevitably, there would be some strategic hitch along the way—photo rights to purchase, seed money to collect, advertising to pay for—and once Ms. Phillips had that stake in hand, she’d typically vanish.

The deal on offer probably sounded vaguely plausible in Ms. Phillips’ own head—the key to carrying off an effective scam, after all, is for scammers to project confidence in their own ornate fantasies; that confidence is what they are selling to their clientele. And since the managers at ESPN had already hired Ms. Phillips without even a minimal semblance of due diligence—so certain is the mass appeal of a comely young woman writer in the online sportswriting world—well, who’s to say what’s possible? (Mr. Koblin reports, by the way, that Phillips was not merely an online con artist, but also something of a sock puppet: She had a history of channeling sports forecasts and betting odds by a longtime male confrere named Nilesh Prasad; the two had attended high school together in Oregon, and worked at the same T-mobile store until they’d both been fired for allegedly perpetrating another online scam there, involving the resale of company phones on Ebay.)

But like all cons, the Sarah Phillips episode is more interesting for what it reveals about the marks than about the perpetrator, whose motivations almost always turn out to be sad, venal, and banal. But since this con was aimed squarely at the great enabling myths of the rapidly monetizing world of social media, it speaks volumes about the ultimate end-uses we envision behind the frantic connectivity of our online lives.

Just consider the inner workings of the Phillips pitch. There was the testimony of the geektrepreneur who had swiftly monetized her own online brand—her identity, that is—and who was now extending the same bounty to a corps of web-savvy self-starters, just like her. There was the credibility of major online brands dangled before the marks as a classic inducement-cum-distraction.

And there was, most of all, the the illicit allure of a hot-seeming twenty-something woman reaching out to shut-in geeks with the promise of easy money explicitly rewarding them for their pet obsessions—in other words, the very fantasy of transcendent personal specialness and irresistibly attractive genius that keeps most young men transfixed before the Internet for hours on end in the first place.

From the demand side of the equation, the Phillips scam also had to seem invitingly credible in a broader sense, as well. After all, the standard come-on of Web business prophets is that the self-generated marketing of your personality online is the hidden secret of online prosperity. “The new American Dream is to go viral,” burbles the cyber-visionary hack Jeff Jarvis. The interactivity of the Web has enhanced all manner of enterprise, announces the NYU digital cheerleader Clay Shirky, precisely “because there is no way to filter for quality in advance: the definition of quality becomes more variable, from one community to the next, than when there was broad consensus about mainstream writing (and music and film and so on).” Lay these entirely representative specimens of pat and content-free managementspeak side-by-side, and you have the high-theory version of Sarah Phillips’ business plan.

The ever-elusive quest for the optimally self-marketing kind of personality was also why my former corporate superiors at Yahoo News would obsess over the intangible magic of the online “voice” in the site’s coverage of the news cycle—even though the occasional appearance of a strong voice in a Yahoo-branded platform was also guaranteed to send them into operatic bouts of managerial fretting. One of the more curious sidelights of the Phillips affair, indeed, was a scam whereby the young hustler would purchase individual Twitter accounts outright to boost her own social media profile. This may be the saddest footnote to the Phillips saga: Madly seeking to monetize a Web-branded personality, the con artist is reduced to subcontracting the illusion of an appealing online persona.

It used to be an elementary job requirement for charming hucksters that they at least be colorful—but in today’s social-media-verse, all that evidently matters is that you seem popular. And that you don’t get caught.

]]> http://observer.com/2012/05/05082012-social-media-espn-scammer-sarah-phillip/feed/ 0 jhanasobserver sarah-phill http://observer.com/2009/06/jeff-jarvis-give-government-permission-to-fail/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:15:22 -0400 http://observer.com/2009/06/jeff-jarvis-give-government-permission-to-fail/ Gillian Reagan http://www.observer.com/2009/06/jeff-jarvis-give-government-permission-to-fail/ Two years ago, at Davos, the annual summit of great technological and economic minds, a media scion of one of the most powerful journalistic voices in the world was demanding answers from Facebook's co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

"He said, Mark, how do we get a community like you? Tell me how!" remembered Jeff Jarvis, the "Web guru" and preacher of  New Media gospel, who was speaking at Personal Democracy Forum yesterday. (Mr. Jarvis declined to name the scion, so make a guess.) Mr. Jarvis, explaining why a powerful media person would go to a kid for such advice, wrote in a blog post after the event that Mr. Zuckerberg was the kid "who understands this new world in his soul; it’s not the money that should make the moguls jealous but that understanding."

"You can't," was Mr. Zuckerberg's answer. "Full-on geek stare," Mr. Jarvis described to the PDF crowd. "Communities already exist without you," Mr. Jarvis explained. The question you should be asking is, how do you help them do what they want to do better? Mr. Zuckerberg's advice, according to Mr. Jarvis, is to "bring them elegant organization," he said. "If you think about it, that's what government is there for,"
said Mr. Jarvis. "To help us to elegantly organize our communities, our societies, our needs and our lives."

This was the crux of Mr. Jarvis' discussion on how following examples like Wikipedia and Craigslist can help make government more collaborative and participatory.

Mr. Jarvis' idea of a "Googley government," as he described it, is to be truly collaborative and transparent. "We need for transparency to be the default government," he said. "We need a government that is searchable, clickable and linkable." The Freedom of Information Act should not need to exist, he said, because data should already be public and accessible to all citizens.

But people also need to give government the "permission to fail," he said. "We have to find a way to help government try things, experiment, innovate, learn by failing."

Then Mr. Jarvis decided to come out and "play Oprah" to audience members—running around the auditorium with a microphone to allow Personal Democracy Forum attendees to give ideas on what a government in the Google age might look like. "Simple," "easy to understand," "collaborative," "open-source," "throw out the cookie," were some of the responses. Of course, Mr. Jarvis added his own comments to almost every idea, even challenging some of them, like "good design," "rapid response" (Jarvis: "Sometimes deliberate is better") and "get the bugs out" ("We can't make government perfect," Mr. Jarvis reiterated).

Toward the end of the discussion, Mr. Jarvis gave the microphone to one audience member who said: "You're all going to write your congressmen and get them to fund all of this, right?" Right.

At the time, Mr. Jarvis—a former magazine editor-turned-digital evangelist—responded by calling Mr. Rosenbaum "a pissy third grader," which sparked an on-going war of words and inspired The Observer's John Koblin to spend some time with The Web Guru in November.

The war continues with Mr. Rosenbaum's latest Slate column from Friday, all about Billy Joel, "The Worst Pop Singer Ever."

In the middle of a pointed, at times brutal, critique of Mr. Joel's work, Mr. Rosenbaum offers this tiny aside:

Stay turned for Mr. Jarvis' counter-attack-ack-ack-ack.

Speaking of change, which current and former journalists want to become flacks for Dan Abrams' new venture? According to Felix Gillette, "Less than a week after he announced he was launching a 'global strategy firm' that would assemble a network of thousands of working journalists, bloggers, authors and ex-journalists, he was drowning in applications."

And yet more change. Leon Neyfakh writes, "Though prayers this week should undoubtedly be with the editors of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who were told a few days ago by their CEO that they can no longer afford to acquire new books, it should not go unremarked that editors at other houses are being forced to give up something almost as essential: lunch!"

Plus: It's Living Room 2.0... Vegetables Are the New Meat... Mark Bittman

The Foursquare Conference was organized by media mogul Steve Rattner’s Quadrangle Partners, and had the kind of exclusive list Mr. Rattner is known for. Barry Diller attended the conference, as did Lachlan Murdoch, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Tribune chief Sam Zell.

It was just the place for Jeff Jarvis, the tall 54-year-old professorial-looking guy who was looking intently through unfashionable glasses at the participants of a panel discussion on the state of American media, from his perch up front.

The blogger, professor and media consultant has, through his Web sites, seminars, journalism classes, panel-discussion appearances and the occasional flame-war, preached for some time now the gospel of New Media. These days, it’s taking hold—and not just among the patchwork constituency of media studies majors, technophile utopians and media malcontents left and right. To oversimplify it: The old business of journalism has failed. It was full of monopolies, a lot of egos, a lot of overhead; presided over by a medieval guild of protectionist editors, copy editors, managers; staffed by reporters who were doomed to stand alongside “competitors” to cycle out the same press-conference reports for only marginally different audiences.

A new model of journalism, one that starts in his West 40th Street classroom, begins with new ideas, a smaller staff, and a direct cooperation with the public to contribute stories, ideas, videos and more.

If newsrooms are getting smaller, anyway, it’s time to rethink them. Critics, opinion writers, lifestyle writers are all a waste of space. In an industry with few resources, throw them overboard first. Editors just get in the way. They should teach the public how to report for itself, instead of coming between them and the news.

On a recent Friday evening, he was sitting with a glass of red wine in a corner booth at Lindy’s, the fading retro commuter bar inside the Hotel Pennsylvania across the street from Penn Station.

Beginning from a premise anyone can accept—truisms, critics might say—he builds his argument subtly—insidiously, again, a critic might say.

“We should embrace change,” he said. “Instead, too often we fight change. That’s the nature of organizations and institutions that hold power. Change might mean losing power. The great and magnificent irony of online—this would really send [Ron] Rosenbaum’s spine up—is that in my blog, in what I call Jarvis’ Law, is that I say if you give people control, we will use it. If you don’t, you lose us. The counterintuitive way of the Internet age is when you give up control, you win. The old way was to maintain control to win.”

Mr. Jarvis speaks in short, PowerPoint-ready sentences. And that’s because he often gives them! About a month ago, he organized a CUNY conference that developed models for a new newsroom.

In one session, a group convened concluded that you needed only a few dozen people to cover the entire city of Philadelphia.

“This city used to have 400 in a newsroom, now we have 35,” he said. “Surely that’s not enough to cover news in this community. But! You have the opportunity to create new networks. Which would include, yes, bloggers and freelancers and could also include recently laid-off journalists who can start their own businesses.

“Is the new model better or worse?” he asked. “The first answer is, that’s irrelevant. This is how people connect with each other for information now. Having said that, it’s better. I have more sources for information than I ever had before.”

Editors, he argues, can be cut significantly, because they don’t create value the way reporters do.

“Community organizers” is the term he uses for the editors of the future: the people who teach “citizens” how to call and verify information; how to do sourcing; all those things you would learn on the first day of your CUNY J-school class.

These ideas, which he’s been trying to sell to journalists for years are resonating now, with their cash-strapped publishers: opening up journalism, albeit in a careful way, to the masses. If it seems unlikely that a major news organization like The Wall Street Journal would turn its editors into community organizers, that might just be because they’re not that interested in finding new jobs for the editors they want to chuck.

“We’re always looking to streamline the editing process,” said Alan Murray, the executive editor of wsj.com, in a telephone interview. “Look, this is a challenging time for our economic models, and we certainly don’t want to reduce the reporting we do, and we’re looking for efficiencies all over the place.”

To meet Mr. Jarvis is to wonder how he can have become the bogeyman to so many in his profession. He is tall with that recessive posture that is meant to compensate, the body repelling the attention his ideas so readily attract. He has a good face, not a frightening one; when he speaks on anything, however small, the circumspection and intentionality ripples around his gray-stubbled, professorial face.

But his is a model of journalism that gives a lot of old-school journalists a vague feeling of nausea.

Mr. Jarvis had shown up at the Foursquare conference pretty revved up by one of them, Slate columnist Ron Rosenbaum (formerly a columnist for this newspaper), who had referred to Mr. Jarvis in an excoriating piece as a wannabe Marshall McLuhan who is “visibly running for New Media Pontificator in Chief.”

“He’s become increasingly heartless about the reporters, writers, and other ‘content providers’ who have been put out on the street by the changes in the industry,” Mr. Rosenbaum wrote. “Not only does he blame the victims, he denies them the right to consider themselves victims. They deserve their miserable fate—and if they don’t know it, he’ll tell them why at great length. Sometimes it sounds as if he’s virtually dancing on their graves.”

“Sadly, Rosenbaum doesn’t debate the idea and history and fate of journalism, which might be productive or at least provocative,” Mr. Jarvis wrote in a response to Mr. Rosenbaum on his blog, early the following afternoon. “Instead, like a pissy third grader, he attacks me. Because of my opinion, he says he doesn’t ‘like’ me anymore. Take that, Jarvis! You can’t sit at my lunch table ever again! He reminds me of that same third grader who, when he doesn’t study for a test and sees the results of his inattention, whines, cries and stomps his little feet, declaring, ‘It’s not fair.’ No, kid, life ain’t.”

And added: “Whether we save all the journalists today is entirely another matter and not my goal. Rosenbaum believes that makes me heartless. I think it makes me realistic. And we need some realism in this business.”

THE ACCIDENTAL AMANUENSIS?

A lot of the graves Mr. Rosenbaum accused Mr. Jarvis of dancing on were dug by Sam Zell, the flame-throwing owner of the Tribune Company, which includes the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun.

Mr. Zell has said in interviews that his purchase of the Tribune company has been “the deal from hell.” He’s cut hundreds of jobs at all of the Tribune’s newspapers, including more than 250 jobs this year in the L.A. Times newsroom, and has cut roughly 500 pages for news each week from the company’s newspapers. He also hasn’t exactly been the biggest fan of his reporters! Back in February, he yelled “Fuck you” at one staffer, and in a trip to the Tribune Company’s D.C. bureau, he told reporters that the system they had set up—little fiefdoms fighting for turf—were, essentially, an embarrassment.

It’s been enough that a group of current and former L.A. Times staffers have filed a class action lawsuit against him for damaging the “reputation and business of the company.”

“The institutional integrity of the Los Angeles Times and other Tribune papers is being seriously damaged piece by piece,” the complaint reads in part, between claims about complicated corporate buyout issues that are probably what landed them in court in the first place. “Certain foreign bureaus and the Sunday opinion and book review sections of the largest newspaper in America’’ second largest media market—the Los Angeles Times—have been closed down. Numerous veteran reporters have been terminated … The Los Angeles Times Magazine now reports to the business department rather than to the editorial department, a clear violation of journalistic ethics.”

As Mr. Jarvis watched, Mr. Zell took the stage at the Plaza to answer a question put to him in the panel discussion. There were too many editors at his newspapers; a ridiculous number of them! How can they ever have expected to be competitive with all those editors?

Mr. Zell is not popular with most journalists, but not many journalists were there. When the panel had broken up and it was time for questions, Mr. Jarvis was one of the first to volunteer himself.

“Hi, Jeff Jarvis,” he said. “Mr. Zell, first, I may speak for others here when I say I wish you would do this more often and talk publicly more often. It’s great fun. I’m a journalist, and I got attacked in Salon this morning, or Slate this morning—I get them confused—for holding journalists responsible for the fate of journalists. Is it possible, do you think, to change the culture of journalism? What’s the major changes that need to be made? Are you making any progress in changing that culture, and, if so, how?”

Mr. Zell had a rather long response, but among his observations was that “the newsrooms have basically never recovered from Watergate, and everybody wants to be Woodward and Bernstein, and that’s the definition of success.”

This was an invitation-only affair, and the invitations weren’t given lightly; no press was allowed to cover it in the traditional sense, though Ms. Lipman was allowed to post some stuff on her Web site in exchange for sponsoring the conference.

In the back of the room stood New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Sitting up with the panel was Tribune Company owner Mr. Zell.

“At the FourSquare conference, two or three executives or former executives from big media companies came over to me to say how appalled they were that Zell never said the word ‘journalism,’” said Mr. Jarvis later in an interview with The Observer. “All kinds of things. And I said, ‘Name me three disrupters in the American news business.’ Silence. Zell is a grand disrupter. He may not be the disrupter you choose, but he’s one we have.”

But to us, Jeff Jarvis looks like the real thinker, the real disruptor. Mr. Zell is just his accidental amanuensis.

“He’s always been ideological,” said Nick Denton, the publisher of the Gawker Media blog empire and an old friend of Mr. Jarvis. He said it was he who introduced his friend to the convept of blogging years ago. “He’s settled into his role as being the—what is it? He’s like the defector. There are other Internet ideologues and other Internet supremacists, but of all the Internet supremacists, he is the one who has betrayed his origins in print. Of all the people who grew up in newspapers and magazines, he is the one who has most clearly abandoned them. Over the last five years, he has slammed newspapers and magazines print as being useless and unable to change. And doomed.”

Jeff Jarvis worked in print for years. He worked with the San Francisco Examiner, where he wrote a column up to six days a week—with his words counts coming in at around 1,500 words per column. He was an editor at the Daily News, a TV critic for both People and TV Guide, and he was also the founding editor of Entertainment Weekly for Time Inc. before—as often happens to launch editors—he was shown the door roughly six months after its launch.

In the 1990s, he worked with Advance Publications to help Condé Nast’s Web sites, and for its newspaper sites.

He found blogging in 2001 after he was in a PATH train when the first plane struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. After pulling together some quick reporting, he took to the Internet. Eventually, his blog, BuzzMachine, was born out of that.

For years since then, Mr. Jarvis has been on the margins with those citizen-journalism guys who you’d see linked on Romenesko, or occasionally pop up on TV. He’s had a media column for The Guardian, he worked for Advance Publication for years, and he’s done a little consulting with The Washington Post recently.

But for much of the last three or four years his pronouncements have fallen on deaf if polite ears in the media establishment. He’s a nice guy, but a bit … strident.

“We won’t save journalism the way it was,” he wrote on his blog back in March of 2005, sounding a little less confident than he does nowadays. “We shouldn’t if we could. The business must change. Some in newsrooms think they should not change, that change is sacrilegious. Of course, that’s ridiculous. From a consumer perspective, if the habits, needs and abilities of the audience change, then so must journalism. From a business perspective, if every other industry in this country has gone through restructuring as it finds new ways to do business, then why shouldn’t journalism? From a journalistic perspective, well, wouldn’t you hope that journalists would be the most curious, the most eager to explore the new? O.K., that last one is a straight line.

“But here’s the news: I am starting to see executives in old, big media figure this out and seek out this change. Will it work? Who the hell knows?”

Three and a half years later, it’s old news. Mr. Jarvis’ message is penetrating.

“I think he’s done a good job translating Internet commonplace into language that traditional publishers can understand,” said Mr. Denton.

Even at the heights of American journalistic success, the air is getting thin. The Times Company stock has lost roughly 65 percent of its value this year, Standard and Poors lowered the company’s credit rating to “Junk” bond status and its marketing capitalization is dangerously close to falling under $1 billion. Last week, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced that there would be a 75 percent cut to the company’s dividend, the pool of income that brought the Sulzberger-Ochs family $25.1 million last year.

Mr. Sulzberger, who attended that session at the Plaza and is a personal friend and former colleague of Mr. Rattner, stood near the back and left shortly after that Q&A session, his reaction inscrutable to our spies in the room.

“He’s an ideologue,” said Jon Landman, deputy managing editor for digital journalism at The New York Times, who is answerable for much of the newspaper’s own emergent Web strategy, when The Observer interviewed him on the phone. “And the world needs ideologues. He has bright ideas. I would say, actually, he’s a utopian.”

But when utopians win, he said, “they turn into Mao Zedong.”

“Jarvis’ own career depends on a permanent revolution,” said Mr. Denton. “He needs it to be 1792 [in France] so he can continue to get his consulting gigs and so people can listen to him when he says, ‘The system is broken! It’s broken!’”

WHITEBOARD THIS!

On a recent Wednesday afternoon at the CUNY School of Journalism, Jeff Jarvis sat at the front of a classroom, conducting a three-hour seminar on entrepreneurial journalism.

Mr. Jarvis was listening to each of his 10 students, one by one, give presentations on Web sites they will compete for funding to develop.

They were listing specifics on how much traffic their site would generate, where they’d get ads—a lot of them think Nike!—and how much it would cost to get their site going. One person wanted to create a site that would report news from Washington Heights; another wanted to create a New Yorker-like news site in Denmark that would start with virtually no overhead and open its editorial meetings to the public.

The workshop was meant to prepare the students for a final presentation next month to determine who will win the grant.

As each student presented, the classroom looked less like a grad seminar than it did the set of a reality show, like Project Runway. Student prepares news outfit; advice is handed out; judgment is rendered.

And Mr. Jarvis was playing the role of the tough-love, good guy Tim Gunn.

“I really think you’ll need to whiteboard this,” said Mr. Jarvis, in an incredibly deep anchormanlike voice, to one student.

Mr. Jarvis is preparing to send out the next generation of journalists. Also revolutionaries: This is the generation that will finally transform journalism, and rescue it from financial failure, topple its accepted hierarchies and put the field back at the service of the people.

But for most newspaper editors, he remains like that lovable and incredibly intelligent Marxist history professor from college, whose ideas leave a lasting imprint but whose total philosophy reeks of a certain simple-minded completism.

“He’s an all-or-nothing thinker,” said Mr. Landman. “I think subtlety isn’t his greatest virtue.”

“I still think his concept of a minimally edited, largely self-regulating information world tilts too far toward a romantic’s vision of anarchy,” wrote Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, in an email. “And the proliferation of blogs, while wonderful in many respects, has yet to make a compelling case for the wisdom of crowds. Sometimes citizen journalism resembles mob journalism, or vigilante journalism.”

“On the growing role of editors and reporters, I think directionally he’s right but he may take it farther than I would take it,” said Mr. Murray, the Journal editor.

“I respect Jeff’s thinking, but I don’t mean to say for a second I agree with it all,” said Jim Willse, the editor of the Star-Ledger whose newsroom is getting a 40 percent cut. He has worked with Mr. Jarvis off and on for the last three decades. “He’s not given to understatement. I think he and I part company on a number of points that he makes. One of them is the reliance on whatever the phrase of the moment is—citizen journalism or pro-am journalism—and I think that in his enthusiasm for a new newsroom model he undervalues the worth of good old-fashioned reporting.”

“For someone like me who is living the life of newspaper editor in difficult times, Jeff is a very valuable source of ideas because he’s lived the life of mainstream media as a magazine editor, columnist and an entrepreneur,” said Mr. Willse. “He’s not just sitting in the bleachers bloviating about media transforming. He’s got a good grounding in the economics of it.”

“Over the years he and I have edged somewhat closer,” wrote Mr. Keller, the Times editor, in an email. “Not to put words in Jeff’s mouth, but he now, I think, acknowledges the utility of professional judgment, skills and standards in helping an audience navigate the new information world, and the advantages of having stable institutions to pay for such things as a Baghdad bureau and to protect First Amendment rights in court. In turn, I’ve embraced the value of the audience as a participant in gathering, truth-squadding and appraising information.”

“That is bullshit,” Mr. Jarvis said when we told him what Mr. Keller had said. But, it seemed, he was directing the charge at us. “That is journalistic cliché. That’s what every story tries to do: create a conflict. That conflict doesn’t exist. We’re all trying to figure what to do about it, and we all should have different answers and experiment with those answers. To say it’s traditional against something else is bullshit. And you can quote me on that. That’s dangerous.

“I’ve been forced into this blogger-versus-MSM thing for a while and I refuse to play the game anymore. I don’t give a damn if Bill Keller is closer to me or I’m closer to him. The question is: What are we all doing to advance this? I am delighted to see The New York Times advance in many, many ways. I think they’re brilliant.”

jkoblin@observer.com

Here’s a blow-by-blow, so far:

In his Nov. 11 column published last night, Mr. Rosenbaum throws the first crustless PB & J sandwich at Mr. Jarvis by saying he's running for "New Media Pontificator in Chief" and becoming "increasingly heartless about the reporters, writers, and other 'content providers' who have been put out on the street by the changes in the industry," he wrote.

"Sometimes it sounds as if he's virtually dancing on their graves."

Mr. Jarvis used to be a friend of print journalism. He was former television critic for TV Guide and People magazine, and associate publisher of The New York Daily News. And, as he's so fond of reminding readers, he created Entertainment Weekly.

Mr. Jarvis left print to join the bright New Media world. "He took to blogging and—eventually—blogging about blogging," Mr. Rosenbaum wrote. "Recently he has even begun to host international forums and self-proclaimed new-media summits, when not directing J-school programs focused on new media (at the City University of New York) or raking in consulting fees from old-media giants like The New York Times and Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast."

And now, as print journalists fall, Mr. Rosenbaum argues, Mr. Jarvis is kicking 'em while their down.

Mr. Rosenbaum quotes Mr. Jarvis’ response to an American Journalism Review essay by Paul Farhi, in which he said, "The fall of journalism is, indeed, journalists' fault. It is our fault that we did not see the change coming soon enough and ready our craft for the transition."

Mr. Rosenbaum writes:

He even attacks Mr. Jarvis’ new book, What Would Google Do?, in which he doesn’t speak with anyone who actually works for Google.

"It makes you wonder," Mr. Rosenbaum writes, "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."

Mr. Jarvis responded around high noon on Buzzmachine:

Mr. Jarvis claims Mr. Rosenbaum's criticism doesn't solve any of the immediate problems in journalism. "Sadly, Rosenbaum doesn't debate the idea and history and fate of journalism, which might be productive or at least provocative. Instead, like a pissy third grader, he attacks me."

Mr. Jarvis then gives tons of evidence of all the meetings and croissants he's shared with newspaper editors and owners, trying to hack out how to solve all of journalism's problems.

Defending his research for his book, he writes, "I interviewed many people like [Paulo] Coelho. I chose not to seek official and controlled access to Google and in my acknowledgments in the book," choosing instead to "listening to the market."

Mr. Jarvis also tries to steer the blame:

Mr. Jarvis' comrade, Mr. Godin, responded in the comments section:

Another commenter, “joe O” had this to say:

But I like to describe the conflict as one between Metcalfe’s Law and Ron’s Outlaws.

Do you know about Metcalfe’s Law? It was named after my high-school friend and rival, Bob Metcalfe, now probably a billionaire from his invention of Ethernet, the device that effects connectivity between computers in a network. He subsequently founded the 3Com Corporation and established himself as an Internet-boom progenitor and guru. Some give him—and Metcalfe’s Law—the credit (or blame) for the late-90’s dot-com bubble and the credit (or blame) for the Web 2.0 expansion that, according to some, is fast approaching a Bubble 2.0 bursting point.

In fact, a hot debate has broken out in the blogosphere (I first noticed it on Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine blog, www.buzzmachine.com) over whether, as the title of a recent scientific-journal article bluntly put it, “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong.” And not just wrong, but “dangerous.”

The principle of Metcalfe’s Law, for those coming late to this crucial argument about the nature and economics of the Web, was first outlined circa 1980 by Mr. Metcalfe and given the name Metcalfe’s Law in 1993 by First Bubble philosopher George Gilder. Paraphrased, the law states that “the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the number of its users.” Or, in mathematical notation, V~n2.

Why should you care about whether this formula is right or wrong? Well, only if you care about the economic future of the nation, if you believe the authors of “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong,” which appeared in the electrical-engineering journal IEEE Spectrum (spectrum.ieee.org/jul06/4109). They argue that Metcalfe’s Law became the theoretical basis for the late-90’s dot-com expansion and collapse. Why? Because it was used to lead (or mislead) investors into overvaluing the growth potential of dot-com companies specializing in connectivity services, from Cisco to 3Com.

Or, as the authors of “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong,” Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko and Benjamin Tilly, put it: “It seemed to offer a quantitative explanation for the boom’s various now-quaint mantras, like ‘network effects,’ ‘first-mover advantage,’ ‘Internet time,’ and, most poignant of all, ‘build it and they will come.’”

What it did, in practical terms, was to convince a sufficient number of venture-capital investors that the potential profitability of net-related start-up companies would increase in value to the second power while their costs to reach such profit levels would increase only in a lesser, linear fashion. Which justified pouring exponentially greater investment capital into ventures that, as it turned out, did not produce that level of growth, but rather enormous losses when the bubble burst.

Whether this was because “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong” or whether other factors caused the bubble to burst is a matter of dispute. And Mr. Metcalfe himself disputes the critique in a forcefully reasoned argument that you can find at a Web site called VCMike’s Blog (vcmike.wordpress.com/2006/08/18/metcalfe-social-networks/#more-99), in which he not only declares that he regrets nothing, but he ingeniously positions his Law as a precursor of the newly fashionable “Long Tail” theory of net economics. (It’s a long tale.)

But according to the authors of “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong,” this is not just a matter of past history. The persistence in the wrongheaded belief in Metcalfe’s Law, they argue, is “dangerous” because it adds “a touch of scientific respectability to a new wave of investment” that is inflating what they ominously call “Bubble 2.0.”

They proceed to propose their alternative to Metcalfe’s Law, an alternative formula they render as V~n log(n), which predicts growth from network connectivity greater than linear but far less than the n2 growth that Metcalfe’s Law predicts.

I’ll return to the question of these competing laws, but first, a brief return to high school, where I believe the philosophical differences that lie behind the clash I’ve called Metcalfe’s Law vs. Ron’s Outlaws had their origins.

Yes, I think I could make a case that it all goes back to Bay Shore High School, where Bob and I were friendly rivals. I should emphasize friendly: He was (and is, as far as I can tell—although we’ve had only sporadic contact since high school) a genuinely good-natured guy, with a good sense of humor to leaven his intellectual seriousness.

There was, however, one key philosophical difference and one, let’s say, difficulty in our friendship. The philosophical difference was that even back then, he tended to see the world through the lens of hard science. I recall watching in awe as he soldered together his first primitive analog computer from a kit he ordered from Popular Science. I knew then we were on different paths. My lens was literature: Novels like Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Heller’s Catch-22, with their emphasis on romanticized band-of-outlaws anarchism, led me to a more irrationalist, or at least anti-technocratic, literary-Luddite view of the world.

The difficulty involved our rivalry for the position of No. 1 in our class. I edged him out and, as I recall, there was a bit of not entirely good-natured bitterness about this on his part (I was, needless to say, completely gracious about it all).

Of course, he went on to be a billionaire, more or less—and I’ve entertained the notion that his galling high-school loss to me spurred him on to achieve his fabulous success, which he therefore owes to me. And I went on to … considerably less lucrative, more literary pursuits. (Still, Cynthia Ozick’s quote about my new book The Shakespeare Wars—“Electrifying. A spectacular book”—feels better than any sum of money could).

Nonetheless, I’d always been a little suspicious of Metcalfe’s Law, precisely because it seemed too confident that it could quantify and digitize human relationships, turn them all in their infinite variety into an all-too-simple mathematical formula—a formula that seems a bit too much like a thinly disguised promotional device for Ethernet. He’s selling connectivity devices and he’s proclaiming a “law” that values the growth they promote at n2 levels. Not bad for business, although that alone does not disprove its truth.

In fact, I also have a problem with the recent IEEE takedown of Metcalfe’s Law for the same reason. It, too, attempts the quantification of human relationships—long a dream, often a dreadful mistake. But at least the authors exhibit a tentativeness, an awareness of the arbitrariness of assigning a number value to human connections, or of identifying techno-connections with human connections.

In any case, the discussion of this question sparked by “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong” on Jeff Jarvis’ blog reawakened high-school memories and made me think of my “blue box” story and what I like to think of as “Ron’s Outlaws,” the original hackers.

There’s been, lately, a curious spike in interest in the story, which I wrote for Harold Hayes’ Esquire (on the basis of a tip from my colleague there, Craig S. Karpel).

The story, first published in October 1971 (and reprinted in The Secret Parts of Fortune, and also available on the Web at www. webcrunchers.com/crunch/esq-art.html) concerned my odyssey into the techno-nerd outlaw world of blue-boxers, many of them blind teenage electronics geniuses who created their own illicit net in the web of then-monopoly AT&T’s long-distance line circuits using devices dubbed “blue boxes.” These “phone phreaks” included one who, on the basis of my story, became a legendary original superhero of hacker culture, “Captain Crunch.”

In retrospect, my technology-vs.-anarchy debates in Long Island diners with Bob Metcalfe may have shaped my vision of these anti-technocracy tech geniuses. I envisioned them in my story as analogues of the black-clad secret society, the “Tristero” in The Crying of Lot 49. One of the distinguishing achievements of the Tristero was that they traced their ancestry to a group that sought to subvert the official postal system of Europe with their own private communication network.

If Bob Metcalfe was the guru of connectivity, my story at least had helped give birth to both the dark side of cyber culture and other more profitable sides as well.

When I say there’s been a spike of interest, there was a call from a TV documentary producer working on a project about the history of the telephone. They were asking permission to reproduce an image of my Esquire story, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” in conjunction with their interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, an interview on the history of the telephone. The reason: Mr. Wozniak and his friend Steve Jobs both read my “blue box” story in high school and, as they both have publicly reported, were inspired by the story to try to manufacture the illicit “blue box” devices in one of their parents’ garages, a project that led ultimately to their Apple partnership. It also led to their contact with and (I’d say) spiritual kinship with the hacker legend I’d portrayed in the story, Captain Crunch, who, after getting into trouble with the law, left the dark side and became a “white hat” hacker and an important innovator in the PC revolution.

My account of Crunch’s exploits gave widespread recognition—helped the wildfire spread—of incipient hacker culture. For better or worse, I felt I had made enough of a contribution to the origin and spread of this subculture to justify thinking of them as the antipodes of Metcalfe’s Law: Ron’s Outlaws. After all, the former is about enhancing connectivity, the latter about subverting it.

Or is it? In a way, its origins in the secret blind-boy blue-box networks suggest that hacker culture is about enhancing connectivity, or about offering an alternative connectivity. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that there was a kind of interdependence between Metcalfe’s Law and Ron’s Outlaws: that “my” hacker outlaws did more to enhance connectivity by demonstrating the holes and flaws in cyber-based networks, testing the system and spurring it to greater heights of efficiency and security.

And Bob’s known in his world as a bit of a rebel, taking on Bill Gates early, offering heretical apocalyptic visions of the Internet future.

Perhaps Ron’s Outlaws are not necessarily opposed to Bob and his Laws. Too bad there was room for only one No. 1 in high school, which, as we know, is all that counts.

Ron Rosenbaum’s new book, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups, is just out from Random House.