The New York Times Paywall Has Made Me Forget What Reading the New York Times is Like

My relationship with the New York Times online has gone stale. Once, he opened doors for me, and we together engaged in free-wheeling exploration of science news, arts reviews, Maureen Dowd’s latest rant, and even lesson plans for my students.

Now the chemistry’s all wrong. When we do get together, I broach new topics with anxiety. Do I really want to read that? I think. I never quite know when he’ll slam the door. Is the article limit now ten, or twenty per month? If I bookmark an article, or save it to Instapaper, and then try to return, will it count again? Who cares, I think, I’m done.

I’m usually through the first few paragraphs by the pay wall emerges. I know that he’s savvy that way, and he’s planned for us to be through the appetizers before he goes in for the sell. The writing’s good. He is an old friend, after all. I’m tempted. But, no.

I don’t come up against pay walls too often, for the simple reason that I read fewer and fewer sites with pay walls.

As the number of New York Times’ digital subscribers reaches nearly half a million, some are withdrawing their initial criticisms of the pay wall. The New York Times has made strategic concessions to keep the site open and relevant. Intentional holes through linking and social media make it such that access is not under lockdown, and the newspaper has yet to go after twitter streams and add-ons that take advantage of these loopholes.

What the pay wall does effectively shut down is the kind of playful, exploratory interaction that emerging readers might have directly shared with the New York Times brand. As a long term strategy, a pay wall’s exclusionary measures diminish the New York Times, putting it one step behind sources that are building loyal readers through a consistent availability of “free.” I'd rather give my money to NPR. You won't leave me, right buddy?

Road Kill Citizen Science App "Splatter Spotter": Safer Cities for All Species

Rotting animal carcasses? Yeah, my response would be avoidance at all costs.
 
At the Chautauqua Series lecture at Temescal Gateway Park on Tuesday night, Cal State Channel Islands professor Sean Anderson spent the better part of the evening convincing visitors otherwise. It helps that his organization, the Pacific Institute for Restoration Ecology, is also known as PIRatE.

According to Anderson, there's about a 1 in 10 chance you'll see road kill during a mile of driving in Southern California. For every ten miles you travel by road, you're more likely than not to be driving past a dead animal.

Anderson wants to learn more about exactly how much road kill is happening, and how we can build cities and roads that will minimally harm animal populations. And he's recruiting you (Me? Well, mostly your smartphone) to help.

Koreatown Kidnapping and Car Theft

Photo from City Data

At approximately 4pm on Monday, August 13, two children and a vehicle were taken near 3500 Wilshire Blvd (pictured above). According to LAPD Officer Webster Wong, the children were  released, and are currently safe.

Update: An arrest was made today.

Curiosity Scientist Visits Students at 826LA Echo Park

Photo from America Noticias

The day before the much-hyped August 5th launch, Melissa Soriano, a scientist on the Curiosity team at Jet Propulsion Laboratories, visited students ages 6-12 at 826LA in Echo Park. 

Soriano told students, “The most exciting thing would be if Curiosity found some evidence of life,” but warns that life on Mars might not look like it does today. 

The students were attending It’s (Partially) Rocket Science, a science writing workshop held over four Saturdays sponsored by Time Warner Cable to provide STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) enrichment for low-income and minority students.

Soriano talked students step-by-step through the landing using this footage, highlighting, among other features, the heat shields and parachute that helped Curiosity slow from over 13,000 mph when it entered the Martian atmosphere to a mere 1 mph on the surface, all in only 7 minutes. 

Just the week before, workshop students had built their own spacecraft from paper trays and popsicle sticks, attempting a safe landing on the surface of an imaginary planet. The challenge? The planet’s surface was made of ooblek, a non-Newtonian fluid made from cornstarch and water. 

 

Photo from Casey Fleser

While not many astronauts would have survived some of these landings, Soriano says “It’s possible we’ll send a person to Mars.” She emphasizes the challenges of getting along in a small space over a long, laborious journey, and says, “I wouldn’t necessarily want to be the person going.” While Curiosity made the trek to Mars in 8 months, a manned journey would have to travel at a slower speed to take less of a toll on the human body. 

Soriano, who graduated from the California Institute of Technology, has worked for JPL since 2003. Her final words to the students encouraged them to work hard, so that perhaps they could be rocket scientists working on the next shuttle.

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826 runs creative writing workshops and after school programs for low-income students nationally. 826LA is located in Echo Park and Venice. Storefronts of 826 sell novelty items to fund their programs—the original 826 is The Pirate Store, and 826LA Echo Park is The Time Travel Mart. This author attended the workshop as a volunteer with 826LA.

Jonah Lehrer Resignation

Jonah Lehrer / Flickr.com – poptech

As someone whose life is saturated with science news, it's been impossible to not notice Jonah Lehrer. I've read his work on The New Yorker and Wired, read about him at the New York Times and NPR, heard him contributing to Radiolab, and, finally, saw him speak a few months ago at First Fridays at the Natural History Museum.

As my buddies can attest, I was pretty excited to chat with Lehrer, particularly about the creativity in science education. I bought Proust was a Neuroscientist, got it signed, and spent the next few hours running about in jubilation (to be fair, the Grilled Cheese truck and getting to drink wine standing directly adjacent to dinosaur bones were also huge contributing factors to my ebullience).

A couple months later, news broke of the Lehrer Frontal Cortex self-plagiarism scandal, but I shrugged it off. Plagiarizing yourself… what does that even mean?

At the time, Lehrer pledged a renewed dedication to journalistic integrity; it wasn't going to happen again. Turns out, it was already too late: Imagine, the book that cost Lehrer his career this Monday, had already been published.

Michael Moynihan's Tablet article details the inaccuracies, fabrications, and contextual problems with the book's chapter on Bob Dylan, a story I personally heard Lehrer retell on stage and again on Radiolab. Most disappointing are Lehrer's lies to Moynihan, including inventing access to an unedited cut of a Dylan documentary that he now admits he never saw.

This is not a naive writer bungling a complex message, but a prolonged and deliberate deception and seems likely to overshadow much of the work he's done for years.

Now the web is abuzz with Lehrer's resignation from The New Yorker, and everyone's got a theory on the great unanswered question: Why?

Jayson Blair, another reporter whose career ended in a 2003 New York Times journalism scandal, shares with Salon 

I certainly understand that pressure. Once you’re young and successful, I think, in this profession you’re only as good as your last story — and you want every story to be better.

GOOD's Andrew Price cites overwhelming cultural consumption of Wow! stories and science churned up at unreal rate.

But Roxane Gay, in another Salon article, emphasizes the young-genius-boy-wonder rhetoric that shaped Lehrer's career arc. She doesn't give him too much benefit of the doubt:

There is hubris and there is hubris.

The tone of Moynihan's article is even.

Jonah Lehrer has resigned from the New Yorker and apologized to me. Not that this matters, but I accept his apology and wish him luck.
— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) July 30, 2012

Moynihan told the NY Observer "I didn't want to twist the knife." Still, he says,

More than anything, though, by the way, I’m completely fucking mystified as to how somebody who does this sort of thing thinks they’re going to go work at The New Yorker. Those fact-checkers are obviously notorious, and that sort of stuff wouldn’t be published there.

(Which raises a whole 'nother question.)

Lesson learned:

If you think: no one will check, you're wrong: someone will. And the more visible the work, the more visible the check. nyti.ms/MwfT9v
— Jay Rosen(@jayrosen_nyu) July 31, 2012

LA Reserved

LA Observed is a hybrid of new media tactics and old-school tone. It does what every news blogger posting multiple times a day has to: LA Observed aggregates. In subtly bolded hyper-links, numerous media outlets are cited in the morning news round-ups, in addition to providing fodder for blog quotes directly responding to other authors (often with large blocks fromthe article source). Articles may also be significantly altered after publication, and are denoted with an asterisk for reader information.

The publication markets itself to those with a stake in LA history, business, and politics with greater emphasis on impartiality as opposed to the snark of many online-only publications (see: Gawker). Recent ongoing coverage on the city council’s decision on medical marijuana did not take a stance on the issue, in comparison to the more pro-marijuana coverage on LA weekly. 

By betting its success on the ability to build a recognized and stable brand, LA Observed is taking a unique route for local news. It's never going to be the Times, but its leg up is that it’s a one-stop shop for this kind of news for Angelenos, and it’s free.  

Gawker to the New York Times: YOU'RE TRIVIAL, TOO!

Gawker, the snarky and frenetic teenage boy of the internet, isn’t afraid to pick a fight with grandpa. Last month, Gawker columnist DrewMagary (username: bigdaddydrew001) put the New York Times on the SHIT LIST for an article glorifying the Brant brothers, teen socialites who are known for exactly that much. 

The headline?  “The New York Times Profiles the Brandt Brothers Because the New York Times HatesYou.” Magary makes no attempts to veil his disdain as he quotes large swaths of the Times’ society piece, followed by immediate mockery. Even the author’s biography is fair game.

Magary writes:

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? Why would the New York Times, an entity that positions itself as a paper that reports on important shit, tell us about these fuckfaces?

Gawker’s not big on restraint. It’s big on sarcasm, four-letter words, and the kind of news that cloys scattered, distracted clicks from people seeking a moment of reprieve from their spreadsheets, hoping for a hit of something that will make them LOL.

But even bigdaddydrew001 knows that for all his histrionics, for now the New York Times is still the newspaper. It’s classic, if severe, but most importantly, it’s built a brand as a crucial, expansive source of information (and crosswords!).