The Periscope Post

Opinion-makers: Who to read today.

The Google Gods
Lady Gaga. Sarah Palin. Non-Muslim Obama. These are the words that reel in search engines and therefore the readers, the denizens of the Internets who are interested in subjects and people, but not necessarily in reading newspapers. And this is the reality that journalists today face: “Our mission – and we have no choice but to accept it – is to grab some of that traffic that could otherwise end up at hundreds of other places, even blogs riffing off the reporting that your own publication has done. If you appease the Google gods with the right keywords, you are blessed with more readers,” opined The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, on his Media Notes blog. Online headlines, once designed to catch the attention of readers, are now written to catch the attention of the elusive search engine bots. “But the dilemma goes well beyond headlines to what content to post on your site, and people like me are hardly exempt,” he continued.

Writing about Mel Gibson’s rants or Lady Gaga’s pants is more likely to generate traffic than, say, “a sober report on how nonprofit groups are pursuing investigative reporting”, Kurtz noted. Essentially, Kurtz is getting at the candy versus veggies argument, the one that newspapers have been dealing with for generations: Do you report on creampuff stories in the hopes of grabbing readers’ attention, or do you pursue the healthier, if less tasty stories? But now, with the Internets being ruled by the Google Gods and their minions, the search engine bots, newspapers and news sites face this dilemma virtually every hour. Ulttimately Kurtz argued, brand-name news organizations like The Washington Post or The New York Times can’t “abandon serious news” for the fluffy stuff without risking losing long-time readers. “What they gain in short-term hits would cost them in long-term reputation.”

A hopeful note, but Kurtz doesn’t really address what this may mean for new sites, such as The Periscope Post, that don’t have the same brand draw. Nor does he address the reality of declining subscription rates, both online and in print, of those brand name papers, and the implication that holds for the future of “serious news”.

Fidel Castro speaks
Jeffrey Goldberg, Middle East correspondent for The Atlantic, got some very interesting fan response after a recent article about Iran and Israel and the inevitability of a confrontation between the two: Cuba’s former comandante en jefe, Fidel Castro, read it and wanted to talk to him about it. Cue one of the stranger “road trips” any journalist has probably ever taken.

“His body may be frail, but his mind is acute, his energy level is high, and not only that: the late-stage Fidel Castro turns out to possess something of a self-deprecating sense of humor,” wrote Goldberg. Castro had a lot to say – so much that the article is in two parts – including warning Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to stop “slandering” the Jews. Said Castro, “They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything.”

Goldberg’s interviews with Castro took place over three days – one of which appears to have been spent at the dolphin show at the aquarium – and is posting his pieces on The Atlantic over the next few days, to be followed up by a larger article in the forthcoming issue of the magazine.

Don’t mess with a good thing
Conservatives aren’t fundamentally afraid of change – they’re afraid of changing a good thing, claimed Dennis Prager, in a piece for conservative site National Review Online. “One unbridgeable divide between Left and Right is how each views alternatives to present-day America,” Prager wrote. “Those on the Left imagine an ideal society that has never existed, and therefore seek to ‘fundamentally transform’ America. When liberals imagine an America fundamentally transformed, they envision it becoming a nearly utopian society in which there is no greed, no racism, no sexism, no inequality, no poverty, and ultimately no unhappiness. Conservatives, on the other hand, look around at other societies and look at history and are certain that if America were fundamentally transformed, it would become just like those other societies. America would become a society of far less liberty, of ethically and morally inferior citizens, and of much more unhappiness. Moreover, cruelty would increase exponentially around the world.” Conservatives see America as exceptional, he claimed, and believe that to change it would mean changing it for the worse. Then he reprints all the lyrics to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and declares that Lennon’s utopia is a conservative’s nightmare.

More opinion-makers »