What Price Information?

By John Ballard

What is a fair price?

That may be the most vexing question ever faced by man because price is not always measured in dollars and cents. The price of education or war, for example, is more than how much money was spent. The total price should include sacrifices made by parents or soldiers in achieving those ends, sacrifices that might include everything from enduring an abusive relationship in return for financial security to life-long injuries or fatalities resulting from combat. In terms of principles, the price is frequently tallied by the number of lives lost, from individual martyrs to large numbers of their followers. 

Within this broad definition of price, consider the following readings.

?Tim Hetherington�s Funeral�and Four Missing Journalists by Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker
Tim Hetherington, you may recall, was one of several journalists killed in Libya in the line of duty, not as military personnel but as reporters.

I looked around and saw friends I had first met in Iraq, or Afghanistan, and some whom I have met up with in every conflict I�ve been to in years, including Lebanon and, most recently, Libya. With the war ongoing there, and several other colleagues�English, American, French�recovering from wounds suffered there that will, in some cases, have life-long effects, yesterday�s gathering was a reminder not only of the fragility of our common bond but also all of the deeply-felt personal aftermaths for those assembled there together, respectfully, in that tearful hall.

Seated in the pew behind me in the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception was Penny Sukhraj. Penny, who recently gave birth to a child, is the wife of photojournalist Anton Hammerl, a British-based South African-Austrian citizen, who, along with three other freelancers�American reporters Clare Morgana Gillis and James Wright Foley and Spanish photographer Manuel Varela de Seijas Brabo�is being held prisoner in Libya. While trying to cover events on the eastern front line, they were captured by Qaddafi�s military forces near the oil town on Brega on April 5th. All of the reporters except, inexplicably, Anton, have been visited by diplomats or other intermediaries, and so there had been some independent verification of their well-being. When I asked Penny what she knew about Anton, her eyes grew wide and she said, solemnly: �Nothing.� Word had trickled out that Anton was alive but for some reason he had not been allowed even a telephone call. Penny asked me if I knew anything. I felt terrible, but I could only shake my head.

?�There are some people who don�t wait.� Robert Krulwich on the future of journalism
(This is a lengthy piece by Ed Yong who either forgot to identify himself or is too modest  to do so at the link. In any case, the meat of the content, is in Krulwich's text.)

On May 7th, Robert Krulwich gave the commencement speech to Berkeley Journalism School�s Class of 2011. That�s Robert Krulwich, who hosts the singular radio show Radiolab, one of the most accomplished pieces of science broadcasting in any nation. Robert Krulwich, who won a Peabody Award for broadcast excellence a few months ago. Robert Krulwich, whose blog Krulwich Wonders should be on everyone�s reading list.

So let me tell you a feel-bad story that should make you feel good.

It�s about a guy who got a job as a correspondent at CBS News, in its day, the best place in the world to work. And he got it at the age of 23. He�d had a short stint at the Charlotte News in North Carolina; he�d written some good pieces and got a call� literally, he got called and was asked to come to the CBS Building, then on Madison Avenue in New York, where he was offered a writing job on the spot. These things actually happened. And because he was fast, a natural stylist with a keen eye, it happened to Charles Kuralt. That was his name, Charles Kuralt.

And he knew how lucky he was�because at that first job interview, as he walked from the elevator to the guy he was supposed to talk to, on his way down the hall, he passed a door � it was closed, but on it, lettered in gold, were the words �Mr. Murrow�, as in Edward R. Murrow, who was at that moment the anchor of the evening newscast. And when he was hired as a writer there, he could looked around at the mailboxes with names on them that in those days, those names, you may not know them now, but those names back then were legends: Eric Serveried, Charles Collingwood, Richard C. Hottelet, Daniel Shorr, Robert Trout. This was friggin unbelievable: to be one of Murrow�s boys � at 23 � when you practically ARE a boy! Oh my god.

And then, not too long after, he had his big break.

As I say, he was a news writer, writing copy off in a corner, sometimes for Murrow, but he�s pretty much an indoors guy, and he�s dreaming of course, of getting outdoors where things are happening and one night � in the middle of the night, on the graveyard shift, two a.m.�the bell on the wire ticker goes off and says an airplane has just fallen short of the runway at LaGuardia Airport and is sinking in the East River, right now.

And Kuralt and the night editor flip a coin for who�s going to go, Charles wins and runs downstairs, jumps into a cab and says �Take me To LaGuardia.� The problem is, no sooner are they out of the midtown tunnel, then the cab gets snarled in some weird pre dawn, fire engines-heading-to-the-airport traffic jam, so Kuralt leaps out, and starts running through the tangled cars up the highway when he sees a guy on a motorcycle weaving his way through the traffic, so he waves his hands wildly, flags him down, says he�s a news reporter, there�s a plane in the water, he�s on deadline, �take me!� and the motorcycle guy jerks his thumb at the saddle on his bike, says �Hold On� and then, like a stunt driver, zigzags through the cars to the airport and Kuralt is one of the first on the scene, where he climbs over fences, gets the interviews, and makes it onto the evening news. After which he�s anointed �correspondent�, the youngest ever�at 23.

Charles Kuralt not only could write nicely. He had a voice and a calm and a style that was� well, let�s just say when I got to CBS, I felt about Charles Kuralt they way Kuralt felt about Edward R. Murrow� I thought he was remarkable. There have been few reporters in my lifetime that I admired more.

He goes on to make several inspirational points, but his most practical advice to this group of newly minted journalists is to play not for the money but for the love of the game.

...the notion that if you could get yourself into the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS, NBC, Time, Newsweek, they�d take you in, teach you, protect you�.

Those days � first, didn�t last long�

Maybe one, one and a half generations got that deal.

And for you, the generation after me, I�ll say to you what I said to my hero, Charles:

You can�t trust big companies to keep you safe.

I know most of you don�t and I�m just here to remind you: A job at NBC, ESPN, New York Times, NPR, may look safe today � but things change. They always change. And companies won�t protect you from that change. They can�t. And these days, they don�t even try.�[...]So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your turn.

Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy. Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don�t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.

And when it comes to security, to protection, your friends may take better care of you than CBS took care of Charles Kuralt in the end. In every career, your job is to make and tell stories, of course. You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you�ve helped who�ve helped you back.

And maybe that�s your way into Troy.

?On the Media: The price of 'free' journalism by James Rainey, LA Times
Information at no charge abounds on the Internet, but at what cost to quality newsgathering?

It's been more than a quarter-century since futurist Stewart Brand said, "Information wants to be free." In about half that time, the founders of Google have accumulated fabulous riches by putting free information a mouse click away. Six years on, Arianna Huffington has shown that free content, assembled by a couple hundred paid journalists and thousands of unpaid bloggers, can pay off in a big way � at least for her.

In recent days, the second part of Brand's aphorism has also been proved. The technology enthusiast, who created the Whole Earth Catalog, also said, "Information wants to be expensive." He predicted that the collision between the high cost of producing good information and the technology that enabled the cheap spread of that information would create "endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property,' the moral rightness of casual distribution."

Did it ever. Even as AOL's Patch.com looks for 8,000 new bloggers to cover suburbia for free and a photo agency announces it will try to profit from images people freely post via Twitter, strong voices push in the other direction: One of America's top sportswriters, Rick Reilly, urges journalism school grads to insist on being paid. A survey finds some of the most popular Huffington Post bloggers would (surprise!) like compensation. Prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bill Davidow urges Google to find a way to get money back in the hands of writers to preserve "reliable news � a national treasure."

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Academics at UC Santa Barbara said they recently contacted 60 of the most popular contributors at Huffington Post. They got responses from 26 of them, most of whom said they believed they should share in the $315 million AOL paid for the website. Good luck with that.

But the scribes also hope for something more modest � some kind of payment for their submissions. They said they might be willing to join a union to get a cut.

Michael Curtin, a professor of film and media studies who helped collect the information, said "sacrificial labor" has long been an issue in entertainment. Low-paid go-fers prop up many a multimillion-dollar film.

As news consumers become producers, the issue has leaped to journalism.

"In a more interactive media universe, there are wonderful opportunities but also opportunities for exploitation," Curtin said. "It seems like it's time to have the conversation about what we do about that."

?Unnatural selection: How humans are driving evolution by Michael Le Page

Snips will come in a moment, but hold that thought...

This link is included for two reasons. First, the content is so important that it needs to be understood by the greatest number of people possible. Second, it is not freely available in that manner but is not only behind a subscription paywall but very likely is further limited by copyright and other agreements between publishers, sources and the scientist/journalist types who did the work that further restrict the dissemination of this very important information.

Most readers can with little effort recall examples of information restriction that not only violate the principle of full disclosure but border on safety violations.  Egregious illustrations abound in Say What? A Chemical Can Damage Your Lungs, Liver and Kidneys and Still Be Labeled "Non-Toxic"? (AlterNet by Monona Rossol).

Until the 1980s, even asbestos was a common ingredient in many products including children�s art materials. For example, one product was a powdered papier-m��roduct for children marketed by Milton Bradley. It contained about 50 percent asbestos powder. Called FibroClay, the asbestos-containing product had a nontoxic approved product (AP) seal on it from the organization known today as the Arts and Creative Materials Institute (ACMI).

Although the hazards of asbestos were known in the 1970s and the 1980s, the only required toxicity tests for consumer products at the time were acute animal tests. These tests involve a brief exposure to the test substance and observation of the animals two weeks later. Because asbestos didn�t immediately poison the test animals, no law was broken by labeling this product �nontoxic.�

This lengthy, well-researched example of old-fashioned muck-raking shows how large populations with a "need to know" can be kept in the dark because information is too radioactive to be widely disseminated.

This is but one of many rabbit trails to be explored, but let's go back now to the link about humans driving evolution.  This delightful  disturbing and informative article in New Scientist may someday breathe the free air of public domain (synonymous with "Google" ?) protected only by copyright restrictions without an added paid-subscription firewall. Meantime, like the asbestos in FibroClay (Was that an inspiration for Play Doh?) we have a load of science that lands a double-whammy to climate zombies and creationists alike.

Thanks to mirror sights stealing "intellectual property",  here is a peek behind the curtain.

Most predators target the young or the weak. We are different, targeting the biggest and best, or those with characteristics we desire, such as large antlers. Combine this with our ability to kill in great number and the result is extremely rapid evolution of our prey.

The first clear evidence was published in 1942, and since then many examples have emerged of how hunting can transform the hunted. The targeting of large animals has resulted in a fall in the average size of caribou in some areas, for instance, while trophy hunting has led to bighorn sheep in Canada and mouflon in France evolving smaller horns.

Perhaps the most dramatic example is the shrinking of tusks in elephants, or even their complete loss. In eastern Zambia, the proportion of tuskless female elephants shot up from 10 per cent in 1969 to nearly 40 per cent in 1989 as a result of poaching. Less dramatic rises in tusklessness have been reported in many other parts of Africa, with some bull elephants losing tusks too.

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There are countless examples of how global warming is affecting life, from plants flowering earlier in spring, to species spreading to areas that were once too cold for them to survive, to birds becoming smaller. The vast majority of these changes are not genetic but due to plasticity: organisms' built-in ability to change their bodies and behaviour in response to whatever the environment throws at them. At least a few species, however, like the owls of Finland, are already changing genetically - evolving - in response to climate change.

In North America, for instance, pitcher plant mosquitoes lay their eggs in pitcher plants and the larvae enter a state of dormancy in the winter months before resuming development in spring. Dormancy is genetically programmed, triggered not by falling temperature but by the shortening days. As the growing season has lengthened, mutant mosquitoes that keep feeding and growing for longer have thrived. Northern populations now go dormant more than a week later than in 1972, when studies began.

The earlier breeding of red squirrels in North America is also thought to be partly a result of genetic changes. Some families emerge earlier in spring, and they are doing better as the climate shifts.

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Whatever their drawbacks, there is no doubt that pesticides have made a huge difference to our lives. They have helped eliminate diseases like malaria from some areas and made possible the switch to intensive farming. As soon as we started using them, though, resistance began to evolve.

"Insects that succumb readily to kerosene in the Atlantic states defy it absolutely in Colorado [and] washes that easily destroy the San Jos�cale [insect] in California are ridiculously ineffective in the Atlantic states," wrote entomologist John Smith in 1897 - the first known report of insecticide resistance. The use of synthetic pesticides like DDT took off in the 1940s. Resistant houseflies were discovered in 1946. By 1948, resistance had been reported in 12 insect species. In 1966, James Crow of the University of Wisconsin-Madison reported that the count had exceeded 165 species. "No more convincing examples of Darwinian evolution could be found than those provided by the development of resistance in one species after another," he noted at the time.

In the film version of Money Driven Medicine there is a scene in which Dr. Donald Berwick, working with a hospital in Massachusetts, heard about an important treatment breakthrough discovered by another hospital in Texas. When he called for the details he was told that those details were "proprietary" for the Texas facility, giving them a competitive advantage, and they were not to be shared. (Video at the second link) In other words, profitability of the procedure for the hospital was more important than sharing a treatment approach which would benefit a large population with the same condition.

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I have a hard time accepting that profitability trumps the general welfare when the two come into conflict, but there is not a sharp line dividing journalism from ordinary information gathering. And I offer no solution to this puzzle. Journalists, especially investigative types, are more than valuable. They are indispensable (though I have my doubts about opinion writers). Without them we are on the road to wholesale ignorance.

Little by little climate zombies (like their cousins the Creationists) are inching forward. They have started using the qualifier anthropogenic in front of the term global warming in the same way that old-fashioned William Jennings Brian types figured out that Intelligent Design is a lot easier to argue than a literal translation of Genesis.

My two favorite illustrations of evolution (also called "natural selection") are dandelions and pilonidal cysts.

Dandelions are the easiest to grasp. In Spring they have long stems, but as the lawnmower misses the ones with short stems those which reproduce have shorter stems than those not allowed to go to seed. As a result by the end of the season nearly all dandelions have short stems.

Pilonidal cysts are a little more subtle, illustrating the old medical school aphorism that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."  Most people know by now, but never discuss, that human fetal development includes a tail which disappears as the buttocks forms at the end of the spine. In a few cases the outer skin forms a pocket which may appear as a cute little dimple at the top of a newborn's butt. All goes well until body hair starts growing with the onset of adolescence, at which time a "hair nest" forms under the skin and becomes inflamed, requiring minor surgical intervention. The condition is not commonplace but also not considered rare. 

My concerns this morning are underscored by another link to a Reuters report...

?Trees may grow 500 km further north by 2100 by Alister Doyle. 

Trees in the Arctic region may grow 500 km (300 miles) further north by 2100 as climate change greens the barren tundra and causes sweeping change to wildlife, a leading expert said.

A quickening melt of snow, ice and permafrost will enable more southerly species such as pine trees or animals such as foxes to move north.

"Changes seem to be happening even more rapidly than we had anticipated just 10 years ago," Aevar Petersen, chair of the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF), told Reuters from Greenland on Thursday, where foreign ministers of Arctic countries agreed steps to bolster regional cooperation.

"Scientists estimate the treeline could move 500 km north by 2100 from now," he said, based on CAFF projections. If that happened, as much as half the Arctic tundra from Siberia to Canada could vanish.

In some places, southerly evergreen shrubs were taking over from grasses, mosses and lichens typical of tundra. "The tree line is moving north quite rapidly," he said.