That Broken Record Called History

I read the following bit – the concluding paragraph of the chapter “Bargaining with an Empty Wallet” in Max Hastings’ “Winston’s War,” an in-depth look at the work, successes, and follies of Winston Churchill during the war years, and thought it has a message that modern politicians ought to examine:

But the British people had by now hardened their hearts towards their rulers, even the greatest. Many felt less gratitude to those presiding over victory in the most terrible conflict in history than implacable resentment against the politicians whom they held responsible for getting them into it in the first place. Even if Churchill had not himself been among the guilty men of the 1930s, he was now their political standard-bearer. And for all his giant stature as Britain’s war leader, millions of voters sensed that his interest in the humdrum domestic troubles of peace was perfunctory. An anonymous officer of the Second Army, fighting in Holland, wrote in the Spectator about the mood of the British soldier under his command: “[He] is fighting for the future of the world and does not believe in that future . . . He asks a lot of the future, but he doesn’t expect to get any of it.” The writer perceived his men as chronically mistrustful of all authority, institutions and politicians, but Tories most of all: “It is, perhaps, encouraging that Tommy, 1944, will not be foozled by facile talk of a land fit for heroes. He wants deeds, not words.” Few among such men perceived Winston Churchill as the national leader likely to fulfil such hopes once victory came.

Page 421, “Bargaining with an Empty Wallet,” In “Winston’s War.”

This kind of weariness is, I think, pretty common today. We saw it with Bill Clinton – the man who could do no wrong now boiled down to the man who monkeyed around with an intern, if we’re to believe everything said by the folks at JibJab. We saw it with George W. Bush, who went from the rallying hero of 9/11 to Monkey Boy, to continue the monkey theme. And we’re seeing it with Barack Obama whom we’re apparently not allowed to compare to a monkey but we can kinda make fun of the whole “hopey-changey” thing because, well, just go back and read what that anonymous officer said of Churchill in that quoted paragraph, especially the part about fighting for a future that he does not believe will arrive, or, if it does, that he will be able to “get any of it.”

Maybe this is why I like reading history after it’s all over, not the instantaneous history most journalists produce. They say journalism is the first draft of history, but given the many changing facts we’ve seen with, for instance, the bin Laden raid, that first draft is nothing but a first draft, in need of serious revision by those who can look at the situation with cool, dispassionate eyes.

Wanna Buy A Ghost (Town)?

I don't know what it is with me and ghost towns.

Back in the late 80s, a Dutch exchange student we were hosting wanted to go pan for gold. He'd gone to the local army surplus store and bought an authentic gold-panning pan -- they have everything at our surplus store, except the gold -- and wanted to try it out. I figured, why not go gold-panning where the prospectors had found gold years before?

So we headed to Stanley , Idaho.

Stanley itself is nto a ghost town, though it is almost. Nearby, however, is the ghost town of Bonanza, which sounded as a likely spot.

We camped, made a fire, monkeyed around as high school kids will do, then went panning for gold. Didn't find a single flake. But we had a ball poking through the old buildings at Bonanza, wondering who lived there, why they left, and why in the world they used such splintery wood for the seats in their outhouses.

Then on out, I was hooked.

I've been through ghost towns in extreme southern Idaho , where they built their homes out of stone because trees were scarce. I've been through several in central Idaho , where the roofs have crumbled and trees are growing up through the buildings.

And I've been to Gilmore , Idaho , time and again, hoping against hope that on the next journey, I can convince my wife to buy a lot there. They're for sale, you know. Owning part of a ghost town. How cool would that be? Read more about it here.

Gilmore, Idaho, from the surrounding hills. Photo by Michelle Davidson.

Pew Study Delves into Where and How People Get Their News

The folks over at the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism continue to put out interesting research that ought to influence how media companies on the web shape their web and social media strategies.

Their most recent study, “Navigating News Online” (full link here, or see below for a PDF of the study, which Pew, for some reason*, has spread over several web pages), comes up with some surprising – and not so surprising – conclusions, based on nine months’ worth of mining data from Nielsen research conducted in 2010. Pew focuses on the following areas, critical to anyone hoping to build monetizable traffic on the web:

• How users get to the top news sites
• How long they stay during each visit
• How deep they go into a site
• Where they go when they leave

Their findings ought to hearten media companies who have worked hard to build a Facebook presence, cause chagrin to those who have poured any amount of effort into Twitter and make them think again about who might be the bad boy – I did say bad boy, not bad girl – in the business of news aggregation.

Most telling, however, are these points, delivered in the study’s overview:

[T]he findings suggest that there is not one group of news consumers online but several, each of which behaves differently. These differences call for news organizations to develop separate strategies to serve and make money from each audience.
  
The findings also reveal that while search aggregators remain the most popular way users find news, the universe of referring sites is diverse. Social media is rapidly becoming a competing driver of traffic. And far from obsolete, home pages are usually the most popular page for most of the top news sites.

The home page thing, to me, is the most startling, and yet almost the most obvious thing to think of. Back when Web 1.0 was king, much was made of making the home page visible, dominant, and navigable. In the Google age, however, thought has poured into the philosophy that since traffic is coming to sites in droves through search engines that the home page is not necessarily as important as it was in the past. Not so, according to Pew, at least for the 25 major news sites they looked at:
For 21 of the 25 sites studied, the home page is the most viewed part of the site. This suggests a couple of likely behaviors. One is that some of the traffic coming from search is people typing in the name of the Website, not searching for specific topics. Second, it suggests that, for certain sites especially, going online to check the latest headlines is still an important dimension of news consumption.

This finding reinforces my belief that at Uncharted (you knew this was going to devolve into a discussion about Uncharted, right?) we need to do more to offer enticement and different places to go on the home page, including having links to our blog, our Facebook page, and perhaps a list of ten to fifteen of our most recently-updated stuff, in addition to the slide and banner updates we already do. Giving our readers a plethora of at-home places to go, tied in with Facebook, also matches nicely with what Pew concludes in its study.

First, Facebook. Here’s what Pew says:

With roughly 500 million users worldwide, Facebook’s audience is vastly larger than any single news organization. Its role has evolved from a network for friends to share personal information to a way for people to share, recommend and link together all kinds of information, including news. If searching for news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next.

Google ought to be a little concerned here – which is why they tried to get Google Buzz going. Sharing news, I think, is going to become increasingly significant in the future. We’re doing that already, thank heaven, with our Facebook page, and with the AddThis widget we have on the tail end of every story we’ve got. Speaking of which:

If a large portion of users are going to Facebook after leaving a site, that may indicate the site’s content is easy to share and viewed as worth distributing to friends. On the other hand, if most users are leaving for Google or some other search engine, that could indicate that users either did not find what they were looking for on the site or got what they needed but were not drawn to any other content.

The addition of social networking “share” tools to the margins of nearly every news story seems to have paid off. Facebook shows up among the top destinations for every site studied. So do sharing tool widgets like Addthis.com, which allow users to share a story across a wide range of social network pages. And the share tools rank higher among the content producers on the list than aggregators, suggesting that people share actual news stories more than search results. While these are technically clicks away from the site, they are positive clicks away, likely multiplying additional traffic to that story. The extent of their use may even be under counted here as this figure measures when people click on a link or tool to share the story. It does not record instances when users copy and paste URL’s onto a share page.

So we’re at least doing the share thing right. I’d love to search Facebook to see whether or not the stuff on our site is being shared, however, as our users tend to be an inscrutable bunch.

There’s lots more from the study, of course. I’ve only scratched the surface here. Read it. It’s a good ‘un. It's getting a lot of press. Here's what TIME Magazine's Techland blog has to say about it.

*Which they explain in their own study, obtusely yet thusly: The largest sites that operate many subdomain properties also tend to succeed at keeping much of the “departing” traffic within the family.  On ChicagoTribune.com, for instance, the top seven destination sites are pages within Chicago Tribune itself, such as the ChicagoTribune.com sports page or breaking news section. On CNN.com, 13 of top fifteen destination sites are within the CNN family, including CNN subdomains like news.blogs.cnn.com and money.conn.com as, well as other Time Warner properties promoted on the site like sportsillustrated.com. Google and Facebook are the only external sites to make it in that mix.

An Open Letter to the Library Book, “A to Z Mysteries: Something or Other about Quicksand” (We Can't Even Remember the Title) that Our Daughter Lost.

NOTE: I'm thinking of submitting this, or a more polished version, to McSweeney's Open Letter forum. Kinda fun.

I'm so terribly sorry.

She left you on the third step up from the basement, “right where that bottle is,” apparently, as if the book somehow magically transmogrified into a bottle of antibacterial soft soap.

I hope your final resting place is a pleasant one. That you're in the house somewhere I don't doubt, unless, of course, she left you at the vet's, or at ballet, or at Grandma's house, or at the university when we took everybody there a few weeks ago so we could go for a long walk out of the cold. Considering, however, that we found her brother's copy of Jeff Kinney's “Diary of A Wimpy Kid” in the middle of the rain-drenched street in front of the house because he left that one on the car bumper, and that we found my heirloom copy of D. Manus Pinkwater's “The Hoboken Chicken Emergency” amidst the dust bunnies and butt crumbs on the floor behind the boys' toilet, it's also likely you're somewhere dark and sticky.

I spent more than an hour today looking for you. I cleaned the boys' bookshelf trying to find you. Part of me is glad you weren't there, frightened at the pages spilling out of their “Captain Underpants” books and the ripped-off covers from their “Garfield” comics. Nestling among the corpsey bits of other books certainly wouldn't be comforting. Of course, either would be the alternative if you're lost somewhere in her room, squeezed into the pile of schoolwork from the first and second grades that she insists we cannot, under any circumstances, throw away, because she might, in some distant future, require examples of her ability with spelling or her felicity with fractions.

Your absence makes me think of Terry Pratchett's dwarves who chided Chalkboard Monitor Vimes for his irreverence in erasing words from existence. I'm half-dwarvish, I've decided. When a book becomes too aged, too crumbled, too pulped to be of service any more, I burn it. I can't bear to simply throw books away. They gave their lives for me to enjoy the ideas and suggestions and characters and words printed on their pages. The least I can do is offer them a reverential burial. Sometimes I sneak books out of the boys' room and put them in the fireplace, sending their words to heaven through the chimney.

My wife wents me to do that with the “Captain Underpants” books, but not because of any reverence she feels towards words. Pratchett's grags would not like my wife. Different strokes, of course.

She's willing to pay the library what it'll take to replace you. I can't however, guarantee that they'll buy a new copy of the same book. I don't know how popular you were, but as our kids tend to bring home books that were last checked out from the library in, say, 2005, your chances of being replaced with an exact replica aren't good. But maybe that's okay – some other book, containing another story to enchant the mind of a nine-year-old girl, will come to the library, for our daughter to check out and, hopefully this time, return.

And if we eventually find you, maybe she'll finish reading your words.

Sincerely,

MisterFweem

Even Bigger than bin Laden

The most significant thing to come out of the raid in Pakistan that led to the killing of Osama bin laden is not the man’s death, but the wealth of intelligence the Navy SEALs brought with them out of Abbottabad.

According to an article in Politico, the SEALs grabbed “personal computers, thumb, drives and electronic equipment” during the raid. The article goes on to say:

"They cleaned it out,” one official said. “Can you imagine what’s on Osama bin Laden’s hard drive?”

U.S. officials are about to find out. The material is being examined at a secret location in Afghanistan.

“Hundreds of people are going through it now,” an official said, adding that intelligence operatives back in Washington are very excited to find out what they have.

“It’s going to be great even if only 10 percent of it is actionable,” the official said.

Part of me hopes they find that bin Laden was a fan of “Angry Birds.”

Officially in at Columbia

Well, we're officially in at the CSPA. Here's what Alan says about our repeated invitation:

Here is the link to the workshop I will be teaching. The Columbia University people told me that the reasons they are having me come teach this summer are because I come well prepared and get really good reviews with class numbers increasing. The words they used to describe the sessions were things like innovative and attention-grabbing. They also like that we cross train and deal with small staffs. This invitation would not be possible if it were not for the team effort that goes into helping me prepare for these events. Each of you have played a key role in this and I appreciate it. When I go to these things and am successful it is only because of this team. You should all take credit for this. Thanks.

That makes us feel pretty good. Here's the link he mentions.

National Cartoonists Day

It's to surprise to my readers that I like my comic strips. And while it's true that my tastes have evolved over the years, two things have remained constant: I've always liked Peanuts, and I've always disliked Alley Oop. Not that I didn't try awfully hard as a kid to like Alley Oop. It just never caught my fancy.

It's the same with Pearls Before Swine. Really trying to like it. I come close several times, but most of the time, no, it's just Alley Oop all over again. And I can't really put my finger to why I don't much care for either of those two strips, either, though Swine's awful puns and plays on words are a big turnoff for me. Never much liked puns as a kid. Except for those that appeared in Wiley's Dictionary. Something about that disembodied, authoritative voice just made the awfulness come to life for me.

Absurdity, like this, I do like:

[He tries in vain to find a comic to fit the absurdity bill here. No luck. Almost all of my comic books are in storage because there's not enough room on the shelves for them. Next house will have lots of bookshelves. And a garage.]

There are better ones than this. Just don't have the time to find one tonight.

Two things started my love affair with comic strips: First, the Forbidden Books -- BC and Wizard of Id collections -- my brother Jeff had hidden on his bookshelf, but not well enough that his younger brothers couldn't find them. Second, "Barnaby," which my sixth grade teacher Mr. Loertscher read to us using what I recognize now as the voice of W.C. Fields as Mr. O'Malley. (It doesn't matter what any of my other elementary school teachers did or any of the stuff they tried to make us learn. My most lasting memories of school will always be of "Barnaby.") My dream one of these days is to find some "Barnaby" comic books in a thrift store. I love to dream that dream. I know they've been reprinted. But to find an original . . .

So who are my favorites today?

Well, Cul de Sac, for one. And Dilbert, for another. And the Dogs of C Kennel I rather enjoy. Overboard. Baby Blues. Yes, I'm a traditional newspaper comic strip fan. None of this magna or DC Comics or anything like that. No. They all appeal to the desire I have to feed the absurdist within.

A Washed-Up Journalist Heads, in Spirit, to CSPA

Back in April 2005, I washed my hands of newspaper journalism.

Sick to death of it I was. And even with the prospect of underemployement as a hod carrier (to be followed up by stints at call centers and Target) I was glad to be out of the profession.

I’ve grown up a bit since then. Well, a lot.

I now realize I frittered away opportunities in the field. Still, I’m happy I left. I’m enjoying my career as a technical writer and have turned my desire to write into a handful of blogs, a strong presence at Uncharted and, at last count, a 114,000-word fantasy novel that I’m in the midst of editing. Also during that time I earned a Masters degree and, through Uncharted, have become associated with people who want my input on all sorts of things, writing being only one of many. I’m also teaching an online English class at Brigham Young University-Idaho, hopefully shaping students’ minds to become better writers, or at least not to regard writing with fear and loathing. I’ve also grown closer to my wife, with whom I collaborate at Uncharted, and who is going through the same masters program I finished in 2009.

And thanks to Uncharted – more specifically, to Alan Murray, our illustrious CEO and Sith Lord – I’m kinda in a back-doorsy way getting back into journalism.

For the past two years, Alan has traveled to Columbia University’s Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s spring and fall workshops, to teach high school students there everything he knows about writing for the web, collaborating with people dispersed across the globe, and other such stuff. Now this summer they’ve asked him to come back for a full week to teach a workshop on newspaper writing for the web.

He wants me to help.

All I can say is yikes. Two rubes like us working together to present something at Columbia. He’s feeling overwhelmed. I’m feeling overwhelmed. Yet excited and challenged at the same time.

I’m sure some of my compatriots in my former field of employment would raise their eyebrows at my participation in this. No matter. I’m not the same person I was back then. I’ve changed for the better, and don’t mind saying that, though I know I’ve still got a long way to go.

So here’s a rough draft of what we’re thinking:

Tonight's Nonsequitur: Bunny in A Bunny Suit

This I Believe

NOTE: Another bit for my Foundations English class.

Used under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes.

I sat in the back of Mrs. Barrett’s third grade classroom, next to the bookshelf.

When I got my school work done – and sometimes even before it was finished – I’d pull a book off the shelf to read. There I found the magical worlds of Robert C. O’Brien, Marie McSwigan, Beverly Cleary, Alexander Key.

As I wondered at a new world alongside Jon O’Connor, as I tagged along in the background as Henry Huggins romped with Ribsy, as I sat beside Mrs. Frisby in the rats’ library, rapt at the story of the rats of NIMH, I decided I wanted to be a writer.

Then I promptly did nothing about it.

Oh, I did little things. A poem here, a short story there. But through several fits and starts, I never did what I set out to do, there in the back corner of Mrs. Barrett’s classroom at Lincoln Elementary.

Until 2010.

By then, I had a third-grader of my own, plus two other children. I was writing – but as a technical writer at a Department of Energy laboratory. During a lunch break in late January, however, I sat at my computer mulling the madelines of memory. I pecked out a few hundred words: two boys, bored at living in their primitive village, longing instead to climb the cliffs that ringed them in and climb toward the stars, then over and out the green pass that led to the world beyond.

Maybe, I thought, I have something.

So the next day, at lunch, I wrote some more.

Each day, it became an obsession. Write a few more hundred words about these curious boys, now departed from the only home they’ve known into a mysterious school training them to become –

I didn’t know. I kept writing, on the bus rides home, late into the night on weekends. And at lunches. Many lunches. I posted snippets of this growing story on my blog. If anyone ever read them, I didn’t know it. I knew a third-grader who was reading them. And he kept insisting, staring at those words in the ethers, that the story continue.

It did.

By January 2011, those first few hundred words turned into 114,000 words.

I’d written a novel.

It’s unpublished. It’s unedited. It’s raw. But there, in that little folder on my desktop, in that binder at home, on the thumb drives were I’ve stored it, my first novel awaits the finishing touch that may some day lead it to sit on a bookshelf in the back corner of some dusty classroom where another kid will pull it off the shelf and fall into the world I created because that third-grader who still loves the rats of NIMH told me I had to do it.

I believe, with the proper tools and motivation, one person can indeed move a mountain. Or feed the inner muse-child, staring longingly at the shelf of books not yet written.