Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

John McWhorter sums up my position succinctly: “Calling attention to the fact that black nerds are often teased by black peers for “acting white” elicits predictable reactions, such as claims that the problem doesn’t exist.”

Yeah, the problem doesn’t exist.  Just by virtue of the fact that black people are inherently cool.  If there are nerds among us, they are anomalies, probably infected at birth by the same gene that makes white people smart, yet incredibly uncool.

Tongue in cheek, people.  Stay with me.

I’ve been listening to the unelected Black Nerd spokesman, McWhorter (and sometimes, Stanley Crouch), bitch about this “black nerds slammed for actin white” problem for what seems like a decade.  I didn’t even know that group needed representation.  I picture a whiny coven of old men plotting revenge over the ass whoopin’s and ego bruising they received as children.  Yeah.  Children are cruel (ever read Lord of the Flies?).  Get over it.  Stop turning your humiliation into a book, just because you have the nerd cred, i.e. degrees and media access, with which to do so.

Now that Barack Obama’s on the scene, McWhorter says black nerdiness is “in”–as if it were ever “out.”  If you grew up in a black neighborhood, “black” and “nerd” go together like no-name kicks, high water pants and coke bottle glasses. Like the cute girl with the pigtails who stayed behind after class to talk to the teacher.  Like the kid who the principal always singled out for good behavior.  Like every freshman class at Morehouse.  Like the kids who lived in fear of the 3pm bell.  And yes, like the kid who got jawned on for “actin’ white.”

Point is: this was a problem for a very specific group of black nerds.  So it is intriguing that McWhorter can push the angle that because black nerds were smart, they got jawned on for actin’ white and then get media play like it somehow indicates a problem for black America.  I mean, really?

I have another angle on McWhorter’s thesis. I came up in the prep school system and I distinctly remember thinking, about some of my peers, “I know we attend white schools but do you have to sound white, too?”

I never thought this about the few black kids who grew up on the UES or in the Village; I thought this about the kids who, like me, took trains, planes and automobiles home to working or middle class black neighborhoods but still managed to sound like the subculture who summered in East Hampton. I mean, really?

And sometimes, they pulled rank.  I remember one private school senior speaking down about her Bronx family members in front of a small assembly of tony Manhattanites and me. Her facial expression, tone of voice–both implied, with some show of shocked disgust, that her cousins treated her different because she valued education and they did not, she valued “proper English”, but they did not. I cringed in my seat.  “Ever think,” I wanted to say, “that you stand out among your family because y’all live in the South Bronx but you sound and act like a stereotypical Upper East Side JAP?”

I remember this incident though, because of the girl’s mother.  She’d sought me out after the panel, perhaps because I was the only other black person there and was a few years older than her daughter.  She was West Indian, like me, and spoke with a 24/7 Caribbean accent like my mum.  So I code-switched and inflected my speech with a little Caribbean dialect, too.  The woman’s eyes lit up and she said,  “Come meet my daughter!”

Her daughter was less than thrilled.  She didn’t need a mentor, which is what her mother was trying to force upon both of us in the parking lot of the school’s campus.  The meeting ended awkwardly.  I tried to get the mother to smile.  Her daughter’s first-class education–the thing for which she had undoubtedly sacrificed–formed the chasm that now separated them.  I understood that from my own life.  But how difficult it must have been for the mother to at once, feel pride to watch her daughter speaking on a panel but then, listen to her child denigrate their family in front of strangers.  Talk about an Imitation of Life moment.

McWhorter’s bully and my private school example represent two sides of the same coin.  They speak from the same bleak landscape of low self worth in that they both equate “being educated” with the race to which they do not belong*.  Now, why doesn’t McWhorter make that point?

* I write this, recognizing that race is socially, not biologically, real.

An elderly community sees its roles reverse as a young child hands them candy for a change

The holiday celebrates a miraculous victory, where a revolt led by religious Jewish rebels defeated a Syrian-Greek king and his allies, briefly reestablishing an independent Jewish state, before the Romans finally extinguished the ancient Judean state a century later. A tiny isle of victory in a stormy sea of persecutions. (more…)

I want to throw down my gauntlet in the future of journalism debate and I will do so making a falsifiable statement (a rarity in these discussions): Journalism will not become profitable again until the industry figures out how to charge people for online content.

Recently I went to yet another hyperbolic panel discussions on internet journalism. The CEO of Slate.com Jacob Weisberg spoke in triumphant tones of how the time for coexistence between print and online was over now that the internet guys had bigger “armies”. It sounded a bit like a declaration of war from some newly empowered ethnic nationalist movement whose glee over a fresh shipment of arms stripped away any facade of caution or diplomacy. This guy was ready to march on Rome and he didn’t mind saying so.

Some of his hot air was sucked out when an audience member asked him, “Is Slate.com profitable?”

His enfeebled response drifted from something about lawyers to an awkward silence.

And that is the point – behind all the rhetoric and triumphalism it is very hard to think of any free ad-based content that has proven profitable. Google – the king maker of adbased revenue – has not been able to monetize there  most user-centric web 2.0, journalism for the people, ethno-everything magic tool: youtube.

And folks if Google can’t create big ad based profits on user generated content that ought to be telling us something.

The theory is that people are unwilling to pay for content now that anyone can publish stuff online. There is no scarcity, according to this reasoning and people will not pay for something that is not scarce. You or I can put up a movie review according to this argument and it can compete with the best.

This is wrong.

Scarcity of news is actually increasing not decreasing. Its true that anyone can publish online for free – and there are certainly more opinion makers than ever before – but that does not mean that you can do reporting for free and we actually are seeing a shrinking core of new coverage.

The media adopted a false economy online. When one newspaper decided to offer free ad-based content  they all had to jump in or face being left behind. For awhile the public adapted to this free, unsustainable model and the newspapers and magazines – bloated from decades of plenty – could afford to try out this new idea of giving it all away. It failed.

Ad revenues were never able to deliver up the goods. All the sources of news that we have relied on for decades are going under. And they are not being replaced. A million  opinion writers blogging on a million other opinion writers cannot fulfill the one vital function of journalism: to gather news.

We have  gotten into thinking that this is a service we can get for free because we jumped on board with the news media’s failing experiment in something for nothing over the past eight years. And once a certain amount of news media and consumers decided to invest in this experiment the rest had to. But now it is coming to an end.

The audience will not come to paying for content out of a love for the product but out of a neccesity. The failure of the free model is going to leave us with very few quality media outlets. That means there will once again be scarcity.

When quality, free content dwindles past a certain point people will once again be willing to pay for news, just as they always were before these past eight years of illusion. The industry, for its part will need to work out a pricing structure that leverages the ease of payment and low cost of publication that online offers.

Lots of people thought that noone would ever buy music again but Itunes found  price structure that worked – as of June 2008 the store has sold 5 billion songs. The trick was knowing to do it 99 cents at a time.

The historic house at 11-41 123rd St., known as the Schleicher Court Mansion, in College Point is empty these days.

Why that is exactly is a matter of dispute.

Residents, such as Rita Douglas, 51, a longtime resident of College Point, say it’s because the electrical system was so out of date, the Department of Buildings declared it a fire hazard.

(more…)

Your grandma’s eggnog, it ain’t.

Coquito, the Puerto Rican version whose ‘kick’ depends on the cojones of its maker, drew hundreds of party-goers this Saturday to el Museo del Barrio in East Harlem.  The seventh annual coquito-tasting contest featured more than 30 entries from as nearby as 110th and Third Avenue, to as far away as the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania.  What everyone shared though was a love of Boricua heritage and an undeniable desire to keep a family Christmas tradition alive.

“Coquito is about a cultural connection,” said Debbie Quiñones, who flitted here and there all evening, trying to make sure her ‘extended family’ was all right.  She hosted the first tasting party in her apartment.  When the gatherings became too large, three years ago, she chatted up a welcoming neighbor: el Museo.

But, “It’s growing bigger than what we can handle!” el Museo’s director of public programs, Gonzalo Casals said onstage, sharing a laugh with the overflow crowd.

Well before the pouring, yelling, jostling and tasting began, it was clear that coquito (literally, small coconut, in Spanish) was so much more than the yummiest drink, ever.

“I’m the only one in my family who makes coquito,” said Enid Rodriquez, who was participating in the contest for the first time.  “Throughout the years, the tradition has gotten lost in the family and I was the one who picked it up.”

Iris Mendez, bottle #10 and also a first-timer, debuted her mother’s recipe.  “I hope I get lucky tonight,” she said, “because there’s lots of competition here.”

Martha Laureano-Perez, bottle #21, entered the recipe of her late husband, Richie Perez, a well-known human rights activist who died in 2004. “We were married for 23 years and every Christmas we made coquito together.”

This year’s winner, a husband and wife team who concocted bottle #15, accepted with a nod to their New York roots: Hunts Point, the Lower East Side and of course, Harlem.

After the tasting, everyone rocked their hips to the transplanted African rhythms of Segunda Quimbamba and head-nodded as poet, Emanuel Xavier, essentialized what it was and is, to be Nuyorican. (In his “Nueva York” poem, below, listen carefully for, “papitos vendiendo coquitos mientras brown-skinned project mothers crossed themselves every morning before heading off to the factories or going off to do the compras…”)

The museum event ended around 8:30pm with little to no coquito left.  No doubt, the after-party duró toda la noche.

All month until Christmas, Union Square transforms into a bustling holiday marketplace. Dozens of smiling vendors crowd against each other in little striped booths and peddle everything from gems to cookies to the festive crowds.

The staggering amount of foot traffic through the colorful holiday maze makes one think that open air markets are the perfect way to do business during a recession. Talk to some of the vendors, however, and their smiles grow sad. With the dark cloud of deflation hanging overhead, the vendors have one consensus about customers: they’re coming but they ain’t buying.

“It’s definitely slower,” said Alexandra, one of the vendors. “People are being more careful about what they buy.”

In years past, Alexandra’s booth where she sells dolls and designer dresses used to bring in at least a thousand every day. This year, she has yet to reach that number on even the busiest shopping days. In a nearby booth, Lorenzo has seen profits from his artwork literally halved.

The drop in retail prices was a record-breaking 1.7 percent in November. Out in the holiday market, it appears that December is faring no better. Many of the vendors had to cut their prices steeply in order to stay competitive.

But the drop in performance isn’t uniform for everyone. Some booths are doing clearly than others, depending on what products they sell. Jewelry isn’t doing so well but bath and comfort items are still in demand.

“We sell a product that makes people feel good,” says Al. “So that usually does well, even in a hard time.”

Some vendors also have the advantage of customer loyalty on their side. Unlike store loyalty, this kind of repeat business is much more personal. This might explain why so many booth owners are smiling, even though they know their business is going down.

By Sergey Kadinsky & Joel Schectman

The public has now come out against the American car manufacters saying they have been sluggish in innovating their classic American guzzlers.

But a survey by the Japanese Trade Union Confederation showed more than a third of the nation’s companies have laid off workers or taken other steps to reduce labor costs in the past three months to cope with the global economic crisis. Nearly 40 percent of manufacturers are expected to lay off more temporary workers.

At the same time, much like their American counterparts, Japanese unions continue to defend wage increases, the Japanese Automobile Workers’ Union is demanding at least ¥1,000-a-month as a salary adjustment, while other unions are demanding even more.

Since 1986, Japanese law has made it easier for companies to hire temporary workers, who are largely non-union. Both Japanese trade union confederations, Rengo and UI Zensen, are working to enlist these workers, making substantial gains last year in recruiting part-time and non-regular workers into the union ranks, judging by a 12% increase in 2007.

Among Japanese Auto Workers, membership declined from a peak of 830,000 in 1994; to the 2004 membership of 699,000. Today, JAW is looking for further growth through part-time and temporary autoworkers. Their strategy is clearly forward-looking as major automakers recently announced that they would slash the number of contingent employees due to slow sales.

Toyota reports that its number of full-time workers will fall from 9,200 early this year to 3,000 by the end of next March. Mitsubishi Motors Corp. says it will not renew 1,100 contract staff from now until next March. Mazda Motor Corp. is eliminating 1,300 temporary jobs.

People often cite the $70+ per hour cost of American labor as the reason behind the Big Three’s financial losses, but it should be noted that in Japan, the pensions are paid by the state. As a result, labor costs are much lower  for Japanese companies

Even Chris Sands of the conservative Hudson Institute says that a lot of the auto industry’s problems come from having to vest pensions, which often forces them to shift money from working capital. This is a problem not shared by the Japanese auto industry, that has state pension. In the past, American companies  would borrow money to pay for this gap, and they’ve always been able to pay it back. But with the markets frozen this year, they didn’t have this option. That’s why they’ve come begging to Congress.

Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill and Pras

The lights over the Bowery Poetry Club went dim, casting the stage into blackness save for the brief silhouettes cast by camera flashes. Raw sounding interview clips of hard to distinguish voices emerged from the speakers, muffling the screech of a single microphone’s feedback and hushing the crowd.

When the clips ended, the room fell silent. A lone male voice rang out.

“Hey yo one, two, three!”

Cheers erupted.

“The crew is called refugee ee ees! And if you come fa tes the rap style ee, stop the violence and just bring it on, wi ild!”

With that, the house lights came up to reveal emcee Nyle standing atop a speaker at the front of stage left, his right hand holding the to his mouth, his left waving above the crowd. The band burst into sound, and the Fugees Tribute was officially underway.

For over an hour on the night of December 4th, Nyle and an assembled collection of extraordinary young talent from around New York City performed hit after Fugees hit, as well as songs from individual Fugees members Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras.

The performers played to a more than capacity crowd.

“The Bowery Poetry club has a standing room occupancy of 175 people,” said Nyle, full name Nyle Emerson, a student at NYU’s Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music. “We had 278 people come in throughout the course of the night. So, throughout the entire night, it was beyond occupancy.”

Christine Dominguez, who played the role of Wyclef Jean during the song “Gone ‘Til November,” said the audience was the most memorable part of the show.

“It was a connection with the audience — I’ve never had something like that before,” said Dominguez, a singer/songwriter now residing in the Bronx. “There were so many people, and we were all on the same page.”

The audience was comprised of a mix of ages and demographics, something that speaks to the lasting success of a group who was on the music scene for only a few short years.

The Fugees compiled just one noteworthy album as a group, the 1996 release The Score, but it was one of the most acclaimed hip-hop/pop albums of the decade. The Score was a meld of hip-hop, reggae, R&B, rock and soul, and it earned the group a Grammy for Best Rap Album. Two of its biggest hits were remakes of older songs: Roberta Flack’s 1973 song “Killing Me Softly” and Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.”

Despite the success of The Score (it sold more than 17 million copies, making it the highest selling rap album to that point), The Fugees disbanded less than a year later, as the members chose to focus on their solo careers, to varying levels of success.

Nonetheless, as the crowd at the Bowery Poetry Club demonstrated, The Fugees sound still manages to remain relevant.

“The Fugees man, that’s real music,” said Rahj, a New York City vocalist who performed “No Woman, No Cry” at the show.

The success of the tribute show, though, had everything to do with the artists.

Nyle, who put on a successful Tribe Called Quest tribute at the same venue in October and was subsequently invited back, thought a Fugees tribute would enable him to optimize the unique talent of many local musicians.

“I thought about the different singers and different people I know, and The Fugees just really seemed perfect,” Nyle said.

In the true manner of The Fugees themselves, each performer took a verse or a song of the group’s members and reinterpreted it to the beat and melody of a live band.

The result was a thematic talent show of all that is good about the now in music. For spine tingling moments, it made you think that perhaps this was one of those shows, a crossroads of talent that will drive the future of the industry, a show that in 15 years will have you saying, “I was there the night that…”

When asked if he felt the same way, if he too thought the show was one of those moments, Nyle said this:

“Do I think that? I can’t. I just hope it. I hope that we can all look back on that. Because we all have the talent. We definitely all have the talent to be on that level. But, really, it’s just a roll of the dice.”

To hear more from the performers, visit their MySpace pages:

Nyle
Christine Dominguez
Chaz Kangas
Elle Varner
Genesis Be
Rahj

*Special thanks to Nick Loomis for his editorial assistance