Tag Archives: Politico

A hint from the insect world about radical post-Gutenberg adaptation

. 4th Estate moves, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . , , , ,
enchantedlearning.com

-photograph: enchantedlearning.com

With eyes usually peeled on the media revolution, we read with special fascination about a Darwinian parallel in the insect world in a small item by Sindya Bhanoo in today’s New York Times.

We came across it still reflecting on a post about the sacking last month of the editors of Le Monde and The New York Times by Susan Glasser — editor of the Politico site – in which she revisited her own disastrous experience as an editor and department head at The Washington Post:

In the course of my short and controversial tenure in the job, I learned several things, among them: 1) print newspapers REALLY, REALLY didn’t want to change to adapt to the new digital realities; 2) I did not have the full backing of the paper’s leadership to carefully shepherd a balky, unhappy staff of 100 or so print reporters and editors across that unbuilt bridge to the 21st century …

The doomed survival strategy of the newly silent Hawaiian crickets at the end of this snippet reminds us of print newspapers’ continuing refusal to make radical alterations of their ‘business model’ for the identical task: communication.

On Separate Islands, Crickets Go Silent

In 2003, a number of male field crickets on the Hawaiian island of Kauai were born without the ability to chirp. Two years later, the same thing happened on Oahu.

Researchers thought the events were related — a genetic mutation that spread from one island to the other through commercial transport, or perhaps even a flying cricket that found its own way over.

But now, researchers report that the mutant males on each island stopped singing independently, through two similar but distinct adaptations.

“It’s an example of convergent evolution,” said Nathan Bailey, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an author of the new study, which appears in Current Biology. “And it’s exciting because we are catching this mutation as it’s happening in the wild.”

Male crickets have specialized structures at the end of their wings. When they rub them together, the structures engage with one another and make the chirping sound.

“It’s like rubbing a fingernail along the teeth of a comb,” Dr. Bailey said.

[…]

Dr. Bailey said the crickets had adapted to become less vulnerable to a parasitic Hawaiian fly that is attracted to the males’ chirp. The fly larvae burrow into the cricket, causing it to die within a week.

But there is a downside: The males who do not chirp cannot attract females as easily as those who do.

“So instead they adjust their behavior,” Dr. Bailey said. “They hang around the remaining singing males and then intercept the females.”

 

A Pulitzer prize for typing up the Snowden leaks? We suggest the Laziest Journalism Ever award

. 4th Estate moves . , , , , , ,

We saw no fine journalistic instincts unfurled; no dogged sniffing, and above all, no sweaty investigative reporting: only papers playing mouthpiece to boost circulation - photograph: postgutenberg[at]gmail.com

We saw no fine journalistic instincts unfurled; no dogged sniffing, and above all, no arduous investigative reporting: only papers trying to boost circulation
– photograph: postgutenberg[at]gmail.com

Preposterous. That is what Politico evidently thinks of bestowing a Pulitzer journalism prize next month on one of the hyperbolic leak-and-spin collaborations between Edward Snowden and journalists who have made the über-leaker famous enough for search engines to suggest that we really want him when we ask them about Snowdon – the Welsh mountain.

We agree especially with the last reason Politico gives for doubting the rightness of elevating the Snowden-and-NSA story above — for instance — the kind of wrenching immersive reporting on the mentally retarded that won the fearless, compassionate Katherine Boo her Pulitzer public service medal in 2000. In ‘Edward Snowden looms over Pulitzer prizes’ its media reporter Dylan Byers argues:

Finally, there is the issue of effort. Though [two reporters who disseminated Snowden’s leaks] have dismissed the suggestion that Snowden’s trove of NSA files simply fell into their laps, the Pulitzer Board could feel conflicted about giving an award to the recipients of stolen documents when other applicants may have dedicated a significant amount of time and resources to old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting on, say, a local government issue. In several instances throughout its history, the Board has honored reporting based to a significant degree on the amount of effort and diligence shown by the reporters.

[… quoting a USA Today editor:] “Not to minimize the role of the reporters — it’s not just stenography. You have to sift through the information, present it clearly, explain why it matters, put it in context, etc. The real challenge would be if you had entries where reporters had to go to extraordinary lengths to pry out information of vital interest to the public, as opposed to having it turned over to them. If you had examples of great magnitude, that would make it complicated. That said, this was clearly the story of last year.”

“There’s a real question about whether this is reporting,” [a veteran Washington Post reporter] said. “It might be a public service award, but it’s not a great reporting coup when a source comes to you and hands you this stuff.”

Post-Gutenberg would also like to remind readers about an … ahem … significant detail – that the Guardian’s and New York Times’s endless column-inches on government surveillance have the story back-to-front, by failing to acknowledge that the NSA watchers in the U.S. and their GCHQ equivalents in the U.K. are only doing what privacy-scoffers at the commercial technology giants and most newspapers running on the ‘surveillance business model’ have done for far longer. (See ‘Spooky yarn-spinning: just how did the Guardian and New York Times get the surveillance story back-to-front?‘ … and … ‘When will the #TeamSnowden newspapers admit to using the same spying tools as the spooks at the NSA and GCHQ?)

Bill Gates, we are pleased to note, has made the same point as we have about Snowden’s lack of judgment and selectivity in what he chose to make public, to snatch his place in history:

‘…[I]f he had been careful in terms of what he had released, then it would fit more of the model of “OK, I’m really trying to improve things.” You won’t find much admiration from me.’

He said that in an interview with Rolling Stone on 13 March – and we recorded the identical objection in a post on this blog last November, with the help of the Mannekin Pis.