Here’s one way to find out. Send them this fake ad:

A blogger gets fired from his day job at the WaPo for exercising his freedom of speech:

A Washington Post staffer who had been blogging at a sports-themed Web site apparently lost his job after editors came across some profane-laden postings that also identified him as a Post scribe.

Michael Tunison, who blogged under the name “Christmas Ape” at the “Kissing Suzy Kolber” site, wrote on Wednesday that he had been fired for “bringing discredit to the paper.”

Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. confirmed that Tunison no longer worked at the paper and had left his job on Wednesday, but would not specify if he resigned or was fired. “We don’t discuss personnel matters, but we have standards for people’s outside work,” Downie told E&P. “You need to clear it with your editors here before and it should not be a conflict of interest.”

Free speech isn’t free. Proceed at your own risk.

In a letter to shareholders, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos proclaims the success of the Kindle:

’ll highlight a few of the useful features we built into Kindle that go beyond what you could ever do with a physical book. If you come across a word you don’t recognize, you can look it up easily. You can search your books. Your margin notes and underlinings are stored on the server-side in the “cloud,” where they can’t be lost. Kindle keeps your place in each of the books you’re reading, automatically. If your eyes are tired, you can change the font size. Most important is the seamless, simple ability to find a book and have it in 60 seconds. When I’ve watched people do this for the first time, it’s clear the capability has a profound effect on them. Our vision for Kindle is every book ever printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.

 

---

Publishers—including all the major publishers—have embraced Kindle, and we’re thankful for that. From a publisher’s point of view, there are a lot of advantages to Kindle. Books never go out of print, and they never go out of stock. Nor is there ever waste from over-printing. Most important, Kindle makes it more convenient for readers to buy more books. Anytime you make something simpler and lower friction, you get more of it.

 Well yeah, dude.

This is looking more and more like the tipping point for the book business, as I suspected it would be when I wrote:

kindles interest

December 6th, 2007 — books, publishing

It looks like Amazon has hit the sweet spot with the Kindle, its new reading device. There’s a ton of press, much of it positive.

…

I think it was a year and a half ago [in early 2006  ---ed.] that I wrote “the future of books is here.” There’s an awful lot of press right now, so it’s hard to say amidst the fog of PR whether or not the Kindle will ignite (ha ha ha HA!) the imaginations of gadget lovers as well as book lovers. Its wireless capability just may give it the kind of crossover appeal to make the idea of an electronic device for reading books stick. And that’s more than half the battle, I believe.

Which means that books may finally be tipping over into the digital realm for real. I’ve been writing about this subject for a long time on the blog. And I’m also the author of the slogan

if you love books, set them free™

So I’m pleased about this development.

The book business is great terrain for the long tail, and it will—eventually, after a lot more disruption in the lives of publishers, agents, authors, and wannabes—entertain, enlighten, and enrich the lives of more people in the world, in places where it’s hard to reach them now. The potential for the spread of knowledge is unfathomably huge.

Eventually, everyone will win.

Meanwhile, Bezos tries to make the claim that the Kindle will stretch short attention spans:

We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us. Writing, invented thousands of years ago, is a grand whopper of a tool, and I have no doubt that it changed us dramatically. … Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. … As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools. 

I’m not buying that argument. I believe that info-snacking is very much here to stay. I also believe that the “info” we’re getting via the media (old and new)  is being produced in snack-sized bits (and bytes) and that, more and more, the content will be molded to fit an info-snacking world.

But I’m optimistic about the future of books as we know them, and about our maintaining our long attention span, the potential for which is probably hardwired into us.

The thing is this: it requires discipline on the part of the user to exercise a long attention span. We are the agents of our own fate. We need to unplug in order to concentrate.

It’s a choice. Don’t blame the tools. Use your attention span or lose it.

[[ updated and corrected: In the comments, Kit Seelye clarifies when her piece appeared, in what form, and who did the editing. I've updated this post accordingly. Deletions and inserts are in brown. ---ed.]]

[[Welcome, PressThink readers.]]

A couple of years ago, just after I started blogging, I saluted the NYT’s Kit Seelye for the first time (for “going off the reservation” to comment on the making of the news from within in the news pages of the paper). Her perspective on the changing nature of newsmaking and newsgathering was refreshingly candid and honest.

Here’s what Seelye wrote (in 2006)—she noted that the “news” on TV has been a devolving enterprise—competing with the fictional programming—for a long time.

Ever since [”Monica-mania”], the White House briefings have played out in real time against the daytime dramas, giving the world a glimpse into the daily push-me, pull-you in a democracy of making news (or not) and trying to report it. Now, with cable channels, reality television, talk-back live and blogging on the spot, with viewers and readers hip to stagecraft and expecting to be taken behind the scenes, there seems no turning back.

If you’ve been reading my blog, which is about that very subject, you’ll understand that I always read Seelye’s work with interest—she’s attuned to the evolution of media, and she takes the time to provide NYT readers with the context they need for understanding the reports they read or hear or see in that constantly evolving media.

Sometimes that gets her into trouble with her Times overlords, who then seem to edit her after the fact, different versions of her stories appear online and in the dead-tree paper, sparking my suspicions of nefarious editorial monkeying around at the Times. (It has been known to happen. —ed.) I last noted this on January 1, when Seelye covered Mike Huckabee’s initial surge in popularity with the media.

Now the Times has done it to Seelye again , my suspicions were aroused again, by a piece that originated on the paper’s Caucus blog and then appeared in the dead-tree version on Wednesday, and then migrated over to the hybrid (I guess) “online.” [I'm all for "online"; I would, however, like to understand how it works in terms of corrections and glaringly obvious post-facto edits. Is there a policy? ---ed.] I can only link you to one version, because that’s the only one that exists. (As it made the journey from the Web to the paper [the piece on the Web is the original, published on April 14], it was Silently Edited for Excessive Eliteness, to remove edited down for length to fit in the paper and to add a reference to Arianna Huffington’s exact whereabouts at the time she was quoted for Seelye’s piece; info about Jay Rosen was added too.)

But before you jump to the [Arianna] gossip, it’s worth reading Seelye’s piece.

The Flack lays out the story Seelye tells so well:

In a nutshell, the Obama campaign invited one Mayhill Fowler, a 61-year-old reporter for Off the Bus, the Jay Rosen/Arianna Huffington’s consumer-driven campaign press corps, to attend an Obama fundraiser in California supposedly as a contributor. It was at this closed-to-the-media event where the mostly inspiring candidate dissed all gun-loving, religious types living in pivotal Pennsylvania.

Ms. Fowler, wearing her journalist hat and armed with her digital recorder, struggled with whether to report the ill-timed and ill-conceived remarks by her candidate-of-choice. Four days later she did, and all hell broke loose.

Since this is a PR blog, I found it especially intriguing, in an age of the Internet-driven political campaign, how the Senator’s handlers thought they could keep the media lid on what was ostensibly a public event. Ms. Fowler gained a “credential,” (i.e., access) as a supporter, not as a reporter, but she believed otherwise:

“We had a fundamental misunderstanding of my priorities,” Ms. Fowler told me. “Mine were as a reporter, not as a supporter. They thought I would put the role of supporter first.”

He concludes with the wisdom of today’s PR professional (and what every person in public—or even semi-demi-public—life should know [e.a.]):

Today, most of the smart PR set acknowledges that everyone and anyone can be a journalist, nothing is off-the-record, and that total command over a client’s public portrayal is a thing of the past.

His postscript leads to the long-promised (by me) gossip:

BTW - I did get a kick seeing Obama-supporter Ms. Huffington’s quoted in the newspaper this morning:

I’ll let Hendrik Hertzberg take over from there [e.a.]:

I’m a longtime aficionado of what Steven R. Weisman (of the New York Times) calls New York Times humor. … I think this qualifies. It’s the penultimate sentence of Katharine Q. Seelye’s backgrounder about how the Huffington Post got its big Obama/cling/bitter scoop, from page A17 of today’s [April 16 ---ed.] paper:

“We are a news site,” said Ms. Huffington, who cleared the post by cellphone while aboard David Geffen’s yacht in Tahiti. “We have opinions, points of view, but we’ll post whatever is newsworthy.”

No word on whether La Arianna was wearing pajamas.

Ouch. I have my differences with Ms. Huffington, but she didn’t deserve that hit from Hertzberg at all.

On the other hand, what exactly is Arianna trying to hide, and why? What a juicy morsel that is about Arianna in Tahiti! Of course she’s allowed to take cruises on David Geffen’s yacht. Who cares how elitist it makes her look?—especially since her judgment on the Fowler stories was correct: that they were news. No matter how uncomfortable those stories were for her (and Geffen’s) preferred candidate, she’s now in the reporting business and she knows it, and she acted accordingly.

I think Seelye also deserves kudos for her extremely nuanced and detailed reporting of the (excruciatingly nuanced) backstory of how “Bittergate” came to be: through the work of a “citizen journalist.” And I am totally impressed by the responsible, thoughtful performance of all the players behind the scenes at OffTheBus, not least Mayhill Fowler (and Arianna Huffington).

There’s a lot more to read on this subject. See Jay Rosen. See Jeff Jarvis contra Michael Tomasky. See also Marc Cooper’s blog post in which he explains how he edited Mayhill Fowler’s stories.

This post is long enough, but I’d be ignoring my subject matter if I failed to mention that even as we’re debating the proper role of the citizen in journalism, we don’t yet know the ramifications (and may never know for sure) of this “incident” on Obama’s campaign—that is a) on his securing the nomination of his party and b) on his chances of winning the general election if he does secure the nomination.

What we do know, however, is really interesting—and that’s the fact that the fallout from this “incident,” which in fact was a pseudo-event—has caused (or catalyzed) changes in the real world (Obama was supposedly “bad news-proof”; now he’s on the defensive). More about that another time.