Before you believe much of anything today — April 1 — read about the Top 100 April Fools Jokes of All Time.

 

I live on a mostly residential block on the neighborhood’s main commercial street. My building is nearly at the end of the street that runs into the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which overlooks lower Manhattan.

A couple of years ago, a bomb went off in the building two doors down. It was built and set off by a former building superintendent who had a romantic thing for one of the residents, who had that day graduated from the Police Academy (and whose husband was and is now the super).

At 10:30am, my babysitter called, saying she couldn’t get past the barricade at the corner. Say what? I told her to grab a cup of coffee at the Starbucks on the next blook, put on some shoes, grabbed my keys, and stepped out the front door. I saw barricades at both ends of the block. A cop across the street yelled at me to get back inside; they thought there was a bomb in a car parked in front of the building two doors down.

After a half hour or so, she called again asking if I knew anything else. I went outside the apartment door and ran into some neighbors and their kids. They said a plainclothes cop had come to their door and told them to evacuate. I collared a cop on the street and asked what the deal was; he said the suspected bomb wasn’t in front of the neighboring building but was more or less across the street and maybe five car lengths to the left in a Fire Zone at the corner. Someone saw a gun and some PVC pipes with wires sticking out of them, and he said it’d be a good idea to scram.

I called my wife, called the babysitter to tell her I’d be out shortly, and started packing. Woke the kids, changed and dressed them. Grabbed some food for them, tossed them in the stroller, and scrammed. During all this, I heard a large-ish crash out in the street, but I didn’t see anything odd out the window.

The street was pretty empty; I’d been counting on there being a cop to direct me. I headed away from where I’d been told the suspected bomb was (a good idea, it seemed to me). At the next corner, behind the barricade I saw some guys in uniform gesturing, but it was really too far to see what the gesture was. One uniform started toward me, and we met up two doors down — in front of the apartment building where I’d first been told the device was.

The cop — wearing an Inspector’s badge (Inspector is a *very* high rank in the NYPD; they command precincts and higher) suggested that I get into that building before something untoward happened. I said a task force sergeant had told me to leave my building, and he said he thought that had not been an excellent suggestion. So there I was, in the lobby of a building not my own with my twins. Indeed, I should have stayed put.

The suspected explosive was in a car owned by the super of the building I’d taken refuge in, the one where the bomb went off two years ago. The car was parked in a fire zone roughly 50 feet from my front window.

Over the next hour or so, several other strays came by, unaware of what was happening and similarly brought off the street by Inspector O’Brien. Turns out that O’Brien is the Brooklyn commander of the Counter Terrorism Task Force. Nice guy. The radiation detector on his belt kept going off, but he says all kinds of things do that, including the bricks in a lot of buildings.

The loud crash I heard was the bomb squad busting into the car. A similar explosion a little later was the same. I’d hate to have to explain it to the car insurance people.

Eventually, the Bomb Squad got the thing out of the car — it was five 18-inch lengths of PVC pipe filled with gasoline and drywall nails, with wires running in (no detonator, no means for detonation) — and they let people who were on the block either get off the block or go home. Pedestrians were allowed back at about 3p, but the block wasn’t opened for cars until after sundown.

Here’s how the NYDailyNews, the NYPost, and the NYTimes covered it. Read carefully, and you’ll see some provocative details. One thing not brought out especially well: the 911 calls came from pay phones roughly a half-mile from the car; there’s a working phone literally across the street from where the car was parked.

So how was your Monday?

 

I was just looking at the logs for this web site, and noticed asomething interesting. Someone from within the “af.mil” domain — that’s the US Air Force — peeked in not long ago as a result of an MSN search. Our seeker had entered a search for the string “pictures of Bagdhad.”

With that misspelling, there’s just one result on the entire Internet. I’ve fixed the typo, but the question remains: why is some flyboy cruising the Net for pix of Baghdad? Isn’t that what the CIA is for?

 

When the World Trade Center was destroyed, so was New York’s main broadcast antenna. (In fact, six broadcast techs died in the collapse.) Ever since, people have been looking for a new place to build a mast.

The NYDailyNews reports today that Univision is close to a deal to occupy a new antenna atop 4 Times Square, the Conde Nast building, at Broadway and 42nd Street. It would reach 1,142 feet above street level and be the first new antenna in midtown since the Empire State’s antenna went up in 1938. (Yes, the antenna was added several years after the building was finished; before that, it was a dirigible mooring dock. Watch the end of 1933’s King Kong if you think I’m kidding.)

Other broadcasters want to put a 2,000-foot tower on Governor’s Island, perfectly situated in New York Harbor, but the city is saying No. The group is instead looking at a site in Bayonne, N.J. And the 1,776-foot spire in the plans for the new Trade Center won’t be built for another decade, in all probability.

 

Ed points out the following at the Borowitz Report:

 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon today that the U.S. has succeeded in removing Connie Chung from the airwaves, a primary objective of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

ãTo those critics who would say that this campaign isnât moving quickly enough, let me say this: itâs only been a week and weâve already gotten Connie Chungâs show cancelled,ä Rumsfeld said. ãGoodness gracious, Iâd say weâre on track.ä

 

So I had a spare couple of minutes today, and I stepped into Apple’s luxe storefront in SoHo to check out the new 17-inch Powerbook. Apparently, words south of Houston Street don’t mean the same thing as they do elsewhere.

When you walk into the store, you’re likely to see a sign that says “17-inch Powerbook. In stock now.” Given the highly restricted supply of the machines (the Apple web site cites a 3-to-5 week delivery interval), this was something of a surprise.

I cruised over the Powerbook table, which was full of 12-inchers and 15-inchers. No 17s. I found a salescritter and asked if they had any on display. He led me over to the front window, where there was a 17-inch model on a turntable.

“Would you like to buy one?” he asked prematurely, as he reached to take the computer off its pedestal and put it on a nearby counter. “Well, I’d certainly like to take a look at it first,” I said, lowering the immense screen to its latched position.

The salesman moved the screen away from my hand. “Doesn’t that hinge have a great feel to it?”

“Can’t tell. Let me take a look, will you?” I pressed the power switch a couple of times. Nothing. I latched the screen and picked up the unit and turned it over, finding that there was no battery installed. It was impossible to tell the unit’s true weight, or what the screen looked like in action, two important points for a machine that makes a big deal out of its portablility and screen real estate. I did notice that the closed lid did not meet the bottom of the unit uniformly across the width of the unit.

“So would you like one?” the salesman asked again.

“Are they in stock?”

“Yes they are. I’d be happy to put you on the list.”

“So they’re not in stock.”

“Yes they are. We have a list of 300 people waiting to get theirs.”

“There’s a waiting list? So they aren’t in stock.”

“Yes, they’re in stock,” he said. “But they go out to people who have already ordered them.”

“Oh. How long would I have to wait before I can come get my ‘in stock’ laptop?”

He shrugged. “No way of telling. Probably a couple or three weeks.”

At Apple, “in stock” does not appear to mean Give Us Money And We Give You Goods. I kind of wonder what “in stock” means to the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs…

 

Peter Shaplen, Ratcliffe’s production partner, chimes in on the discussion, making terrific points that show exactly how television’s slavery to the clock encourages the trivialization of developing news. A truly excellent post that defies adequate encapsulation here. Read it yourself, and feel your head nodding.

 

Mitch Ratcliffe, don’t you sleep? Here’s his response to my last.

In truth, we’re agreeing more than we’re disagreeing. He gets to the nub of what’s wrong with televised coverage here:

The access is no better than in World War II, when Ernie Pyle (who was killed by a Japanese sniper) chronicled the important elements of the war instead, including the boredom and the intense drama, but did it reflectively, humanizing the story which is too big for anyone to sit and absorb through a bunch of soda-straw views offered by CNN. Today’s coverage is just faster to land in our retinas.

Yes, there’s way too much cooing over the technology and the speed. Again, we’re in early days. It’s a horrible thing to wish for, but I bet the gee-whiz focus will shift to the story itself if the war drags on. Even local stations know that Doppler 4000 is ultimately less important to viewers than whether it’ll rain tomorrow.

We want our news accurate, colorful, in perspective, with plenty of story and heart. And now. We want it now. Gotta be now. My first bureau chief told me early on, as I struggled with some instantly forgotten story, “It might win a Pulitzer, Danny. But if I don’t have it by 6, we’ll never know.” As Carrie Fischer wrote, instant gratification takes too long.

I’ve been a journalist, too, Mitch; I spent six years with UPI and more time with other news services and weeklies and magazines and it’s added up somehow to 25 years. (I’ve got to get a bio up on this page.) I know a little something about using technology to report and distribute the news, and I know about how news is managed. When the hostages came home from Iran, I was camped for a week at West Point interviewing returnees; for a week, my life was literally spent in footraces with Peter Arnett and Connie Chung as we sprinted for phones. A 1981 news scrum is different from a 2003 news scrum, and I doubt the difference is an improvement.

It’s good that you use World War II and Ernie Pyle as benchmarks; the rules the media is operating under look much like the ones Pyle had to abide by. Pyle, of course, was a print reporter, not required to fill time at an anchor desk and not required to send an endless stream of snap reportage to a wire desk. It’s also worth noting that Pyle’s reputation grew over years of warfare, not in a week-long night sprint across the desert.

Speed is the natural enemy of thoughfulness and perspective, and we’re in the Speed part of this war. If you want thoughtfulness and perpsective, turn off the box. There are two things that TV does well: the live shot and the Up Close And Personal package. Just you wait: it won’t be long before we start bitching that we’re learning too much about the soldiers and not enough about the progress of the war itself.

Can we get better from bloggers? Sure. Maybe. Why not? But let’s not confuse technology with the end product. If the bloggers are good reporters, know their territories and see something interesting, their dispatches will be worth reading. If they aren’t, it’s just the next generation of ransom-note desktop publishing.

Mitch writes:

Unless we are engaged in another war, which we probably will be, there is little likelihood the media will ever do a reality check on the plan vs. the actual way the battle played out.

Well, it sure won’t be on TV, with the possible exception of Frontline, because TV doesn’t do stuff like that well. But I bet it’ll be in the dozen or so newspapers who care to devote their resources to real journalism. Which means it’ll be available to people who care. If that can be done through an on-line medium, have at it. It’ll be an evolution.

And Mitch writes:

Maybe the most powerful thing CNN could do is make its footage available for people to use to make their own points about the war. What if every time a bomb exploded a blogger could overlay the phrase “50 people died in that explosion” over the video? That would change the way we see this war, just as it would if every explosion said “50 U.S. soldiers’ lives were spared by using that bomb, just as Hiroshima was necessary to prevent 150,000+ American casualties invading the Japanese home islands.”

Wonderful. Pop-Up War Videos. That’ll change the world for the better. It’d be instructive to see how, say, Fox, CNN and Al-Jazeera caption the same explosion. Triangulating to the truth sometimes gets harder, not easier, because of course there is no one truth.

Mitch says:

… the journalists who are supposed to help us understand events have ceded that responsibility to the technology, a kind of panopticon function that lends absolutely no clarity for the audience. Then, the only expert voices we get are former generals, maybe a former secretary of defense who agrees the war is going well…

But a new media that collected these records of events and presented them in ways that can be navigated and explored so that, in addition to hearing and seeing the stories of a war or an election, we can participate and share our own ideas and get the ideas of others in a truly plural view of events, then that would be new. 

New, yes. But not neccessarily better. A former general knows more about warfare than I do, so he’s worth listening to more than I am — even with all his biases and history.  More voices are good, more perspective is good, and the ability to amplify thought is the single most exciting thing about the personal computer revolution. But anyone who’s been to a public meeting knows that there’s such a thing as too much conversation and input.

It’s a beautiful Saturday morning in New York, and I’ve spent the last two hours typing into a 13-line box in a browser I don’t like, and there’s coffee to be drunk and breakfast to cook and laundry to put away and babies to play with. There’s lots of ideas still buzzing — a good thing, since this is our life’s work — but they’ll still be here later.

 

Much gnashing of teeth tonight in Blogspace. Apparently, CNN has asked reporter Kevin Sites to quit blogging from the war zone.

Why? CNN’s not saying. Of course, this is the blog crowd’s prima facie evidence of big media squatting on the Golden Revolution of weblogs. Oh, and while they’re at it, big media’s coverage sucks, too. And Aaron Brown’s an ugly windbag, besides.

Let’s see if we can separate those issues.

As far as Sites’s weblog. There are some thoughtful posts during the runup to war, and some pretty though unremarkable pictures of civilians that could have been taken in The Bronx. But after Tuesday night, the next post was today’s announcing the shutdown.

You think that between Tuesday and Friday, Sites may have been a little busy?

Sites is an employee, and CNN is utterly with its rights to suggest that he should be concentrating on filing to the network rather than his blog. What goes on between Sites and his employer is between them, and none of us jeering from the sidelines can claim to know that dynamic.

Now let’s talk about how coverage sucks. Mitch Ratcliff writes this:

I keep seeing the worst in journalism displayed during this war. I’ve also seen many examples of big media — and new and old — refusing to think and act differently up close and personal. There is an explicit assumption by the people running Web sites that reporters and reports should be the same as they’ve always been. They will talk about the desire to change, but get to the point where actual change is required and they back away fast.

“The worst in journalism”? There is unprecedented access to troops and battle, combined with 21st century communications and imaging technology that puts us squarely in the world of Max Headroom. If pixelated views of jeeps moving through the desert at night don’t turn his crank, it might be worth remembering that he’s seeing live pictures at night from a featureless landscape half a world away. Just now, I saw high-quality nighttime pictures of Baghdad (San Francisco on the Tigris) being blown to hell. Ten years ago, these were light green dots against a slightly darker-green background.

Footage from Vietnam, it’s worth remembering, was never fresher than two days old. It took at least a day to fly the film back to the States, and another day to process and cut it.

Is there a lot we’re not seeing? Of course. But fer chrissakes — it’s a war! It’s going on right now. Stories will be coming out for decades to come. That’s the way journalism and history work. Howard Kurtz writes about this in Saturday’s WAPost:

NBC’s Dana Lewis, who is with the 101st Airborne, said from northern Kuwait that “we know unbelievable amounts of information” but that “you can’t use a lot of it.” Still, he said, “we’ll go back to this two or three months from now and say, ‘This was the original battle plan and this is what really happened to these guys.’ We’ll do a reality check, which I think is valuable.”

The worst in journalism? I’d nominate not the war coverage, but rather the White House press corps, which rolled over the other week and let its belly get scratched by an automaton President.

Actually, I’d say the quality of war reporting is vastly better than recent American history would have given us reason to expect.

Are anchors windbags? Well, yes — and that’s why they get paid the big bucks. It is hellishly hard to stay on camera for hour after hour, where there may not be any actual new news coming in, and not sound like any more of an idiot than is actually neccessary. This is the weakness of the medium: when broadcasting in real time, the clock is your enemy, one way or another.

Here’s where Mitch and I agree:

If doing something radically new requires a form of corporate governance that supports teams of journalists (in the broadest possible sense, including bloggers and participants in events) who never meet face-to-face or have ideas that can co-exist peacefully, then we need to develop that. Or just go ahead and do it the old-fashioned way by paying a few folks upfront to edit what a lot of “freelancers” submit for publication — again, I use the word “publication” in the broadest possible sense. Just be sure that what you produce is different in a fundamental way.

As I said earlier today, the BBC is doing interesting things in this direction. But as Mitch himself acknowledges, coverage by blog is different than coverage by TV or any other medium. It has to be — otherwise, why bother? And there’s that pesky problem of both the publisher and the writer getting paid. I wrote about it last June.

And from a purely practical perspective, it’ll be interesting getting official credentials for all those independent bloggers. It’s a problem that Blogcritics has been wrestling with, more or less unsuccessfully, since it started last year.

[Thanks to J.D. Lasica for getting this debate started.]

 

An excellent idea from the BBC. Its correspondents are flashing three-graf blurbs on what’s going on where they are, and the Beeb is simply running them in reverse chronological order. More detailed communications would probably be difficult and can wait for later; this is a great way to provide a big picture out of small pieces.

They say that journalism is the first draft of history. This stuff is the first draft of journalism.

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