Cut-and-paste writing

Hemingway had it easy. Writing books in the 1920s involved little more than pen and ink. The period’s most advanced tool was a Remington typewriter. No such luck for the modern author. Yes, we have access to a wealth of information unthinkable a few decades ago. But we confront a problem unknown in Hemingway’s day: the proliferation of software designed to help to organise our thoughts before sitting down to write.

Because my books weave together multiple disciplines—one was even subtitled “the connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software”—and in part because I write about technology, people often ask me how I write. As it happens, I have developed an idiosyncratic writing system. My basic tools, like word processors, have varied. (I swore off Word after one book, and used another programme for the next two before returning sheepishly to Microsoft.) But the one constant is a truly ingenious piece of software, called Devonthink.

Devonthink is a database programme into which you can copy anything from PDFs to snippets of text, web pages and images. There are dozens of other similar programmes, among them Evernote, Nota Bene, and even a Microsoft product called OneNote. But Devonthink is set apart by an elegant semantic algorithm: a mathematical formula that detects relationships between different bits of text. The programme can take your words, or anyone else’s, and suggest related passages from its database.

Over time I have made Devonthink a central part of my book writing process. The first crucial stage is a disorganised capture of information, where I grab paragraphs from web pages, digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text. This goes on for months; I read widely, in an unplanned and exploratory way, increasingly online, thanks to Google Books and other sources. Each snippet I drop into Devonthink, with only a brief citation. By the time I’m done, I have somewhere near a thousand separate snippets of text on my computer.

When it is time to actually write the book, I have a pretty clear sense of the chapters and structure. For instance, with my last book—The Ghost Map, which tells the story of London’s 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak—I wrote each chapter so that it both would convey the events of a single day, but also address one of the book’s major themes. Once the sequence is mapped out, I return to Devonthink, make a folder for each chapter, and read through every little snippet from my year of research. As I read I assign each snippet to a folder. Some go in multiple folders; most don’t make it into any at all.

Why use software, rather than just keeping notes? In part because Devonthink lets you take a folder—say for chapter two—and turn it instantly into a single document. Now I launch myself into the writing process by grabbing a folder and exporting it. Instead of a terrifying blank page, I begin with pages of quotes from letters, sources and papers.

The software also acts as a kind of connection machine, helping to supplement your own memory. The results have a certain chaotic brilliance. In my last book, for instance, while researching Joseph Priestley’s experiments with oxygen, Devonthink reminded me of a wonderful passage from Lynn Margulis’s book, Microcosmos, which talked about the way excess oxygen, created by early photosynthesis, became one of the earth’s first pollution crises. I had read the passage years before, but forgotten it entirely. The programme remade the link, and opened up an line of inquiry that ultimately resulted in an entirely new chapter.

I imagine some may consider this cheating: reducing the art of writing to an elaborate game of cut-and-paste. But authors have long written quotations on index cards. My system simply makes it easier to move virtual index cards around. The old techniques of pinning cards on a cork bulletin board, or shuffling them around on your desk, is just a crude way of getting the kind of elegant serendipitous thinking that such software allows.

Perhaps the most important benefit of my system, however, is that it’s a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I used to lose weeks, stalling before each new chapter because it was an empty sea of nothingness. Now, each starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

A New Kindle While Journalism Burns

The blogs already say the new Kindle will still be an oyster white, with an easy-on-the-eye gray screen slightly smaller than a mass-market paperback. The blog Boy Genius Report last week had purported pictures of the new device. Unlike the first Kindle, the supposed new model has rounded corners and a unified keyboard, instead of the slashed edge and broken layout of the first model. The screen still has no backlighting. The “Previous Page” and “Next Page” buttons are smaller and less intrusive, to prevent accidents. A couple of other buttons and the headphone jack have been moved around, and commands that used to be inside the software, like connection to the menu, appear to have buttons on the machine.

The big question is whether Amazon will also offer a Kindle-like store for Apple’s (nasdaq: AAPL – news – people ) iPhone and other mobile devices. It would be a smart move–why not be on every possible outlet?–and necessary. There are already readers for smart phones that access books in the public domain. Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people ) has said it will offer the 1.5 million library volumes it has scanned in a mobile formas suitable for both the iPhone and its own open-source Android operating system.

Still, Amazon wants to sell hardware, as does Sony (nyse: SNE – news – people ), which offers its own electronic reader. Amazon fans may be disappointed that there is not more seemingly new to the new reader. I like the Kindle, however, and do not think the company needs to change too much in the core experience.

I own about 2,500 old-style books, and my wife works in the restoration of antique volumes, so I was prepared to hate electronic reading. The Kindle offers a way to download and carry a lot of books (Amazon claims 200, with an expansion card in the current model that allows for more) with next to no weight. More important, reading on the Kindle is very pleasurable. Choosing one’s own print size and losing the paper shuffling for a low-intrusion click, time’s passage more easily gives way to a good book than it does with the pulp-paper form.

The shopping convenience offered by the Kindle is fun and addictive. The device wirelessly connects to the Amazon store at no charge to the customer. After the initial authentication, ordering and downloading a volume into the Kindle takes about a minute. Amazon claims it has over 230,000 titles available. I am suspicious: On my more obscure searches, about 10% of the volumes listed for sale were not actually available. While fans of State Building and International Intervention in Bosnia are admittedly few, if you say you have it, you should have it.

Kindle books are cheaper, too. The current Kindle does carry a too-high $359 price tag–the new one may be a little cheaper–but that should be weighed against a lower price for content. Current books like Richard Price’s Lush Life run about $9.99, vs. the conventional book’s $26 at full retail or $17.50 plus shipping from Amazon. Older titles, such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, are $7.96. The real savings are the classics. For $4.99 per author, you can get the complete works of Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov, William Shakespeare and many others. Navigating through all of those titles isn’t easy but these are still early days, and it is an impressive value.

That kind of value, and the free books from Google, may hurt book publishers’ bottom lines if they catch on. So-called older “backlist” titles, along with books in the public domain without copyright, like that student copy of Hamlet, are good earners for many publishers. There is not a lot of money in any one volume, but they add up well.

Similarly, if Kindle really does eliminate the business of packaging in paper, a lot of the value in being a book publisher goes away. Writers and editors could regroup in other forms, and Amazon could be a publisher itself. (People are already selling self-published, .pdf copies of works on Amazon.)

As much as this takes away from book publishing, it could be a boon to journalism and publishers of newspapers, magazines and even blogs.

Besides books, the Kindle wirelessly updates 31 newspapers, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, 21 magazines (yes, Forbes, too) and over 1,000 blogs. And while most of these publications are free on the Web, scratching out a living on advertising alone, the Kindle versions have subscription prices ranging from $6 to $15 a month for the newspapers and $1.25 to $3.50 a month for the magazines. Even popular blogs like Boing Boing run $2 a month.

Reading the papers on the Kindle is slower than it should be, with lots left to do on design and layout. So far the publishers seem to be moving Web copy directly to the Kindle rather than designing content for this as a unique device. I tried to go to The New York Times’ op-ed page, and after an initial blank screen received a full-screen picture of David Brooks. Eeek. Satirical blog The Onion jumps straight into stories, with no organization.

On a per-reader revenue basis, though, the charges are almost certainly more than anybody makes off an ad-supported Web site. New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller recently published a thoughtful take on how unworkable the current economics have become. His solutions included micropayments, not-for-profit publishing and devices like Kindle.

For anyone who loves journalism, here’s hoping.

Is There Life After Newspapers?

Thousands upon thousands of newspaper journalists have lost their jobs in recent years in endless rounds of layoffs and buyouts. What happens in the next act?

Erica Smith has a job as a graphics designer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. At least for now. There are few journalists in America who know as well as Smith how tenuous a steady newspaper job is these days. For the last year and a half, she has spent 10 or 12 hours a week at an old oak table in her sixth-floor loft with her Mac laptop, a bottle of Pepsi and her cat, tallying the fallen: 18 more jobs cut at the Tallahassee Democrat, 15 at the Desert Sun , 13 at the Jackson Sun. And the list goes on and on. Eight at the Visalia Times-Delta, 12 at the Statesman Journal , 125 at the Virginian-Pilot, 60 at the Asheville Citizen-Times.

Smith tallied 15,554 newspaper job cuts for 2008, and she was still updating in January. Her research is artfully rendered on a Web page called “paper cuts” and appears to be the only such comprehensive list.

“I started out because I was curious about the number of cuts. Now it’s because I have too many friends who’ve been laid off,” says Smith, 32, who got into the newspaper business right after graduating from Northwest Missouri State University.

Her tally, which she builds from news releases, wire reports, blogs and tips from colleagues, includes all newspaper jobs, not just those in the newsroom. But she estimates half of those 15,000 cuts were journalists. And that means the newsroom population of American papers shrank by about 15 percent last year, down from 52,000 at the start of the year. That’s three times larger than the single greatest annual newsroom employment decrease since 1978, when the American Society of Newspaper Editors began making estimates of the editorial workforce.

But it’s worse than that. Smith cautions that her count actually understates the total because many newspapers don’t announce layoffs. What’s more, her total does not include jobs lost through attrition.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ count for all newspaper jobs – from reporter to delivery truck driver – shows the payroll shrinking from 336,000 at the start of the year to 313,600 through October, a drop of 22,400 positions.

Smith, a cheerful woman who laughs easily, finds this all a bit depressing. “I can only update so many at a time without wanting to jump off the ninth floor of the building I live in,” she says, with not a trace of a laugh. The 2,000 layoffs that Gannett announced during the holiday season did nothing to improve her mood and kept her swamped for a week.

All of which raises a question: What happens to all of those laid-off and bought-out journalists? Is there life after newspapers? To find out, I posted a questionnaire about the fate of those who have lost their newspaper jobs.

A word of caution here: This was not a scientific poll, because there is no comprehensive list of those who’ve been laid off from which to draw a random sample. Instead, AJR posted a link to the questionnaire on its homepage. I advertised on Journalismjobs.com and posted word on every online venue I could find aimed at journalists, including Jim Romenesko’s popular Web site.

In the end, 595 people who say they left newspaper editorial jobs in the last decade under circumstances that were not totally voluntary filled out the questionnaire. Since this wasn’t a random sample but rather a self-selected group, there’s no way to know whether this group accurately represents the entire universe of people who have been forced out of news-papering. But it offers some interesting insights.

Many of the respondents have found new jobs. It’s too early to tell about those who lost their jobs within the past year, but for those who did so between 1999 and 2007:

• Just under 36 percent said they found a new job in less than three months. Add those who say they freelance full time, and the total jumps to 53 percent.

• Less than 10 percent say it took them longer than a year.

• Only a handful – 6 percent – found other newspaper jobs. The rest are doing everything from public relations to teaching to driving a bus and clerking in a liquor store.

While they’ve found work, many of the people with new jobs are making less money. The midpoint salary range for their old jobs was $50,000 to $59,000. Those who listed salaries for their new jobs were a full salary band lower – $40,000 to $49,000.

Of the people who volunteered their old newspaper salary, only 2 percent made less than $20,000 a year. Of the people who gave me their new salaries, that number shot up to 17 percent. The age of those at the bottom of the salary scale has changed surprisingly as well. The median age of those who made less than $20,000 at their old newspaper job was 24. The median age of those now making less than $20,000 is 48.

Here’s another surprise: While the overwhelming majority – 85 percent – say they miss working at a paper, they are often happier in their new jobs. Sixty-two percent tell us they had been satisfied in their old newspaper jobs; 78 percent report being satisfied in their new jobs. (The bus driver and liquor store clerk are not finding much job satisfaction, however.)

So it’s safe to say there is life after newspapers. But it’s not always the life the journalists had expected.

Take, for instance, Theresa Conroy.

Conroy, 46, wanted to be a reporter from the get-go. “At 12 years old I can remember saying to my mother that I wanted to be a newspaper reporter,” she says. “I was nosy, and I always wanted to know everything first.”

Conroy estimates that 90 percent of the journalists of her generation felt the same way she did about the field: “I don’t think I ever considered anything else.”

For the last five years of her career, Conroy covered cops and criminal courts for the Philadelphia Daily News, inevitably described as a scrappy tabloid living in the shadow of its larger sibling, the Inquirer. In all, she worked 12 years at the Daily News. A former Knight Ridder paper, the Daily News, along with the Inquirer, was purchased by a group of local investors in 2006.

Conroy says her stint at the paper was great fun – the colorful characters, the scoops, the deadline pressure, the colleagues. But toward the end, with a shrinking staff and a shrinking paper, “most of the time we felt beaten down,” she says.

“I was profoundly heartbroken by journalism,” she says. “It became less and less, and I started to love it less and less.”

To deal with the stress in her life and to help her quit smoking, Conroy took up yoga. She became a part-time yoga instructor, shaking the “stink off” from her grim day job by teaching clients how to relax.

In January 2007, Conroy volunteered to be laid off; she took the 31 weeks of pay and walked away. For the past nine months she’s had her own yoga studio in Philadelphia’s Roxborough section called Yoga on the Ridge, and she’s “doing pretty well.” She says the satisfaction she got from breaking a big story isn’t nearly as great as the satisfaction she gets now helping an elderly patient with Parkinson’s disease do something simple, like stand up.

But, she adds, “I can’t quite shake the crime reporter persona. I may be the only yoga teacher who says ‘fuck’ in class.”

As for journalism, she says, “I have to say, overwhelmingly and surprisingly, I don’t miss it… I’m very happy at what I’m doing.”

But for every Conroy, who doesn’t miss it and has found meaningful work, there is a Joseph Demma. Demma, 65, is purely old school in the tough-talking, hard-living New York tradition.

“I first wanted to be a reporter in high school,” he says. “I watched a TV show called ‘Night Beat.’ There was a reporter who’d sit over his typewriter with a fedora hat and a cigarette in his mouth, and he’d go around helping people by writing about them.”

Demma started as a copy boy at Newsday in 1965. He had a good run. He ended up working on the investigative team run by the legendary Bob Greene, who gave the young Demma this advice as he went on his first out-of-town trip for Newsday: “You’re going to be judged by how much money you spend.” It was the good old days. Greene wasn’t telling Demma to scrimp.

As an investigative reporter and later editor, he had a hand in three Pulitzer Prize-winning projects. But hard living caught up with him, and in 1998 he left Newsday and went to Reno, Nevada, which is not at the top of everyone’s list of places to go to straighten out your life. But he did. In Reno he taught at the University of Nevada and did freelance reporting and investigating. After stints in California at papers in Modesto and Sacramento, he moved to Florida to be near his elderly mother. In 2004 he took over as investigative editor of the Tribune Co.-owned South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. “FEMA, Legacy of Waste,” a series he oversaw, was a Pulitzer finalist in 2006.

Then on July 18, 2008, the day before he was to start vacation, Demma was laid off. Seven weeks’ pay, health insurance until October, and that was it. He’s been without full-time work ever since.

“It’s tough to get a job when you’re 65,” he says. “And there are fewer and fewer jobs out there.”

When he’s not riding his silver Yamaha V-Star Silverado motorcycle, he does some part-time investigative work for lawyers. But he’d really like to get some newspaper work; three days a week on a copy desk would be fine. Otherwise, he says, “I may have to become a greeter at Wal-Mart.”

But he has no desire to go back to newspapering full time. “If you were to ask me to go back into that pit again, I’d say, ‘No thanks,’” he says. “I thank God I’m not 40 years old with two kids in high school that I have to put through college.”

On the brighter side, a year ago his heart was in such rotten shape doctors had to put in a stent. Now, he says, “My health has never been better. My blood pressure is down 25 points. I exercise.”

Generally, journalists Demma’s age have a harder time finding work than their younger colleagues. For those laid off between 1999 and 2007 who responded to the questionnaire, journalists who needed more than a year to find a job averaged 51 years old. Those who found work in less than three months averaged 46.

But try telling that to Chris Jackson.

Jackson, 30, graduated in 2000 from the University of Arizona as a journalism major. After a stint at the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, he took a job at the Daily Breeze in Torrance, California. Jackson remembers that February 28, 2008, was an especially busy day, so he was surprised to be called to the paper’s human resources office. There he found his editor and the head of HR for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, which includes the Daily Breeze.

“‘We’re sorry,’ they told me,” Jackson recalls. He was one of six let go that day, the Leap Year Six, they call themselves. He was given four weeks’ pay and health insurance for three months. Jackson went back to work and finished his shift.

When he didn’t find work right away, Jackson had to move back in with his parents in Albuquerque. He has applied for sports information jobs at several universities. One person he interviewed with told him, “Frankly, I don’t think newspaper people have the skills to do what we do.”

Jackson has applied to be a substitute teacher while he figures out “what I want to do.”

Another young casualty of the collapse of the American newspaper business is A. Dominic Efferson, 29, a 2007 graduate of Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. He majored in visual journalism, “the journalism of the future,” Efferson says.

In January 2008, he got a job at California’s Eureka Reporter, an upstart daily in a town that already had a daily. For a time, the town of about 26,000 was on the short list of places with two daily newspapers. But it wasn’t to last. In November, the paper closed, throwing Efferson and 20 other journalists out of work.

“It had its ups and downs, but I totally loved it,” Efferson says. But now he’s “kicking the idea around whether I need to be in a newsroom right now. I’ve been kicking the idea around of joining the Peace Corps.

“I guess,” he concludes, “it was the wrong time to get into the newspaper industry.”

Sometimes companies that lay people off provide the services of an outplacement firm to help the newly jobless find new work. John Challenger is chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the oldest outplacement company in the country.

“Everyone hopes there’s an agent out there who will find a job for them,” Challenger says. “One of the first key hurdles to get over is there is no agent who’ll find them a job. They have to find it themselves… The world doesn’t call you, you’ve got to call it.”

Not surprisingly, Challenger points journalists toward jobs that require strong writing skills. “Journalists are good at writing,” he says. “That might mean writing books, it might mean writing for company publications of one kind or another, it might be communications more broadly – marketing communications.” He also thinks journalists are “generally more intellectual” than most people. That’s on the plus side. The downside Challenger sees in journalists is “a lot of time journalists are more internally focused.” He tells clients to “connect with lots and lots of your brethren, because the best way to find a new position is to follow your compatriots to their places.” And get out in the community. “Go to lunches,” he says.

Challenger advises out-of-work newspaper people to “get a fast start. Don’t think about it too long. A lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about what they want to do next instead of getting started. They’re waiting for an epiphany about what to do next.”

And he says he tells journalists weighing a new career to think hard about that. “I want him or her to think whether he really was sick and tired of journalism,” he says. “If they get into a new field, they’re competing against 22-year-olds.”

But when they do change fields, some find it a good thing. “Sometimes you’ve been wishing to do something new for a long time, and the status quo is hard to break out of,” he says. “It can be a release, liberation.”

In the survey I asked the former newspaper staffers if being laid off was an opportunity they’d been looking for. About 40 percent said that wasn’t true at all, but for the rest, it was either absolutely true or had at least some ring of truth.

For 18 years, Joe Grimm was the recruiter for the Detroit Free Press . Talk about a job with a limited future these days. Grimm, 54, accepted a buyout last July and left the paper the following month. With his two boys grown, Grimm says, “I had the luxury of making less money.”

Grimm says journalists must “become much better entrepreneurs.”

As he has.

Grimm supports himself working as a visiting editor in residence at Michigan State University; editing at a Web site for Native Americans ( reznetnews.org); editing teaching guides for the Wall Street Journal classroom edition; and writing the “Ask the Recruiter” column on the Poynter site. He put together a collection of those columns in a self-published book.

His advice to people who still have newspaper jobs: “I would use my working hours to prepare myself” for the uncertain future that lies ahead. And, he suggests, devote nights and weekends to learning new skills – database management, say, or PhotoShop.

Like Challenger, he sees writing as one of the strengths journalists bring to their next life. But he also says they’re good at “analyzing and synthesizing and making pretty quick decisions about what can and should be done.” He says he knows former journalists who now work for foundations to help establish whether their money is being well spent.

But at some point, Grimm says, you have to have a pretty serious conversation with yourself. “What is it you like to do? What are you best at?” One top editor he knows “finally did something really different. He bought a franchise for an after-school golf program. He really loved golf.”

Sam Amico wasn’t forced out of his newspaper job at Ohio’s Sandusky Register. He decided on his own that it was time to make a move. “In February, I turned 40, and I just didn’t feel I had a future in newspapers,” he says. “I saw what was going on around me, seeing friends taking buyouts or flat-out laid off.”

He did what advice columns are always telling people to do: Find your passion and turn it into a job. In his case, the passion was the National Basketball Association. In 2001, while working as sports editor at Wheeling, West Virginia’s Intelligencer, he started a weekly, electronic NBA newsletter that he e-mailed to friends and contacts in the NBA.

“I’d come home after work each Tuesday and write it, and it’d be in people’s mailboxes Wednesday,” he says. The newsletter caught on. People started posting it on their blogs and passing it around. By 2005, he says, “I had so much information I thought I could do a Web site and write every day.” He also had enough credibility with the NBA that he has credentials to cover all its games.

About that time he divorced and moved to Sandusky to stay near his four-year-old son. He voluntarily went from full time to part time at the Register and then quit altogether in May 2008 to see if he could make a living off his site, probasketballnews.com.

He says advertising income from the site, which he built himself, “is very inconsistent,” but he’s making a living he describes as “decent.” And though he loves what he’s doing, like a lot of former newspaper people he misses the newsroom, the “smell of the ink and the paper. I felt more comfortable there than in my daily life.”

Jay Westcott, 36, came to journalism a little later than most. He did a hitch in the Navy, then sold cars for awhile. But photography was his love. He worked his way through the Corcoran College of Art and Design by working on the picture desk at the Washington Post and later as a staff photographer at the Washington Examiner. He was “churning out” three photo assignments a day. “You’re not going to get the best work that way,” he says. “I felt like I was stalling in my career a bit.”

On January 25, 2007, he was laid off. He went to work almost immediately for the International Medical News Group but kept getting calls for freelance work. “You need to know what you like to do, what you want to do, and own it,” he says. For him that was editorial portraiture. In August 2007, he quit his job and started freelancing full time.

“Sometimes it’s stressful, waiting for the checks to come in,” he says, echoing the lament of freelancers everywhere. But he’s getting a steady stream of assignments. He shoots an average of six days a month for Washingtonian magazine. In July, he had 22 shooting days altogether.

“For the most part I’m much happier,” he says. “Honestly, looking back, [getting laid off] was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Joanne Cleaver, 50, spent the first 23 years of her career freelancing as a business writer in Chicago. During that time she did research for Working Woman magazine on the top 25 companies for women executives. But she felt she needed to work as an editor at a newspaper. In 2004, she and her family moved to Milwaukee, where she became a deputy business editor of the Journal Sentinel.

When she accepted a buyout, leaving the paper in August 2008, she says, “I was really well positioned… I never let go of my freelancing.” Her advice to others still working at papers is a variation on Grimm’s: “Trade on the position and title while you have it.”

While Cleaver, Grimm, Amico and Westcott are all still in journalism after leaving newspapers, Patrick O’Driscoll and Mike Peluso took another popular escape route. They went into media relations. Both are happier men for it, and not because they’re making a pile of money. They were both better paid in their newspaper jobs.

O’Driscoll, 56, had the kind of career young journalists dream about. After graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno in 1975, he went to work for Gannett’s Reno Evening Gazette and Nevada State Journal. In 1983, Gannett was plucking reporters from its smaller papers across the country to staff its high-profile start-up, USA Today. O’Driscoll was one of them. “It was a pretty good gig,” he recalls. “Quite a lot of travel.”

The six-month temporary assignment at USA Today lasted six years, but O’Driscoll missed the West and the mountains. In 1989, he became the roaming Western regional reporter for the Denver Post. “They gave me $500 more a year and a company car,” he says.

Eight years later he was back with USA Today, opening the paper’s Denver bureau. He covered the Columbine school shooting, the JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation, the Kobe Bryant saga, the Salt Lake City Olympics, Hurricane Katrina.

But about five years ago, O’Driscoll felt the paper’s “philosophy and story focus” at the time didn’t leave him the opportunity “to tell the stories I wanted to tell.” On December 21, 2007, he took a buyout that included 48 weeks’ pay. Days before, he had covered shootings at two Colorado churches that left five people dead.

“That was the last media herd thing I had to cover,” he says, remembering the 12-degree weather as he stood outside waiting for a press conference. “All of that told me, ‘Yeah, another reason I’m not going to miss this job.’ “

In April 2008, four months after taking the USA Today buyout, he went to work as a public affairs specialist for the Intermountain Regional Headquarters of the National Park Service in Denver. “They were looking for a veteran journalist who could write and was adaptable,” he says. In his new job he handles media relations and writes news releases and the employee newsletter as well as speeches.

“I thought I would have a period of mourning having left the newspaper business,” he says. “I didn’t.” He adds, “There’s something to be said for dialing it back. It’s not as all-consuming as newspapering.”

O’Driscoll says he has learned this overarching lesson: “Second and third acts can start in your mid-50s.”

Peluso, 59, started his second or third act in 2002 when he was laid off by the online division of the St. Paul Pioneer Press , then owned by now-defunct Knight Ridder, where he’d worked in a variety of editing jobs since 1980, including, at one point, news editor. “That was the toughest job I ever had,” he says. “Twelve hours a day without even a coffee break. Any meal I ate, I ate at my desk. It was brutal.”

He got almost a year’s severance pay and within a month was working as a writer and editor at the University of Minnesota Foundation, where he’s now director of marketing analytics and technology. “It’s a terrific place to work, and it’s very stable,” he says.

“I miss the newsroom that I left,” Peluso adds. “I don’t miss what I’m certain it became.” He describes newspapers today as “continually reining in ambitions.”

At newspapers today, “there’s no other way to feel other than beat down, and I’m glad I’m not there to be beat down,” he says. “My blood pressure is at least 20 points better than when I was in the newsroom. That’s no lie,” he says, adding, “Getting laid off six years ago was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“We were there at the top, the best time to be in it,” he says. “The ’80s were a blast, the ’90s were a bit more stressful, but the last few years – who’d want to be there?”

Robert Hodierne (robert@hodierne.com) is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Richmond. He worked for 35 years at newspapers, wire services, radio and television news operations and on the Internet.

How the Web is opening up our democracy

A See-Through Society

It may be a while before the people who run the U.S. House of Representatives’ Web service forget the week of September 29, 2008. That’s when the enormous public interest in the financial bailout legislation, coupled with unprecedented numbers of e-mails to House members, effectively crashed www.house.gov. On Tuesday of that week, a day after the House voted down the first version of the bailout bill, House administrators had to limit the number of incoming e-mails processed by the site’s “Write Your Representative” function. Demand for the text of the legislation was so intense that third-party sites that track Congress were also swamped. GovTrack.us, a private site that produces a user-friendly guide to congressional legislation, had to shut down. Its owner, Josh Tauberer, posted a message reading, “So many people are searching for the economic relief bill that GovTrack can’t handle it. Take a break and come back later when the world cools off.”
Once people did get their eyes on the bill’s text, they tore into it with zeal. Nearly a thousand comments were posted between September 22 and October 5 on PublicMarkup.org, a site that enables the public to examine and debate the text of proposed legislation set up by the Sunlight Foundation, an advocacy group for government transparency (full disclosure: I am a senior technology adviser to Sunlight). Meanwhile, thousands of bloggers zeroed in on the many earmarks in the bill, such as the infamous reduction in taxes for wooden-arrow manufacturers. Others focused on members who voted for the bill, analyzing their campaign contributors and arguing that Wall Street donations influenced their vote.
The explosion of public engagement online around the bailout bill signals something profound: the beginning of a new age of political transparency. As more people go online to find, create, and share vital political information with one another; as the cost of creating, combining, storing, and sharing information drops toward zero; and as the tools for analyzing data and connecting people become more powerful and easier to use, politics and governance alike are inexorably becoming more open.
We are heading toward a world in which one-click universal disclosure, real-time reporting by both professionals and amateurs, dazzling data visualizations that tell compelling new stories, and the people’s ability to watch their government from below (what the French call sousveillance) are becoming commonplace. Despite the detour of the Bush years, citizens will have more opportunity at all levels of government to take an active part in understanding and participating in the democratic decisions that affect their lives.
Log On, Speak Out
The low-cost, high-speed, always-on Internet is changing the ecology of how people consume and create political information. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that roughly 75 percent of all American adults, or about 168 million people, go online or use e-mail at least occasionally. A digital divide still haunts the United States, but among Americans aged eighteen to forty-nine, that online proportion is closer to 90 percent. Television remains by far the dominant political information source, but in October 2008, a third of Americans said their main provider of political information was the Internet—more than triple the number from four years earlier, according to another Pew study. Nearly half of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds said the Internet was their main source of political info.
Meanwhile, we’re poised for a revolution in participation, not just in consumption, thanks to the Web. People talk, share, and talk back online. According to yet another study by Pew, this one in December 2007, one in five U.S. adults who use the Internet reported sharing something online that they created themselves; one in three say they’ve posted a comment or rated something online.
People are eager for access to information, and public officials who try to stand in the way will discover that the Internet responds to information suppression by routing around the problem. Consider the story of a site you’ve never seen, ChicagoWorksForYou.com. In June 2005, a team of Web developers working for the city of Chicago began developing a site that would take the fifty-five different kinds of service requests that flow into the city’s 311 database—items like pothole repairs, tree-trimming, garbage-can placement, building permits, and restaurant inspections—and enable users to search by address and “map what’s happening in your neighborhood.” The idea was to showcase city services at the local level.
ChicagoWorks was finished in January 2006, with the support of Mayor Richard Daley’s office. But it also needed to be reviewed by the city’s aldermen and, according to a source who worked on the project, “they were very impressed with its functionality, but they were shocked at the possibility that it would go public.” Elections were coming up, and even if the site showed 90 percent of potholes being filled within thirty days, the powers-that-be didn’t want the public to know about the last 10 percent. ChicagoWorksForYou.com was shelved.
But the idea of a site that brings together information about city services in Chicago is alive and kicking. If you go to EveryBlock.com, launched in January 2008, and click on the Chicago link, you can drill down to any ward, neighborhood, or block and discover everything from the latest restaurant-inspection reports and building permits to recent crime reports and street closures. It’s all on a Google Map, and if you want to subscribe to updates about a particular location and type of report, the site kicks out custom RSS feeds. Says Daniel O’Neil, one of EveryBlock’s data mavens, “Crime and restaurant inspections are our hottest topics: Will I be killed today and will I vomit today?”
EveryBlock exists thanks to a generous grant from the Knight News Challenge, but its work, which covers eleven cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., offers a glimpse of the future of ubiquitous and hyperlocal information. EveryBlock’s team collects most of its data by scraping public sites and spreadsheets and turning it into understandable information that can be easily displayed and manipulated online.
It may not be long before residents of the cities covered by EveryBlock decide to contribute their own user-generated data to flesh out the picture that city officials might prefer to hide. EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty tells me that his team is figuring out ways for users to connect directly to each other through the site. Forums that allowed people to congregate online by neighborhood or interest would enable EveryBlock users to become their cities’ watchdogs. If city agencies still won’t say how many potholes are left unfilled after thirty days, people could share and track that information themselves.
Such a joint effort is no stretch to young people who have grown up online. Consider just a couple of examples: since 1999, RateMyTeachers.com and RateMyProfessors.com have collected more than sixteen million user-generated ratings on more than two million teachers and professors. The two sites get anywhere from half a million to a million unique visitors a month. Yelp.com, a user-generated review service, says its members have written more than four million local reviews since its founding in 2004. As the younger generation settles down and starts raising families, there’s every reason to expect that its members will carry these habits of networking and sharing information into tracking more serious quality-of-life issues, as well as politics.

What We Learned In the Meltdown

Financial journalists saw some trees but not the forest. Now what? One day in June 2005, my colleague Nell Henderson and I hiked over to the Bond Market Association to get ourselves educated on collateralized debt obligations and related products. I was editing The Washington Post’s Wall Street coverage, and Nell was covering the Federal Reserve, and we both had a feeling this might be a corner of the market in which troubles could occur. A couple of hours later our heads were spinning, but at least we felt like we had a better sense of how some of these increasingly complicated financial instruments that were flooding the markets worked.
What we didn’t have was a story to write, or so we thought. What would we have said? That there is a rapidly growing, unregulated market in these things that might turn out to be pretty risky? We had been assured repeatedly all afternoon that the people who dealt in these products were constantly on guard, looking for risks and figuring out how to defuse them. But more than that, we both knew that there isn’t much appetite for speculative stories about complicated issues in most newsrooms. Once the crisis occurs, once you can quote government officials referring to credit-derivative obligations and credit-default swaps as “toxic assets,” it gets easier.
Still, I wish I had gone further and considered other options. I wish I had walked downstairs to where the Real Estate section was segregated from the rest of the business staff to find out more about the connection between the subprime loans they were writing about and these new types of securities. I wish I had learned back then, instead of in the course of writing this story, that the market for asset-backed securities, loans secured by mortgages or other debt, had grown by 45 percent the previous year, mostly because of loans backed by housing, and had surpassed the market for corporate debt for the first time in history. And I wish I had suggested a meeting of the real-estate staff, the reporters who covered the economy, and those who covered regulatory agencies, markets, and banks to explore the connections.

Blogosphere and money

Top bloggers have become more influential

than many print journalism specialists.

But how many make the web pay?

In the United States, political bloggers have taken on an importance that would be unthinkable in the UK. Several have a profile comparable with the leading print-media and broadcast commentators. The Drudge Report is the media phenomenon of our age. The Huffington Post and Daily Kos are as familiar to the political establishment as the omnipresent ex-ABC White House correspondent Sam Donaldson and Peggy Noonan, former Ronald Reagan speechwriter turned commentator. U.S. bloggers are prominent in all U.S. election coverage. Hundreds of political bloggers make real money from their activities and devote their entire working day to their online activity.

In Britain it’s very different. The development of the UK political blogosphere, while much heralded in almost-weekly newspaper features, is way behind that of the United States. Few bloggers have any sort of media profile and even fewer make any money at all out of their online activities. There are only four independent UK political blogs with what one could describe as a mass readership – and by that I mean an audience of at least 50,000 unique users each month. Guido Fawkes, the anarcho-libertarian blogger who specialises in political gossip and scandal, boasts a readership of more than 100,000. conservativehome.com, edited by Tim Montgomerie, recently joined by The Daily Telegraph’s Jonathan Isaby, and my own blog, Iain Dale’s Diary, both boast monthly audiences of more than 70,000. PoliticalBetting.com attracts more than two million pageviews each month.

But there are others that are building an audience which any normal website would envy. Liberal Democrat Voice, the LibDem equivalent of conservativehome, is about to break through the 20,000 monthly-user barrier; Conservative technogeek Dizzy Thinks is up to 25,000; and the libertarian swear blog Devil’s Kitchen has an average monthly audience of 25,000. And there are plenty of others snapping at their heels, including Labour Home, John Redwood’s Diary, Liberal Conspiracy and Tim Worstall. When you consider that the New Statesman has a circulation of around 25,000 and The Spectator a little over 70,000, all these blogs can be considered influential to one degree or another.

Over the past 12 months, political blogs run by mainstream media (MSM) organisations have taken on a new importance. Virtually every newspaper or magazine has now ordered its team of political journalists to get in on the act. The Daily Telegraph has Three Line Whip; The Times, Red Box and Comment Central; The Guardian, Comment is Free; and even The Independent has finally caught up with its Open House blog. The Daily Mail’s Ben Brogan is considered to be the best individual political journalist-cum-blogger, while The Spectator’s Coffee House has become one of the most widely-read political blogs in the country. But they have all struggled to find as big an audience as the leading independent bloggers. Despite the marketing power of the Telegraph, its political blogs struggle to get half the audience of Guido Fawkes, while Ben Brogan and Sky News political editor Adam Boulton’s Boulton & Co, although widely read in the Westminster village, attract barely a fifth of the audience of conservativehome or Iain Dale’s Diary.

Few bloggers thought of earning money

The thing most of the independent blogs have in common is that they are owned, written and edited by individuals, most of whom blog as a sideline. In contrast to the situation in the United States, there isn’t a single UK-based political blogger who earns a living directly from blogging. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Few bloggers ever start blogging thinking they might earn money from the activity – or even wanting to. I certainly didn’t. I saw blogging as a platform for me to give my views on politics. It was attractive because I could do it when I wanted and write what I wanted with no media filter. I never thought of building a huge audience. It just kind of happened. Blogging wasn’t a substitute for anything.

Many in the MSM believe bloggers to be wannabe journalists, or even failed journalists. That may be true for a small minority, but the rest of us regard it as an insult. If I wanted to be a journalist, I would be. I didn’t set out on my blogging journey to do anything journalistic. I set out to write an online diary providing daily political comment. I never set out to be investigative or to break news. The fact that I do so from time to time is more by accident than design. I still regard my blog as a vehicle for personal political commentary. And I think I am typical of many of the many one-man-band bloggers.

Because his blog is funded by polling entrepreneur Stephan Shakespeare, conservativehome’s Tim Montgomerie is an exception, but Guido Fawkes, Devil’s Kitchen, Dizzy Thinks and PoliticalBetting.com are all run by enterprising individuals who have created niches. With the level of audience these blogs have reached one might assume there is an advertising pot of gold out there. In the future that might be the case, but it certainly hasn’t been found yet. Advertisers are wary of partisan political blogs, even if they have the kind of readership demographics most advertisers would die for. For example, 10 per cent of my readers earn more than £100,000. Blog readership is predominantly male, aged 25-50 and most likely will travel abroad and read quality newspapers.

MessageSpace, an online advertising agency,was set up three years ago to exploit the blog advertising market. While initially it found it difficult to persuade brand advertisers of the merits of advertising on blogs, slowly but surely a breakthrough is coming.More than 50 blogs are now earning money from the adverts placed by Message Space, ranging from £100 a year to several thousands. With the acquisition of several blue-chip advertising clients, MessageSpace now confidently predicts I will earn a low five-figure sum from my blog over the next 12 months – but that stil lwon’t be enough for me to give up the day job, even if I wanted to.

My blog traffic-levels are attractive to many. Twice now I have been approached by mainstream media organisations – they shall remain nameless – who wanted me to blog on their platforms. I could certainly see the advantages from their point of view, but what was in it for me? The money on offer was derisory and the loss of independence would have had an effect. At the moment I can blog what I like, whether it’s to do with politics, football or some personal idiosyncrasy. I doubt if an MSM blogging platform would welcome my musings about the death of my godmother.

The blog provides a public platform

But, for me, much of my other income is an indirect result of what I do on my blog. I certainly wouldn’t have a Daily Telegraph column if the editor hadn’t liked what he had seen on my blog. The same goes for Phil Hendren (of Dizzy Thinks), Tim Worstall, and Oliver Kamm at The Times. Would I be invited on to TV and radio so much if it were not for my blog? I doubt it. Similarly, the blog has given me a public profile that has enabled me to charge a decent fee for public speaking engagements. And there are other minor sources of income that a blog can provide, such as ads placed on the blog site by Google and Amazon commissions on sales of recommended books. For most bloggers this won’t earn much more than pin money, but for the high traffic blogs it can amount to several hundred pounds a month.

Blogging is almost a byword for specialisation. And with specialisation can come real influence. Richard North co-writes the EU Referendum blog, specialising in foreign policy, and the Defence of the Realm blog on defence issues. He now enjoys a status within the MoD far higher than most defence correspondents. Former Defence Secretary Des Browne irritated defence correspondence beyond belief when he told them: “This is Richard North – he writes the Defence of the Realm blog which has had more influence on MoD procurement policy then the rest of you put together.” North says he has never seen a group of journalists look more annoyed. But he says that far from earning money from his blog, the effort he puts into it means he is subsidising it. There are other specialist blogs that ought to be a magnet for advertising in their own spheres, yet advertisers have so far shied away from the likes of NHS Blog Doctor, Burning our Money and Inspector Gadget. Crime writer Martin Edwards says that he, too, earns money indirectly from his blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name?, but that’s mainly because it has improved his reputation: “Since I started blogging [every day] a year ago, my profile and sales have increased and I’ve won a major award for the first time. I don’t attribute this mainly to the blog, but I do think the blog creates increased interest and profile, and it must be helpful.” Liz Upton, who writes the Gastronomy Domine food blog, agrees. “I started my blog when I was working in educational publishing and loathing it,” she says. She intended that the blog should work as a portfolio for a kind of writing she wanted to do professionally and reckons it has served its purpose well. “I left my job and went freelance, and I now have some huge clients, including National Geographic and Penguin. There’s absolutely no way I could have got the exposure I needed to find work with them without the blog. Many of my clients have approached me directly after having read it, which is just as well, because I’m rubbish at networking in the old-fashioned way.”

Some bloggers have earned money directly from their blogging by obtaining book deals. Former Sunday Times journalist Judith O’Reilly won many plaudits for her blog Wife in the North, where she told the painful story of following her husband north and the changes it meant for their family. She reportedly earned a £70,000 advance for a book. Conservative PR guru Ellee Seymour has also signed a book deal that would never have happened without her blogging profile. Speechwriter Nick Thomas started a blog a year ago with three aims: acknowledge, advise and advertise. He says: “ [I wanted to] acknowledge the hospitality and appreciation from the audiences I speak to, advise other speakers by passing on presentation skills tips and, of course, advertise my services as a speaker, speechwriter/comedywriter and coach.” The plan has paid dividends and brought him work he would not have got without the blog.

Bloggers, me among them, grow incredibly frustrated when newspaper diary columns steal their original work and pass it off as their own. The Sun’s Whip column and the Mail’s Ephraim Hardcastle are the main culprits. On some days both columns are stuffed full of stories they have lifted (sometimes almost word for word) from the likes of Guido Fawkes. Had he or I sold them the stories directly we’d probably both be several thousand pounds richer each year. More fool us, some might say. The Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary is far more willing to credit where a story came from, and because of it gets far more tip-offs.

Earlier this year, the LabourHome blog was sold by Alex Hilton and Jag Singh to Mike Danson, the new co-owner of the New Statesman. They were paid more than £50,000 for it – an astonishing sum bearing in mind its lack of readers. But Danson invested because of its potential. Hilton and Singh were wise to cash in. However, they were only able to do so because the blog is not reliant on a single person for content. Guido Fawkes calculated that if LabourHome was worth £50,000, his own blog must be worth £1 million. Up to a point, Lord Fawkes. A blog like his or mine is worth anything only if its author comes as part of the package. We are our blogs. Blogs such as PoliticalBetting, conservativehome or Labourhome are group efforts and are therefore more suitable for web entrepreneurs to take over.

Slate.com recently revealed that a blog in theUnited States with 100,000 readers a month earns around $75,000 a year from it. A few earn more than $200,000. Bloggers on this side of the Atlantic can only dream of such rewards for their efforts. It has been suggested that some bloggers could charge a subscription for their work. Maybe, but it goes against all the (nonexistent) rules of blogging. It would shrink the audience and be very exclusive. Would I rather have 1,000 readers paying a few pounds a month to read my blog or 70,000 reading it free? Clearly the latter.

Slate.com tells of a blogger called Jason Kottke, who quit his job to blog full time. He asked his readers to support him, and they did. More than 1,450 of them coughed up nearly $40,000, but he abandoned the experiment within a year, worried that people wouldn’t contribute again. I have little doubt that if I decided to charge I would be able to raise a substantial one-off sum to keep me going, but could I do that every year? I’m not sure I would risk it just yet, but, although political blogging in the UK is three or four years behind the United States, it is flourishing. Readership is rising year on year – in my case by 50 per cent over the past 12 months. Newspapers and magazines would kill for that. Blogs here haven’t got the money-making ability of those in the U.S., nor their influence, or their profile. But in three or four years, they just might.

Web jungle, Web garden—you decide

Trimming the Hedges

It may seem like people have been gawking at the proliferation of online news sources for ages now, but it was not so long ago that readers had a much narrower field of options. The Democratic and Republican national conventions threw that fact into high relief at the end of last summer. The New York Times media critic David Carr catalogued the presence of online news outlets during the Democratic gathering: “Politico, which also puts out a newspaper, had 40 people in Denver. The Huffington Post had 20 people, Talking Points Memo had 9, Daily Kos had 10, Slate had 7 and Salon had 9. That list is far from comprehensive and does not begin to describe how thoroughly mediated this convention was.” And save for the latter two (which sent the fewest reporters) and TPM, all of those outlets just wrapped up either their first or second presidential campaign.

Add to this mix the seemingly endless variety of blogs, and it’s no wonder that many readers—even professional journalists—feel lost. What most misunderstand, though, is that the problem is not information overload, but rather access-to-information overload. Since well before the creation of the printing press, there has been more news available on a given day than any one person could follow, and more information than any one reporter could process. It’s just that today both reporter and reader have much greater access to the news and information, and as such, there is a greater need to employ filters and other tools to help us organize and manage the deluge.

Plenty of these devices already exist, but it takes some time to set them up and maintain them. Most are right under readers’ and journalists’ lcd-strained eyes, embedded in the program that provides all that access to the news in the first place: the Web browser. Bookmarks (or Favorites, for PC users) are one of software engineers’ simplest but greatest gifts to news hogs. The problem is that it’s so easy to bookmark pages that most people forget to organize them, much like photos in an album.

Who Checks the Spell-Checkers?

Microsoft Word’s dictionary is old and outdated. Here’s how to fix it

On April 30, 2007, with all the usual fanfare that accompanies a software update, Microsoft added Barack and Obama to Office’s dictionary. It was a fairly quick canonization for the Illinois senator. His surname had been on Microsoft’s candidate list for new words since Jan. 5 of that year, and his first name followed three days later, in the same recruiting class as Zune, Klum, and Friendster. Three months later, it was official—no longer would Microsoft suggest Boatman as a replacement for the future president’s last name.

Of course, by April 2007 Obama was already a figure of some renown. He’d announced his bid for the Democratic nomination in mid-January and had been an object of intense fascination since his July 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention. But escaping the shackles of Microsoft Word’s red corrugated line is no small feat, and the list of those who’ve made the cut can seem arbitrary: Why does it recognize the surnames of Matthew Broderick and Susan Sarandon but trip over DiCaprio and Blanchett? They’ve heard of Friendster, but not Facebook? Does Microsoft really want to start something with Mark Wahlberg? (Or, speaking of Entourage, with Jeremy Piven?)

There’s no reason why spell-check dictionaries need to be so behind the times. All the technology to build a relevant, timely spelling database already exists in search engines like Google and Microsoft’s own Live Search, which have a vast vocabulary of words and names and update their dictionaries in near real time. Microsoft Word may not have heard of Marky Mark, but a Live Search or a Google query for Mark Walberg includes results for the actor, who has an “h” in his last name.

For another example, take a reasonably new tech neologism like pharming. Neither Microsoft Word nor the Google Docs spell-checker, the latter of which is based on an open-source tool called GNU Aspell, have heard of the word. Live and Google recognize the term just fine, however, and can retrieve it as a correction for a basic misspelling like pharmung.

What’s behind this disparity? Word processors and search engines have different goals. The latter has to field queries as broad and varied as the Internet itself, so it needs a very large vocabulary in order to differentiate spelling mistakes from legitimate search terms. Word processors are much more conservative, limiting their lexicon to words that are definitely legitimate. This way, a program like Word can catch virtually every typo, even if it means misidentifying some proper names and newer words. In other words, search engines put breadth first and spelling accuracy second while word processors are the other way around. If you type in Monkees, Google will assume you’re searching for the band; Word will give you a red squiggly line, thinking you’ve screwed up the word monkeys.

Not surprisingly, search engines and word processors build their dictionaries differently. A search engine’s lexicon is typically put together using words gathered from Web pages or old search queries—a huge corpus of real-world data that constitutes a list of valid words and their frequency in the language. Word-processing lexicons are more heavily chaperoned, and the pace at which new terms enter the dictionary is much slower.

Microsoft is beginning to incorporate more natural-language detection into its Office products, though. Ten years ago, they kept candidate words on a single Excel sheet for review by a higher-up. Mike Calcagno, a member of Microsoft’s Natural Language Group, says the company now scans through trillions of words, including anonymized text from Hotmail messages, in the hunt for dictionary candidates. On top of this, they monitor words that people manually instruct Word to recognize. “It’s becoming rarer and rarer that anything that comes to us ad hoc isn’t already on our list” from Hotmail or user data, Calcagno says. According to a July 14, 2006, bug report, for example, the Natural Language Group harvested the following words that had appeared more than 10 times in Hotmail user dictionaries: Netflix, Radiohead, Lipitor, glucosamine, waitressing, taekwondo, and all-nighter.

Incorporating user data is a huge step in the right direction for Word, but the process is still sluggish compared with search engines. Google and Live Search generate dictionaries that approach real-time models of language. In a fascinating paper (PDF), two Microsoft researchers explain that a stream of previous search queries can be used to maintain an up-to-date lexicon capable of correcting a high percentage of mistakes, even when 10 or 15 percent of your searches have errors. This purely statistical approach is much timelier than any involving human editors and has far fewer biases. When it comes to fixing errors, the researchers write, “the actual language in which the web queries are expressed becomes less important than the query-log data.”

Google’s system relies heavily on word data gathered from the Web itself. As tech staff member Pandu Nayak explained to me recently, Google tries to determine proper spelling algorithmically. While Nayak was unable to look up exactly when Barack Obama entered the lexicon, he predicted that the president-elect was in there well prior to his 2004 convention speech, when even local attention would have produced a substantial online footprint. As soon as a word starts showing up on the Web with any appreciable frequency, it becomes a candidate for a spelling suggestion. Take a very obscure academic term like theothanatology—the study of the death of God—which returns all of 829 results as of this writing. Not only does Google recognize the word, it gets you there from a close misspelling like theotanatalegy. (Live Search is a little behind here. It returns 103 results but can’t correct a misspelling that’s even one letter off.)

Google’s process is wholly automated, which generates a natural set of challenges. The correct spelling of a word is usually more frequent than its incorrect permutations, but there are exceptions. Dalmation, for example, is such a common misspelling of Dalmatian that it can trip up the algorithms. The best search-engine spelling models look at the other words in the query for clues. A search for Sasha Baron Cohen automatically corrects to Sacha, since that spelling of the first name is heavily associated with the latter two. The best algorithms can identify a mistake even when each individual word is spelled correctly—a Google search for golf war returns some results for Gulf war as well.

What would happen if Google’s search technology was ported into a word processor? First, the spell-checker would recognize the bulk of any document’s proper nouns (no more squiggly red line under DiCaprio) as well as any new terms the kids are using these days (Urban Dictionary tells me, for example, that overchicked is an adjective used to describe a man who is significantly less attractive than his female companion. A word processor powered by search-engine spelling could handle overchicked just fine.)

I also suspect the search-engine model would do a better job at suggesting the right word when you really did make an error. Most word processors make suggestions using the concept of “edit distance”—basically the number of letters you have to change, add, delete, or switch to transform one word into another. Duck has an edit distance of one from luck, and trial and trail are also just one edit away. (For the nitty-gritty on this, see Google research director Peter Norvig’s paper on how to write a spell-check program.) While edit distance usually works pretty well for word processors, it can produce some funny suggestions, like Boatman for Obama. (The edit distance there is three; just switch the b and o, add a t, add an n.) Most search engines, by comparison, complement the edit-distance method with a huge amount of data on common mistakes. Given the complexity of the English language, this real-world information is a tremendous spell-checking boon.

The search-engine method does have drawbacks. People have faith that Microsoft Word won’t mislead them spellingwise. Perhaps because those red squigglies are so quietly reprimanding, we do anything we can to avoid them. In that last sentence, I originally wrote reprimatory, which is not a real word. Microsoft suggested respiratory. I appealed that verdict to Google, which returned this blog post in which someone uses the word in a comment, plus a bunch of Italian pages with reprimatori. So even though reprimatory isn’t a bona fide word, Google found it often enough that it didn’t return an error. Relying on Web users for your dictionary does have its perils.

Because it is guided by humans, the Word dictionary is full of words that Microsoft thinks you should be using—it’s “prescriptive” instead of “descriptive,” to use the lexicographer’s parlance. Microsoft will tolerate a few FCC violations in your copy, but damned if it will ever suggest one. Just watch what it does with “siht.”

While New Yorker critic Louis Menand has written movingly about Word’s hijacking of the writing process, there is something to be said for steering people toward basic literacy. If Microsoft Office’s core dictionary becomes a creation of the Web, we’ll be handing the keys to a bunch of people who often wield the language clumsily. This clumsiness may be the parent of linguistic evolution, but it’s going to make for some rocky spelling suggestions.

Some of these problems could be solved algorithmically, such that a minor word like reprimatory returns an error if it fails to meet a certain frequency in the index. At the very least, Microsoft could give Word a supplemental online dictionary, to ensure that its words are always up-to-date. (Google Docs, too, should take a few hints from the Google search engine.) Eventually, a spell-check based on Web data will be the way to go. Sure, we would see a few more naughty words and Dalmations in our Word documents, but the end product will be something that resembles the way people use language in the present day. Tally it up as one more victory for the pragmatists in the language wars.

The day the newspaper died.

The newspaper is dead. You can read all about it online, blog by blog, where the digital gloom over the death of an industry often veils, if thinly, a pallid glee. The Newspaper Death Watch, a Web site, even has a column titled “R.I.P.” Or, hold on, maybe the newspaper isn’t quite dead yet. At its funeral, wild-eyed mourners spy signs of life. The newspaper stirs!

The last time the American newspaper business got this gothic was 1765, just after the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto,” was published, in London, and, in an unrelated development, Parliament decided to levy on the colonies a new tax, requiring government-issued stamps on pages of printed paper—everything from indenture agreements to bills of credit to playing cards. The tax hit printers hard, at a time when printers were also the editors of newspapers, and sometimes their chief writers, too. The Stamp Act—the “fatal Black-Act,” one printer called it—was set to go into effect on November 1, 1765. Beginning that day, printers were to affix stamps to their pages and to pay tax collectors a halfpenny for every half sheet—amounting, ordinarily, to a penny for every copy of every issue of every newspaper—and a two-shilling tax on every advertisement. Printers insisted that they could not bear this cost. It would spell the death of the newspaper.

On October 10, 1765, an Annapolis printer changed his newspaper’s title to the Maryland Gazette, Expiring. Its motto: “In uncertain Hopes of a Resurrection to Life again.” Later that month, the printer of the Pennsylvania Journal replaced his newspaper’s masthead with a death’s-head and framed his front page with a thick black border in the shape of a gravestone. “Adieu, Adieu,” the Journal whispered. On October 31st, the New-Hampshire Gazette appeared with black mourning borders and, in a column on page 1, lamented its own demise: “I must Die!” The Connecticut Courant quoted the book of Samuel: “Tell it not in Gath! publish it not in Askalon!” The newspaper is dead!

Or, then as now, not quite dead yet. “Before I make my Exit,” the New-Hampshire Gazette told its readers, “I will recount over some of the many good Deeds I have done, and how useful I have been, and still may be, provided my Life should be spar’d; or I might hereafter revive again.” The list of deeds ran to three columns. Nothing good in the world had ever happened but that a printer set it in type. “Without this Art of communicating to the Public, how dull and melancholy must all the intelligent Part of Mankind appear?” But, besides the settling over the land of a pall of dullness and melancholy, what else happens when a newspaper dies? In one allegory published during the Stamp Act crisis, a tearful LIBERTY cries to her dying brother, GAZETTE, “Unless thou revivest quickly, I shall also perish with thee! In our Lives we were not divided; in our Deaths we shall not be separated!”

In the eighteenth century, the death of a newspaper signalled the death of liberty. What it signals now is harder to know, especially because there’s death, and then there’s death. If, one day, ink-and-print is dead and gone, newspapers will endure, wraiths of ether. The newspaper didn’t stay dead in the age of the American Revolution, either. Soon enough, it rose from its inky grave. Two months after that first Annapolis paper expired, a New York newspaper reported a sighting: “The APPARITION of the late Maryland Gazette, which is not Dead, but only Sleeping.”

That ghost story—the fate of the undead newspaper in Revolutionary America—bears telling. Maybe if we knew more about the founding hacks, we’d have a better idea of what we will have lost when the last newspaper rolls off the presses. If the newspaper, at least as a thing printed on paper and delivered to your door, has a doomsday, it may be coming soon. Not so soon as weeks or months, but not so far off as decades, either. The end, apparently, really is near. That makes this a good time to ask: what was the beginning about?

Newspapers date to the sixteenth century; they started as newsletters and news books, sometimes printed, sometimes copied by hand, and sent from one place to another, carrying word of trade and politics. The word “newspaper” didn’t enter the English language until the sixteen-sixties. Venetians sold news for a coin called a gazzetta. The Germans read Zeitungen; the French nouvelles; the English intelligencers. The London Gazette began in 1665. Its news was mostly old, foreign, and unreliable.

Because early newspapers tended to take aim at people in power, they were sometimes called “paper bullets.” Newspapers have long done battle with the church and the state while courting the market. This game can get dangerous. The first newspaper in the British American colonies, Publick Occurrences, printed in Boston in 1690, was shut down after just one issue for reporting, among other things, that the king of France had cuckolded his own son. Propping up power is, generally, a less dodgy proposition than defying it. The Boston News-Letter, “published by authority”—endorsed by ecclesiastics—lasted from 1704 till 1776. In 1719, two more Colonial papers began printing: the Boston Gazette and, out of Philadelphia, the American Weekly Mercury. (Nearly every early American newspaper was issued weekly; it took sixteen hours to set the type for a standard four-page paper.) But James Franklin’s New-England Courant, launched in 1721, in Boston, marks the real birth of the American newspaper. It was the first unlicensed paper in the colonies—published without authority—and, while it lasted, it was also, by far, the best. The Courant contained political essays, opinion, satire, and some word of goings on. Franklin was the first newspaperman in the world to report the results of a legislative vote count. The Boston News-Letter contained, besides the shipping news, tiresome government pronouncements, letters from Europe, and whatever smattering of local news was bland enough to pass the censor. Franklin had a different editorial policy: “I hereby invite all Men, who have Leisure, Inclination and Ability, to speak their Minds with Freedom, Sense and Moderation, and their Pieces shall be welcome to a Place in my Paper.”

Not long after Franklin started printing the Courant, he hired his little brother as an apprentice. Decades later, when an aging Benjamin Franklin wrote his autobiography, he painted his brother James as a brute, in order to make his own Hogarthian story, the apprentice’s progress, a metaphor for the colonists’ growing irritation with parliamentary rule. James’s “harsh and tyrannical Treatment,” Franklin wrote, had served as “a means of impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro’ my whole Life.” Franklin ran away. He might have titled this chapter of his autobiography “Wherein the Bridling Apprentice Pursues His Independence.” It is just the kind of story that clever people tell about their lives: meaningful, useful, and, quite possibly, not altogether true.

Whether or not James Franklin was a hard master, he was, as a printer, bold unto recklessness. He set as his task the toppling of the Puritan theocracy, and nearly managed it. A fuming Cotton Mather dubbed Franklin and his writers the Hell-Fire Club and called his newspaper “A Wickedness never parallel’d any where upon the Face of the Earth!” Undeterred—more likely, spurred on—Franklin printed, in the pages of his paper, essay after essay about the freedom of the press. “To anathematize a Printer for publishing the different Opinions of Men is as injudicious as it is wicked,” the Courant argued. For this, and much more—and especially for printing a profile of Mather, an “Essay against Hypocrites”—Franklin was thrown in jail, twice. In 1723, a legislative committee charged with investigating the Courant reported, “The Tendency of the Said paper is to Mock Religion, & bring it into Contempt, That the Holy Scriptures are therein profanely abused, that the Reverend and faithful Ministers of the Gospell are injuriously Reflected on, His Majesties Government affronted, and the peace and good Order of his Majesties Subjects of this Province disturbed.” Authorities ordered Franklin to submit the Courant to review or stop printing it. But no one said that someone else couldn’t print it. A notice in the next issue claimed that the paper was “Printed and Sold by BENJAMIN FRANKLIN in Queen Street.” As Benjamin Franklin later fondly recalled, “I had the Management of the Paper, and I made bold to give our Rulers some Rubs in it.”

Giving their rulers some rubs was what eighteenth-century printers did best, as Marcus Daniel recounts in “Scandal & Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy” (Oxford; $28). Standards of journalistic objectivity date to the nineteenth century. Before then, the whole point was to have a point of view. “The Business of Printing has chiefly to do with Men’s Opinions,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, in his “Apology for Printers,” in 1731, after he started printing the Pennsylvania Gazette, in Philadelphia. (Franklin proposed printing a one-size-fits-all “Apology” annually, to save himself the labor of apologizing every time he offended someone.) Franklin’s job, as he saw it, wasn’t to find out facts. It was to publish a sufficient range of opinion: “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”

Often, truth did out. In 1735, John Peter Zenger, the German-immigrant printer of the New-York Weekly Journal, was jailed for seditious libel for printing essays pointing out that New York’s governor, William Cosby, was an avaricious scoundrel. (Zenger didn’t write those essays; he just printed them.) Zenger’s dazzling lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, managed to get the printer acquitted by arguing that what Zenger printed was true—Cosby really was a blackguard—even though truth, before the Zenger case, had never been allowed as a defense against libel.

Boston’s Benjamin Edes gave his rulers some rubs, too. In 1755, Edes, with his lacklustre partner, John Gill, took over the failing Boston Gazette. The son of a Charlestown hatter, Edes was not a man of means. He was once City Scavenger. Two years after Edes started printing the Gazette, Boston’s selectmen scolded him: “you have printed Such Pamphlets & such things in your News Papers as reflect grossly upon the received religious principles of this People which is very Offensive . . . we therefore now Inform you if you go on printing things of this Nature you must Expect no more favours from Us.” Edes could have done with Franklin’s handy-dandy “Apology.” Instead, he was left to issue a vague and impossible promise that he would in the future “publish nothing that shall give any uneasiness to any Persons whatever.”

What would the point of that have been? Edes didn’t stop. In the seventeen-sixties, his Boston Gazette, once the scourge of pious selectmen, became the organ of the patriot opposition. John and Samuel Adams, James Otis, Jr., Joseph Warren—Boston’s self-styled Sons of Liberty—all wrote for Edes’s paper; Paul Revere engraved its masthead. Edes wrote for the Gazette, too, though his prose flickered but dimly. But Edes, like all his writers, knew how to sling mud, especially at royally appointed governors, British soldiers, and tax collectors. Tory printers took to calling the Gazette the “Weekly Dung Barge.”

This charge wasn’t entirely without foundation. Early American newspapers tend to look like one long and uninterrupted invective, a ragged fleet of dung barges. In a way, they were. Plenty of that nose thumbing was mere gimmickry and gambolling. Some of it was capricious, and much of it was just plain malicious. But much of it was more. All that invective, taken together, really does add up to a long and revolutionary argument against tyranny, against arbitrary authority—against, that is, the rule of men above law.

There were twenty-two newspapers in the thirteen colonies in 1764, the year that Parliament passed the Sugar Act, a duty on certain imports, and warned colonists that a stamp tax would soon follow. Very many colonists were already broke, peeved, and even grieving. The gruesome French and Indian War had ended only after taking thousands of lives and leaving in its wake a crippling depression. The imperial coffers were empty, too: the war had nearly doubled Britain’s debt. The reasoning of George Grenville, the new Prime Minister, was that the colonies cost us this war and the colonists should pay for it. Hence the Stamp Act. “It will affect Printers more than anybody,” Benjamin Franklin predicted from London, where he begged Parliament to reconsider. The Stamp Act turned out to be Britain’s worst mistake. (“The Grenville ministry’s grossest blunder,” Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., called it.) Printers, better than anybody, could fight back. In the words of David Ramsay, a South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress who wrote, in 1789, the first American history of the Revolution, “It was fortunate for the liberties of America, that newspapers were the subject of a heavy stamp duty. Printers, when uninfluenced by government, have generally arranged themselves on the side of liberty, nor are they less remarkable for attention to the profits of their profession.” You don’t mess with the men who work the presses. After all, the motto “Don’t Tread on Me” was made famous by a man who wanted his gravestone to read “B. Franklin Printer.”

In Boston, Benjamin Edes refused to buy stamps and, at John Adams’s suggestion, changed the Gazette’s motto to “A free press maintains the majesty of the people.” When Massachusetts’s royally appointed governor, Francis Bernard, who believed that Edes’s paper “swarmed with Libells of the most atrocious kind,” threatened Edes and Gill with prosecution, Adams urged the printers on. Do not, he told them, “suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberty by any pretences of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.”

On November 1, 1765, that Black Day, Bostonians staged a funeral for Liberty, beneath the Liberty Tree. Edes’s Gazette reported on similar funerals held all over the colonies. Everywhere, the story ended the same way. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a coffin was “prepared and neatly ornamented, on the Lid of which was wrote LIBERTY, aged 145, STAMP’D, computing from the Era of our Forefathers landing at Plymouth.” But then, lo, a reprieve, otherworldly! The eulogy “was hardly ended before the Corps was taken up, it having been perceived that some Remains of Life were left.” Liberty stirs!

In 1766, Parliament, blindsided by the fervor of the Colonial opposition, repealed the Stamp Act. GAZETTE, like his sister, LIBERTY, woke from the dead. But other taxes soon followed. In 1768, British soldiers landed in Boston to suppress the growing rebellion. During the occupation, Edes helped prepare a daily “Journal of the Times,” featuring stories, most written by Samuel Adams and not all of them true, about atrocities committed by redcoats on the citizens, like the one about a woman who was raped by a soldier and who staggered across the Common, only to die beneath the Liberty Tree. The syndicated “Journal of the Times,” printed in newspapers across the colonies, proved crucial to the resistance movement (and has been credited with originating the political exposé as a journalistic form). “Working the political Engine” is how John Adams described writing for Edes, after a night in 1769 spent “Cooking up Paragraphs” for “the Next Days newspaper.” The following year, Edes, with the help of Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, turned the shooting by British soldiers of five rioting civilians into the “Boston Massacre.” In 1773, the men who dumped the tea in Boston Harbor apparently changed into their disguises in the Gazette’s back room. In 1774, a British commander gave his troops a list of men—including John Hancock and Sam Adams—who, the minute war broke out, were to be shot on sight, and he added a postscript: “N.B. Don’t forget those trumpeters of sedition, the printers Edes and Gill.”

By then, there were forty newspapers in the colonies. War came, to Lexington and Concord, on April 19, 1775. That night, in Boston—a city held by the British—Edes and Gill hastily dissolved their partnership. Gill went into hiding. Under cover of darkness, Edes, alone, carted his printing press and types to the Charles River, where he loaded them onto a boat moored at the bank, and rowed through the night to escape the siege. In a nearby town, he set up a makeshift printing shop, and, within weeks, managed to resume printing the Gazette, on lumpy paper, with gunky ink. In besieged Boston, British troops searched for Edes but, failing to find him, made do with his nineteen-year-old son. Peter Edes spent months as a prisoner of war. He watched from the window of his cell while a fellow-prisoner, a Boston painter, was beaten until, broken, he finally called out, “God bless the King.”

Peter Edes survived. He became a printer. The war ended. It took some time to figure out what, in a republic, a newspaper was for. Although Benjamin Edes kept printing his Gazette, he had lost his best writers. Warren had died at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Otis had gone mad. John Adams had left Boston for good. The political landscape had changed, too. The Revolution was over; now was the time to constitute the nation. Former radicals had to find a way to build a stable government. Edes, like many other poor tradesmen and long-suffering revolutionaries, was stuck in a moment that had passed. He opposed the Constitution, which smacked, to him, of tyranny. He railed against it but found himself an anti-Federalist in a Federalist city. When the government of Massachusetts passed its own stamp tax, Edes argued against it, signing himself “The Printer’s Friend.”

In 1796, Edes’s onetime friend John Adams defeated Thomas Jefferson and became President of the United States. Adams’s high-handed and controversial Administration led to an even more opinionated press, as Marcus Daniel relates in his shrewd study of the newspaper wars of the seventeen-nineties. Printers, whether attacking Adams or, just as zealously, defending him, grew bolder and bolder. “Professions of impartiality I shall make none,” the Federalist newspaperman William Cobbett wrote. “They are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense.” The printer of the Connecticut Bee promised to report

Of turns of fortune, changes in the state,
The fall of fav’rites, projects of the great,
Of old mismanagements, taxations new,
All neither wholly false, nor wholly true.

From 1790 to 1800, Republican printers founded seventy-two new papers (newspapers grew at four times the rate of the population), as Jeffrey Pasley reported in his 2001 study, “The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic.” In Hallowell, Maine, Peter Edes began printing the Kennebec Gazette. On page 1 of the first issue, he reprinted Alexander Hamilton’s attack on Adams. (Hamilton deemed Adams a man plagued by “the unfortunate foibles of a vanity without bounds and a jealousy capable of discoloring every object.”) In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin Bache, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, and later William Duane, edited the Aurora, a newspaper as passionately devoted to the cause of unseating John Adams from the Presidency as James Franklin’s Courant had been to tipping over Cotton Mather’s pulpit.

In July of 1798, Adams signed into law the Sedition Act, making defaming his Administration a federal crime. Adams had come to consider printers a scourge: rubbing your rulers is all well and good, but not when the ruler is you. Jefferson intended to run against Adams in the election of 1800. The Sedition Act was set to expire on March 3, 1801, the day before the new President would be inaugurated, leading many Americans to conclude that Adams simply wished to silence the opposition in order to insure his reëlection. Twenty-five people were arrested for sedition, fifteen indicted, and ten convicted; that ten included seven Republican journalists who, like the Edeses, supported Jefferson. Duane, who had earlier suffered much the same fate in India and in Britain, went to jail. Bache was spared trial only because he died of yellow fever before he could be brought to court. Thomas Cooper, a Republican editor, was charged with attempting to bring Adams “into contempt and disrepute and to excite against him the hatred of the good people of the United States.” When Cooper, who served as his own counsel, tried to prove that everything he said about Adams was true (since only false statements defaming the government were, by the terms of the act, seditious), the court refused his request to subpoena the President, found the printer guilty, and sentenced him to six months in prison.

By then, Benjamin Edes was an old man, of declining powers. In 1797, he printed in his Gazette a pathetic appeal, trading on his past glories to beg for money, throwing himself “on the benevolence of that Public, to which, as an editor of a paper, I have for upwards of forty-one years been a faithful servant.” Adams’s Presidency left him despairing. Edes, that Trumpeter of Sedition, believed that Adams had betrayed everything his generation had fought for. Had they raised LIBERTY and her brother GAZETTE from the very grave, only to have Adams turn Grim Reaper? Edes, more than most, had reason to take that betrayal personally. It felled him. Two months after Congress passed the Sedition Act, Edes printed his final issue of the Boston Gazette. “And now, my Fellow-Citizens,” he wrote, “I bid you FAREWELL! Maintain your Virtue—Cherish your Liberties.” He closed his shop. He moved his printing press into his house. It filled the whole of his small parlor. He spent his days at his press, spectacles slipping down his nose, setting and unsetting types.

“The newspaper is dead, long live the newspaper!” has lately become the incantation of advocates of e-journalism, who argue that the twenty-first-century death of the newspaper hardly merits a moment’s mourning, since it is no death at all but, rather, a rebirth. Even if that turns out to be true—and you have to hope it is true—the digital newspaper could do with a better slogan. Invoking the hereditary succession of a divine line of kings to celebrate the zippy thrill of reading an RSS feed on your iPhone runs counter to the history of the newspaper. Our rulers do not rule over us for as long as they live and, when they die, their heirs do not inherit their titles. That, in short, is what the beginning of the American newspaper was about.

To tell the story this way, as a struggle between tyranny and liberty, between King and Gazette, or even between John Adams and Benjamin Edes, is to write a Whig history, something that historians generally sniff at, mainly because eighteenth-century Whigs (and Whig printers) saw their world in just this way, with themselves on the side of liberty, and people aren’t to be trusted in accounting for their own place in history. Whig history is suspect, in other words, for much the same reason that Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is suspect. It’s too tidy. Most struggles, like most lives, are messier. Newspapers aren’t always on the side of liberty. Not everyone agrees on what liberty means. Some struggles never end. And it’s not the newspaper that’s forever at risk of dying and needing to be raised from the grave. It’s the freedom of the press.

Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated on March 4, 1801, the day after the Sedition Act expired. In his Inaugural Address, Jefferson talked about “the contest of opinion,” a contest waged, in his lifetime, in the pages of the newspaper. Without partisan and even scurrilous printers pushing the limits of a free press in the seventeen-nineties, Marcus Daniel argues, the legitimacy of a loyal opposition never would have been established and the new nation, with its vigorous and democratizing political culture, might never have found its feet.

Soon after Jefferson came to power, he, like Adams, developed doubts about the unbounded liberty of the press. Printers, Jefferson complained, just days after his election, “live by the zeal they can kindle, and the schisms they can create.” In his second Inaugural Address, Jefferson ranted against printers who had assaulted him with “the artillery of the press,” warning that he had given some thought to prosecuting them. During his beleaguered second term, Jefferson suggested that newspapers ought to be divided into four sections: Truths, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Lies. What Jefferson wanted for the nation under his governance was a “union of opinion.” But that, of course, can never be the aspiration of a democracy—a point that newspapers have been very good at making over the two centuries since.

Benjamin Edes didn’t live to see the republic, and the newspaper, endure. Within three years of Jefferson’s Inauguration, Edes died, destitute. In his will, he bequeathed to his son Peter a single font of types. The rest of his estate was sold, to settle his debts. It wasn’t enough. ♦

A crime paper flourishes by printing mug shots

Isaac Cornetti, aka ‘Dash Dangerfield,’ finds an audience for ‘The Slammer’ in North Carolina – a publication that some think provides a public service but others call an unethical crime rag.

Looking like a “Goodfellas”-era Ray Liotta, Isaac Cornetti strolls into the Raleigh Times restaurant here in a faded corduroy jacket. He’s carrying a stack of his famous – and infamous – tabloid newspaper, The Slammer.

Patrons grab copies. Some chuckle, some hunch over newsprint, and some simply gawk as they scan rows upon rows of mug shots and rap sheets in a frenzy that would spark envy in the hearts of newspaper publishers nationwide.

If “Jerry Springer” came in newsprint, The Slammer could be it – a garish compilation of the week’s local crimes and their alleged perpetrators. The men and women, with their dour mugs, bloodied noses, and booze-induced grins, have been arrested for everything from skipping a court date to robbing a food mart. It is, in essence, the local police blotter writ large.

To devoted readers, The Slammer and similar publications – like Cellmates in Florida’s Tampa Bay area and Jail in Orlando – perform a valuable public service, putting the gritty side of life on display and even protecting the community from predatory criminals.

“It really lets you know what’s going on around you,” says Omar Williams, a Raleigh bail bondsman who advertises every week in The Slammer and – no surprise – reaches a lot of clients through its pages. “You could see your best friend in there for forging checks or selling cocaine, and he’s driving around in the car with you, and you don’t know this stuff.”

Critics, on the other hand, see the papers as sensational, tawdry, and ethically dubious – a modern form of the “crime rags” that flourished in the heyday of early 20th-century yellow journalism. “This is a sad commentary on the state of American journalism,” says Bob Steele, a journalism ethics expert at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. “It’s really painful to know that so many publications are struggling terribly and something as schlocky as this is succeeding.”

And succeeding it is. At a time when dozens of US newspapers are searching for buyers and for cash, The Slammer’s newsstand profit margin is four times that of most local dailies, and its circulation has grown to 29,000 – up nearly 50 percent from 20,000 just last year. At more than 500 convenience stores across North Carolina, it’s selling at a buck a pop.

In fact, the chief complaints the weekly paper gets come from perps complaining that their photos didn’t get printed. In February, the paper will expand its operations from three major North Carolina counties – including the cities of Charlotte, Raleigh, and Durham – to add Columbus, Ohio.

•••

Mr. Cornetti – “Dash Dangerfield” on the masthead – is a 30-something publisher with a thick shock of hair and a Philip Marlowe fascination with America’s “simmering undercurrent of low-level crime.” To him, The Slammer offers entertainment and, yes, social value as well, tracing the thin line many Americans tread between upstanding behavior and the occasional lapse into lawlessness.

“You look at this paper, and you’re amazed by the amount of illegal stuff going on in what you thought was a sleepy little city,” he says, referring to Raleigh. “The appeal is voyeurism and schadenfreude, and it has some redeeming qualities, too, like helping people protect themselves, their families, and their businesses.”

Cornetti, the son of a well-to-do Smithfield, N.C., family, spent a lot of time in courtrooms as a kid: His mother worked at the courthouse, and during Cornetti’s middle-school summers, he spent days watching lawyers and judges, then went home to watch “Law and Order,” “Perry Mason,” and “Matlock.”

In his late teens and early 20s, he ran afoul of the law himself, and spent a year serving time for drug and larceny charges involving marijuana and a stolen TV. After that, he says, he grew interested in practicing law, and took the LSAT in 2004 in hopes of becoming a criminal attorney.

Instead, he took a series of entrepreneurial jobs in sales and software, then read about Jail (the Orlando-based publication) on a business trip and was inspired. He hopes The Slammer can become “the kind of wake-up call that I wish I’d had when I was younger.”

To some extent, that may be happening: Some readers claim they’ve thought twice about drinking and driving, for fear of ending up in The Slammer. And Slammer readers have helped Charlotte police locate several felons with major warrants, Cornetti says.

Even when arrests turn out not to be justified, Cornetti insists, The Slammer can do some good. A Charlotte lawyer who is in the process of trying to settle a case with the police department for what he says was a wrongful arrest recently contacted him. The client had appeared in The Slammer.

“Obviously we won’t run a correction,” says Cornetti of cases like these. “But we’d be happy to tell a client’s story…. If people are being arrested unlawfully, The Slammer is going to be a barometer for that.”

A die-hard reader of the Sunday New York Times, Cornetti is modest in his assessment of his own publication, which is produced by a staff of 12. “I don’t think [The Slammer] deserves the ‘journalism’ title,” he says. “But we do try to present research and we hope that when [readers are] finished with the newspapers, they’ve learned something.”

•••

More colorful and more professionally produced than its counterparts, The Slammer’s eclectic spread includes features such as the “Slammer Salon” of crazy arrest-night hairdos; a “mug shot extravanganza [sic]” of the bleary-eyed; the “Kiddie Korner” of busted young adults; and “Mature Menaces,” featuring senior alleged larcenists and check forgers. A Wendell, N.C., woman was singled out for repeated driving violations, becoming a recent edition’s “featured impaired driver.”

“Oh, Monique,” the text goes, “Aren’t you feeling weak? So upset you can hardly speak? Knightdale Police done punched your card. Now from walking you’ll be ‘tard’ [tired]. Left-right-left-right.”

Shakespeare it’s not. But to fans of such tabloids, like St. Petersburg, Fla., resident Courtney Doerr, a regular reader of Cellmates, they’re “street poetry.” And The Slammer runs more sober pieces, too: A recent editorial came down against the death penalty.

Even some police officials see little difference between the role of The Slammer and those of more prestigious media outlets. These modern crime rags “may well be reaching some readers that the daily circulation papers don’t on a regular basis,” says Jim Sughrue, a spokesman for the Raleigh Police Department. “I would say there’s a value to these publications.”

But critics say ridiculing people who remain innocent in the eyes of the Constitution is the definition of unethical. “They’re basically creating a miniature billboard in which these individuals are named and visually identified, often pejoratively, in a way that does not give them a fair hearing,” says Mr. Steele at Poynter.

Indeed, Mike Hoyt, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review in New York, calls the publications barely a “step up from the stocks.”

But Randall Brown has a different take. An avid reader of Cellmates, Mr. Brown is also a regular feature: He claims he’s been in Cellmates 10 times, all for misdemeanor alcohol violations, and he doesn’t mind the publicity. In his view, all of us are just a banana peel-slip away from arrest. “Everybody makes mistakes – the Bible says so,” he says. “People love to gossip.”

That love of gossip and the longing to know – drives older than newsprint itself – may be Cornetti’s most reliable sales force. Philip Isley, a lawyer and Raleigh city councilor, likens The Slammer to “our own little ‘Entertainment Tonight’ weekly.”

“Clearly, there’s a morbid desire for people to know exactly what’s going on criminally in the community,” he says, suggesting that awareness “can have a great deterrent effect, notwithstanding the thrillseekers who enjoy seeing their mug shot in print.”

Back at the Raleigh Times restaurant, where Cornetti is a minor celebrity, one group of barstool readers is trying to determine if a friend’s boyfriend, who supposedly got arrested recently, is in the paper. Cornetti gets up for a few minutes and returns to the table. He nods back toward the server, who had eagerly grabbed The Slammer when he came in. “She just told me she was in it in May,” he says.