In the words of Howard Beale, the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves in the movie Network, “Woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble!” And, as Beale would shout, we should be mad as hell. Issuing a decision that triggered dismay and anger among supporters…
Revelations that the Clintons keep a spreadsheet updated with everyone who has ever wronged them led us to ask writers and politicians whether they hold a grudge with the same conviction – and impressive organizational skills
If Hillary Clinton is still favourite to become the next president of the US, there may be a few worried Democrats who vote Republican in 2016. The Clintons have long memories, you see, and, according to a new book, they keep a spreadsheet listing everybody who has helped or betrayed them during their time in politics. The scale of the traitors' offences are said to be graded from one to seven, like a kind of Divine Comedy rewritten for Microsoft Excel. For instance, if the book is right, Hillary's election would be the end of the line for the secretary of state, John Kerry, who gets a place in the seventh circle of infamy for preferring Barack Obama.
Keeping a "shitlist", it must be said, is not associated with history's most lovable characters. Senator Joseph McCarthy made himself famous in 1950 by holding up what he claimed was a list of all the spies and communists then employed in the State Department. The list was never published in full, and McCarthy may well have been wrong anyway, but it helped to fuel the Red Scare, which ruined many careers. Richard Nixon was also discovered to have an "enemies list" in 1973. He may never have seen it personally, but it was drawn up by his aides with the express aim of trying to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies".
More recently, the Church of Scientology was reported to keep one. Indeed the concept of the "suppressive person" who sees enemies all around is, somewhat appropriately, written into the religion's demonology.
Just last year the National Rifle Association, for reasons that are hard to fathom, even published an extremely detailed list of its opponents, including many obvious names, such as Michael Moore, along with quite a large number of surprises, such as the ever-villainous Dick Van Dyke.
Keeping a shitlist may not add warmth to one's reputation, in short, but it sure sends out a message. You are implacable, it says. You are going to be methodical about getting your revenge, serve it cold, and then take just a line of ink through someone's name as a digestif.
The idea of the list says so much, in fact, that you don't even need the list. At the beginning of the 2012-13 season, when he was still new in the Liverpool manager's job, Brendan Rogers told all his players – and the TV crew following them – that he had written down the names of three people who would at some point let the team down.
In the middle of a very successful second season, he now admits that the envelopes were empty. It was a trick he says he learned from Alex Ferguson, a man whose real enemies list would fill a book, and has.
Tom Watson
When I was a young activist, I had a shitlist as long as your arm. Yet middle age has taught me an important lesson in life: your shitlist owns you. It gnaws away at your soul and does you more harm than the list's members.
So these days there is only one person I would like to park in a three-hour traffic jam: Jeremy Clarkson. I do not have to describe to Guardian readers why, with his ruddy face and greying clumps of curly hair held together with Copydex, Clarkson is on the list, because he's probably on theirs, too. My only sadness is that he will revel in such notoriety. And the BBC will continue to pay him to be like this. It's almost worth siding with Murdoch to ditch the licence fee over.
He's on my shitlist because he's been bragging about running against Chris Bryant as an MP. I hope the BBC give Chris his own show to even up the coverage. He'd probably beat Clarkson in one of those ridiculous road races they do on Top Gear.
I'd gladly amend the law to free this Tory clown from the onerous red tape of wearing a seatbelt. Then it's just a matter of probability working its magic as he lives his celebrity life in the fast lane.
Marina Hyde
Very boringly – or perhaps very lazily, I can't even be bothered to analyse it – I prefer to go by that old adage that the best revenge is a happy life. In fact, I have frequently been known to express sympathy for someone in the business who is publicly going through a tough time, only for a friend who is far better at keeping track of such things to remind me that the person was once a shitehawk to me in one way or another. I once even sent a long letter of commiseration to someone who I had completely forgotten had done me quite a significant disservice, which – entirely accidentally – must have made me look very gracious. Or maybe outrageously sarcastic. Again, I have no idea.
In (imperfect) memory, I have twice ventured toward what I suppose would be deemed faintly retributive action. The first time was when a colleague plagiarised some lines from my columns in their book, and after offering them the chance to cough to it privately, and being disappointed, I eventually mentioned it in pointed amusement to our mutual line manager. Nothing whatsoever was done about it, equally amusingly, and it doesn't seem to have affected their career progression, so I don't really count it as a dedicated takedown. The second time was during some journalism seminar, in which I was on the panel with the editor of a website who once claimed something personal and false about me that I thought damaging. I am afraid I interrupted their keynote address on the state of the trade or whatever it was to remind them of this unapologised-for error, and they seemed so shaken by being called on it in such a forum that I felt rather mean and regretful about it later, and am sure it only made me look like a complete twat.
Both were years ago, happily – and such infinitesimally minuscule slights, in the great scheme of things, that writing them out just now I can't believe I even bothered to the quarter-arsed degree I did. In the interim, thank goodness, I have absolutely cemented the idea in my mind that even an ice-cold dish of revenge is far, far too much trouble to serve.
Zoe Williams
Here's the thing: in order to have a huge feud with someone, you have to either a) have a huge relationship, as good as married or a very, very close friendship, or b) be engaged in a huge project – take, as a wild for-instance, running for president. In a big undertaking, people can betray each other in big ways even when they don't know each other very well; whereas, on a normal-sized tapestry, you really have to be at the foreground of somebody's life in order to stab them.
As a complete aside, I think this is why Damian McBride and all those end-of-the-era New Labour types make such a big deal about how betrayed they all were, because it lends grandeur to the entire project. Except it doesn't. It makes them all look like idiots (1).
I'm not in the business of holding grudges against people I'm very close to (2), and obviously I don't have a huge project, so there's nobody against whom I nurse an implacable hatred (3). But I will say that any moderately well-lived life will contain some accidental giving of offence, most often by me, and after that I will nurse a grudge against somebody pre-emptively, on the assumption that they already hold one against me and if I were to meet them without acknowledging it, they would then have the opportunity to snub me. Imagine.
Then, if some panel event comes up that they will be at, I will passive-aggressively say to the organiser, "but X (4) hates me, would you check that he's OK with me chairing?", appearing both open and humble, so that even if X wasn't even aware of hating me, X just has to forgive me or he'll look bad (5).
One time, when I'd just met my fella, we were introduced to a journalist at a party, and he asked her what she did, and she put her head in her hands and said: "Oh God, really?" And he said if any other journalists were as obnoxious as that, it was definitely over between us. And I have had to keep my fingers crossed all this time (6). But otherwise, no. No shitlist. Nothing like that.
1 Damian McBride is actually on my shitlist, for a reason too petty to go into, although I will say that it involves LBC presenter Iain Dale.1A Iain Dale is not on my shitlist.2 I just remembered I haven't spoken to my half-sister for 10 years.3 Apart from Orlando Bloom. 4 Oliver James.5 This Thursday. 6 I really want everyone to ask me who this was, but I'll have to shake my head sadly and say I can't tell you.
Jenny Colgan
The problem with having a list (everyone has a list. Anyone who says they don't have a list is telling porky pies, or Pope Francis; mine has a disproportionate number of people called Sadie on it and I am now troubled if I meet someone new called Sadie) is that unless you expressly publish it in a ledger, a la Clinton, the person involved probably has absolutely no idea they're on it. I ran into a (highly successful theatre producer) aquaintance recently for the first time in an age, who said: "Oh my God, I have never forgotten that ferocious review of my play you wrote in 1992. I nearly gave up the game altogether. God, it was something else."
He mentioned this several times during the course of a short conversation.
"I am so sorry," I said. I genuinely was and am sorry. Before doing stuff other people reviewed, I thought reviewing was an hilarious lark, taking other people's hard graft and writing show-off-y takedowns of it. Ah, being young. "What was the show?"
"You don't remember the SHOW???!!"
I didn't. I didn't remember the play, the production, the year, or writing a review of anything. Although if the way young callow wannabes review things is anything to go by, I deserved rather more than being on someone's hitlist; I deserved a hitman.
Mark Borkowski
I do have a shitlist, but I'd be a pretty poor PR man to out the names on it. It's a single sheet of yellowing paper, nestling inside my wallet. Thankfully it's a very short list, however each name is tattooed on to my very soul because of a litany of sins.
My dad offered me the best piece of advice for dealing with the vicissitudes of PR life. I didn't realise the power of his aphorism until the heat of battle. Cherish this, he said: "Lord protect me from my friends – I can take care of my enemies." He claimed it was an old Polish proverb. Many years later I was told the quotation is attributable to Maréchal Villars when taking leave of King Louis XIV: "Defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies."
In work, I need to be surrounded by people with good souls. It's important that the people across the divide share the same values of honesty. So when I experience a less-than-honest dealing from a journalist or client or employee, I notch it up. There is no point in harbouring feelings of paranoia when creating an atmosphere of certainty and reliance is critical. The best contacts are full of heart, and share a sense of responsibility for a relationship. Those on my list are the ugly ones, whose best conduct is enacted behind my back. These are filed in a bin marked "toxic".
It's a matter of being resolute – if we lose heart and a sense of proportion we are likely to be consumed by a craven process. Sometimes PR needs to bare its teeth and just tell the truth.
Although it is good to be merciful, for some, anger, hatred and evil will is everlasting. The shitlist is like a voodoo doll, which I occasionally stick pins in while cursing. It's very therapeutic! Succumb to anger, then expect to slip into a dark spiral of despair. Ensure your own shitlist is small like mine, and then remember the greatest revenge is enormous success.
Stuart Heritage
I wish I had a shitlist. I wish I had the capacity for that level of vengeance. I've seen entire careers get destroyed by shitlists – by people who overheard perceived slights long ago, then spent years waiting for the perfect opportunity to fatally crush the perpetrator – and I'm jealous. I want to be that person. I want to be that shadowy puppetmaster. I want to hurl someone's entire future against a spiked wall because they looked at my shoes disparagingly at a party once. I want to be Kevin Spacey from House of Cards.
But I'm not. The point of a shitlist is to exact painful revenge when the subject expects it least. But by the time the subject expects it least, I've invariably moved on. If revenge is a dish best served cold, I'm the guy who took my revenge out of the oven, put it on a windowsill to cool down, got distracted by a shiny piece of paper on the floor, and let a hungry dog run off with it.
That said, in the brief window between being offended and completely forgetting about it, my shitlist has an incredibly low bar of entry. If you have ever remained stationary on an airport travelator, know that I have temporarily sworn violent retribution against you. If you don't let people off trains before getting on, I'll transiently assume that you're the worst person who ever lived. If you've taken even a millisecond longer at a cash machine than I've arbitrarily decided that you needed, I will have definitely entertained the idea of finding out where you live and torching your house. If you're the builder standing outside my window as I write this, drilling holes in things because it's your job, then oh my bloody God you're going to get it.
Or at least you would get it if my organisational skills were better. I think the problem is that I'm surrounded by such a constant stream of annoyances that I literally don't have the time to commit any of them to memory. By the time I've decided to add, say, Jeremy Kyle to my list, I'll accidentally glimpse a mug with an ironic moustache on it and immediately start daydreaming about tracking down and killing the man who invented mugs. That's no way to live. Perhaps it'd be healthier to keep a shitlist. If that's the case, that builder had better look out.
Ken Livingstone
I never had a hitlist – it sounds like an American thing to me. In British politics, nothing is permanent – people aren't friends or enemies. They will work with you one year, and the next year they will work against you. Just look at the relationship between Blair, Brown and Mandelson, which moved from love to devotion to hatred. There were people I came up against, such as Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch. I'm sure I was on a few hitlists myself – when I was leader of the GLC the editor of the Mail, David English, instructed his reporters to file six stories a day about me. But it tended to be media, rather than politicians, who targeted me, and even then I don't bear a grudge. In a sense, there's a feeling of vindication in knowing that someone like Dacre thinks you're worth targeting.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
America’s unrivaled inequality will be center stage in our political discourse this year, as lawmakers debate raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless and the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion leading…
Gone is the overt, violent, and legal racism of my childhood in the 1960s. It's been replaced by a subtler, still ugly version
A week after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I walked into my old hometown bar in central Florida to hear, "Well if a nigger can be president, then I can have another drink. Give me a whiskey straight up."
Only one day in the town and I thought, "Damn the south."
I had returned home to bury my father, who had spent much of the 1950s and '60s fighting for civil rights in the south. Consequently, my childhood was defined by race. It was why our car was shot at, why threats were made to burn our down, why some neighbors forbid me to play on their lawn, why I was taunted at school as a "nigger lover".
It was nothing compared to what the blacks in town had to endure. I was just residing in the seam of something much uglier.
It is also why I left as soon as I could, exercising an option few others had. I eventually moved to New York City to work on Wall Street.
In the next 15 years I thought less about race. It is possible to live in the northeast as a white liberal and think little about it, to convince yourself that most of the crude past is behind. Outward signs suggest things are different now: I live in an integrated neighborhood, my kids have friends of all colors, and my old office is diverse compared to what I grew up with. As many point out, America even has a black man (technically bi-racial) as president.
Soon after my father passed away, I started to venture beyond my Wall Street life, to explore parts of New York that I had only previously passed through on the way to airports. I did this with my camera, initially as a hobby. I ended up spending three years documenting addiction in the New York's Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point. There I was slapped in the face by the past.
In my Florida hometown, there is a train track that splits the town into two colors. When we passed into the black section of town, even if I were lying in the back of the station wagon, I knew it. The gravel roads would wake me, and I could basically smell poverty through the windows.
Crossing into Hunts Point in New York is the same, complete with a train track. The roads are paved, but feel unpaved. The stench of poverty has not changed much (industrial waste rather than uncollected garbage), nor has its clamor or its destructive power.
Neither has the color of its residents: the poor side of town in New York is still almost entirely dark skinned.
It took me a few months of slow recognition, fighting a thought I did not want to believe: we are still a deeply racist country. The laws on the books claim otherwise, but in Hunts Point (and similar neighborhoods across the country), those laws seem like far away idyllic words that clash with the daily reality: everything is stacked against those who are born black or brown.
We as a nation applaud ourselves for having moved beyond race. We find one or two self-made blacks or Hispanics who succeeded against terrible odds, and we elevate their stories to a higher position, and then we tell them over and over, so we can say, "See, we really are a color blind nation."
We tell their stories so we can forget about the others, the ones who couldn't overcome the long odds, the ones born into neighborhoods locked down by the absurd war on drugs, the ones born with almost even odds that their fathers will at some point be in jail, the ones born into neighborhoods that few want to teach in, neighborhoods scarce of resources.
We tell the stories of success and say: see anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, further denigrating those who can't escape poverty. It plays into the false and pernicious narrative that poverty is somehow a fault of desire, a fault of intelligence, a fault of skills. No, poverty is not a failing of the residents of Hunts Point who are just as decent and talented as anyone else. Rather it is a failing our broader society.
It took me seeing one black teen thrown against a bodega wall by cops, for no reason, to erase much of the image of seeing Obama elected. It took the unsolved murder of a 15-year-old Hunts Point girl, a girl my middle daughter's age, to make me viscerally understand how lucky my children are. It took watching as one smart child grew from dreaming of college to dealing drugs to viscerally understand how lucky everyone in my old office is.
The barriers between Hunts Point and the rest of New York are not as high as they were between the white and black section of my hometown in the 1960s. People can freely pass over them. Practically, however, they are almost insurmountable.
Gone is the overt, violent, and legal racism of my childhood. It has been replaced by a subtler version.
It is a racism that is easier to ignore, easier to deny, and consequently almost as dangerous.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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The post-NAFTA era has been marked by growing inequality, declining job security and new leverage for corporations to attack government regulations enacted in the public interest. But it wasn’t supposed to be that way. Back in 1986, when the leaders…
If there is a singular skill that separates presidential contenders from presidential "also-rans" it is discipline. The ability to stay on message, to keep emotions in check, to avoid distractions, to understand that the long-game must take precedence over the daily news cycle and to dodge the inevitable political headaches that emerge is essential to political success on a national stage.
Obama has it; W had it; Nixon (at least in public) was practically the king. Here's who doesn't have it: Chris Christie, and it's the reason that his political career is on life support.
Even before the bombshell revelations that his top aides actively sought to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey by closing down on-ramps to the George Washington Bridge, it was fairly obvious that Christie was a man whose decisions were guided as much by impulse and emotion as political calculation.
There have been not one or two but repeated losses of his temper, even with his own constituents. This video of Christie yelling at a skeptic on the Jersey boardwalk while holding aloft an ice cream cone spoke to Christie's remarkable inability (particularly for a politician) to control his temper. He couldn't even prevent himself from yelling at a teacher who questioned his education policies only days before Election Day in November.
To be sure, lots of politicians are thin-skinned. But Christie is different, with his almost complete lack of impulse control. An article last month in the New York Times highlighted Christie's struggles. After John F McKeon, a New Jersey assemblyman, offered a mild critique of Christie's relationship with public sector employees, he received a handwritten note complaining about it. "What governor would take the time to write a personal note over a relatively innocuous comment?" asked McKeon.
But this behavior fits a regular pattern of reprisals and retaliation against anyone who even mildly crosses Christie.
A disciplined politician would understand the pitfalls of making so many political enemies and of acting so harshly in public. But not Christie, which leads us to this week's "Bridge-gate".
What is perhaps most striking about these actions is that they were directed at a small-town mayor who refused to endorse Christie in a gubernatorial race in 2013 that he had basically no chance of losing. Christie was always going to wallop his Democratic opponent Barbara Buono. The real subtext of the race was the governor's entrance onto the national stage as a Republican presidential contender. If there was ever a moment to let bygones be bygones or to turn the other cheek, it was here.
Of course, Christie has decided to use the Captain Renault defense, "'I'm shocked, shocked that my aides would do this." He even claimed (we can only assume with a straight face) that, "this behavior is not representative of me or my administration in any way." It's the rhetoric equivalent of a drone strike on irony.
We may never know for sure, but personally, I don't buy for a second the notion that Christie's deputy chief of staff and his hand-picked choice for the Port Authority were operating independently of Christie. That he has a long track record of personally striking back at political opponents who cross him – but sat this one out – stretches credibility. As the New York Times noted:
Even Republican lawmakers who have supported Mr Christie tell stories of being punished when he perceived them as not supporting him enough.
At this point, the New Jersey governor has lost any right to the benefit of the doubt.
Even if Christie wasn't involved, what does it say about the culture in the governor's office? What kind of shop is he running when one of his most trusted aides would feel comfortable conspiring with the Port Authority to use lane closures as a way to punish Christie's political opponents? Even if Christie was at arms length on the bridge closures, his fingerprints are all over this.
It's why that when the smoke clears not only will Christie no longer be the front-runner for the Republican nomination – there's a reasonable chance he'll no longer be Governor of New Jersey. To be sure, it was always going to be difficult for Christie to win over Republican primary voters – what with his willingness to shake hands with President Obama and his feint toward political moderation. But the bigger problem for Christie was cultural. Republicans voters like a tough guy, but there's toughness and then there's Jersey toughness. These aren't the same things.
Above all what today's revelations demonstrate is that he simply lacked the discipline to be a national figure, to undergo political scrutiny and to respond to political differences with something other than fury. He was a ticking time bomb as a politician. It was only a matter of time before he blew up.
Have you heard the one about the gay teacher who was being fired for marrying his male partner, then was told he could possibly stay on if he got a divorce? This may sound like a joke – in theory the church is equally opposed to both divorce and gay marriage – but it was an actual suggestion made to Mark Zmuda, a vice principal at the Eastside Catholic School in Seattle, Washington, who was being forced to resign from his job a few weeks ago when school administrators learned that he is both married and gay.
Zmuda didn't go for the divorce option and was terminated despite a barrage of protest led by the school's mostly Catholic student body. It's unlikely (since he has refused to stop being gay) that the teacher will be reinstated, but the incident has exposed, in a very public way, the church's willingness to be flexible on some of its principles (divorce sort of OK), while remaining totally rigid on others (gay marriage definitely not OK). More importantly, the ongoing protests surrounding Zmuda's dismissal should make it clear to the church that singling out gay people for special (mis)treatment is not something many Catholics are prepared to go on tolerating.
In fact, just yesterday Eastside Catholic School announced that freelance drama coach Stephanie Merrow, who is engaged to another woman, is "welcome" to continue working at the school. The school is now looking for ways to prevent the Zmuda controversy from happening again.
Zmuda married his long term partner last summer, just seven months after it became legal to do so in Washington state. He continued working without incident at the school until December, when some colleagues apparently alerted school administrators of his marriage. Almost immediately after this transgression was discovered (getting married to someone you love while gay counts as a pretty major transgression in Catholic land), Zmuda was out of a job. Legal experts say the school acted within their rights – as an administrator in the school, he was obliged to abide by Catholic teachings. But while his termination may satisfy doctrinal purists, it has caused distress and confusion to many Catholics (including Zmuda himself) who are unable to reconcile the so-called Christian ethos of the church with what they apparently see as a very un-Christian act.
Since the dismissal became public, students at the school – at least some of whom must be practicing Catholics – have been staging protest rallies, sit-ins and started an online campaign to have their teacher reinstated. Even many faculty members, including the school's president, Sister Mary Tracy, were ambivalent about the need to let go a competent and popular teacher. In a video interview with a former student, Zmuda spoke of how his colleagues stood by him the day they were told he would be leaving his job, and spent over an hour trying to come up with options that would prevent his departure. It was Sister Mary Tracy who brought up the possibility of his getting a divorce, a suggestion she later regretted but "owned". As she explained to Seattle King5 News:
I suggested to dissolve the marriage to save his job. I was trying to hang onto him.
Ultimately, it was the Archdiocese, not the school, who made the decision that Zmuda had to go, so her efforts were in vain.
Sister Mary Tracy, most of the faculty at the school, and most of the student body are not the only local Catholics who are uncomfortable with how Zmuda was treated for being gay. Seattle's newly elected mayor, Ed Murray, who also happens to be Catholic, gay and married, has spoken out at the protest rallies. Two other Seattle-based Catholics, Barbara Guzzo and Kirby Brown penned an op-ed for the Seattle Times calling for the teacher's immediate reinstatement. In it, they pointed out that if the church were to fire every employee who failed to abide by Catholic doctrine (the more than 90% of practicing Catholics who use contraceptives for starters), it would be a very short-staffed institution.
In the past two years, more than 12 gay employees of Catholic institutions have lost their jobs for getting married or supporting marriage equality. One of these employees, Carla Hale, a teacher for 19 years at Bishop Watterson High School in Columbus, Ohio, was sacked shortly after her mother's funeral, when parents of one of her students objected to seeing her female partner's name listed in the obituary notice. The particularly unkind way in which Hale was subsequently dismissed sparked a literal "halestorm" of protest similar to the one currently brewing for Zmuda. But the church still refused to reinstate her (Hale has since announced a settlement with the diocese).
The church will continue to ignore the protests of many in its flock surrounding terminations of employees like Hale and Zmuda, but it will do so at its peril. One of Zmuda's former students summed up the growing discomfort among some Catholics regarding the unequal treatment of gay people in a tweet to his holiness Pope Francis, or as he is better known on twitter, @Pontifex:
Hey big guy, we need you over here in Washington. A teacher is being fired for love.
So far, the pope, who was named Man of the Year by Advocate, a prominent gay news magazine, has not weighed in on this particular situation or on any of the firings. This is a bit disappointing in light of his comments to reporters last year that "if a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge"? Francis also stated recently that the church had "locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules", and needed to start treating gay people with compassion and respect.
But the pope ought to know that words are meaningless if not followed by meaningful action, and none has yet been taken. For now at least, it's people like Zmuda who are burning while Rome continues to fiddle. As more Catholics turn up the heat in protest, someday soon, the churches unkind and outdated policies are bound to backfire.
There is a new vision of journalism – call it the auteur school – in which the business shifts from being organized by institutions to being organized around individual journalists with discrete followings.
The latest development is the announcement by Ezra Klein that he will leave the Washington Post and is looking for investors to back him – with a reported eight figure investment (ie more than $10m!) – in an independent enterprise. Last week Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who ran the Wall Street Journal tech conference AllThingsD, announced that, following the WSJ ending its relationship with them, they were setting up in business backed by NBC and other investors.
Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA-Edward Snowden story for the Guardian, is the headliner in a new left-oriented journalism venture backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
The former New York Times data wiz-kid, Nate Silver, has left the Times to set up a new site and vertical business under the auspice of ABC and its subsidiary ESPN. Andrew Sullivan, a blogger first at the Atlantic and then at the Daily Beast, may be the grandfather of the auteur school, leaving the Daily Beast a year ago to set up his own subscription site.
In fact, one might as well include here Tina Brown, who used the seemingly attractive economics of the web, along with her personal brand and the backing of Barry Diller, to claim journalistic independence with the Daily Beast – and in the process lost, I am reliably told, an astounding $100m.
And that leads to my cautionary question: is this all journalistic vanity and hubris, ending in certain tears, or is there plausible economic logic to individual journalistic fiefdoms?
Let me make a basic distinction. There are a set of personal brand journalism businesses that are now working at a self-sustaining level. Arianna Huffington's The Huffington Post, is the most successful of them. There is also Henry Blodget's Business Insider. And there is Buzzfeed which is fronted by the blogger Ben Smith, among a few others. In a sense, these all provide a model or inspiration for personal brand journalism. Except, that their accomplishment is less a personal journalism vision than it is the more specialized skill of traffic aggregation. That's the key attribute and asset of each of these sites, not the uniqueness of the journalism, but the back end deals, algorithms, and canny, proprietary, practices of drawing large amounts of traffic.
Klein, for his part, is a 29-year-old liberal blogger with a specialty in Washington policy issues, who has become well-known in liberal circles because of frequent appearances on MSNBC. And while it is possible that he could have a facility for the arcane arts of digital traffic pumping, that's not evident in his resume, nor, to say the least, a natural fit with the Washington policy beat. Klein, like all the new hopeful personal brands, seems less interested in the publishing business per se then in a kind of channel purity and deepness – and aggrandizement.
That's a new notion, this solipsistic brandedness. The old organizational notion in journalism was exactly the opposite. There were never enough readers interested in one subject or one writer so you created a package of many subjects and writers, sharing the attention and the rewards. This was an older method of traffic aggregation. Everybody benefited from the combined heft and influence.
Mossberg and Swisher's AllThingsD clearly benefited from, if not depended on, the influence of Mossberg's tech product review column in the Wall Street Journal. You paid $5,500 to go to the Mossberg and Swisher conference, or agreed to speak at it, in part to curry favor with Mossberg. Now, without that power, Mossberg, as an independent tech impresario, may well be much less of a draw. Conferences are a tough business, and it is hard to think of one that has succeeded merely because its moderators, lacking powerful leverage, are well informed.
On the other hand, Nate Silver, the New York Times election data blogger, could demonstrably show that a disproportionate amount of Times traffic came to him personally. The Times is famous for telling its staffers that they are nothing without the Times, and, after a while, that probably rankled Silver. Like a television star, he put himself out to bid. And, in fact, was bought by ABC, where he now, riskily, ties his future to his own profitability. In television, journalistic measures of prestige and influence and of the value of being right where others are wrong, are not worth that much. In television terms (whether digitally or on the screen), you have to expressly make more than they pay you – and it's a pretty precise calculation – or they quickly lose interest in you.
The flight from journalist institutions has much to do, obviously, with what everyone assumes to be bleak futures within them. But, curiously, the escape is to an even more difficult economic landscape. At a cost per thousand advertising rate on the web or in mobile of $1 or $2 – pretty standard – Ezra Klein will make, optimistically, $8,000 a month, before expenses, if he has a million readers (assuming four page view per unique visitor). Klein apparently has the idea to build out his brand to encompass much more policy coverage, perhaps attracting more visitors and offering more pages to view. Still, it's hard to think how the 8-figure investment he is reportedly seeking, could ever, in a million years, pay off.
Another model is the Greenwald one of partnering with a rich backer who believes in your journalistic mission as much as you do. The problem here is that no one believes as much in you as you. And, given the Tina Brown example, you can lose amounts of money in digital journalism that might make even the most devoted backer choke – and close you.
To date, Andrew Sullivan is the only branded journalist who has set up his own personal pay wall, deciding that selling ads is not just a distracting endeavor, but often a miserable one. His results are encouraging, but have not inspired anyone to follow him. He recently reported $800,000 in income for 2013. The site lists seven staffers, in addition to Sullivan himself, without mentioning tech or subscription, accounting, and administrative support, so probably half to two-thirds of what the site makes (and that assumes people are working from their homes) goes in overhead costs before Sullivan is paid. Of course, this is a living.
But probably not the future.
Conservatives are having a field day "sticking it" to liberals about the weather. They have no time for scientific theories like "Arctic amplification," which only perfectly models how general warming trends can lead to increasingly severe cold snaps. After all, like evolution, Arctic amplification is "just a theory."
The common refrain, in light of the "polar vortex" sweeping the country, reads a little something -- and just about as intelligently -- as this:
If you believe in global warming your an idiot
— andrew fitzgerald (@ajfitzzz) January 6, 2014So what happen to global warming??
— Donna Klimowicz (@housesdelaware) January 6, 2014Even fictional antagonists, like "Shooter McGavin" from Adam Sandler's magnum opus Happy Gilmore, are declaring global warming a dead issue:
BREAKING: Books on Global Warming being pulled from shelves today.
— Shooter McGavin (@ShooterMcGavin_) January 6, 2014Some conservatives are, however, attempting to take the high road:
@ToddCaddie @ESPNCaddie Come on TM, they now call it Climate Change since global warming has been proven false...
— Kyle Watson (@caddieKdub) January 6, 2014Of course, they fail to realize that they're talking not about the underlying theory, but what it's called in the popular press. Declaring that a theory's "named wrong" doesn't disprove it any more than the fact that the Obamacare website launch was a disaster "proves" that the Affordable Care Act will destroy America.
Given that the "polar vortex" engulfing the nation sounds like a plan masterminded by a mustache-twirling evil genius, the story requires a villain, and conservatives have found theirs:
Global warming my ass, Al Gore can suck one
— Mikey T (@MikeTreinen) January 6, 2014hey Al Gore where u at with your global warming bs?! too busy sleeping with youre Nobel Peas Price?? #Unbelievable
— Derek Grzeskowiak (@d_REk13) January 6, 2014got to work it was almost 50 now it's 36 and snowing. Once again, thanks a lot Al Gore. You and your global warming nonsense and manbearpig
— platypus billed duck (@woodcore22) January 6, 2014The larger conservative outlets are following suit, refusing to acknowledge that cold weather could be a cascade effect of global warming. For example, Red State's Erick Erickson designed what looks to him like a scientific study:
The difference between people who believe in the 2nd coming of Jesus and those who believe in global warming is that Jesus will return.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) January 2, 2014Rush Limbaugh, of course, just thinks liberals are making it all up:
RUSH LIMBAUGH: The media creating 'Polar Vortex' to try and blame 'cold' on global warming https://t.co/1Hw8eCmlK2
— The Right Scoop (@TheRightScoop) January 6, 2014Conservative radio host Bryan Fischer has issued a series of "catastrophic global warming alerts":
Catastrophic global warming alert: all schools in Chicago closed today. Wind chill of -45. https://t.co/kiFyV7T8OW
— Bryan Fischer (@BryanJFischer) January 6, 2014Catastrophic global warming alert: so cold in Canada, getting "frost quakes." Sound like gunfire. https://t.co/z5bj5mVXDk
— Bryan Fischer (@BryanJFischer) January 6, 2014But, of course, reason should win out in the end:
If you think snow disproves global warming, I'm going to assume you think jumping disproves gravity.
— Grand Old Parody (@GrandOldParody1) January 6, 2014Re: global warming and the cold weather
"Liberals keep telling me the Titanic is sinking but my side of the ship is 500 feet in the air."
— justine (@nerdyjewishgirl) January 4, 2014Some liberals are, however, incapable of responding to rightwing stupidity on the subject anymore:
I’m fed up with answering about warming & all that cold+ snowstorm RT @ClimateDesk #Newsflash: Weather isn't climate https://t.co/AatepalUla
— Sergio Abranches (@abranches) January 6, 2014[Image via AFP]
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