Memory’s Rainbow
Confessions of An Aging News Hole Dodger
David Cohea
Last week I attended “Dodging The Memory Hole II: An Action Assembly” in Charlotte, a conference addressing the urgent need to develop a foundation for the archival and preservation of born-digital news. Since news started appearing in digital format 40 years ago, the industry has done very little to mind its memories. Community news — as well as the community itself — is at risk of vanishing forever.
The two-day event, hosted by the Educopia Institute, followed up on work began six months ago at a similar event at Reynolds Journalism Institute, and attracted a broad swash of cultural memory stakeholders — press associations, journalists, technologists, publishers, archivists, librarians and vendors.
New to the conversation, it was a thrill for me to attend, surrounded by such a robust and charged memory trust. Great networking, exciting ideas, daunting challenges.
All the talk must have fired up my neural networks, for the following post goes hither and yon connecting archival dots. Apologies for such a long longform; writing it down from all the was a form of writerly preservation, asking, what to keep and what to toss?
That was question frequently asked in the conference. And always stuck in the middle of that conversation like a toad on a white plate, there is the issue of rights — property rights, privacy rights. Equal rights, too; for in a democracy, do corporations set archival priorities, or communities?
And what about the future’s right to decide for itself what it will need most from our preserved record?
So I wrote it all down.
All first drafts of history are like that: protean, tentative, fleeting, doomed to correction by second and third drafts. (Kathleen has promised to soon make videos and other follow-ups to us, so correction to this effort may be simultaneous.)
A dark fate perhaps, but where are we? — Where is history, without these first drafts?
That’s the peril of born-digital news disappearing down the memory hole. As it goes, so do we.
* * *
Flying is the usual nightmare of long lines working through security and a packed-to-the-gills airplane, but luckily for me I’m sitting next to skinny people — a first. Every flight the dimensions of personal travel whittle by an inch of headroom or aisle space or inside seat width. By such incrementals vast numbers improve or worsen competitive edge; it’s how Google and Amazon and Facebook have lifted up and way from the humdrum mortality of most newspaper websites.
It’s obviously how these airlines make their tiny differences in profit, and why our collective flying experience continues to tank.
* * *
I check into the hotel around dusk. The room’s OK. The view is mostly a vista of tall office buildings whose glass sides are reflecting the last of the sun. Right across the street is the NASCAR Hall of Fame, a big ovoid building that suggests oval track racing. After the sun sets, two lines of lights run around the perimeter close to the roof to simulate races — packs of pulsing lights going round and round and round.
Charlotte’s raceway is considered one of finest hubs in the NASCAR circuit. If there’s any tribute to American oil greed, it would be in those obscenely loud and fast cars. Inside there’s a High Octane Theater with huge screen and surround sound to give visitors the full monty of racing, a Great Hall where you can see relics of wrecks past, Glory Road where you can see cars representative of NASCAR’s 65-year history, and a Hall of Honor were the cars of NASCAR Hall of Fame inductees are enshrined. Greed for Speed, that’s the secret sacred motto there.
A few years back I tried to monetize a NASCAR blog featuring writings by Monte Dutton, a massive racing sportswriter at the Gaston Gazette. They used to publish a NASCAR page called NASCAR This Week that King Features syndicated. I think I got one $80 annual subscription for it, but it sure got lots of traffic and was named one of the ten best NASCAR blogs of 2010.
Then the lawyers at NASCAR saw us using their legally trademarked name in the title of our blog and fired Hearst corporate lawyers a cease and desist letter. NASCAR is like Kleenex, a brand that is also an essence: we couldn’t really call it Race Hard and Turn Right this Week, could we?
When we pulled the plug, two years of NASCAR news, commentary, fan comments and track cheesecake pix wavered and then just disappeared, gone to NASCAR, I mean, Racin’ Valhalla or something.
A few months later Monte lost his job when Freedom Communications sold the Gaston Gazette to Halifax Media Group and the new owner shipped NASCAR This Week down to their Daytona paper. Last I heard he was playing country songs in bars and writing novels.
* * *
The phone doesn’t really work and Internet access seems spotty. I try watching the documentary “Gasland” on my iPad and it kept quitting on me. Switching to my MacBook Pro, the connection holds. Hardware, software, who cares, I’m tired.
* * *
Construction continues all night on an office building across the street. They can’t put these financial ziggurats up fast enough.
* * *
Coming off the elevator for breakfast buffet, a sign announces that there’s a meeting in the hotel that day by R.J. Reynolds. A buddy of mine is doing pretty good business selling his own brew of smokeless tobacco juice, whatever you call that nicotine blend people put in their electronic smokers. Talk about being disrupted by the small.
I pick up a copy of The Wall Street Journal down by the breakfast bar. The lead story is about how the online gaming industry is looking for whales -– a term taken from casinos — gamers willing to spend $50 — $100 a month to play online games. An opinion piece says that without the Patriot Act, US intelligence agencies are dumbing way down; dots will be disconnected if they have to harvest their data from disjunct telephone companies. Unemployment rates are going down in Rust Belt towns not because more workers are being hired but because they are no longer there. They’ve moved elsewhere, retrained for other employment or simply are not trying to look for work any more.
Despite the worrisome toll of news, I’m amazed at how much I enjoy reading it. The beleaguered daily paper in Orlando is flaccid and ghostly, such a fast swipe of the news that the substance is printed on seems more like toilet paper than newsprint.
Some predict that most dailies will be Sunday-only within 5 years. But hey, if you can pack I say if you can pack a lot of quality into a single issue, it might be worth subscribing to again.
* * *
The conference is at the Mecklenburg Library’s downtown branch, just a door down from the Hearst office tower where all my corporation’s finance people are hived. (I’ll stop by and say hi to them before I leave.) I catch a shuttle from my hotel and drop off in the early-morning rush hour of Charlotte, nice-sized city, skyscrapers all around (the city has morphed into a finance center), lots of attractive businesspeople scurrying about in a the more sedate frenzy of a mid-sized city.
A guy on the shuttle wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a tie says he’s working at his third downtown bank now after mergers and consolidations. The last bank had amortized the cost of hiring top talent by classifying their signing bonuses as in-company loans.
I have to walk round the building to find a door that’s supposed to be open. I knock and wait, knock and wait, get ready to plow around the building again when a library staffer shows up to let me in. I haven’t been in a library in a long time — Lord knows I have plenty of e-reading on my iPad Kindle app. I’m reminded of childhood afternoons up in the reading room of the Evanston library north of Chicago, the big picture window, the volumes of Tom Swift that I plowed through in my appetite for news of the next. Long time ago in one sense, but in others, nothing’s changed. It’s always comforting to be surrounded by lots of books. Some geeks never change.
Katherine Skinner opens up. This gathering is a follow up to a Dodging the Memory Hole gathering in 2014 and was designed to reconvene as an action committee — getting to work.
Skinner tells the group the goal for this meeting is to go after the lowest-hanging fruit in the process, the lowest-cost, highest value achievables.
About half of the attendees attended the last meeting, and its is their core recommendations that we are to expand upon.
Kathleen turns the podium over to Brian Hocker, Vice President of Digital Media, Programming and Research at KXAS-TV in Dallas-Ft. Worth. He kicks off with a great story about how tons of archival reels of television news ended up getting donated to the University of North Texas.
When the station first came on the air in the late ‘40s, films were shot and edited of the day’s news, which then were played in the background as anchors read their scripts. For sixty-five years the reels were then piled into boxes down in the basement. It wasn’t until the station got ready to move to bigger digs that someone asked whether it should be digitized and saved. Third-party costs for digitization were prohibitive, and so Hocker turned to Martin Halbert at the University of North Texas, who in turn directed him to the Portal to Texas History, a repository of some 900,000 digital images from more than 130 partners.
The network agreed to the donation as long as NBC kept the copyright; fine, said folks at the Portal. The Portal has physical ownership and may act as a licensing agent.
So far, half a million dollars have been raised to fund the $2.5 million dollars to scan an estimated 2.2 petabytes of digital video.
Why hadn’t something like this happened before? Hocker asks rhetorically. The answer: “No one ever asked us if anything was in the basement.”
This was a good point. The distance between news and memory organizations seems sometimes a lot further than they really are.
Hocker has these additional suggestions for memory institutions seeking to secure digital archives from news organizations:
- Act before the crisis.
- Work to secure the archive now.
- Be a problem solver.
- Position your institution as the expert.
* * *
During the break I ask Brian about how NBC’s archival office was handling digitized historical footage from the other affiliates. He tells me that their approach is decentralized — they don’t store it there, but they do index it.
Asked if he knew how much digitizing of archival footage was going on at other affiliates, he didn’t think much yet.
That’s understandable, given that Brian’s station alone had a digitzed archive of reels estimated to take up some 2.2 petabyes of file space. Storage for video is so much bigger than the sort of born-digital news used by newspapers. I wonder if size matters so much that the TV industry will go much slower digitizing their archival record.
And the invisible wall of digital disruption is pushing as hard against TV news as it is newspapers, with broadcasting and cable TV players fretting the advent of streaming video.
So their collective eye on archival ball may be just as fleeting, perhaps even more so, than their brethren in newspapers.
And oddly, like small local newspaper who have less media competition in their markets, local TV stations may be safer off. There’s a lot of hardware involved in TV production and expertise that isn’t affordable by pure-plays; in that respect, video resources trumps press capacity. And as digital video becomes a Web premium, TV stations are finding themselves courted by online news outfits.
So in the broadcast, the archival story may be just the reverse — very slow motion on legacy media, hyper-speeding in born-digital.
Over the two days there are four panel discussions on major themes. Following each discussion, groups are broken out and tasked with developing action plans for specific aspects of the discussion.
The first panel is on awareness raising and Skinner hosts. She asks: How do we flip a system that was once good at preservation and adapt it to digital?
Right off the bat, monetization is taken off the table as the prime motivator. No one’s come up with any way to make a buck off archives, other than asking customers to pay a fee for archival access or make archive access a subscription benefit. As long as long as newspapers think archives are important primarily for their monetary value, they won’t be interested in any other discussion.
Skinner counters with this: ‘The archive of news is a community asset and should be made available to them. Archives as an expression of community good will and an expanded journalistic tool is far better than any monetization scheme.”
She introduces Edward McCain of Reynolds Journalism Institute, co-chair of the event. Edward underscores the difficulty of our project by relating a conversation he had with a publisher he’d asked about the state of that newspaper’s archives. He was told: “You’re creating an academic problem that doesn’t exist in the real world.”
Is that hubris, or simply that newspapers are working under too much front-end pressure these days? In such a gaze, archival is a second-tier need compared to bottom-line survival. The difficulties of keeping a newspaper’s doors open another day means there’s little time left to think about where yesterday’s news goes.
But hubris or not, it does illustrate how wide the disconnect is. So one task of this group is to raise the awareness.
“And get the metadata!” Edward says, because that’s the soil out of which all preservation is possible. He repeats that phrase so many times at the conference that its becomes a mantra.
Perhaps we have to make this a distributed problem,” offers Leigh Montgomery, a librarian and journalist for the Christian Science Monitor. “Journalists, publishers, librarians, press associations, other memory institutions need to carry some of it.”
How to get those stakeholders to understand this is the hard part. The distribution components are too disjunct, they have their own subsets of stakeholders and shareholders. Everyone’s too busy to talk with each other and the traditional silos still have defensive lawyers, I mean layers.
A certain vibe of frustration is in the air from the start. The magnitude of the problem is daunting. When participants speak up, they frequently preface their comments with “I’m not expert.” Who if anyone can call themselves a pro at levering such a technical, operational, legal, costly, unknowable cluster-diddle of a challenge?
Katherine faces this straight-on when she says, “You are the experts! This is the very best that it gets.”
So into that Mordor we quest. Perhaps because of that, oddly, our mood buoys. As Gimli the dwarf put it in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: “Certainty of death … small chance of success … What are we waiting for?”
* * *
The immediacy of the problem is somewhat akin to that of global warming: if you think you have time to get started, its good to be reminded that too much already has been lost.
Edward tells the group about the server failure at the Columbia Missourian newspaper that dumped 11 years worth of photos and stories for which there was no back up.
When Sony was hacked by North Korean provacateurs earlier this year, some 65,000 computers were wiped. Imagine that many newsroom computers across the country suddenly go dark.
Who got hit this week? Penn State College of Engineering. The German Bundestag. The Minnesota Department of Education. The Washington Post. The Glasgow Choir and Winchester Music Festival. Rutgers University.
Who wasn’t? The systems administrator for my little backwater of Hearst says he fights the hackers daily.
And this: what if the Internet bites the big one following a nuclear-scale cyberattack by a superpower, powering down the entire grid for months, perhaps years?
Unthinkable, perhaps, but Too Big To Fail has never been a convincing enough argument for the bad guys.
If we don’t prove Too Big To Fail, then History indeed would go very dark.
So yes, scare stories to illustrate the urgency of our work.
* * *
Edward says that success stories are just important. When the Rocky Mountain News ceased publication, it was a true stroke of fortune from the archival gods that so much was donated to the Denver Public Library. Academic research libraries have developed best practices for archival and preservation, and solid linkages between them are forming in preservation networks like MetaArchive.
And that’s the key: the networks are forming. Katherine repeatedly extolls the virtues of the network: real power is in the connections.
It’s getting news organizations famous (or notorious) for their independence to understand how much more powerful they can become by giving up some of their autonony.
It may be that inevitable lessons come the hardest.
* * *
Ryan Thornburg, a professor of online journalism at the University of North Carolina, speaks of the challenges to journalists. “There’s a generational gap between how stories used to be done and what they are like now.” In the leaked New York Times innovation report, it was put like this: Previously, a story was finished when it was printed, now it begins after it’s posted. Everything that follows is about driving engagement.
Newsrooms are still learning how to transition to this. This week, the Journal Media Group and Knight Digital Media Center published a study of how 13 newsrooms were making the transformation. One of key upfront decisions necessary for success was that newsgathering needed to have a strong audience focus.
I wonder if archival itself can be seen as an audience engagement tool. One example of this is a story with of Related Posts. Are there other ways to bring the weight of history to the day’s news? A well-commented story followed up by another one might make the community feel more involved with the evolution of a piece. Also, archival material doesn’t have to be created again — it’s cheaper.
“The economics of digital are not yet well understood,” Leigh Montgomery says. “Digital assets reach out far more flexibily and far. Our thinking is still much based on the more limited reach of print.”
What are archives truly rich in? History, yes. Lots of data inside that history, a much vaster repository than the daily morgue. They’re rich in names (of value for ancestry research). They’re rich in stories.
Who knows how the algorithms will be able to sift and massage all that rich data for evolving news. How can we even know what part of the archive will be of most use to the future(s) to come? What we decide now may prove wholly irrelevant.
Except this: If we decide by default not to archive, then the future will have no use for the past.
* * *
Imagine if you will for a moment the exponential possibilities of an organization having full and dynamic access to a fully digitized archive going back a hundred years or more. One that’s fed daily with an oncoming torrent of new news. One that has tendrils that easily connect to archival sources around the world.
The great wall of Data is soaring high and higher. In 2009, about 500 Exabytes (or 500 billion Gigabytes) of information was thought to exist on the Web. In 2013, the number had zoomed to 4 Zettabytes (or four trillion gigs). You could stuff about 250 billion DVDs in a Zettabye.
Fortunately the lurch so far can be matched by the rapid growth of computing power and storage. So far, Moore’s Law is keeping us out of the archival poorhouse.
Thomas Friedman wrote about this in a recent NY Times op-ed piece, “Moore’s Laws Turns 50.” He remembers how Intel C.E.O Brian Krzanich put it:
If you took Intel’s first generation microchip, the 1971 4004, and the latest chip Intel has on the market today, the fifth-generation Core i5 processor, he said, you can see the power of Moore’s Law at work: Intel’s latest chip offers 3,500 times more performance, is 90,000 times more energy efficient and about 60,000 times lower cost.
To put that another way, Krzanich said Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would happen had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle improved at the same rate as microchips did under Moore’s Law: “Here are the numbers: [Today] you would be able to go with that car 300,000 miles per hour. You would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and all that for the mere cost of 4 cents! Now, you’d still be stuck on the [Highway] 101 getting here tonight, but, boy, in every opening you’d be going 300,000 miles an hour.
What’s surprising in both accounts — the incredible explosion of information and the technology to store and access it — is that such an incredible ramp-up is so invisibly melded into the background of our day. Is it that we take it for granted, or simply can’t see far beyond our keyboards? What other invisible magnitudes await in new technologies like quantum computing? Is Kurzweil’s Singularity upon us? Toto, are we in Kanas any more?
Can news organizations accept what Hamlet proclaimed to his friend, “there is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy!” — and get in on the fun?
* * *
After the break, we reconvene for the first breakout task force groups session. Edward shows some of the recommendations from the first Dodging the Memory Hole gathering and then tasks the groups to lay down first steps we can get involved with.
“Low cost — high value steps!” becomes another of Ed’s mantras.
My group looks into building private-public partnerships. Our makeup works well with that — a research librarian at Berkley, Aaron Presnall of the Jefferson Institute (a non-profit examining how information tools can be put to the service of a democracy), Sheila McAlister of the Georgia library system, Les Buchanan of NewzGroup and myself, the backwaters content hound with King Features Syndicate.
Daunted somewhat by the breadth and depth of what we were tackling, it takes us a few minutes to get the wheels turning.
We first look at the short supply of help on the technical side; can’t software become more archive-friendly and enabling? One suggestion was a hackathon to code archival solutions into CMS.
Sheila says she saw a poor relationship between local libraries and newspapers regarding news archival and donation. In many places, there is none. Could that be an essential place to work the public-private partnership? Case studies could be developed showing how strong press association or state-wide library agencies might help prod participation at the local level. And in areas where that participation is weak, how the approach might be made in other ways?
We propose to test in three states where the relationship exists on different levels. Working from both library and newspaper resources in our network, we could flesh out the issues, write the case studies and post them to a website.
Later I thought about creating a software app similar to those used by online tax prep companies. A questionnaire could be developed that helps to assess current archival conditions and asking whether there’s been any conversation about donation to sources like a local library. The result might be a general statement about where an organization is starting from, guidelines for what steps need to be taken to archive and preserve born-digital news and how to get local memory institutions like libraries and historical societies involved.
I would love it our team does form get something off the ground; if the research can get finished and the case studies written, if some real dialog about archival can extend through the market I’ve been working in for the past fifteen years. I started out the year deciding that my outfit needs to partnering with whatever newspapers are working their way toward, and a network like this could provide connective cabling.
Of course, no one may ever turn a dime on this. Our economy may need to turn over in a big way (see Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything) before real substantial work may begin — and by then it will probably be too late.
* * *
The second panel discussion was “What to Preserve … And How?” and here the brain trust get to work Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Library, Ben Welsh of the LA Times and Eric Weig from the University of Kentucky.
The first and perhaps most serious problem with born-digital news is how fast it can disappear. Herbert talks about a parallel research he’d done on online academic papers which found that citation links are disappearing so fast. “After three years, content is completely different.”
He mentions a software called Sidestory that does transactional archiving; when a page is updated, a copy is sent to archival. It’s used primarily by finance firms who need a clear audit trail, but he sees great value to both academic research and born-digital news.
For news platforms using WordPress, plugins might be developed to capture archived pages.
One of the suggestions that had already been voiced was to make archival part of the CMS architecture — to engineer it up front. Unfortunately, newspaper companies have so many different proprietary CMS systems that addressing each in this way would be a tall task.
Ben points out that there are many ways you could engineer archival into a CMS, there is no consensus on optimum paths. Backend dumps could work though media assets would be hard to link; interchangeable formats like NewsML would be a different way to go but still create problems with media files; frontend protocols like Resource Sync or packaging on the web. Furthermore, whatever path you take it could create complexities which slow performance. (I’m stealing here from a presentation Ben put together for one of the sessions and have no idea whether my nerdspeak is properly nuanced or accented.)
Ben talks about an open-source add-on called Memento to be used with the popular Django website platform. Basically Memento is a standard for a time-based Internet, providing rules for how servers, browsers and apps can publish and access previous versions of a URL. It was designed by the Los Alamos lab and is already in use at archive.org and the Library of Congress.
Of course, there are downsides — not everyone uses Django, database queries can be slow, and there are probably a lot of other bugs to work out — but it does represent a real digital archive solution for newspapers.
Ben later announces he’s just made his own pastpages.org project Memento- compliant.
Everyone, of course, thought Ben was one cool nerd. Preaching to the choir, perhaps, but solid gold.
* * *
I talk to Ben briefly on the break. He’s been at the Los Angeles Times for seven years and remembers well the reign of Sam Zell, that ruinous hack who briefly owned the Tribune a few years back. Zell bought Tribune on some sort of mercy-fuck package, used the employee stock ownership plan leverage debt and then did nothing but play poker with his cronies up in Tribune tower. When he sold the company a few years later it dumped into bankruptcy court for three years. The newspapers were then spun off in a separate division in which they no longer owned their real estate (they have to pay rent on their buildings) and were billed more than $300 million to pay the price of the spin-off.
Ben was glad some people kept their jobs, but the hiatus meant a huge window of opportunity was lost.
Now Tribune Publishing has just purchased UT-San Diego for $80 million, and it looks like they’ll consolidate operations and streamline staff while working what advertising opportunities can be gained from broader market share. It’s a plan, but neither newspaper have a lot financially to bring to the project.
Allen Mutter asked in his Newsosaur blog the other day what sense there might be in tethering two companies together who are both so financially unstable.
Even when two businesses are humming along smoothly, a merger takes months -– if not years –- to complete. A merger profoundly distracts the managers and employees in both companies, taking their eyes off the ball of their day-to-day jobs because each is wondering whether she will survive the inevitable game of musical chairs.
The challenge is compounded when the business is troubled, because the mechanics of the merger necessarily have to take a back seat to the immediate problem of shoring up sales and meeting demanding profit targets. This is all happening, remember, amid recurring rounds of musical chairs.
The challenge is most formidable of all when the reason the business is weak is because there is shrinking demand for your product in the marketplace. And this is precisely the problem that every newspaper faces.
Another sidestep away from the real work that desperately needs to be done? Perhaps, but in the daily newspaper business, what else are ya gonna do?
* * *
After the last afternoon session a bunch of us walk through uptown Charlotte to the building that houses the daily Charlotte Observer. It’s sunny and warm , near 90, and the breeze carries a humid clout to it that lets you know that summer soon will begin in earnest. Classy area, expensive digs downtown, lots of banks, eateries everywhere to service a robust industry of financial services support.
Lots of indigents and crazy dudes in the weave, panhandling, singing too loud, snoozing on benches. More evidence of a poorly distributed future.
* * *
Neil Mara, director of news systems for McClatchy, is attending the Memory Hole conference and it is he who has invited us on the tour. He walks us through the squat, 4-story building the newspaper has occupied since 1927 which takes up almost 10 acres of prime uptown real estate.
Down in a lobby that looks like it has seen busier days, he tells us that the newspaper won’t be in the building all that longer. Back in 2011, parent company McClatchy transferred the Observer’s property and six other newspaper sites to its pension fund to cover a $50 million obligation. Back in January, the Observer bought a printing facility in University City from Dow Jones and began printing there. Nothing’s been announced where the newspaper will locate to, but he said they were looking for a more modern facility with a media center environment.
We take elevators up to the newsroom on the fourth floor. It’s late afternoon — normally the busiest time for reporters — but Monday is a slow news day, and half the desks are empty. (This, too: back in March the Observer also laid off 16 percent of its workforce.) There’s the usual reporter’s clutter around desks: A stuffed shark eating a Kermit doll, a sign that says, ”Warning: Due Dates Are Closer Than They Appear.” Around the periphery I see a bookcases filled with reference books, mailroom that looks like it hasn’t been used since the ’70 and an area where big moveable file units suggest morgue.
We cluster round night metro editor Ronnie Glassberg’s desk where he and managing editor Cheryl Carpenter show us how the next day’s paper is assembling. As digital continues to overtake the newsgathering effort , work on the print product recedes. The afternoon budget meeting is less of deal; stories start now for the online product and then inform what is finished by the end of the day for the daily edition.
Another indication of the transition to digital is in the news pagination section. Team leader Ellyn Ritterskamp says the Observer now paginates for four McClatchy properties. It made sense to consolidate this work since digital makeup can be handled just as well in one location as being done redundantly in four. McClatchy stories are shared between them, too.
However, the most recent round of layoffs has the operation sorting itself out again. Trying to get more done with less staff.
* * *
Edward pitched a few questions about archival of stories. How much metadata is stored?
None of the editors weren’t quite sure.
***
The tour put me in a spongy mood. My newspaper career started at The Orlando Sentinel in 1980 delivering inter-office mail. Back then you typed a memo, stuck it in an printed lined yellow envelope, addressed it (hopefully with the mailpoint number every desk had been assigned) and then gave it to me. I was just trying to make a few bucks before getting my next garage band on the road, but I ended up staying for 18 years, working gigs that varied from stock clerk to buyer to handling employee events and communications and in Human Resources. (That’s right, journos, I was one of Them. As I am one of Them now to my vendor-averse colleagues in academic preservation circles.)
Eighteen years at that newspaper. I got to know the office building and production center so well I could walk every inch of it blindfolded.
Back in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, business was so robust that the Sentinel charged the highest rate in the country for full-page ROP advertising. Classified advertising raked in a third of the total revenue. Circulation was great, market penetration rich..
I serviced the corporeal and corporate body of that newspaper in many ways. I delivered mail and artist’s supplies. I negotiated typewriter maintenance and copier rental contracts. I bought the first desktop computers, Apple Lisas that the department director secretaries used for budgeting. I hosted events for three shifts of employees thanking them for their service. I put out a weekly employee newsletter that tried to keep up company spirits as technology began to burn like wildfire through the stress-nerves of the workforce.
I watched the Challenger explode from the roof of the production facility and delivered boxes up to editorial during the workforce reduction of 1991. A third-shift packaging employee showed up at my last veteran’s dinner, ate an hors d’oeuvre cooked in peanut oil and had an allergic reaction, freezing up and dying by the grand steps leading to the ballroom.
When I left in 1998, burned out and desperate for a fresh, less corporate direction, there were more than 1600 employees in the building. When I went back in 2011 to have lunch with an old acquaintance, the one finance employee still working in the department there were less than 600 employees total working at the newspaper. Everyone had been moved to the second floor. The city has announced plans to buy the building, but many months later Tribune still hasn’t announced where the employees of The Orlando Sentinel are headed.
All we focus on now is how newspapers must cut legacy costs to survive.
What we don’t hear much any more is the anger and hurt of the disrupted. It’s like we stopped listening to or caring about it long ago.
You couldn’t hear it either in our tour of the Observer, but it was there, loud perhaps in absence, the way you no longer could hear the rumbling of those big presses on the other side of the wall any more. A loud silence for those who remember.
In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a stain.
How will it appear then in archival record — as something ghostly and far and inconsequential? Or maybe something closer in, as part of a tipping point that became central to what we became?
What to save, what to throw away.
* * *
After the tour, seven of us eventually end up at Mert’s Heart and Soul for dinner. Mert’s is a downtown oasis of southern cooking — how they can still afford the rent, I haven’t a clue. Soul Rolls, corn bread, fried green tomato, catfish, salmon cakes, fried chicken, Carolina chopped barbecue, shrimp creole, yams, okra, black-eyed peas, collard greens — need I say more?
While we guzzle, talk flits everywhere around the table. We talk about Texas, ribbing Brian Hocker about the Pentagon military exercises there that some Texans believed was an advance expeditionary force of Obama’s federalists. (Brian simply said he wasn’t born there.) Edward McCain’s first gig as a news photographer was at a Texas paper, and Ben Welsh’ wife, who joins her husband for our dinner, says she grew up around El Paso. She and Brian compare notes on great eateries. One they both have been to was recently covered by Guy Fieri in his Diners and Drive-Ins Food Network. Turns out that Fieri has been here to Mert’s too: Across from our table is a large signed picture of the Guy.
Ben was a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, so talk gravitates north. Ian Buchanan lives there in Columbia — NewzGroup is located there, and of course Edward lives there, too. A new academic dean is coming on board. I ask about the impact of online distance education on the university, how much will it change upper education? (Edward: completely.)
Ben’s wife works for a foundation (using big data the way Ben does, just for a different institution); somehow she’s also connected with a university. She says she conducted a Skype interview with a prospective student that was the hardest one she’d ever conducted. The applicant was a girl who had an online HS diploma and three online AA degrees.
“I could see how the girl would benefit from being at college,” she says. “ But I couldn’t begin to envision how the college would benefit from her.” Was it the social disconnect of online learning that had made the interview so difficult? (Another person at the table said he had a stepchild with Aspberger’s Syndrome, and online classes were perfect from him — none of the thorns and thickets of face to face communication.)
* * *
On Sunday before heading to the airport, my wife and I had attended the graduation ceremonies for two of my nieces at Rollins College in Winter Park. There were so many graduates that year — more than 450 — that we ended up sitting in the overflow seating watching everything on a big screen TV.
We’re proud as hell of my nieces. They were home-schooled by my sister for many of the early years and have always been off on a great foot academically because of it. One majored in International Studies, the other Environmental Science. Lots of work in both fields, for sure.
Still, watching the proceedings I was struck by a yawning absence. There seemed to be a deliberate refusal to acknowledge how much digital culture was disrupting both the educational and vocational workspace. It was all about service and study and ethics and work — what comprises liberal arts education — but the world they were headed off into — law school, investment banking, teaching, graduate studies — seemed wholly disconnected from the emerging digital economy
Even the notion of a $160,000 4-year education in an age of MOOC — where skills are real-world and hit-the-ground running applicable — seemed somehow strange. An expensive, privileged world, for sure.
By not acknowledging how dramatically different everything was, the silence was loud. And yet in another sense, why bother to acknowledge a digital world in which all value is flat? That’s what’s missing in this big wild explosion: there aren’t any contributions, and none of them are being remembered. Become a venture capitalist, or even better, a tech billionaire. Forget about the rest.
* * *
Dinner plates pushed back, we lingered a while listening to Wilson Pickett and B.B. King, talking about language. I mentioned reading that a doctoral student recently turned in a dissertation writ entirely without punctuation — and wondered when one would be turned in written only with emoticons. We talked about programming language, how the interfaces are becoming simpler and more accessible. Ben’s wife asks, if languages evolve toward the complex, how come computer language is working in reverse?
Edward brings up recent research that suggests the color blue didn’t exist in human experience until we finally developed a word for it. Apparently in the evolution of human cultures, blue is the last color to historically appear in the language. (The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians, who had to come up with a way to describe a blue dye. Did the color not exist? Haven’t skies always been blue? Or did we see the color and simply not know it?
Odd that blue is the favorite color of tech platforms. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Skype: they all brand in blue. Is that a sign of their later invention, Web 2.0, something we couldn’t have seen until we ran through the possibilities of Web 1.0. Some designers say that it’s just because it’s a neutral color when designing apps; other say that it’s a networking color (what color are your links?). Simon Oxley, who created the original Twitter logo in 2006 and sold it for $4 through iStock to Twitter had this to say: “Facebook is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind.” Web 2.0 was visible because some people couldn’t see 1.0.
* * *
Back at the hotel, it’s weird watching cable TV. My wife and I have gotten so used to using the DVR that we never resort to channel-surfing, and we never watch commercials. We also use Netflix and Amazon for streaming content. Watching TV this way is akin to reading a newsprint newspaper.
But sometimes low-tech offers a certain retro comfort to it: It’s flat, devoid of complexity.
Case in point. Sunday morning, the trip doesn’t start off so great — an exercise in futile workarounds trying to get a boarding pass. Showered and packed and having a last cup of coffee, I realize going over my Orbitz.com itinerary that the ticket number I need to add to my mobile app was on the email sent to me at work where I had left the printout, thinking it was a duplicate of all the info I got when booking. And my iPhone email archive only goes back 10 days so I couldn’t get it from there. Tried going through the airline website but it didn’t recognize my locator number, and when I tried calling the reservation line, the robo attendant kept asking my name.
Cohea.
Phlaitt?
The idiotic exchange goes back and forth three or for times until I finally get dumped into the call wait line, which I’m told, at that moment, is an hour and a half long.
In cyberspace, can disruption hear you scream?
Then when I get to the airport I try using the American Airlines check-in kiosk, it spits back my credit card and tells to see a reservation representative. The line waiting to get there was about 200 people long. I catch a harried attendant walking by, and when she asked me what flight I was going out on she said, Oh, that’s US Airways. It’s an American Airlines flight but it’s booking through US Airways.
Who knows why. But when I went to the US Airway kiosk everything then works like a charm.
And that’s the dark truth of the information economy: when everything is right everything’s tight, but insert just one glitch — use a hacked password, or mispronounce your name to the autoteller, or go to a kiosk that’s wrong for reasons you cannot know — it can all go down just like that.
Does it ever feel to you that the complexity of our times has passed into a singularity of hassle?
* * *
The race lights continue around the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Then it’s morning enough and they go out.
Construction on the high rise continues unabated.
* * *
For me the low point of the event comes during a panel discussion on succession agreements and donor agreements. Dwayne Butler teaches copyright law and licensing at the University of Louisville, and he starts out by giving us the news that “copyright law is pretty dysfunctional right now.” We don’t really know what “rights” means. There are different copyright laws in 188 countries. Online copyright and digital rights management is a morass.
Participants look at a number of donation scenarios, but each time the word Copyright dragged things into a chill fog.
Heads loll. Coffee cups drain. Minutes seem to drag.
Lisa Macklin of Emory University brings things back some when she says, “We need to learn how to provide guidelines and pathways for getting around the legal quandaries. We don’t want to put out guidelines that can be used against us.”
According to Dwayne, the Division of Copyright is pushing for reform, but since it can only be changed through legislation, it’s going to be a long, uphill fight.
Then Lisa suggests a different tack: “Just go get the stuff and then figure out the rights. If you don’t get it, you can’t ask what the rights are.”’
This is the approach that Brewster Kahle has used in building the Internet Archive and related sites like archive-it.org and openlibrary.org. There’s a great YouTube video of a speech by Kahle that I found posted on the CNI website titled “Providing Universal Access to Modern Materials — and Living to Tell the Tale.” (see it here)
Time and again, when the Internet Archive sought legal advice when copying and digitizing materials, the lawyers told them that Bad Things Would Happen. But as long as they didn’t try to encroach on an entity’s business model (copying a videocassette, say, that was still selling retail somewhere), rarely has anyone ever asked them to take down what they put up.
So Just Scrape It may be third, secret mantra of the second Dodging the Memory Hole conference.
* * *
Remember Jim Kroll of the Denver Public Library? His is one of the early success stories of the how ownership of a newspaper archive can pass on to a memory institutions. When E.W. Scripps decided to shut down the Rocky Mountain News in 2009, editor John Temple recommended that the entire Rocky archive — reporter’s notes, the newspaper morgue, print photos, artist’s sketches and management documents — gifted to the library. It was a huge transfer of intellectual property, requiring a seven-page archives donation agreement to cover all of the details.
Since then, Kroll says the archive has turned up a lot of items where its not clear whether the Rocky Mountain News owned the stuff in the first place — Denver police surveillance files, U.S. senators’ papers, photos of sports and entertainment events that had specific conditions of use. In most of these cases, the record trail of rights were lost.
Of some 500,000 born-digital images, more than 60,000 turned out to belong to Getty Images or the Associated Press. Contract photographers also had rights. Also in the image library were some 60,000 orphans — no metadata or image information.
Working through such a large archive has created staffing headaches for the Denver Public Library. Kroll has hired an outside vendor to handle archival photo sales.
With copyright law being what it is, the big success story in the archive donation has matured into a lesson in what can be kept and what has to be left out. The culture shift between a legacy publisher and a library that takes it over is huge, and libraries may need significant resources to handle the job.
* * *
Though I sure wish I could stick around for the rest of the day’s fun, my parent corporation Hearst’s finance tower is right next store and I decide to drop in on some of the accounting people I’ve worked with for the past 15 years. Hearst’s 44-floor tower is the third-largest in downtown Charlotte, an elegant beauty.
Security getting in is incredibly heavy, surprisingly so. My visit has to be called in ahead of time, I’m issued a temporary photo pass, and then someone has to come down to confirm I’m me. Whether the heavy defense is against terrorists or cyberthieves or both, who knows.
I’m met by Joy Murphy, an accounting supervisor I’m in weekly contact with over past-due accounts and collections. She looks great at 64, a tall Trinidadian who relocated down from New York City when King Features Syndicate did all of their downsizing in 2000. (Our stable of offices in Orlando was part of that move too, with editorial and production functions outsourced to Reed Brennan, my immediate employer.)
The view from way up there is impressive, though the warren of cubicles could be just about anywhere in Office U.S.A. We take a short tour; half the cubes are empty, the result of years of continued cost-cutting measures.
We have lunch across the street to a chain joint that serves a lunch buffet. Sitting by a window eating soup and salad, we catch up. Joy plans to retire next year, having worked her entire 34-year career in one job. (I had three over the past 40 years). We’re anomalies, corporate relics really, survivors, perhaps endurers. It hasn’t made either of us wise or wealthy, but it’s at least good to see that Joy will make it to the finish line with a retirement package intact. Who knows what the next seven years will bring for me. With things changing this fast, nothing’s sure.
Joy says she’d heard rumors that corporate HR will be outsourced next — payroll, benefits, insurance, the works. It doesn’t seem possible — such a vital central part of every organization — but once the disruption cycle gets going, everything and everyone becomes dispensible.
I walk Joy back to the main entrance, give her a hug — it’s probably the last time I will see her — and roll my suitcase and briefcase to the curb where my airport ride shows up in three minutes.
Sometimes digital fulfillment just works like that.
* * *
Finally off, we lift hard into that shove that says gravity is a visceral shore. But soon its wave passes through us and we’re free. clearing that last clouds into a broad blue sky. Up here two hundred raggedy travelers are no more than motes or spectra in a vast afternoon.
The airport in Charlotte had been a hothouse of humans passing through, wheeling their luggage and carting packs and babies, ever always only staring now at screens with eyeless glaze of the rapturous, the dreaming or the dead.
Not that the flight toward home is without all that. An older woman next me coughs all the way, politely as she can into a sleeve, but its like an ill metronome wagging its finger. It also ramps the cabin’s hushed mayhem, every seat full, two babies yowling fore and aft, three cell phones ringing, some young guy in the row ahead talking like he’s on Letterman about every place he’s gone and done and said to everyone, fascinating only to him and cameras only he can see zoomed in.
I listen to soft music on my iPad, New Age ambients from two decades ago, back when such washes of pure sound seemed mythic. Now it just sounds like nostalgia, a sere too-bittersweet mood that must makes me wish there still easy ways to get back to something thoroughly sweet and fully known.
On my Kindle app I read a sci-fi story, “Countermeasures,” by Christopher Brown, from the Twelve Tomorrows — 2014 collection (MIT Technology Review). It’s about network life fast-forwarded into a fast-crashing future; awesome, terrifying stuff about platform owners so powerful they “build new fortunes on a scale only possible when the idea of money was liberated from earthly value and turned into pure math.” The counterforce here are digital anarchists “rewriting the future” “by reinventing the politics of the past.”
Does this sound as presciently familiar to you as it does to me?
… The owners figured out how to make everyone think they are a star when we are all just digital sharecroppers.
We’ve torn down the old temples. Corporate hierarchies, universities, old faiths, old economy supply chains, banks. Upended human pyramids based on warlords and priests. It was only a matter of time before we went after the biggest one. Hacked the OS.
I won on one of the teams that helped rewrite the code. The tools we’d developed to control crowds could also be used to turn them loose. When they told us to let it run off leash, they didn’t think about blowback.
What started as a wave of fed-up netmobs overthrowing small country tyrants became a political virus that ate the world. Redrew the map, then redrew the idea of maps.
The people who grew up with the old order saw end-times. Entropy. Pirates, oligarchs, refugees, and riots. Others saw opportunity. Creative destruction.
Evolution.
A new order to suit the age.
They didn’t anticipate that some of us might want to see what would happen if we did it the other way around.
We cashed in our equity to make the future happen. It was kind of a breech baby.
Yikes. I haven’t read much science fiction since devouring Tom Swift those afternoons of childhood in the Evanston Public library. The fascination with things to come seems now to be a rather dusty, retro vision, replaced by a nervous evasion that borders on something listed in the American Psychiatric Profession’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Perhaps my nostalgia is for that old-school dream of Progress, horizons everywhere, possibilities infinite. Not the four horsemen of complexity, cybercrime, platform domination and white noise. Christopher Brown’s tomorrow is saddled with those rough riders and I feel both awe and terror at it.
Who wants to think about the future anymore? Maybe that’s the real dilemma here with digital archival and preservation. No one’s all that sure they want to hand the past over to it.
I lean back and drift awhile listening to Michael Whalen’s My Secret Heart, piano ivories tinkling in ambient swashes that have always felt uteral but now feels naggingly suspect. Cabin sounds mute into sub-audible harmonics, the engines of the Airbus A333 lull and gravity is drugged.
Odd comfort perhaps, but I pull up the report “Guidelines for Digital Newspaper Preservation Readiness” Katherine Skinner co-wrote with Matt Schultz in 2014. It’s a how-to manual for newspapers looking to take the right first steps toward archival and preservation of their news. Just because the info is backed up somewhere doesn’t mean that it’s archived, and just because it’s archived doesn’t mean its preserved in a meaningful enough way for full access by the future.
(If you’re working for a newspaper, by some miracle or madness still plowing through this post, and want to hear about ground-level services available to newspaper looking to get started, see my post “The Newspaper Archivists’ Good News.”)
In the report, Skinner and Shultz write,
… all institutions can do something to prepare their collections for long-term use, and that there can be no one-size-fits-all approach to preserving digital newspapers. Institutions need to be able to tackle the challenges involved in preserving digital newspapers in modular increments. Though they need to be able to understand the entire series of “managed activities” as inter-related stepping stones, they also need to be empowered to produce staged implementations based on their current and future capacities.
Stepping stones, yes, but to what? I lean back into ambience and imagine the possibilities of a newspaper’s entire corpus of reporting, from paper editions in 1915 to a news item that only existed for a few hours on a webpage before being updated in 2015. All of it –- news on paper, microfiche, hard drive, server, cloud — — forms what the poet Wallace Stevens called “the complete amassing harmony,” one community’s long chapter of past, current and future history, secure, preserved, distributed and accessible to a democratic society.
The woman next to me keeps coughing and the babies squall without apparent censure as we begin our descent, passing back in from the Atlantic over what seems a flooded plain — Banana River, the barrier islands of the coast — then beneath a lip of light where only the tops of distant stormclouds are bright white, the rest below in shadow, misty with rain.
It comes to me then this question: What if processing power, data sets and algorithms become powerful enough in some not-to-distant future so that the old wisps of historical record, previously residing in scattershot, unrelated, and largely inaccessible places — a column, say, by an editor about a racist sheriff in the 1952, a piece about a shot-up veterans’ homecoming from Vietnam in 1965 or a championship prep sports in the 1972; the mall opening in 1984, the closing of the fabrication plant in 1991 and the mall’s bankruptcy in 1998; the big storm of 2004 and a contentious town meeting over tree removal in the newly-renovated downtown shopping district in 2013: what if all of that could be factored into the news of the present so that the first draft of history was now deeply backgrounded all previous ones?
Wouldn’t history itself become a different animal, a deep Now, a human-net as self-aware as the Internet itself may someday become? How would a democracy change under such conditions, taking into account not only its living citizens but also the collective voice of its living dead?
This meditation merges into the flight’s slow but sure descent back to the ground. When I left Florida two days ago it was only hot: now it’s summer in the late sprawl of daily thunderstorms, hot angst already spent, lingering now into night. Below the coiled guts of tract houses, spiraling out in pseudopodal extensions of credit,, vast suburbs arteried by highways, cars with their lights on hurrying faster and more manic the closer we near the ground.
For a moment it seems two distant worlds must collide; but then it’s only wheels bumping twice upon sure ground, engines reversing thrust, a long loud whoaboy down the tarmac’s throat. And then like that we’re down, spat from one whale onto another shore, no longer airelons in the splendid sky but too many grumpy passengers needing to pee filing one by one through a hatch door.
Florida viewed from the monorail back to the terminal is plush, all palms and waterways, grass green as antifreeze. In the distance, all those stormclouds now sprawl from below, jolting tongues of lightning across their summer-birthed canopy.
* * *
Have I scraped too much? What rights do I have to everything I have hauled back up from my Down the Memory Hole memory hole? Will the official record confirm or deny this?
And where did I put the metadata?
* * *
Pulling my little wheeled suitcase with my tech-crammed pack perched on top, tie loosened and shirt raggedly, gamely still tucked in, I press through the thinning late-day airport crowd. It’s been almost fourteen years since 9/11/01. I was supposed to fly out the next day for a newspaper conference in Wisconsin; was packing up handouts of our product when everyone started tuning into the news on their office TVs. The next year when I flew out on Sept. 11 for a newspaper conference in Portland, I had the easiest day of travel ever.
Long time ago. We forget even big things like that fast. Somewhere out in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Australia, Malaysian Flight 370 lies stilled somewhere in the abyss, unaccounted for a year after it vanished from radars. Human memory is a weaker, more diffuse organ now; its only sure replacement is the archive.
* * *
Out to my car in the parking garage, the heat is thick and the humidity plush. I can hear thunder somewhere far in the distance, under the whine of a jet lifting off. There’s still a long drive home. Calling my wife to let her know I’m on the ground and on my way, she sounds ill and tired from working too hard for too little for too long. Termites are termites swarming in our bedroom room upstairs — last night they were all over our bed. Happens every May, we have someone come in and spot treat the nests (tenting is terribly disruptive). Lotta catch-up ball back in the office tomorrow.
And then there is this brief recap I plan to write.
But for now, the inside my car is cool and driving is smooth through post-rush traffic. I listen to ‘50s jazz — Coltrane, Oscar Peterson, the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Miles Davis and Bill Evans, “Blue in Green.” Good times, the two of them digging deep foundations in jazz, Miles recovering from his heroin addiction while Evans suffered what a girlfriend called “the longest suicide in history.” Each night climbing up on a cross onstage to bleed another bucket of gorgeousness. Paying the piper and hard.
Can human history survive itself? Will the Earth survive our history? I end with a poem by Wendell Berry that offers the benediction of memory:
A VISION
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its difficulty is its possibility.
David Cohea is general manager of King Features Weekly Service, an editorial service for 700 weekly newspapers.
