Diane Ravitch has seen the end of the U.S. system of public schools. And it's likely to happen in 2014.

In her new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, Ravitch provides the narrative arc for how the demise of American public schools may come to pass at the hands of market-driven "reformers" who are using a nefarious scheme of testing and choice to take control of schools away from educators, parents, and the public.

The book sweeps across more than 50 years of American education, pivoting on key events that forever changed the landscape of our nation's schools: from 1950's-era segregation, through the 60's and 70s' years of experimentation and its backlash during the Reagan Presidency, through the promulgation of No Child Left Behind legislation, and up to the current education policies of the Obama administration. Ravitch, a historian by trade, describes a ruthless power grab, carried out ostensibly "for the children," that is bent on dismantling our national education system. The cast of characters is surprisingly small but immensely powerful, including a Nobel Prize economist, influential think tanks on the right and left, five U.S. Presidents (Democrat and Republican), deep-pocketed education philanthropists, and a raft of bullying and dictatorial mayors and school chiefs. The recurring theme throughout the story is that a "great hijacking" of American public education is putting education at risk to "the vagaries of the market and the good intentions of amateurs."

What's perhaps more startling than the message of the book is the nature of the messenger. Ravitch, a self-avowed "conservative," was an early and eager advocate for market-based, NCLB-implemented approaches to education reform. She was Assistant Secretary of Education and counselor to Education Secretary Lamar Alexander under President George H.W. Bush and appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board under President Clinton. She also co-founded an influential task force at the conservative Hoover Institution that advocated for "education reforms based on principles of standards, accountability, and choice." In her own words,

"I was attracted to the idea that the market would unleash innovation and bring greater efficiencies to education. I was certainly influenced by the conservative ideology of the other top-level officials in the Bush administration who were strong supporters of school choice and competition . . . .  Like these reformers, I wrote and spoke with conviction in the 1990s and early 2000s about what was needed to reform public education, and many of my ideas coincided with theirs."

But when Ravitch went beyond the rhetoric of reform and actually looked at the reality of what choice and competition were doing to public education, she experienced an "intellectual crisis." The ideas she had been promoting so passionately were not working, and in fact, were becoming powerful weapons of destruction.

In this two-part diary I argue that the moment of truth that Diane Ravitch describes is a clarion call for progressives to forcefully push back against the Obama administration's misguided education policies. In part one, I specify the talking points that Ravitch arms progressives with in the fight to reclaim public education. In part two, coming next Sunday, I put the book into the broader context of what's driving a "Washington consensus" on education that is being pushed by politicians and mainstream media.
Diane Ravitch's moment of truth occurred on November 30, 2006. She writes: (emphasis added)

"I went to a conference at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. - a well-respected conservative think tank - to hear dozens or so scholars present their analyses of NCLB remedies. Organized by Frederick M. Hess and Chester E. Finn Jr., the conference examines whether the major remedies prescribed by NCLB - especially choice and after-school tutoring - were effective. Was the 'NCLB toolkit' working? Were the various sanctions prescribed by the law improving achievement? The various presentations that day demonstrated that state education departments were drowning in new bureaucratic requirements, procedures, and routines, and that none of the prescribed remedies was making a difference.
Choice was not working . . . . free after-school tutoring fared only a bit better . . . . As I listened to the day's discussion, it became clear to me that NCLB's remedies were not working."

The "most toxic flaw" of NCLB, Ravitch came to realize was the "legislative command that all students in every school must be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014." She writes, (emphasis added)

"The goal set by Congress of 100 percent proficiency by 2014 is an aspiration; it is akin to a declaration of belief. Yes, we do believe that all children can learn and should learn. But as a goal, it is utterly out of reach. No one truly expects that all students will be proficient by the year 2014, although NCLB's most fervent supporters often claimed that it was feasible. Such a goal has never been reached by any state or nation. In their book about NCLB, [Chester] Finn and [Frederick] Hess acknowledge that no educator believes this goal is attainable; they write, 'Only politicians promise such things.' The law, they say, is comparable to Congress declaring that 'every last molecule of water or air pollution would vanish by 2014, or that all American cities would be crime-free by that date.' I would add that there is an important difference. If pollution does not utterly vanish, or if all cities are not crime-free, no public official will be punished. No state or municipal environmental; protection agencies will be shuttered, no police officers will be reprimanded or fired, no police department will be handed over to private managers. But if all students are not on track to be proficient by 2014, then schools will be closed, teachers will be fired, principals will lose their jobs, and some - perhaps many - public schools will be privatized.
But the most dangerous potential effect of the 2014 goal is that it is a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States. The goal of 100 percent proficiency placed thousands of public schools at risk of being privatized, turned into charters, or closed. And indeed, scores of schools in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other districts were closed because they were unable to meet the unreasonable demands of NCLB. Superintendents in those districts boasted of how many schools they had closed, as if it were a badge of honor rather than an admission of defeat."

Convinced that the Obama administration is hurtling down the same destructive policy pathway of his predecessors, Ravitch is determined to stand astride the rails of the oncoming train and yell "Stop!" "In view of the money and power now arrayed on behalf of the ideas and programs I will criticize," she writes, " I hope it is not too late."

The books' message to progressives is that current education policies being advocated by political leaders on all sides are usurping democracy and endangering the future wellbeing of our country's children. Key points to take away from the text:

1. The politics of education has undergone a radical transformation that has been aided and abetted by mainstream media. By 2008, "slogans long advocated by policy wonks on the right had migrated to and been embraced by policy wonks on the left." Only advocates who herald market-driven competition, choice, and accountability are anointed as "reformers" by the media.

2. There is no managerial "silver bullet" that will cure the woes of all our dysfunctional schools. "When a school is successful," according to Ravitch, "it is hard to know which factor was most important or if it was a combination of factors . . . . Certainly schools can learn from one another, but school improvements - if they are real - occur incrementally, as a result of sustained effort over years."

3. Current policies being promoted by Arne Duncan have virtually no track record of producing success in public schools. "Neither Congress," Ravitch writes, "nor the U.S. Department of Education knows how to fix low-performing schools."

4. Relegating schools to "the forces of the marketplace" is a prescription for disaster. "Markets have winners and losers," Ravitch reminds us. It's fine for consumers to choose how they purchase goods and services based on a competitive market. But it's appalling to design a system to purposefully abandon some children to worse outcomes.

5. The argument for "school choice" is really an argument for elitism. "During the 1950s and 1960s," Ravitch informs us, "the term 'school choice' was stigmatized as a dodge invented to permit white students to escape to all-white public schools or to all-white segregation academies." It was a "conscious strategy to maintain state-sponsored segregation."

6. The true purpose of vouchers is to destroy public schools. Invented by Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, vouchers are the chief mechanism in a "shock doctrine" approach to education reform. Plus, the track record for vouchers is not good. Research studies of the district that has had the most experience in using vouchers, Milwaukee, have found that there is no evidence that vouchers improve the academic experiences of students, even those who are the most needy.

7. Charter schools do not compete with mainstream public schools on a level playing field. Because attendance is determined by lottery, charter schools usually siphon off the more motivated students. They have higher attrition rates for teachers and students, with students who quit tending to be the lower performing students. And they are more apt to enforce discipline codes that would likely lead to court challenges if they were adopted by a regular public school. Yet even with these advantages, charter schools are not statistically more apt to produce higher achievement than ordinary public schools.

8. Albert Shanker, the former president of the American Federation of Teachers, is not the "father of the charter school movement" as many politicians and pundits maintain. His proposal for teacher-led autonomous schools within schools was never intended to lead to separate education enterprises run by outside corporations. And Shanker withdrew his endorsement of charter schools in 1993 and became a vociferous critic.

9. The current approach to evaluating schools by test scores is a mistake. Standardized tests are not precise enough, state legislators and school leaders will always figure out how to game the system, and scores are subject to measurement error, statistical error, random variation, and a host of environmental factors and student attributes.

10. "The most durable way to improve schools," Ravitch proposes, "is to improve curriculum and instruction and to improve the conditions in which teachers work and children learn."

Along with these essential lessons learned, Ravitch questions why is Obama, who was elected on a "promise of change," picking up the same banner of choice, competition, and markets" that had been the hallmark of the Bush administration? Without answering the question directly, Ravitch provides plenty of clues, which I'll explore in part two, next week.

A change is gonna come, Nick Griffin will tell the judge. There may be a long wait

• Six days to discover whether Nick Griffin's tinkering with the British National party whites-only membership rule will satisfy the high court. We are no longer that nasty party everybody talks about, he will tell the learned judge. Now we welcome everybody. And that may suffice, but it may not – for two reasons. First, the tinkering changes things a bit, but it may not be enough to bring the party into line with the relevant legislation. And second, it will be hard to convince a judge that the party is a democratic vehicle, just like any other, when its people are issuing death threats. Two have been referred to the police in recent weeks. One by Dominic Carman, Griffin's one-time biographer who is standing against him as a Liberal Democrat in Barking. He says his threat came from an "identifiable individual, a BNP supporter". The other threat – a video posted on the web in the name of Wandsworth BNP – featured Equality and Human Rights Commission chief Trevor Phillips, the man the party loves to hate, and suggested he be "dealt with". Both men have urged Nick to intervene and condemn the culprits. For "this is London in 2010, not Berlin in 1933", says Carman. The response: silence.

• On the whole, supporters of the main parties won't kill you. But in their way, some of them, even the mild-mannered ones, can be quite volatile. Take Phil Collins, the former speechwriter to Tony Blair, now a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics. Known to be quiet and thoughtful in everyday life, he is a bit of a tiger on the football pitch – and when Labour's team, Demon Eyes, played against a side from the Royal Society of Arts and the 2020 Public Services Trust thinktank at the weekend, it seemed safe enough to have Phil in goal. But it wasn't. He still managed "a clash of heads" with an opposing player. He was sent off.

• The death yesterday of Winston Churchill's grandson and namesake recalls a bitter little story told by late Clement Freud. The then Liberal MP and foodie was on a parliamentary delegation to China where he was dismayed by the lavish attention paid to his MP colleague, Winston Jr. Why the pampering, asked Freud. "Ah, because his grandfather was a very famous man," was the reply. "That's the first time I've ever been out-grandfathered," Freud said.

• The Belgians are seething following the verbal assault by Ukipian Nigel Farage on the EU president, Herman Van Rompuy ("a damp rag"), and on Belgium itself. "We don't want to be rude, Mr Farage," says a faux poster placed on the web. "But go fuck yourself." And don't think that this will be the last time the Ukip Euro chief (pictured) elects to throw a stink bomb at his EU colleagues. Yesterday, having likened Van Rompuy to a "low-grade bank clerk", he apologised to bank clerks. Later the MEP was fined. What's going on here? "We are in the business of opposing a hypocritical tyranny," explained an email sent from Farage's office to the journalist and author Walter Ellis. "Wearing its characteristic patronising smile, the EU-elite is crushing democracy – while pretending to promote it – and laying plans for global conquest." The union is "threatening world peace," it says, so "courtesy and restraint are not necessarily appropriate." Time for a hero. His name is Farage. Nigel Farage.

• Finally, didn't it say everything about the government's woes that when the PM was asked to name his favourite biscuit, chaos followed. No answer for an hour, and then a desperate tweet. "Anything with a bit of chocolate," Gordon said. But when Mumsnet asked the same question yesterday, this time of Douglas Alexander, the minister and election coordinator, he was ready for it. "Terrible admission, and not very patriotic, but my favourite are chocolate Leibniz – a slab of chocolate pretending to be a biscuit," he said. "Prefer the dark chocolate ones to the milk ones – and, of course, I hope that they will soon embrace Fairtade." A fine answer. Concise, confident. At last, they've got a grip.

• NBC's Meet the Press: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), WH Director of Health Reform Nancy-Ann DeParle, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), President and CEO of National Urban League Marc Morial, BBC's Katy Kay and Atlantic Media's Ron Brownstein.

• CBS' Face the Nation: Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Politico's Jim Vandehei

• ABC's This Week: Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), NYT's Paul Krugman, ABC's George Will, Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts.

• CNN's State of the Union (with Candy Crowley now): Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

• Fox News' Fox News Sunday: Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Dale Earnhardt Jr. and a panel with Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, NPR's Mara Liasson, Liz Cheney and NPR's Juan Williams.

• CNN's Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz: WaPo's Dana Milbank, David Frum of FrumForum.com, The Nation's Katrina Van Heuvel, ABC News' Brian Ross, Fred Francis.

• Washington Week with Gwen Ifill and National Journal: John Dickerson of SLATE Magazine and CBS News, TIME's Karen Tumulty, WSJ's Naftali Bendavid, David Shepardson of The Detroit News

• CNN's GPS with Fareed Zakaria: The Soros Foundation's George Soros, Columbia University's Simon Schama, FT's Lionel Barber

• NBC's The Chris Matthews Show: NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent Kelly O'Donnell, Washington Post Columnist David Ignatius, TIME Assistant Managing Editor Michael Duffy, Washington Post Columnist Kathleen Parker

• Bloomberg's Political Capital with Al Hunt: Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), Bloomberg's Mike Firn, Lizzie O'Leary, Julianna Goldman, Margaret Carlson and Kate O'Beirne.

• CNN's Amanpour: Ehud Barak, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense

• C-SPAN's Newsmakers: Sunday at 10:00 AM / 6:00 PM
This week's guest is George Miller (D-Calif.). Guest reporters are Perry Bacon of WaPo & Steven Dennis of Roll Call.

We'll update as we get 'em.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

With the news of the last few nights that the USF1 Formula 1 team, led by Peter Windsor and Ken Anderson, looks doomed, I thought that I would round up the full ratifications of the teams expected failure to make the grid this season.

First, the whole USF1 concept gathered a lot of European skepticism ever since Windsor announced the team on Feb. 24, 2009, because they could all see the difficulties that the team has had over the last couple of months.

Foolishly perhaps, I wanted to see the team make the grid.  Therefore, I have followed its progress (or lack there of) throughout the offseason just as much as I've followed the progress of the other new teams who have also suffered problems.

Campos Meta, run by Adrian Campos, also has had their problems.  But according to creditable sources, they have been rescued by a new investor that is rumored to have secured the team's place for the new season. This new investor, ironically, is rumored to be Chad Hurley: the founder of YouTube.  Hurley is one of the main investors in USF1 with the millionaire annoyed at the team's lack of progress looking to move onto the struggling Spanish team.

The main criticism of USF1 was always the fact that being based in America would hurt them in the long run.  Why?  Because they would be away from F1's European heartland, and would be behind other teams in car development.  I think that’s a valid argument.  But at the same time, after the initial announcement in February when the team was launched, they had a few more months even before they were announced as one of the new teams.

That being said, both Windsor and Ken Anderson have lots of connections in the world of Motorsport.  And knowing that the team was going to be based in America, when they were announced as one of the new teams, they still had plenty of time to pull things together.

One of the main problems was the fact the team was called "USF1," which implied that the team would be fully American despite the fact that Windsor, of course, is British. Although the team said it wouldn't favor American drivers, with the team having '"US" in the title it would (and has) make the team look slightly weaker if they didn't have an American driver in their lineup or at least an established name in the sport.

Of course, a driver’s nationality is not the most important thing to an F1 team.  However, it's good for national pride if you have a driver from the same nationality as the team.

Perhaps looking back, the team should not have called its USF1: it could still have maintained its "American" background, but not as boldly as it did.  Looking around the Internet over the last couple of weeks, there are not too many American/North American drivers with an FIA Super Licences. 

Every driver needs a Superlicense in order to race in the sport, although in recent years when push comes to shove (eg. Kimi Raikonnen in 2001) a driver does not necessarily need one to compete.

In fact today, Lotus Racing's test driver, Fairuz Fauzy, qualified for his FIA Super license by completing a required amount of laps driving the team’s 2010 car at Jerez. With that in mind, it shows that had the team got its car finished on time, it could have turned up for the tests.  Also, the team's driver(s) could have completed sufficient laps to earn that license.

The signing of Jose Maria Lopez brought a few snickers from the media.  Lopez had been racing in Argentina for the last couple of years at Touring Car Level after being released from the Renault Drivers Development scheme in 2006. 

Lopez is not necessarily a bad driver, but with USF1 even at the time of Lopez's appointment looking shaky of making the grid in Bahrain, perhaps the team should have appointed an older wiser driver.  It would have given the team some credibility in the face of the media and fans.

With drivers like Jacques Villeneuve, Giancarlo Fisichella, and Christian Klien all on the market, the team perhaps should have taken a risk and gone out for one of them. Having someone of that caliber would have been good for development of the car, which is so important for a new and small team.  But it would also have made things easier in attracting sponsors to invest into the team.  With a creditable driver leading the team, it would have attracted more national and local media exposure.

Villeneuve would have been the team's dream-driver, and with his popularity in the states, Europe, and in F1, would have brought immediate income to the team. Also, with an established driver on board, it would have made it easier to sign a second driver for the team.

Of course, the team never had the money to sign an established driver and it had to go for the "pay driver" in Lopez, who was backed by the Argentinian government and other minor sponsors.  Had the team planned the project better, it would never have gone for someone of Lopez's quality and would have ensured that their driver choice would have been focused more on quality than 'money' quantity. That's not to say the team didn't try that though.

The team also promised that its car was going to be designed and built with innovative on the car that would be different to the other teams. It was claimed that they would be bringing in concepts that had been used on Indy/Champ Cars and that they would be using these within the rules.

Formula 1 is a sport that showcases itself as the most technically advanced sport in the world.  In terms of the sport, it is always interesting to see different ways of building a team car and not only potentially be interesting for the sport, but for the automobile industry which has strong relationships within the sport.

In terms of the American market, which for years Bernie Ecclestone has never been able to master: it’s a big blow, as American companies might not want to get involved.  The news also means that any future bid by an American owned F1 project will just be laughed at and won’t gather any support worthy to get selected as a future F1 team.  It’s a shame for the American public who have been treated badly, as have the workers at the factory in Charlotte, N.C. 

Windsor promised that the team would look to have a great relationship with the fans and as well as the team having a website, they have also stepped into social media like Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter.

Videos of the development of the car and interviews were put on YouTube whilst photos and short messages were put on Facebook and Twitter to help gather the team some support.  Even with that, very little has been heard on those networks in the last couple of weeks when it looks from the outside that the team does not care about the supporters, who are losing interest in the team.  That, of course, does not look good for prospective investors in the team, who may see little real need for the team to exist.

With Formula 1 looking to move away from its historical European base, this was a great opportunity missed for the sport to increase its profile in the 21st century.  There could have been countless big American-based multinational companies looking to get involved in the sport and of course with USF1 involved the chances of a US Grand Prix would also have greatly improved.

The sport has never really recovered after the disaster that was the 2005 Grand Prix at Indianapolis, Ind.  In that Grand Prix, Michelin had tire issues and only six cars raced in front of almost a sold-out crowd.

There are more than a few American drivers waiting in the wings for a chance in the sport like JR Hildebrand, Jon Summerton, and Alexander Rossi.  Rossi is clearly a future star and is doing well in the GP2 Asia series.

Ex-Torro Rosso driver Scott Speed should not be forgotten either.  He is experienced and now, as a mature driver, could have been tempted back in the future. 

Following in the footsteps of Villenueve, is the young Canadian Robert Wickens who is racing in the FIA F2 Championship.  He is an option for the sport in the near future as well.

However, perhaps all the blame shouldn't rest on Windsor and Anderson's shoulders. The selection process that the FIA used in selecting the new teams should also come into question as with Campos and USF1 struggling, it appears that other candidates such as Lola, Prodrive, and Epilson Euskadi should have been accepted.

Another problem that all the new teams had to deal with was the fact that the actual regulations for the 2010 season were not finalized until the FOTA/FOM argument was settled over the summer.  This definitely did not help USF1 or Campos and certainly set them back. There were also issues with Cosworth engines not being delivered on time.

Overall, it looks like it is going to be a sad and complicated end to the USF1 project that looked slightly flawed at the start.  It is a real shame for the American public who I am sure would have taken great pride in seeing a car designed and built in the United States representing them on the world scale.

If the team does fold, it's a shame for the sport, which will, as a result suffer in the short and long-term in the States.  Fans unfamiliar with the sport will lose interest, and sponsors will not be willing to get involved.

It's also a huge blow to the FIA, who will have missed out on a huge opportunity as well, which will embarrass them greatly.  Regardless of USF1, I hope that an American driver does get involved in the sport.

The Jan. 31 filing deadline to submit financial statements to the Office of Campaign Finance has passed, so let's take a look at what kind of shape the District's 2010 candidates are in, eight months out from the Sept. primaries.

By the way, if you'd like to download any of the candidates' financial statements for yourself, you can do so here.

Adrian Fenty, mayor (D)
Mayor Fenty has raised a stunning $3.58 million, with over $800,000 of that coming in the most recent reporting period. And he's only spent a little over $500,000 so far, so that leaves over $3 million still sitting there, waiting to be unleashed should a serious challenger emerge.

There's plenty of notable names on Fenty's donor list, including: the Motion Picture Association of America ($1,000), philanthropist Eli Broad ($2,000), Washington Ballet director Septime Webre ($100), Ben's Chili Bowl ($500, plus another $500 from co-owner Nizam Ali), Lost creator and Star Trek director J.J. Abrams ($1,000), Office of Unified Communications Director Janice Quintana ($100), DCRA Director Linda Argo ($350), former Ward 8 Council member Sandy Allen, legendary music producer Clarence Avant ($2,000), D.C. attorney and former Council candidate A. Scott Bolden ($1,000), D.C. Shadow Senator Paul Strauss ($51), 18th Street's Public Bar ($500), DDOT Director Gabe Klein ($100), former California Gov. Gray Davis ($500), landlord-to-many Borger Management ($2,000), Deputy Mayor Valerie Santos ($500), Dan Tangherlini ($100), and Hollywood film producer/Will Smith producing partner James Lassiter ($1,000).

Sulaimon Brown, mayor (D)
Brown's only raised $13,765, and he's already spent most of it. Most of his support comes from small business owners and taxicab interest groups.

Leo Alexander, mayor (D)
No form has been posted to the OCF's web site, but we're told the campaign has raised about $20,000.

Mary Cheh, Ward 3 (D)
Running unopposed, Cheh has pulled together $101,572 so far, and has spent very little of it. Former mayoral candidate Marie Johns gave Cheh $500, as did philanthropist Peggy Cooper Cafritz. The rest of her donor list is largely developers, other local business interests, and Cheh's George Washington University colleagues, including president Steven Knapp ($250).

David Catania, At-large (I)
Catania only filed to run for re-election late last month, but he's already got $33,750 in the bank. He's got a short list of generous donors so far, including construction bigshot Steven Donohoe and several parking lot owners.

Harry Thomas, Jr., Ward 5 (D)
He's raised a total of $50,140, not nearly as much as some of his colleagues, but has only spent about $8,500 of that so far. Tommy's donor list includes a lot of smaller, individual family friends, plus some unions and plenty of local developers.

Delano Hunter, Ward 5 (D)
The little known Brookland community organizer filed a report that shows just under $12,000 raised, and nearly all of it spent.

Jim Graham, Ward 1 (D)
The potentially interesting Ward 1 race still technically only has one formal candidate in incumbent Graham, who has raised an impressive $171,391 in total, with very little of it spent. Graham's supporters include a lot of Ward 1 residents and business interests, including the 9:30 Club ($500), the Donatelli Development group, PN Hoffman, U Street Parking, Inc., and lots of Ethiopian restaurants.

Tommy Wells, Ward 6 (D)
Wells has raised a total of $117,450, but has spent $18,000 already. He doesn't have anyone running against him, however, and his donor list is chock full of supportive Ward 6 residents, so he looks like he's in good shape. Other Wells supporters include K Street Developers ($500), Splash Car Wash ($500), and the Coalition for Smarter Growth's Cheryl Cort ($100).

Phil Mendelson, At-large (D)
This is where there's actually something to compare. Mendo has amassed $130,969, with almost all of it still in his pocket. Lots of familiar names on his donor list, too: former CTO (now with WMATA) Suzanne Peck ($1,000), Arent Fox LLP ($250), Geico ($500) and Comcast ($1,000).

Clark Ray, At-large (D)
The former DPR head reported a perfectly respectable $80,381, but he's already spent over $30,000 of that trying to introduce himself to the electorate. Ray's supporters include James Abdo ($500), former Mendo challenger A. Scott Bolden ($100), lots of friends who have made multiple donations, and former Council candidate Adam Clampitt ($500).

Davos is here and all the world's media is going to be reporting on the World Economic Forum starting this Wednesday. More than 200 of them will be clogging your Twitter feed with updates.

Reuters is sending their largest team of reporters to Davos, including 20 journalists plus editors and three columnists. Reporters Steve Clarke, Natsuko Waki, Gerard Wynn, Martin Howell, Peter Thal Larsen, Felix Salmon, Ben Hirschler and Krista Hughes will be on site.

Bloomberg TV anchors Margaret Brennan, Andrea Catherwood, Francine Lacqua, Erik Schatzker and radio host Tom Keene are attending along with a small production crew.

The Wall Street Journal held a contest on MySpace and is sending Sloane Berrett, a correspondent, to report on the panels and parties. Alan Murray, the Journal's deputy managing editor, and Emma Moody, markets editor, will also be there.

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzeberger Jr. is attending, along with columnists and reporters Nicholas Kristof, Thomas Friedman and Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Huffington Post's leading lady Arianna might also be spotted on the slopes, along with CEO Eric Hippeau.

Here's a partial list of journalists in Davos, culled from WEF sources and Twitter. We'll update this post with more names soon.

Paul Armstrong - public relations executive, founder of @themediaisdying on Twitter, part-time journalist
Alexander Higgins - blogger, alexanderhiggins.com
Ben Verwaayen - CEO and executive director of Alcatel-Lucent
Ross Chainey - online editor and web producer, Reuters UK, London
Evelyn Rusli - anchor and reporter, Forbes
Moritz Gimbel - project manager for innovation, change and development, Bloomberg Television
Tom Keene - editor-at-large, Bloomberg News; host, Bloomberg radio
Erik Schatzker - anchor and Editor-at-large, Bloomberg Television
Francine Lacqua - anchor, Bloomberg News
Poppy Harlow - anchor, CNNMoney.com
Felix Salmon - reporter and financial analyst, Reuters
Adam Lashinsky - editor-at-large, Fortune; contributor, Fox News
Adi Ignatius - editor-in-chief, Harvard Business Review
Alan Murray - deputy managing editor and executive editor online, Wall Street Journal
Allison Gollust - executive vice president of corporate communications, NBCU
Andrew Ross Sorkin - assistant editor and columnist, the New York Times
Arianna Huffington - editor-in-chief, The Huffington Post
Eric Hippeau - CEO, Huffington Post
Michael Arrington - founder and co-editor, TechCrunch
Daniel Finkelstein - comment editor, The Times (UK)
David Kirkpatrick - tech reporter, Fortune
Emma Moody - markets editor, The Wall Street Journal
Walter Isaacson - CEO, the Aspen Institute; former CEO of CNN and managing editor of TIME
Daniel Gross - senior editor and columnist, Newsweek
David Pilling - Asia editor, The Financial Times
Jacob Weisberg - editor, Slate.com
Jason Pontin - editor-in-chief and publisher, Technology Review
Jeff Jarvis - Author of What Would Google Do?; blogger, BuzzMachine.com
John Gapper - associate editor and chief business commentator, The Financial Times
Margaret Brennan - anchor and reporter, Bloomberg television
Matthew Bishop - American business editor and New York bureau chief, The Economist
Nicholas Kristof - columnist, the New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman - columnist, the New York Times
Tanya Beckett - presenter of BBC World News' World News Today: Business Edition
Vikram Chandra - senior editor of NDTV; CEO of NDTV.com
William Lewis - editor-in-chief, the Telegraph Media Group (UK)
Tom Buerkle - international editor, Institutional Investor
Simon Jack - Regular Presenter of BBC Breakfast's Business News
Bianna Golodryga - Financial Correspondent, ABC News

See also:

Early Davos Pics To Make You Insanely Jealous

The Only 12 Davos Panels Worth Paying Attention To

Join the conversation about this story »

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Thank you for inviting me to give this lecture in honour of the memory of Hugh Cudlipp.

Ask any British journalist who were their editor-heroes over the last 30 or 40 years and two names keep recurring. One is Harry Evans. The other is Hugh Cudlipp.

Why were they so admired? Because they seemed to represent the best of journalistic virtues – courage, campaigning, toughness, compassion, humour, irreverence; a serious engagement with serious things; a sense of fairness; an eye for injustice; a passion for explaining; knowing how to achieve impact; a connection with readers. Even if you missed their editorships – as I did with Hugh Cudlipp – both men wrote inspiring books about journalism: about how to do it, but, more importantly, about why it mattered.

It is wonderful that Jodi Cudlipp is here tonight, though I hope she will not misunderstand me when I say a tiny part of me is quite glad Lord Cudlipp is not here in person. I believe he liked and admired the Guardian. But something tells me he did not enjoy being lectured by the Guardian.

He once wrote:

“The robust tabloids flashed the Green Light, were promptly denounced by other newspapers for their gaucherie or vulgarity or lèse majesté, and then were echoed by the very newspapers who had so severely upbraided them for their frankness.”

He quoted Kingsley Martin, former editor of the New Statesman:

“The Mirror says openly only what the readers of the News Chronicle and the Guardian say behind their hands.”

So I don’t think Cudlipp would necessarily have enjoyed sitting through a lecture by the editor of the Guardian.

The one thing Cudlipp and Evans hardly ever wrote about was business models. For one thing, they didn’t have to. They lived at an age where, if you got the editorial product right, money was usually not the burning issue. There was cover price and there was advertising and – though, of course, there were many newspaper failures along the road – there was no great mystery about where revenues came from. Secondly, they didn’t see that as their job. Their job was to edit great papers: other people worked out how to pay for it.

Yet the most common question most editors are now asked is: “What’s the business model?”

Of course, you know why people ask. Journalism may be facing a kind of existential threat. Whether you are a 22-year-old thinking about a career in journalism, or a 45-year-old wondering if your chosen calling will see you through to retirement, it’s the question that nags away all the time. Insecurity is the condition of our journalistic age.

So it’s a vital question. At the same time it’s a kind of deadening question for journalists to be asking of other journalists. One – honest – answer is that no one can currently be sure about the business model for what we do. We are living at a time when – as the American academic Clay Shirky puts it – “the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place”.

And it’s a bit deadening because journalists are, as a rule, better at thinking about journalism – including the most fundamental question of all, hinted at in my title tonight – of whether there is such a thing as journalism.

If you think about journalism, not business models, you can become rather excited about the future. If you only think about business models you can scare yourself into total paralysis.

Having said all that, I am going to begin tonight by talking about one business model – in part because it is even now coming down the slipway; in part because it so radically affects some of the most stimulating ideas of what journalism is becoming, or could become.

The business model is that one that says we must charge for all content online. It’s the argument that says the age of free is over: we must now extract direct monetary return from the content we create in all digital forms.

Why I find it such an interesting proposition – one we have to ask, and which, typically, that great newspaper radical Rupert Murdoch, is forcing us to ask – is that it leads onto two further questions.

- The first is about ‘open versus closed’. This is partly, but only partly, the same issue. If you universally make people pay for your content it follows that you are no longer open to the rest of the world, except at a cost. That might be the right direction in business terms, while simultaneously reducing access and influence in editorial terms. It removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world.

- The second issue it raises is the one of ‘authority’ versus ‘involvement’. Or, more crudely, ‘Us versus Them’. Again, this is similar to the other two forks in the road, but not quite the same. Here the tension is between a world in which journalists considered themselves – and were perhaps considered by others – special figures of authority. We had the information and the access; you didn’t. You trusted us filter news and information and to prioritise it – and to pass it on accurately, fairly, readably and quickly. That state of affairs is now in tension with a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority. Journalists may remain one source of authority, but people may also be less interested to receive journalism in an inert context – ie which can’t be responded to, challenged, or knitted in with other sources. It intersects with the pay question in an obvious way: does our journalism carry sufficient authority for people to pay – both online (where it competes in an open market of information) and print?

So I want to talk about those three forks today. They are not, I think, simply esoteric points about the choices facing one industry – newspapers. If, like Hugh Cudlipp, you believe that journalism actually matters, has some kind of moral purpose and effect, then these are decisions of great significance to society as a whole.

Which – before we think about business models – is probably a good moment to introduce the man who prompted the title of tonight’s talk. Last autumn I was at a government seminar on the future of local newspapers when one of the participants suddenly interjected: “I don’t believe in journalism.”

This was a very direct challenge to my general worldview, not to mention my job, so I sought out the person who had made it – a very interesting man called William Perrin – a former Cabinet Office civil servant who threw it all in to run a hyperlocal website reporting on the area of London where the Guardian now lives – King’s Cross.

Perrin absolutely believes in the moral power and importance of what many of us might think of as journalism. But he isn’t a journalist, he doesn’t call it journalism and he is completely uninterested in the monetary value of what he does. He finds other ways to pay his mortgage. This is William Perrin:

 

   
         
     

 
 

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William Perrin: “I set up a very simple website in 2006 … to my surprise this thing took off and has been very successful. In three or four years we have written 800 articles on King’s Cross and area a mile long by half a mile wide …The website we have used to drive campaigns on the ground. We’ve run big campaigns against Network Rail, where we secured a million pounds for community improvements. We used the website again to take on Cemex, a multibillion-pound company … we took them on and we won. We have about four people who write for the site, on average, there’s up to six, but normally there’s about four of us writing. We all do it as a volunteer effort. It costs us about £11 a month in cash, which is about three of four pints of beer ... we have a very strong community of people around here who send us stuff. None of the people who work with me are journalists. I’m not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination; it’s an entirely volunteer effort … Some people what I do in my community some people label journalism, it’s a label I actually resist.”

Depending on your point of view, you may find that vision of new ways of connecting and informing communities inspiring or terrifying. I think it is both – but it is a useful starting point to thinking about the value of journalism, in every sense of the word ‘value’. And it is good to be forced to think at an even more basic level – about what journalism is and who can do it.

So, let’s begin by thinking about this question of what the direct value of content is. It seems to be a subject on which no one can agree. Rupert Murdoch, who has in his time flirted with free models and who has ruthlessly cut the price of his papers to below cost in order to win audiences or drive out competition (“reach before revenue” as it wasn’t called back when he slashed the price of the Times to as low as 10p) … this same Rupert Murdoch is being very vocal in asserting that the reader must pay a proper sum for content – whether in print or digitally. The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) announced last week that it would be reinstating a form of pay wall around its content. Casual readers will get the NYT for free. Repeat, or loyal, readers will be expected to pay.

At the other end of the spectrum we have millions of William Perrins, beavering away for free, not to mention a Russian oligarch and former KGB man, Alexander Lebedev, who is experimenting with giving away everything for free – in print and digital. He is junking the one tried and tested revenue model of people handing over money for the printed paper. So there is no agreement among publishers, never mind the public, as to whether journalism has a direct value in any form.

Many people would like Murdoch and the New York Times to succeed – who could be against anything which could be relied on to support this thing which looks like journalism well into the future?

Now, I happen to believe that Rupert Murdoch is a brave, radical proprietor who has been a good owner of the Times and that he has often proved to be right when he has challenged conventional thinking. But many people who similarly admire him have nagging doubts about whether he’s right this time. The publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, admitted last week that his own pay wall proposals are, to some extent, “a bet”. Full marks for honesty. What they’re doing is a hunch.

To put it another way, it may be right for the Times of London and New York, but not for everyone. It may be right at some point for everybody in the future, but not yet. There is probably general agreement that we may all want to charge for specialist, highly-targeted, hard-to-replicate content. It’s the “universal” bit that is uncertain.

Murdoch, being smart, knows better than most that a printed newspaper – a tightly-edited basket of subjects and articles – becomes a very different thing in digital form. He will know the argument that says that in future you may be able to charge for mobile, but not for desktops. That specialist information may have value, general information little or none. The arguments hardly need rehearsing tonight. We all know the Walmart-Baghdad subsidy theory – that it is retail display advertising that pays for the New York Times Iraq operation, not the readers.

On mobile, we’re all at the start of an experiment that is fascinating but unknown. We had no clue what, if anything, to charge for the Guardian’s iPhone app when we launched it at the end of 2009. We settled for £2.39 and sold 70,000 in the first month. It’s one clue to the future, not an epiphany.

This year will see a fascinating struggle for dominance between the Kindle, the NYSE: SNE) reader" class="yoono-link-hover yoono-link-active-link">Sony reader, Plastic Logic‘s Que, the Skiff Reader and LG’s 19-inch bendy e-journal. They may all have (if they don’t already) significant revenue opportunities. Things are moving so fast that these remarks may be out of date by Wednesday, when Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is expected to launch something between an iPhone and a Kindle.

That’s mobile, where different rules may well apply. Universal charging brings different challenges. For universal charging to work, the argument goes, every news organisation would have to put all content behind a pay wall. One of the favourite Murdoch arguments against the BBC is that – so long as it exists and is “free” then that makes it harder for commercial news organisations to charge, James Murdoch describes what the BBC does as “dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market”. The Murdochs would like the BBC to be drastically curtailed in order for their business model to have a better chance of success.

Now, Australians sometimes find it easier to speak bluntly to fellow Aussies than we Brits do. So I read with interest a recent speech by the head of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation – called “Media after Empire” – by their director general, Mark Scott.

The “empire” in his title was not the British Empire, but old media empires. He used his speech to rebut the notion that public broadcasting in Australia should have its wings clipped to prop old media models up. Yes, it’s the same issue down under.

This is the speech you won’t hear from Mark Thompson – or indeed anyone in British political or regulatory life:

“This old proprietorial model, long run by media barons, operated as a form of protection from harsh realities the business might otherwise have faced. They were still vastly profitable ... The barons worked a variation of the J Paul Getty formula for success: “Rise early, work hard, strike oil”. TV, radio, newspapers were their oil … Media policy amounted to not much more than a tawdry chaos of compromises designed to appease these moguls.”
“Today they seem largely out of solutions – and instead challenge reality by seeking to deny a revolution that’s already taken place by attempting to use a power that no longer exists, [and] by trying to impose on the world a law that is impossible to enforce.”

To Scott’s way of thinking, newspaper companies are facing dreadful problems because – in his haunting phrase – “technology companies [have] continually outclassed the content companies”.

“It would be wonderful to be able to present you with some blinding vibrant future for the old media organisations … For newspapers, the last great hope now seems to be something called Waiting for Rupert.”

Scott’s argument is it would be utterly wrong to hobble the one model that does successfully produce distinguished and serious news journalism – publicly-funded broadcasters – in order to sustain a failed business model.

A little digression about the BBC. I know it is regarded as an act of faith by some that all print journalists should be baying for BBC blood, wanting it neutered or drastically reduced. I find it difficult to join that particular chorus for three reasons.

Firstly, look across the water to America, where newspapers are in as much trouble as they are here. They have no public service broadcaster to speak of to contend with, and yet they are still in desperate trouble. So you could do an awful lot of damage to the BBC and still find you had not solved the problem of newspapers because it is actually a worldwide challenge, not a specifically British one.

Secondly, as a citizen rather than competitor, I’m afraid to admit that I really like, admire and respect the BBC – including, even, its website. Now, of course, there is plenty to criticise – the BBC can be arrogant, hard to work with, complacent, needlessly expansionist and insensitive to the plight of their colleagues in the commercial sector. We need to agree, or understand, the limits of its expansion. But the BBC is almost certainly the best news organisation in the world – the most serious, comprehensive, ethical, accurate, international, wide-ranging, fair and impartial. So I hesitate to join the sometimes deafening chorus of BBC denigration, even though I suspect the Guardian would undoubtedly thrive even better in the digital world were the BBC’s website, in particular, to be curtailed.

Thirdly, there is another really excellent broadcaster with an irritatingly good news website – Sky News. I have seen nothing to suggest that there is any intention to put this website behind a pay wall. So, any British newspaper intending to charge for general content would have to contend – not only with the BBC – but with the free availability of a first rate Murdoch-owned general news service on the web. All the arguments about competition from a ‘free’ BBC online apply to a ‘free’ Sky News website.

So charging might be right for some bits of the Murdoch stable of media properties, but is it right for all bits of his empire, or for everyone else? Isn’t there, in any case, more to be learned at this stage of the revolution, by different people trying different models – maybe different models within their own businesses – than all stampeding to one model?

One difference between the Murdochs and most other people is that they already have a digital business in this country – a highly successful and profitable one in Sky.

The Guardian is our digital business.

And it is a business, not a charity. The paper has always employed very talented and driven commercial people. The move from Manchester to London was a tough business decision as much as an editorial one – and how right that was. Our first decade of digital growth wasn’t subsidised by the Scott Trust – it was relatively modest and covered by the profits of the paper.

And, before anyone makes the obvious point that we are trust-owned and loss-making, let me make the equally obvious point that all the Scott Trust does is to enable the Guardian to compete on the same more or less level playing field as a host of other loss-making papers, whether their own cross-subsidies come from large international media businesses, Russian oligarch billions or unrelated companies within the same ownership or group.

As 2009 ground on there was no shortage of digital sceptics who were ready to call time on the business of digital publishing – mainly on the grounds that search engine optimisation (SEO) was bringing in readers who didn’t stay and who were hard to monetise.

There was something in their critiques. The indiscriminate chasing of numbers will do no good long term for any serious news organisation. And it is perfectly true that 2009 was a disappointing year for those who hoped for an unbroken pattern of growth in digital advertising.

But to dismiss the potential growth of digital right now – on the basis of the worst economic crisis since 1929 – may be a little premature.

Here’s Sir Martin Sorrell, head of WPP, and one of the most influential figures in advertising anywhere in the world. He employs 140,000 people in 106 countries and takes $60bn a year in billings, with revenues of $14bn. He makes weather in advertising, the same way as Murdoch does in print.

 

   
         
     

 
 

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“I would hope that within five years, so let’s say 2013, or something like that, we would be at least one third in digital. We know that customers are spending 20% of time online. So if clients are spending 12% and consumers are spending 20% – and I’ve seen some evidence to suggest they are spending more than 20% – then there’s a natural gravitational pull to 20% of the budgets being spent online … my guess is that when we get to a third of our business in 2014 we may very well want to up that percentage to 40% or even 50%.”

Sorrell is not saying all this advertising is going to newspapers, and he has some sympathy for the pro-pay wall arguments. But he is signalling a steadfast belief that the digital share of the advertising cake is going to grow very sharply and significantly.

My commercial colleagues at the Guardian – the ones who do think about business models – are very focused on that, want to grow a large audience for our content and for advertisers, and can’t presently see the benefits of choking off growth in return for the relatively modest sums we think we would get from universal charging for digital content. Last year we earned £25m from digital advertising – not enough to sustain the legacy print business, but not trivial. My commercial colleagues believe we would earn a fraction of that from any known pay wall model.

They’ve done lots of modelling around at least six different pay wall proposals and they are currently unpersuaded. They’re looked at the argument that free digital content cannibalises print – and they look at the ABC (NYSE: DIS) charts showing that our market share of paid-for print sales is growing, not shrinking, despite pushing aggressively ahead on digital. They don’t rule anything out. But they don’t think it’s right for us now.

So, having said I wouldn’t talk about business models, I’ve said far too much. But that’s because it’s difficult to ignore this particular business model in talking about how the future of journalism is shaping up.

As an editor, I worry about how a universal pay wall would change the way we do our journalism. We have taken 10 or more years to learn how to tell stories in different media – ie not simply text and still pictures. Some stories are told most effectively by a combination of print and web. That’s how we now plan our journalism. As my colleague Emily Bell is fond of saying we want it to be linked in with the web – be “of the web”, not simply be on the web.

Some stories can be told in one sentence plus a link. Some journalists are fascinated by the potential of the running, linked blog. Andrew Sparrow’s minute by minute blog of Alastair Campbell’s appearance before the Chilcott inquiry was a dazzling example of this new form of reporting, which relies on the ability to link out to sources and other media, including original documents and even (in the lunch break) Campbell’s own Twitter feed.

You can see journalists everywhere beginning to get all this.

Ruth Gledhill at the Times is, for me, an inspired example of how you can layer reporting – with the most specialist material in the blog (linked to yet more specialist source material on the web – and the most general material in newsprint.) The paper will carry a paragraph on a controversial sermon by the Bishop of Chichester. Gledhill will explain its significance on her blog, and link to the full sermon for those who want the source. Readers can then debate the text on the blog and follow other links. It’s called through-editing.

Ben Brogan does something similar at the Telegraph, as he did in pioneering form at the Mail previously. Robert Peston and Nick Robinson increasingly regard their blogs as the spine of what they do at the BBC. That’s where they put the detail: the Ten O’Clock News is the icing.

This, journalistically, is immensely challenging and rich. Journalists have never before been able to tell stories so effectively, bouncing off each other, linking to each other (as the most generous and open-minded do), linking out, citing sources, allowing response – harnessing the best qualities of text, print, data, sound and visual media. If ever there was a route to building audience, trust and relevance, it is by embracing all the capabilities of this new world, not walling yourself away from them.

Two further points about this fluid, constantly-iterative world of linked reporting and response: first, many readers like this ability to follow conversations, compare multiple sources and links. Secondly, the result is journalistically better – a collaborative-as-well-as-competitive approach which is usually likely to get to the truth of things, faster.

When I think about universal pay walls, I wonder how this emerging world of editing and writing would change. How would you handle a story like the Guardian’s exclusive revelation that Google was about to drop censorship in China – a hugely significant story that bounced around the world within seconds of us breaking it online at 11pm on January 12?

Had there been a universal pay wall around the Guardian that would have been a difficult story to handle.

- Wait and publish in print? But we knew that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) was about to post the story on its own blog at 6pm Eastern.

- Publish digitally and hope that people would buy a day pass to read it? But in the time it took to key in your credit card the essence of the story would have been Twittered into global ubiquity. It is one of the clichés of the new world that most scoops have a life expectancy of about three minutes. A valuable three minutes for the FT or the Wall Street Journal if it’s market sensitive information. Most people, with most information, and without subscriptions paid for by their companies, are happy to wait.

If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world.

The internet has, of course, has had a dramatic impact on the economics of newspapers. But it has changed almost everything else as well. The whole world is in the middle of a revolution. This may sound an old-fashioned thing to say, because it has been true for at least 10 years. Things are still changing overwhelmingly and fast; in part, because the first digital generation is still growing up.

There’s been one change so big and obvious in the last decade that we may not have noticed it: the new media have disappeared. They are just media now: the means through which our world must be experienced. No one under 25 can remember a world without them. Everything shows up on screens, from the big ones we sit in front of all day at work to the small ones on the phones with which we spend our leisure hours – when they’re not sending us emails.

These screens give us very much more than written words, and they change the ways we understand the world – from text to multimedia; from linear to hypermedia; from passively absorbing material to learning how to navigate actively – and we change them right back.

Don Tapscott, in his book Growing Up Digital, has explored some of the ways in which the technologies of the last 20 years have helped develop a generation of fierce independence; of emotional and intellectual openness; of inclusion; biased towards free expression and strong views; interested in innovation, used to immediacy; sensitive to/ suspicious of corporate interest; preoccupied with issues of authentication and trust – which includes having access to sources; interested in personalisation or customisation rather than one-size fits all; not dazzled by technology, but more concerned with functionality.

In the digital world, the distance between impulse and action is shorter than ever before. The goal of most interface design is to make it vanish altogether. In this open and immediate world millions of people are realising they can be publishers, that they don’t need intermediaries. The British Museum or the Tate or the Royal Society or Imperial College don’t have to wait any longer for the BBC or Channel 4 to ring and suggest a programme or series; they can make their own. The same is true of any writer, scientist, politician, photographer or activist. To call this the “democratisation of communication”, or of information, or of culture seems somehow inadequate.

Governments are freeing up their data, records and information; museums and galleries are throwing open their doors; NGOs and charities are becoming publishers; universities are opening their lecture halls; scientists and corporations are sharing knowledge in ways which would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago. And then there is Google, with its ambition to digitise and organise all human knowledge since time began.

Mention Google, and we think of China: the spread of disorganised information is balanced by organised disinformation and censorship. We can’t know yet who will win, but we know what side we must be fighting on.

We know that the fastest – almost vertical – growth in amongst all this is what is rather lumberingly called ‘social media’. This involves the power to generate content and connect with others at low, or no cost; in real time. The innovation that made all this possible – crudely, developments associated with Web 2.0 – is now happening alongside the evolution of so-called semantic web, which wants to find better ways of understanding the meaning of content and how to find it, organise it and share it.

Where do news organisations think they fit into all this? Are we in, out – or in only if we can make it pay in the immediate future?

I try to imagine the Guardian deciding it doesn’t want openly to be part of this world I’ve just described and I struggle. And do, please, forgive me for talking about the Guardian a bit, but it is necessarily the thing I am most focused on, and which illustrates the point that one size may not fit all.

The other day I interviewed the playwright Michael Frayn for the Guardian and Observer archive. He described life on the Manchester Guardian he joined in 1957 – just over 50 years ago, but within one working lifetime.

The paper he joined was still a provincial morning paper, hugely influential, but not always readily available on the day outside the north-west and parts of London, Oxford and Cambridge.

This ledger shows the sale of the Manchester Guardian in and around Manchester in January 1956 – the year before Frayn joined the paper.

 

         
         
The Guardian’s Manchester sales in 1956

       

It was a paper which counted every sale in Rusholme, Didsbury or Cheetham Hill.

Today, in print, the Guardian is, even now, the ninth or 10th biggest paper in Britain.

On the web it is, by most measurements, the second best-read English-language newspaper in the world. If the New York Times really does start charging for access, the Guardian may become the newspaper with the largest web English-speaking readership in the world.

In December the journalism we’re producing at GNM was read by 37 million people around the world – very roughly a third in the UK, a third in North America and a third in the rest of the world.

Go back to the 1956 Manchester Guardian ledger of sales outside Manchester, the paper Frayn joined.

 

         
         
The Guardian’s sales outside Manchester in 1956

       

The last line shows the worldwide sales of the Guardian – “foreign agents” – to be 650 copies. We had more readers in Colwyn Bay than in the rest of the world.

This clever little widget is effectively our digital circulation map today. It shows you in real time a sample of the people reading the Guardian from just one of its 32 servers.

 

   
         
     

 
 

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In Michael Frayn’s professional working life the Guardian has grown from sending 650 copies abroad to becoming one of the eight most read newspapers in the world, a ranking that includes two Chinese, one Japanese and one South Korean.

I think back to an essay CP Scott – for 57 years editor of the Guardian – wrote in 1921 – not the famous essay on the separation of comment and fact – but the preface to the American edition of the centenary history of the Manchester Guardian.

“The world is shrinking. Space is every day being bridged. Already we can telegraph through the air or the ether, from Penzance to Melbourne and tomorrow we shall be able to talk by the same mechanism. Physical boundaries are disappearing … What a change for the world! What a chance for the newspaper!”

Scott would, I think, have been intensely intrigued to know that the paper he edited for so long and in whose name a family trust was established to continue the spirit of the Guardian – was so openly available and read around the world. That it was becoming as influential in Beijing and Washington as in Paris or Delhi. That its reporting could change the minds of governments, inspire thinking, defy censorship, give a voice to the powerless and previously voice-less. The same is true of all the British newspapers who have grasped the importance of the web.

It’s certainly a powerful thought for journalists on all these papers. Reporters and commentators who were digital sceptics even a couple of years ago now realise they are part of, and linked to, a worldwide conversation. An art critic will be picked up and referenced in Berlin; a defence correspondent in Moscow; an environment writer in Copenhagen. Tell them their work was about to disappear from that conversation without the production of a credit card, and they would not be overjoyed unless they knew it was the only answer in business terms.

In an industry in which we get used to every trend line pointing to the floor, the growth of newspapers’ digital audience should be a beacon of hope. During the last three months of 2009 the Guardian was being read by 40% more people than during the same period in 2008. That’s right, a mainstream media company – you know, the ones that should admit the game’s up because they are so irrelevant and don’t know what they are doing in this new media landscape – has grown its audience by 40% in a year. More Americans are now reading the Guardian than read the Los Angeles Times. This readership has found us, rather than the other way round. Our total marketing spend in America in the past 10 years has been $34,000.

Nor is all this being bought by tricks or by setting chain-gangs of reporters early in the morning to re-write stories about Lady GaGa or Katie Price. In that same period last year, our biggest growth areas were environment (up 137%), technology (up 125%) and art and design (up 84%). Science was up 81%; politics 39% and Comment is Free 38%.

This is the opposite of newspaper decline-ism, the doctrine which compels us to keep telling the world the editorial proposition and tradition we represent are in desperate trouble. When I think of the Guardian’s journey and its path of growth and reach and influence my instincts at the moment – at this stage of the revolution – are to celebrate this trend and seek to accelerate it rather than cut it off. The more we can spread the Guardian, embed it in the way the world talks to each other, the better.

And that leads to the third fork – the one that pitches authority against involvement, or Us against Them.

Have a look at this website, recently launched, which aims to do for books what Facebook has done for general social engagement.

Bookarmy is a rather clever site – completely free – where, once you’ve registered, you can share your passion for books with thousands of others. You can join forums around types of books, or individual books. You can have virtual discussions with authors, link your reading group to others, publish your own reviews and so on. Apart from the authors themselves, there are no “authority” figures here.

Compare it with, say the Times books pages. Here the reverse is true: the emphasis is on “expert” reviews by critics, with not much interest in what you might have to say about a particular book. There is a kind of book group, but you would have to say that interactivity is not the feature it most promotes.

Why am I comparing these two sites? Because both are owned by Rupert Murdoch.

BookArmy – though it avoids saying so – is an offshoot of Harper Collins. The two enterprises point in completely different directions. As it was explained to me, the point of BookArmy is to get as many avid book readers engaged as possible and learn as much as possible about their likes and dislikes. At some point in the future (the theory goes) publishers will no longer need to spend a fortune on marketing Max Hastings’ next book by lavishing money on Waterstones or in print. They will go to BookArmy and say “We know you have a database of the 80,000 people in the country who read books of military history. We’ll give you our targeted marketing spend instead.”

BookArmy is a telling illustration of two aspects of the digital world.

- One is the ability of digital disrupters (in this case, even within the same company) to take one bit of a newspaper and do it with a conviction, range, depth and passion that a portmanteau print-based newspaper cannot match, especially in digital form. It is the unbundling of newspapers.

- And the second is the only hope of matching the power of the these digital disrupters is to harness the same energy and technologies which they are using.

So, all credit to the Murdoch empire: they are themselves beavering away to unbundle parts of the print world in digital. How should other papers which care about books react? Sit behind a pay wall while the audience is unbundled for us by the make-it-free bit of the Murdoch empire? Or get out there and have a chance of being part of the way the rest of the world is going?

If you still want convincing look at this site, the Artsdesk, on which a lot of arts writers who used to work for the national press have set up their own culture site. That’s right, they want to unbundle the arts coverage from newspapers. I imagine they begin each day with a prayer session for all national newspapers to follow Rupert Murdoch behind a pay wall. That’s their business model.

We know about the audience for social media forms of engagement – 350 million active users on Facebook, 2.5bn pictures posted a month; Twitter growing at 400% a year. We know people spend much more time with such sites than with newspaper websites.

Now, of course, lots of journalists find this hard to take. We are supposed to be the ones in the know, or with special access or insights. “Social media is interesting,” say the digital sceptics, “but it may be transient – and it has got nothing to do with what we do. Our brands are about authority.”

But this position – that journalists are uniquely knowledgeable and insightful – is a hard one to sustain to anyone who looks at the blogosphere with an open mind, or looks at the astonishing way in which a tool like Twitter can be customised into a personalised news feed to give you extraordinarily rich and deep content on specialised subjects faster (and in many cases deeper) than any newspaper could hope to match.

Does all this mean you sack Michael Billington, with his 39 years of experience, and ask all the Guardian readers in the National Theatre audience to tweet their reviews in 140 characters or less?

No – but you could keep both.

Many of the Guardian’s most interesting experiments at the moment lie in this area of combining what we know, or believe, or think, or have found out, with the experience, range, opinions, expertise and passions of the people who read us, or visit us or want to participate rather than passively receive.

There have been long-standing innovations such as Travel – where the experiences of readers, properly harnessed, is necessarily going to be broader, deeper and more eclectic than any us-to-them travel section based solely on the individual experiences of travel writers. 433 views of Amsterdam, rather than one.

There has been over-by-over cricket – not replacing Mike Selvey or Vic Marks, both of whom played for England and know a thing or two, but adding the enthusiasm, passion and graveyard humour of cricket-loving Guardian readers to the blogging of Rob Smyth or Andy Bull.

There is Comment is Free – infinitely more diverse, wide-ranging and, at its best, enlightening than any newspaper ever achieved by simply pushing the opinions of a few columnists out of the door and slamming it shut.

The last year has seen us crowd-source tax-avoidance – the internal Barclays documents that can (after a legal fight) be found on Wikileaks and whose publication undoubtedly led to changes in legislation and attitudes to corporate tax avoidance. It began with a traditional piece of investigation by David Leigh, followed by participation and analysis by people who really understood this world. It was classically an example of “our readers know more than we do” – the bit of new media theory which seemed so daring when first aired by Dan Gillmor in 2004.

There have been other examples of crowd-sourcing:

- The G20 protests – another example where old fashioned reporting was allied with the mass observation of people we wouldn’t call reporters, but who were, on the day, able to do acts of journalism. The truth about the death of Ian Tomlinson probably wouldn’t have been uncovered without the doggedness of one reporter – Paul Lewis – but it certainly wouldn’t have emerged without thousands of people searching their own digital record of the day for the crucial evidence.

- There was the widget we built to allow 23,000 Guardian readers to help us sort through hundreds of thousands of documents relating to MPs expenses. The Telegraph’s original investigation was brilliantly executed. But the future will also be about asking for help in digesting vast and complex amounts of data.

- There was the exercise of asking readers to get to the bottom of Tony Blair’s tax affairs<

The Exiled Journalists’ Network in the United Kingdom is deeply concerned about the situation faced by members of the Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ) following a formal warning issued to them by the Belarus Ministry of Justice.

The BAJ is an NGO which monitors violations of media freedoms in authoritarian Belarus.  It is an umbrella organization for 1,200 independent journalists and it provides them with free legal aid, information support and trainings. 

The Ministry of Justice now says that identity cards issued by BAJ to its members are illegal. It argues that BAJ is not a media organization but an NGO and it can therefore not include “PRESS” in identity cards for its members.  

The Ministry has also declared that activities of BAJ’s Legal Centre for Media Protection are “beyond the Statute of the organization”.  It has issued conflicting and contradictory rules of engagement, which are aimed at ensnaring BAJ members. Please visit the website of BAJ (www.baj.by/eng) for a fuller account. 

BAJ Chair Zhanna Litvina believes this is just an attempt to distract attention from media support and to force organization to think only about defence.  “I think in this way they test us.  And it’s directly connected with the upcoming elections in local councils and the preparation for presidential elections.  

We must pass this test,” she added. "It's difficult to imagine what violations the Ministry could have found suddenly in the regulation which had been in use for several years.  I think we will receive answers to these questions after we appeal to the Supreme Court," said Andrew Bastunets, Deputy Chair of BAJ. 

There are real possibilities that BAJ, which has operated since 1995 and is affiliated to major European and international media organizations, could be proscribed.  Belarus has been ruled by one of Europe’s remaining dictators Alexander Lukashenko since 1994.  

He’s likely to run again for the office in the elections due in 2011. Reporters Sans Frontiers (www.rsf.org) ranks Belarus on the Press Freedom Index at 151 out of 175 countries.  

It is marginally better than Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran, but worse than Sudan, Zimbabwe and Venezuela. If you want to support Belarus journalists please send letters of protest to EJN: ejn@exiledjournalists.net, 02082237216 or directly to Belarus Ministry of Justice: e-mail: kanc@minjust.by, 220004 Minsk, Kollektornaya street. 10 Belarus or to Belarus Ministry of Information: info@mininform.gov.by 

EJN (www.exiledjournalists.net) is London-based, organisation set up to help journalists who have fled to the to the UK to escape persecution because of their media work. In October 2008 EJN run Belarus Press Freedom Forum at House of Lords. BAJ representatives gave their evidences to international audience

America’s most famous crybaby was just viscous to Sarah Palin. He asked her who her favorite founding father was ... and ... she ... froze. In other news: Privacy is for old people, it looks like the Jews didn’t build the pyramids and someone was arrested for interfering with Tiger Woods’ right to sell Gatorade.

Note: By special request, the links now open in a new window. If you love it, great. If you find it annoying, so sorry, but then there’s no pleasing everybody.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

Newer links are on top.

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Talk Like an Egyptian with UseMyAccent.com
Citizens of the blogosphere who enjoy ranting about such things agree that Angelina Jolie was conquered by the Greek accent demanded of her in the Oliver Stone epic “Alexander,” that Brad Pitt’s Austrian accent in “Seven Years in Tibet” would have tried the tolerance of even the Dalai Lama, and that “ay yi yi” was the best response to Al Pacino’s go at a Cuban accent in “Scarface.”

Revise the Haggadah? Slaves Didn’t Build Pyramids: Egypt
The tombs of ancient Egyptian pyramid builders suggest these artisans were respected—and paid—for their work.

Flattery Will Get You Far
The authors speculated that the susceptibility to flattery stemmed from a simple desire to feel good about themselves. Indeed, we hold ourselves in high esteem, a phenomenon known as the above-average effect.

GREAT MOMENTS WITH HAROLD FORD
Rep. Harold Ford, Jr., who wants to become a U.S. Senator from Tennessee, has sunk lower than a snake.

GAY TEEN WORRIES HE MIGHT BE CHRISTIAN
“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Faber admitted to reporters Monday. “It’s like I get these weird urges sometimes, and suddenly I’m tempted to go behind my friends’ backs and attend a megachurch service, or censor books in the school library in some way. Even just the thought of organizing a CD-burning turns me on.”

FACEBOOK FOUNDER: PRIVACY JUST A PASSING FAD
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has denounced privacy as a ‘social norm’ of the past as social networking’s popularity continues to grow.

Department of things you didn’t know you needed
A Michigan company announced the release of software Tuesday that introduces new punctuation to the typed word: The sarcasm mark.

The U.S. Military, al-Qaeda, and a War of Futility
In his book on World War II in the Pacific, War Without Mercy, John Dower tells an extraordinary tale about the changing American image of the Japanese fighting man. ...

Glen Beck is mean to Sarah Palin—he asks her a history question

Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America
The historian Elizabeth Fraterrigo asks us to accept a somewhat unlikely premise, which is this: A titty magazine that has been culturally irrelevant since the late 1970s was at the forefront of many of this nation’s most important social upheavals and reconfigurations.

Tiger Woods “Pop Art” Bust
A Colorado artist who replaced the labels on 100 Gatorade bottles with a picture of Tiger Woods and his wife and the word “unfaithful”—and then returned the items to store shelves—has been charged with tampering with the sports drink. ...

Related Entries

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Genre fiction - as opposed to nonfiction, graphic novels and picture books - lends itself to enjoyable Kindle reading because when you pick up a book of fiction you don't necessarily expect it to be illustrated. Authors of mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, romance novels and westerns paint word pictures and their readers use their own imagination to picture the scene of the crime or the stare of a vampire or the track of an alien space craft hurtling towards earth.

Spend less time searching for new genre fiction and more time reading it as I watch for newly-released genre fiction in the Kindle Store so you don't have to. Recent genre fiction releases in fantasy and mystery fiction include:

FANTASY

Tempest Rising by Nicole Peeler. Orbit. Kindle edition $6.39. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Living in small town Rockabill, Maine, Jane True always knew she didn't quite fit in with so-called normal society. During her nightly, clandestine swim in the freezing winter ocean, a grisly find leads Jane to startling revelations about her heritage: she is only half-human. Now, Jane must enter a world filled with supernatural creatures alternatively terrifying, beautiful, and deadly - all of which perfectly describe her new friend, Ryu, a gorgeous and powerful vampire. It is a world where nothing can be taken for granted: a dog can heal with a lick; spirits bag your groceries; and whatever you do, never - ever - rub the genie's lamp." - Amazon.

Deadtown by Nancy Holzner. Ace. Kindle edition $6.39. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"They call it Deadtown: the city's quarantined section for its inhuman and undead residents. Most humans stay far from its borders - but Victory Vaughn, Boston's only professional demon slayer, isn't exactly human... Vicky's demanding job keeping the city safe from all manner of monsters is one reason her relationship with workaholic lawyer (and werewolf) Alexander Kane is in constant limbo. Throw in a foolhardy zombie apprentice, a mysterious demon-plagued client, and a suspicious research facility that's taken an unwelcome interest in her family, and Vicky's love life has as much of a pulse as Deadtown's citizens." - http://nancyholzner.wordpress.com.

Kitty's House of Horrors by Carrie Vaughn. Book 7 in the Kitty Norville series which began with Kitty and the Midnight Hour. The series' main character, Kitty Norville, first appeared in a story published in the Summer 2001 issue of Weird Tales. You can read it online here. Grand Central Publishing. Kindle edition $6.39. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Talk radio host and werewolf Kitty Norville has agreed to appear on TV's first all-supernatural reality show. She's expecting cheesy competitions and manufactured drama starring shapeshifters, vampires, and psychics. But what begins as a publicity stunt will turn into a fight for her life. The cast members, including Kitty, arrive at the remote mountain lodge where the show is set. As soon as filming starts, violence erupts and Kitty suspects that the show is a cover for a nefarious plot. Then the cameras stop rolling, cast members start dying, and Kitty realizes she and her monster housemates are ironically the ultimate prize in a very different game..." - Amazon.

Death's Mistress by Karen Chance. Book 2 in the Dorina Basarab series which began with Midnight's Daughter. Onyx. Kindle edition $6.39. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Dorina Basarab is a dhampir - half-human, half-vampire. Subject to uncontrollable rages, most dhampirs live very short, very violent lives. So far, Dory has managed to maintain her sanity by unleashing her anger on those demons and vampires who deserve killing. Back home in Brooklyn after the demise of her insane uncle Dracula, Dory’s hoping her life is about to calm down. But then she gets some visitors. A friend wants Dory’s help in finding a magical Fey relic, and the gorgeous vampire, Louis-Cesare, is desperate to find his former mistress Christine. Dory and Louis-Cesare quickly discover that the same master vampire Christine is bound to is also rumored to be in possession of the relic. But when the master vampire turns up dead, they realize that there’s more at stake than a missing mistress..." - book jacket.

Arms-Commander by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. Book 16 in the Saga of Recluce series which began with The Magic of Recluce. For more on the series, read this Saga of Recluce article in the Wikipedia. Tor. Kindle edition $15.39. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"The keep of Westwind, in the cold mountainous heights called the Roof of the World, is facing attack by the adjoining land of Gallos. Arthanos, son and heir to the ailing Prefect of Gallos, wishes to destroy Westwind because the idea of a land where women rule is total anathema to him. Saryn, Arms-Commander of Westwind, is dispatched to a neighboring land, Lornth, to seek support against the Gallosians. In the background, the trading council of Suthya is secretly and informally allied with Gallos against Westwind and begins to bribe lord-holders in Lornth to foment rebellion and civil war. They hope to create such turmoil in Lornth that the weakened land will fall to Suthya. But Zeldyan, regent of Lornth, has problems in her family. To secure Zeldyan's aid, Saryn must pledge her personal support - and any Westwind guard forces she can raise - to the defense of Zeldyan and her son. The fate of four lands, including Westwind, rests on Saryn's actions." - Amazon.

Blood Cross by Faith Hunter. Book 2 in the Jane Yellowrock series which began with Skinwalker. Roc. Kindle edition $6.39. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Jane Yellowrock is the last of her kind - a skinwalker of Cherokee descent who can turn into any creature she desires and hunts vampires for a living. Now the Vampire Council has hired her to hunt and kill one of their own who has broken sacred ancient rules, but Jane quickly realizes that in a community that is thousands of years old, loyalties run deep..." - Amazon.


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson. Book 1 of the projected 10-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Transworld Digital. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Bled dry by interminable warfare, infighting and bloody confrontations with Lord Anomander Rake and his Tiste Andii, the vast, sprawling Malazan empire simmers with discontent. Even its imperial legions yearn for some respite. For Sergeant Whiskeyjack and his Bridgeburners and for Tattersail, sole surviving sorceress of the Second Legion, the aftermath of the siege of Pale should have been a time to mourn the dead. But Darujhistan, last of the Free Cities of Genabackis, still holds out - and Empress Lasseen's ambition knows no bounds." - Amazon.

Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson. Book 2 of the projected 10-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Transworld Digital. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Weakened by events in Darujhistan, the Malazan Empire teeters on the brink of anarchy. In the vast dominion of Seven Cities, in the Holy Desert Raraku, the seer Sha-ik gathers an army around her in preparation for the long-prophesied uprising named the Whirlwind. Unprecedented in its size and savagery, it will embroil in one of the bloodiest conflicts it has ever known: a maelstrom of fanaticism and bloodlust that will shape destinies and give birth to legends... Set in a brilliantly-realized world ravaged by anarchy and dark, uncontrollable magic, Deadhouse Gates is the thrilling, brutal second chapter in the Malazan Book of the Fallen. A powerful novel of war, intrigue and betrayal, it confirms Steven Erikson as a storyteller of breathtaking skill, imagination and originality - a new master of epic fantasy."

MYSTERIES/THRILLERS

The Breach by Patrick Lee. HarperCollins. Kindle edition $7.00. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Trying to regain his life in the Alaskan wilds, ex-con/ex-cop Travis Chase stumbles upon an impossible scene: a crashed 747 passenger jet filled with the murdered dead, including the wife of the President of the United States. Though a nightmare of monumental proportions, it pales before the terror to come, as Chase is dragged into a battle for the future that revolves around an amazing artifact. Allied with a beautiful covert operative whose life he saved, Chase must now play the role he's been destined for-a pawn of incomprehensible forces or humankind's final hope - as the race toward Apocalypse begins in earnest..." - Amazon.

Altar of Eden by James Rollins. HarperCollins. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Following the fall of Baghdad, two Iraqi boys stumble upon armed men looting the city zoo. The floodgates have been opened for the smuggling of hundreds of exotic birds, mammals, and reptiles to Western nations, but this crime hides a deeper secret. Amid a hail of bullets, a concealed underground weapons lab is ransacked - and something even more horrific is set free. Seven years later, Louisiana state veterinarian Lorna Polk stumbles upon a fishing trawler shipwrecked on a barrier island. The crew is missing or dead, but the boat holds a frightening cargo: a caged group of exotic animals, clearly part of a black market smuggling ring. Yet, something is wrong with these beasts, disturbing deformities that make no sense: a parrot with no feathers, a pair of Capuchin monkeys conjoined at the hip, a jaguar cub with the dentition of a saber-toothed tiger. They also all share one uncanny trait - a disturbingly heightened intelligence..." - Amazon.

Nobody's Safe by Richard Steinberg. First published in 1999 and now available in a Kindle edition. Bantam. Kindle edition $5.20. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Picking locks is second nature to the steel-nerved protagonist of Steinberg's tough-talking - and pulp to the core - thriller. Greg Picaro, a thief who prides himself on his fine taste and self-restraint (he doesn't take unnecessary risks and can distinguish Paul Revere silver from the dross) is robbing Jack Kerry's apartment when three men enter and kill Kerry and his hired date. Mr. Kilbourne, the leader of the group, offs Kerry on the hunch that Kerry leaked information about two people named Joe and Max to tabloid TV reporter Megan Turner. Picaro is the next on Kilbourne's list. Steinberg... calls on his personal expertise in high-risk security and counterterrorism to impart realism to the courtroom scenes and chilling detail to the maneuvers of the thieves and thugs." - Publishers Weekly.

Deeper Than the Dead by Tami Hoag. Dutton. Kindle edition $13.10. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"California, 1984. Three children, running in the woods behind their school, stumble upon a partially buried female body, eyes and mouth glued shut. Close behind the children is their teacher, Anne Navarre, shocked by this discovery and heartbroken as she witnesses the end of their innocence. What she doesn't yet realize is that this will mark the end of innocence for an entire community, as the ties that bind families and friends are tested by secrets uncovered in the wake of a serial killer's escalating activity. Detective Tony Mendez, fresh from a law enforcement course at FBI headquarters, is charged with interpreting those now revealed secrets. He's using a new technique - profiling - to develop a theory of the case, a strategy that pushes him ever deeper into the lives of the three children, and closer to the young teacher whose interest in recent events becomes as intense as his own..." - http://www.tamihoag.com/

The Sculptor by Gregory Funaro. Pinnacle Books. Kindle edition $4.47. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
In life, they were flawed. In death, they are perfect works of art - killed, preserved, and carefully molded into replicas of Michelangelo's most celebrated creations. Only The Sculptor can bring forth their true beauty and teach the world to appreciate his gift. FBI Special Agent Sam Markham has a reputation for tracking serial killers, but this artful adversary is meticulous, disciplined, and more ruthless than any he's encountered. The only clue is a note dedicating the latest 'statue' to Cathy Hildebrant, an art historian who shares Sam's fear that the killing has just begun." - Amazon.

I, Sniper: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel by Stephen Hunter. Simon & Schuster. Kindle edition $13.69. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Four famed '60s radicals are gunned down at long range by a sniper. Under enormous media scrutiny, the FBI quickly concludes that Marine war hero Carl Hitchcock, whose ninety-three kills were considered the leading body count tally among American marksman in Vietnam, was the shooter. But as the Bureau, led by Special Agent Nick Memphis, bears down, Hitchcock commits suicide. In closing out the investigation, Nick discovers a case made in heaven: everything fits, from timeline, ballistics, and forensics to motive, means, and opportunity. Maybe it's a little too perfect. Nick asks his friend, the retired Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger, to examine the data. Using a skill set no other man on earth possesses, Swagger soon discovers unseen anomalies and gradually begins to unravel a sophisticated conspiracy..."

There's a sad tradition of looking back at the end of the year to see the toll that time has taken of our friends and heroes.  We may never had met some of those we most admired, may never have stood in the same place with them.  But we shared time with them.  Shared an era.  Some of them not only shared our time, but helped to shape it, and 2009 is the last year we hold in common.

So here, as last year, is an eclectic gathering of just a few of those we lost during the last twelve months.  I invite you to add other names and stories to the list.

When you think of baseball, Billy Werber may not be the first name that comes to your mind. For three seasons in the 1930s, he lead the league in stolen bases, but with a .271 career batting average and only 78 home runs spaced across 11 seasons, he wasn't exactly an offensive powerhouse.  But if Werber wasn't that famous, he shared both time and space with someone who was. Werber was the last living teammate of Babe Ruth.  He was also Ruth's last living opponent.

Who was so cool that he not only turned down the chance to be The Saint, but passed on the chance to say "Bond, James Bond"? It was Secret Agent man, Patrick McGoohan. McGoohan was born in Queens, New York City, but he cemented his position as an international icon when, during the 4th season of Secret Agent (Danger Man in the UK) McGoohan created a new series which he produced, wrote, directed and starred in. More than forty years later, fans are still puzzling out all the messages of The Prisoner (and trying to avoid the remake).

You may still have leftover holiday ham today, but sooner or later you'll grab another hot dog, and when you do, thank Alan Geisler for the red onion sauce he invented.

Rabbit came to rest in 1990, but it took nearly two decades more before Rabbit's creator put down his pen. Multiple Pulitzer winner, John Updike, wrote about characters in crisis -- ordinary Americans caught in hard spots. He did it with prose that celebrated directness and plots that were as whimsical as Estwick, as ordinary as those surrounding Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, and as familiar as our own lives.

Andrew Wyeth

Mr. Rogers kept an Andrew Wyeth painting next to the door of his home, visible in every episode of his show. What higher endorsement can there be?

In these days of CSI and Bones, it's easy to forget where the character of the forensic scientist appeared on American TV. But there would have been far fewer chances to say "Book'em, Danno" if Che Fong, played by actor Harry Endo had not been there with all the answers.

Figure eight is double four. Figure four is half of eight. If you skate, you would be great. If you could make a figure eight. And if you sing, you would be great if you could achieve the crystal purity of singer Blossom Dearie. Dearie was a well-known jazz artist since the 1940s, but for a generation of Americans, she'll be remembered as the voice of "Mother Necessity" and well as the spokeswoman for "Figure Eight."

9/11 widow and victim's advocate Beverly Eckert died in a plane crash only days after meeting with President Obama. And if you're wondering, that's not ironic.

And then there were five, after munchkin Clarence Swensen was gone.

It wasn't just Hollywood script writers who ended up on the black list during the McCarthy era. William Price was one of 35 journalists called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1955. He refused to invoke the fifth amendment to protect himself. Instead he declared that he was protected by the first amendment. He was fired the next day.

You may be wondering why the "economic indicators" and the conditions you see around you rarely seem in alignment. But you won't be able to ask Raymond Saulnier who devised the indicators while at the National Bureau of Economic Research during the Eisenhower administration.

Robley Rex was my distant relative (you'll have to excuse me for not being able to follow the combination of X-removed and Nth-degree of cousinhood).  On his death, Frank Buckles became the last surviving World War I veteran from the United States.

If your Chatty Cathy is ailing, you may need to count on home remedies. Irving Chais, owner of the New York Doll Hospital, is no longer available.

His stories ranged from the painfully realistic recollections of his childhood internment in a Japanese prison camp, to jungles made of glass and future worlds were songs compose themselves. Whatever the venue J. G. Ballard fixed his subjects with searing insight and unflinching clarity.

If you wandered away from the Big Two during the 2004 election season, you might have been enticed to vote for the Personal Choice Party, especially if you had fond teenage memories of the vice-presidential candidate and, um, multi-talented former "Ivory soap girl" Marilyn Chambers.

Everyone remembers Gygax, but if you've ever rolled a 20-sided die, you owe equal thanks to Dave Arneson who was the co-creator of Dungeons &amp; Dragons and the originator of many of the basics behind every RPG that followed.

In 1993, George Tiller was shot in both arms. He did not let this stop him from returning to work and helping women caught in the most difficult of circumstances. He continued in his work despite daily harassment. He continued in his work despite being labeled a "baby killer" no less than 28 times by Bill O'Reilly. He continued despite lies told about him by O'Reilly and others. He continued until an anti-abortion activist entered the church where he was attending worship, and shot George Tiller through the eye at close range.

It's easy to think of a nun as someone who has stepped away from society, but Carol Anne O'Marie not only ran a shelter for homeless women, she was the author of 10 mystery novels -- novels that featured an elderly nun who solves crimes.

If you visit the site of one of America's great shames, the Manzanar Internment Camp, you can see the desk and typewriter of Togo Tanaka on display. It was at this desk that Tanaka reported on the often ugly conditions inside the camp from the perspective of the people being held there. His work to document what went on at Manzanar made him a target for both the government and his fellow internees.

When Robert Furchgott worked out the factors in endothelial cells that causes blood vessels to relax, he received a Nobel Prize. He didn't receive any payment from the most famous product of his work -- Viagra.

Not only did Wayne Allwine provide the voice of Mickey Mouse for more than 30 years, he was married to the woman who provides the voice for Minnie Mouse.

At 6'7" former football player Rodger McFarlane didn't fit the stereotype of a gay man. Starting as a volunteer, he became the first director of the Gay Men's Health Crisis and helped organize many programs in the fight against AIDS.

At a time when America appears to show disdain for international law, it's worth remembering "the George Washington of modern international law" Henry King. A U.S. Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, King continued to work on a legal approach to war crimes for decades. It was at his insistence that the International Criminal Court added starting a war as a war crime.

If you were an African-American reader of romance novels before 1980, the number of books available where the couples were African-American was more than limited, it was nonexistent. Elsie Washington changed that with her novel Entwined Destines.

Martha Mason was only 11 years old when polio forced her into an iron lung. She would remain in the device for the next 60 years. Despite this, she graduated first in her class at Wake Forest, worked as a reporter for her local newspaper, and in 2003 wrote a book about her life.

Whether it was giving voice to numerous characters in animated films, or providing animated comic relief for partners ranging from Burt Reynolds to Dean Martin, Dom Deluise was sure to bring a smile.

The supply-side economics that Jack Kemp championed helped set up decades in which the wages of average Americans stagnated and those at the top benefited. But Kemp's example in looking at the issues of racism and immigration provide lessons that many Republicans, and some Democrats, should take to heart.

"The Straight Shooter" Joe Bowman performed his amazing feats of marksmanship for rodeo fans, gun show goers, police SWAT teams, FBI agents, NASA astronauts, film stars, and foreign dignitaries.

You're going to have to come up with a better pitch, because Billy Mays is unavailable to move your product.

By last spring, the face (among other things) that launched a million wall posters was indelibly marked by the long, hard and public struggle with cancer, but Farah Fawcett continued the fight to the end. When Farrah and her fellow Angels appeared on television in 1976, it was easy to dismiss the characters as high-kicking models who often found themselves in scenarios that involved limited clothing. But they were also tough, clever, and constantly outsmarting the men who underestimated them. Farrah went on to show that she had real acting chops to go with the no-so-real karate chops.

If there was any departure in 2009 that both shocked and generated discussion, it was that of the "King of Pop" Michael Jackson. Jackson was... immensely talented.

America's best-known sidekick had some tough times in his final years, but for many of us Ed McMahon will always be the jovial presence at the edge of the scene, helping to make both host and guests comfortable with a few well-timed words and a booming laugh.

100% of respondents note that Alec Gallup, chairman of the Gallup Poll and son of the founder, handed off his duties this year.

When cruise ships ferry "explorers" to Antarctica with regularity, it's easy to forget that once Edith Ronne was the only American woman who had ever been there.

There was a period of little to no sunspot activity lasting from around 1645 to 1715. The relationship between low solar activity and the climate is still open to question, but it's a sure thing that Jack Eddy put the data together and named the Maunder Minimum.

If that Farah poster generated nostalgia, then David Carradine, despite roles in over 100 films, is probably forever wandering the west as Kwai Chang Caine. If not, just let Black Mamba know that no one needs to kill Bill.

David Eddings had a theory about how to create a fantasy novels, an approach that some thought made his work formulaic. To investigate you might want to read just a couple of his novels. Or maybe a couple more.  And a couple more after that, and...

The way the civil rights movement would bring the GOP to power in the South might have been surprising to some politicians, but not to G. Alexander Heard an adviser to both JFK and LBJ, who predicted the change in 1952.

Sure, winning that hundred-yard dash at the Olympics may be tough, but it's equally tough to set world records the way Waldo McBurney did it -- by outliving all competition in his age group. The multiple world record holder in the 100+ category was 106 when he died this year.

Here's a confession: as a teenager, I wasn't watching those Marilyn Chambers films, I was reading books by John Keel. Whether it was the inter dimensional beings of Strange Creatures From Time and Space or the unmatched weirdness of The Mothman Prophecies no one sold a UFO conspiracy like Keel.

If you see a wiener-mobile roll past draped in black, it's because Oscar Mayer, jr. has gone.

No matter how momentous the events, their effect is limited without someone to tell the story. William Emerson was a southerner who understood the southern mindset, and was able to out-talk, out-joke, and out-bluster everyone in range while reporting the often painful and occasionally joyous truth of what was happening in America.

An important chapter in our history has come to an end. Our country has lost a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States Senator of our time.

If you love the gentle piano work in the background of Brige over Troubled Water that's the work of Larry Knechtel, who also performed on tracks for Elvis, the Beach Boys, and Bread.

Both science fiction readers and science fiction writers have long been grateful to Donald Grant, who took a chance on books that didn't always seem commercial and produced volumes of exceptional quality.

Sometimes August is the cruelest month. Not only Ted but Eunice Kennedy Shriver left us in August. Founder of what would become the Special Olympics and one of the founders of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, she was every bit a Kennedy.

Need an expert on the dulcimer? What about the autoharp, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, and guitar? Mike Seeger played them all, and did so beautifully -- but never so well as when he joined his family in the New Lost City Ramblers.

The popular princess, the jock, the rebel from a troubled background, the nerd, and the girl sunk into despair. Why are they all hanging around the school together? Because John Hughes wrote them that way on his way to defining the teenage years of a generation.

Budd Schulberg might not have written about teen angst, but with a few little films like On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd to his credit, I suppose he can be forgiven.

For proof that you can think that someone is wrong on almost every point, and still find them witty and entertaining, you don't have to look any further than William Safire. Or should that be "farther"? Without Bill, we may never be sure. Why don't more conservatives harness the kind of arguments that Safire used to promote his positions? Because none of them has half the intelligence or one tenth the oratorical firepower.

For decades, the source of the best Hollywood inside info wasn't a web site or even the tabloids. It was Armand "Army" Archerd.

Don't remember Milton Supman? How about comedian, host, and perennial game-show guest Soupy Sales?  

If the theme songs for the Addam's Family and Green Acres are still stuck in your head after four decades, you can thank composer Vic Mizzy for these and many more.

This was a bad year for Navajo Code Talkers with at least five of their few remaining members being lost over the course of the summer.

Lester Shubin served in the Army during World War II, which might have been his inspiration in creating the Kevlar vest.

Her list of friends reads like a who's-who of civil rights, so it's no surprise that 107-year old Ann Nixon Cooper was featured in President Obama's speech on election night 2008.

I liked Brittany Murphy darn it. The girl did sassy really well.

If there's a middle school student (or science teacher) in your home then you're probably familiar with (and fond of) the characters from Beakman's World. There's no actor in a rat suit I'll miss more than Mark Ritts who played "Lester" on the show -- probably not what a guy with an lit degree from Harvard expected to do with his life.

If you passed Andy Hallet in the street, you might not recognize him. In his best-known role, Hallet played the green singing-dancing demon "Lorne" on Angel.

The Clamshell Alliance is one of those names that rings few bells today, but when Guy Chichester help found the group in opposition to the Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant, it helped to kick off a new generation of environmental activism.

As always, this is a hugely incomplete list filled more with names that caught my eye than with those who were most important to the world -- or to you. I encourage you to add more.