Brooks in Beta

Live Bait: A Lesson From the Annals of Peter Kaplan's New York Observer

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:21:00 -0500

This story about Tyler Rush takes place on Aug. 5, 2003. It was originally published sometime in May 2009 as part of a special Peter Kaplan farewell edition of the New York Observer. After reading it, Tyler sent me this drawing of an eel. It’s been prominently displayed in my living room ever since.

Back when I was Jake Bloom and just an intern at an Observer still headquartered at the old townhouse on 64th Street, I was summoned into Peter Kaplan’s office and given a very important task: Buy Tyler Rush, head of the art department, a birthday present. He was turning 40 and the staff was going to celebrate after the paper’s close that night.

He likes fishing, I remember being told by Peter. Find him a nice tackle box. And be sure to get him some bait. Live bait.Tackle box. Easy. Live bait? Not so much.

Even though I was from Miami and had grown up surrounded by water (and presumably fish), I was clueless.

But so great was my desire to impress Peter, to separate myself from the other interns, to have my name remembered accurately, that I said, No problem.

I had learned from Peter the most important lesson of my brief career: A good reporter says yes to any assignment and figures out the details later, whether it’s hard news, a trend piece or … live bait.

But what was he talking about? Shrimp? Chum? Worms!?

Extensive Googling turned up only one shop in the city that sold “live bait”—vague, but promising. I called. They were closed.

Dismayed, I headed out to the fishing supplies store to buy the tackle box. It was cloudy, foreboding.

Where can I find some live bait? I asked the clerk, as I purchased the tackle box with Peter’s credit card (cha-ching!). They only sold frozen shrimp.

What are you fishing?

Er, striped bass?

Oh, they like eel.

Perfect. Where do I get one of those?

Chinatown.

Gulp!

The live eel was 3 feet long, when straightened. I picked him out from a tank in a market on a side street off Canal. Like a harmless goldfish, he was handed to me in a knotted black plastic bag filled with water.

I flagged a cab and once inside, I could immediately tell the eel was not happy.

It made a loud clicking noise, the eel equivalent of Get me the fuck out of here, you fucking piece of shit. If I could reach your eyeballs, I would eat them out of your motherfucking skull. Or so I imagined.

Luckily, the cab driver, a Sikh, was too busy asking me questions about the news of the day to hear anything.

What ees dis gay bishop? he asked me, a Jew with a live eel and a tackle box.

I didn’t know how to answer.

Back at the townhouse on 64th street, I marched directly to Peter’s office to present him with my prize.

Great! I can almost remember him saying in his inimitable way—unless, I guess, if you’re Tony the Tiger.

Somehow—and I don’t want to put the blame squarely on Peter or Elon, his assistant at the time—the decision was made to release the eel into the downstairs bathtub, so that it could swim freely until we gave it to Tyler (the close was still hours away).

Elon and I went to the basement. We plugged the bathtub with a towel, started the water and gingerly put our sinewy friend in.

It immediately became enraged, swimming away from the rushing water and clicking like mad.

I remember thinking, if the eel, seemingly on the verge of a heart attack, died, I would be haunted forever by the clicking—my tell-tale heart.

Only when the steam started to fill the bathroom, did we realize we had mistakenly turned the wrong knob and hot water was filling the tub. We were cooking the eel alive.

Defying common sense—perhaps it was dazed by the heat—the eel made a mad dash for the drain. It pushed the towel aside, stuck its head down the hole and tried to wiggle its way to freedom.

One of us shrieked. (I don’t want to point fingers, but it was Elon.)

Panicked, I lunged and twisted the cold knob, sending Elon, myself and the eel into an exhausted stupor.

There must be some wisdom gained out of all this, I thought, watching Edgar (yes, we named the eel) swim serenely around the tub. At some point, “Follow the money” had become “Follow the live bait” and I realized there was little difference between the two (ok … maybe a Pulitzer). Faced with the untenable prospect of disappointing Peter, I had learned to be more resourceful.

But what was I going to do with this eel? I was certain Tyler was going to take one look and run back upstairs (even though I doubt Tyler had run a day in his life).

Hours later, after we sang happy birthday to Tyler and gave him his tackle box, we ushered him downstairs for his one last surprise.

Tyler looked into the tub and chuckled. He sized up the eel, and feeling magnanimous, decided he would free it in the East River. (So much for bait!) Without hesitation, he stuck his arm into the luke warm water, grabbed the eel, stuck it in a garbage bag and walked out.

It was a happy ending in true Observer fashion: Peter, inspired and feeling perhaps a little mischievous, had sent a cub reporter on an impossible task and the cub reporter returned with, well, a story. And Edgar, he was free now.

Thank you for everything, Peter. The New York Observer will never be the same without you.

Sadly, I can now say the same thing about Tyler.

Today is my last at Hazan+Company. I will miss working with...

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:44:24 -0400

Today is my last at Hazan+Company. I will miss working with Randi, who is as wonderful a person as she is a designer. If you don’t believe me, check out Hazanotations: nobody who owns a dog as cute as Lulabelle Jones or cares as much about typography, gardening and the beauty in all things could be anything but. It was great fun doing some great work.

Psyched to be at Street Fight Summit. Big props to David...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:02:14 -0400

Psyched to be at Street Fight Summit. Big props to David Hirschman. #sfs11

"For Mr. Dobbs the risk paid off. The Atavist’s retail partners (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and..."

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:54:52 -0400

“For Mr. Dobbs the risk paid off. The Atavist’s retail partners (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Apple) do not allow their partners to disclose sales figures, but Mr. Dobbs’s Atavist story, “My Mother’s Lover,” at one point was the sixth most-downloaded book on the Kindle and atop the most-downloaded list for Amazon’s short-form division, Kindle Singles—what Mr. Dobbs called a “healthy five-figure number” of copies sold. He earned roughly a dollar for each $2.99 copy, making the e-book a more profitable venture than any magazine story he has written. The story even generated more sales revenue than two of his books.”

- Observer on the business models of Atavist, Byliner and the magazines who are starting to pay attention.

Potential with a capital P.

News Consumption Tilts Toward Niche Sites - NYTimes.com

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:12:00 -0400

News Consumption Tilts Toward Niche Sites - NYTimes.com:

2105:

Like newspapers, portals like AOL and Yahoo are confronting the cold fact that there is less general interest in general interest news.

Warning: mentions AOL v TechCrunch v Arrington, if that kind of thing makes you apopleptic. (@jimray)

Not actually true. There is arguably more interest in general interest news, but the Internet has served up exponentially more general interest news to meet the demand. Since the audience for general interest news is so large (think about the traffic numbers for national sites like msnbc.com, nytimes.com, Drudge Report) and the inventory for advertisements on that kind of content so large, it is less valuable to advertisers and naturally the companies that rely on advertising dollars. Orgs like Yahoo! and Aol! who have traditionally tread in this territory have been playing a numbers game from the beginning. It’s not the quality of the audience, but the quantity. This trend toward niche content is a movement away from this numbers game.

Pitchfork launched a redesign last week. The reaction has been...

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:17:00 -0400

Pitchfork launched a redesign last week. The reaction has been mixed. Some have picked on the new, subtler logo, the exclusive use of Helvetica, and the boxiness of the new layout. One person tweeted, “Not wild about the Pitchfork redesign. I give it a 6.8.” (Credit to Billboard for finding that gem.)

Sadly for Pitchfork, a site I visit often, all of these observations have merit, though they miss the real reason why people’s reactions are so meh: from the users standpoint, the new design does not have a clear raison d’etre.

To put it another way, is the content better served by the new design? To determine such a thing is near impossible, although I guess traffic would be a good benchmark. Reactionary blog posts are probably not.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen a more radical approach to structure. Pitchfork, like many sites who are juggling not only a lot of content, but a lot of different kinds of content, has not yet found a elegant way of seamlessly promoting that content. Their approach, which is more functional than it is engaging, is to dump each content type into its own box and then to order the boxes according to editorial priority—reviews, news, new music, video, respectively. They are more interested in making it easy for the user to find the kind of content they’re looking for, rather then telling the user what content they should be looking for. And while the latter may not sound like an appealing idea in the Internet age, it is a fundamental service provided by any editorial product.

So I guess I’m saying the Pitchfork redesign represents a minor cop out. I say minor because this is an incredibly difficult challenge, both from a design and an editorial perspective, and to be fair, the new design is visually appealing. Album art, photography and video are given more “room to breathe.” The site’s navigation is somewhat improved, especially on interior pages, where the site is doing a better job of promoting related content, creating an especially vicious rabbit hole.

Luckily, the content is so good, I’m sure they’re going to have plenty of more time to figure it out.

"@jaketbrooks That’s absurd! Of course we want @dailydot content shared everywhere. You..."

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 13:08:08 -0400

“@jaketbrooks That’s absurd! Of course we want @dailydot content shared everywhere. You don’t need a panoply of buttons for that.”

- Owen Wilson, founding editor of The Daily Dot, tweets his response to my post.

Touché.

Daily Dot interested in covering Reddit, Digg, 4Chan, not so interested in letting users share their content on them

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 10:39:00 -0400

The Daily Dot, a digital “newspaper” that will cover social media communities—think Reddit, Digg, 4Chan—like metro beats, is a great idea. It’s easy to see where the traffic will come from: Not only will the locals clamor to see their names “in print,” but the outsiders, intimidated yet intrigued by sites like 4Chan, will stop by to gawk at the exotic products of these communities’ cultivated insularity.

It’s a win-win, except for one small thing: They are neither interested in making it easy to share their content on anything but Twitter and Facebook, nor are they interested in tracking its popularity on other social media sites.

The question is why. Now, I think there may actually be a reason for this—aside from your usual startup hiccup. These guys know these communities. They know how their users operate. I don’t think they saw it as a conflict of interest or playing favorites. That would be taking the newspaper metaphor a bit too far. I think there’s a deeper explanation for it: Those social media buttons just don’t work.

We have had clients tell us that only Twitter and Facebook integration has been successful in driving significant traffic to the site and while its nice to include the Reddit and Digg icons, they do nothing. If that is the case, then it would make sense that the editors of the Daily Dot thought that the inclusion of those buttons would undermine their credibility, as those buttons demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how those communities function. Am I warm?

So what does that mean to a site whose sole purpose is to cover these communities? Truthfully, the most reasonable explanation is that this is a startup and they just haven’t gotten around to it. But even that explanation hints at a real issue: if it’s something that can be easily omitted, how important is this kind of social media integration to an editorial product?

The new Nieman Journalism Lab is confident you will scroll down

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:43:00 -0400

Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab launched a redesign today, again demonstrating their wisdom regarding the interwebs. Everyone knows the last Monday in August is National Soft Launch Day. (Oh, I just made that up? Doesn’t matter. Nobody is reading this, just like nobody will notice that the Twitter bar at the top of NJL’s homepage is one pixel off. It will be fixed by the time the Uniques get back from drinking Mai Tais at some Cancun Club Med. Didn’t I just mention it’s the last week in August?)

To be honest, that one pixel—which is probably unique to my browser (hey njl, it’s firefox v. 6)—is the only proof I could find that suggests this is indeed a soft launch. Kudos! It’s a sharp, well thought out redesign. Don’t trust me. You can take a quick tour with director Joshua Benton.

So what does their redesign tell us about their vision of the future of journalism?

* Your users will scroll down. The new NJL features no less than 8 stories above the fold on its homepage. All its other offerings, the newly minted Fuego, Encyclo, its app and other Nieman spin-offs, are further down the page.

* More “magezine-y” design means more of a focus on features.

* Pick a pretty font for your headlines.

* Double down on Wordpress.

* Double down on Twitter.

Condé Nast digital has been busy this August, launching...

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:32:00 -0400

Condé Nast digital has been busy this August, launching redesigns of both WWD.com and VanityFair.com. Nothing really new to see here. They’ve even kept the Graydon Carter bobblehead on the 404 page.

I did uncover one little interesting (perhaps only to font geeks?) difference between the two sites. Both designs benefit mightily from font replacement, but only one site gets the benefit of a Condé Nast custom coded font replacement. That would be Vanity Fair. The magazine’s logo and titles uses VF Sans, a custom font. Since I assume VF is the only one with the license to use the font, it naturally wouldn’t be available on a font replacement service like TypeKit. So they had to go build the code themselves. That’s what I call investing in your brand.

"We can’t think of anything more fun than being part of the wave of places that’s..."

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 13:22:25 -0400

““We can’t think of anything more fun than being part of the wave of places that’s figuring it out. There’s really something good that’s happening because we’re innovating, and others are as well.””

- Josh Benson, co-founder of Capital New York and ever the optimist.

Love it. Bit of a coming out party today for Capital New York, one of our favorite clients, if we had favorites. We don’t. That would be unprofessional.

"For touring, my Kindle is just about the greatest thing I own. I have a few hundred books on it and..."

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 09:31:00 -0400

“For touring, my Kindle is just about the greatest thing I own. I have a few hundred books on it and have recently been going back and rereading Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. When I was in college I was a philosophy major and now I feel like forgotten almost everything I’ve learned. So I’m putting myself through a Bertrand Russell refresher course.”

- Moby lays out his media diet. Read the rest at The Atlantic Wire. (via theatlantic)

I never thought I would have anything in common with Moby (despite being made of stars), but I, too, was a philosophy major. And I, too, sometimes feel like I have forgotten everything. When I need a refresher, though, instead of turning to Bertrand Russell, I usually go to my man, Will Durant and “The Story of Philosophy.” One of these days, I am going to rock a reference to monads in casual conversation. Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that is going to be a very sad day?

"Nobody thinks the staff at [The Daily] is doing any phone-hacking. They haven’t broken enough scoops..."

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 09:49:00 -0400

“Nobody thinks the staff at [The Daily] is doing any phone-hacking. They haven’t broken enough scoops to raise that kind of suspicion.”

- The Observer’s Kat Stoeffel gleefully takes the piss out of Murdoch’s iPad baby.

Her kicker is equally vicious: “What The Daily does offer, one imagines, is some insight into the mind of Rupert Murdoch. He is the only person we know who reads it every day.”

What Stoeffel would have us believe is that Rupert Murdoch is some doddering “cuddly Emperor Palpatine” whose foray into technology is as misguided as your grandma buying an iPhone. But as much as Murdoch deserves all of the scorn he has coming to him for the phone-hacking scandal, I think The Daily still stands as a courageous editorial experiment. $30 million may not be a lot of money to Rupert Murdoch, but it’s still $30 million—and he’s invested it in an editorial startup. That’s an investment in journalism regardless of whether or not you believe in the brand.

The article reads like pure schadenfreude. Yet as much as it may be fun to point out CMS issues and personnel departures, these are not incredibly telling. All startups have these. The real questions are: Is The Daily finding any traction with its readers? Are its number of subscribers increasing? Will Murdoch continue to fund it if the numbers plateau? Has the walled garden of the iPad hurt their content? What are the difficulties they’ve found exposing people outside of iPads to their content?

Stoeffel poses the question herself:

“Now, with James under the spotlight and The Daily’s top patron, Rupert Murdoch, looking increasingly vulnerable, one wonders just what will become of the tablet paper, which has already cost News Corp. some $10 million without yet making a dent in the national conversation.”

Yes, one does wonder.

Andy Rutledge's nytimes.com designs are pretty, but some of his thoughts about news sites are ugly

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:09:00 -0400

Andy Rutledge's nytimes.com designs are pretty, but some of his thoughts about news sites are ugly:

Why does Andy Rutledge have to make it so hard to like his designs? His suggestions for the Times are elegant, but they are a little misguided. Websites need to be more readable and usable and to a degree, Rutledge presents some elegant solutions to those problems. But he goes too far in making his point. Here are some mistaken assumptions about the news industry:

1) The news industry has abandoned actual journalism. That’s just silly. If that were true, if all of the content was bullshit, what would be the point of redesigning it?

2) The newspaper’s “promotional strategy” and “pandering” is “thoughtless.” Actually, they have put a lot of thought into it. Perhaps it’s executed poorly, but news sites make a lot of money from ads and simply suggesting, “Hey, why don’t you move to subscription model?” isn’t a viable option for a lot of sites. The question really should be: Is there a better way of incorporating advertising into news sites?

3) Most Popular is worthless. People like to know what stories are trending. Dismissing it as social media makes no sense. Like Cameron writes, social media should be integrated into news content. How other people are experiencing the news can be as powerful a reading experience as the news itself.

This all being said. I agree with Rutledge’s point. High quality content deserves high quality design. I would just go one step further. While Rutledge’s design solutions are easier to read and use, I don’t know if they would inspire readers to open their wallets. In order for there to be a subscription based model, I think design has to go even further, treating each piece of content as a discrete design challenge. This means dumping templates. But I would limit this idea to magazine-style content, not daily news content.

cameronmoll:

Andy Rutledge:

Regarding content strategy and mechanism, today’s ‘news’ is rife with irrelevancies and distractions. Part of this is due to the news industry’s abandonment of actual journalism, but much of it is due to thoughtless promotional strategy and pathetic pandering. I suggest that digital news acquire a responsible and more usable approach.

Andy’s arguments and mockups are both very well-conceived — I would love to see online journalism (all of it, not just NYT) head in this direction. His design concepts are fabulous.

I do believe, however, there should be an affordance for social components in news media, as the context of others’ opinions as to what is news and what isn’t, and what is more important news for that matter, can be helpful in sifting through the daily deluge of reported information. Not that peers are more discerning than editors, mind you, but that their voices (ours, that is) should be allowed to influence society’s understanding of the world around us.

Love how quickly this was produced and published. Useful, too,...

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 15:31:45 -0400

Love how quickly this was produced and published. Useful, too, no?

shortformblog:

brooklynmutt:

WSJ: Here’s an annotated image of the pie attack on Rupert Murdoch, which identifies key figures in the room.

(Click thru for interactive graphics)

The best pie chart we’ll post today.

Hey, old friend. New design looks great. Definite improvement on...

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 10:40:00 -0400

Hey, old friend. New design looks great. Definite improvement on the old one. But what happened to the navigation menu at the top of the site? I want to navigate. It’s a little cheeky to make me scroll down to find your silos, verticals, buckets, whathaveyou, etc. Is that the point?

"Great story. Maybe you all will start a trend of media people reporting on what is positive -..."

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 10:25:00 -0400

“Great story. Maybe you all will start a trend of media people reporting on what is positive - instead of the usual whining.”

- Flyover State, first commenter on New York Magazine’s 21 New Media Innovators list.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Not only is this interesting as a matter of historical record,...

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:49:24 -0400

Not only is this interesting as a matter of historical record, but design, too. Notice how LITTLE the page changes day to day. The main photo and the text changes, but visually, it’s the same structure and layout every day. Kinda boring, no? Remarkably, the only major changes to the homepage are not due to large breaking stories, but ads. Perhaps it’s time to rethink the flexible homepage.

futurejournalismproject:

Time-lapsing the New York Times Home Page

Phillip Mendonça-Vieira ran an errant cron job that ended up taking two screenshots of the New York Times home page every hour from September 2010 to July 2011. The fortunate result of the mistake: 12,000 screenshots of what the Times felt important for its home page.

Phillip writes that most publications don’t save their frontpage layout data and if the printed newspaper ceases to exist, society will lose key historical snapshots of the every day.

Via Phillip:

This, in my humble opinion, is a tragedy because in many ways our frontpages are summaries of our perspectives and our preconceptions. They store what we thought was important, in a way that is easy and quick to parse and extremely valuable for any future generations wishing to study our time period.

Notable moments: Chilean miners at 0:39, Arab Spring at 3:38 and Japanese Tsunami at 4:54

Writing it in a headline doesn’t make it true. The NoTW...

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 09:44:49 -0400

Writing it in a headline doesn’t make it true. The NoTW phone hacking scandal does tarnish every journalist at News Corp. Every journalist period, really. Whether it should is the question.

Here’s where you start to feel bad for every honest journalist. They do deserve a defender. They do deserve editorials extolling their virtues. But this is not that editorial. Just look at WSJ’s defense of Les Hinton, the former publisher and CEO of Dow Jones who resigned on Friday.

In nearly four years at the Journal, Mr. Hinton managed the paper’s return to profitability amid a terrible business climate. He did so not solely by cost-cutting but by investing in journalists when other publications were laying off hundreds. On ethical questions, his judgment was as sound as that of any editor we’ve had.

It’s not hard to see the institutional priority here. Sure, Hinton was ethical (well, relatively ethical). But what’s more important? He put the company in the black. Defending Hinton’s ethical judgment comes second to his alchemy, his ability to spin gold from a product that most everyone is calling straw. Isn’t that mentality partly why Murdoch is in this mess to begin with?

Love how The Times illustrated this op-ed about food trucks....

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 10:24:00 -0400

Love how The Times illustrated this op-ed about food trucks. They were able to leverage the vertical nature of the illustration in a visually interesting way online, making this page look different from how it looks every other day.

OK! You got me. I’m a little biased. The op-ed happens to be written by my brother, Zach, who for over the last five years has been the stomach behind midtownlunch.com. He is what you would call an authority—and now he has the Times op-ed to prove it. Very nice!