Andrew Golis

During the Revolutionary War, the British Army had a difficult time because of its strict adherence to what it believed were the proper rules of war.  They lined their men up, made their intentions clear to their enemy, marched them to the battle field, and engaged head on.  Their tactics were so predictable and gentlemanly that aristocrats would watch the battles with picnics and parasols from the tops of surrounding hills, unafraid of harm.

The American colonists used the Brits’ predictability and tactical captivity against them.  Knowing they couldn’t compete with the huge British Army head to head, they improvised guerrilla tactics: ambushing their opponents from forests as they marched by, attacking from behind and then quickly retreating to avoid taking casualties.  The British found themselves fighting with antiquated rules born of antiquated tactics enabled by the fact that they had such sheer size that they hadn’t previously needed to evolve.

I give you, The New York Times.

Bill Keller is concerned that the in-depth political reporting and analysis of The New York Times doesn’t have the impact that it used to.  He tells the New York Observer:

“It’s obvious, and no crime against humanity, that the world has many, many places to turn for information, misinformation, analysis, rants, etc,” wrote Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, in an e-mail. “We—The Times, The Washington Post, Politico, the news outlets that aim to be aggressive, serious and impartial—don’t dominate the conversation the way we once did, and that’s fine, except it means some excellent hard work gets a little muffled.”

Blood, sweat and tears poured into a perfect Sunday A1 story, unless picked up by a politician for an attack, pundits to further a narrative, or partisan bloggers to feed the base, are simply wasted.  In this new media era, the sheer, predictable brute force of The Times doesn’t pack the punch it once did.

In this new era of a proliferation of voices, everyone else has improvised.  Those that couldn’t rely on over a million print readers a day, 1.5 million on Sunday, and another 17 million a month online had to develop guerrilla tactics to be heard.  Cable television entertains.  Bloggers mobilize and make trouble.  Politicians lie, and joke, and spend millions of dollars running mini paid-media empires of their own.  Like the American colonists, they realized they couldn’t compete playing by the rules, so they changed them.

But The Times, and other big media companies that had relied on their distribution oligopoly to control the discourse haven’t learned tactics to have an impact in the new media system.  They just print the story and then stand back and hope.  Previously, their information dominance alone would do the trick.  No longer.

And worse, their old brute force model allowed them to develop a journalistic ethos of detachment that prevents them from saying in anything other than a boutique paper that they care about whether or not their journalism has an impact.  They haven’t learned to engage and don’t seem to know that they need to.

Keller doesn’t realize that it would be a lot more effective to take his messages to his millions of readers than to The New York Observer’s 51,000.  He doesn’t realize that if they write the story once and no one cares, they can just write it again and criticize people for ignoring it.  He doesn’t realize there are many ways to have an impact if he can bring himself to admit that that’s the point, and that The Times’ detachment does it no good when it’s ignorable.

If the battle were independent media as guerillas and The Times as the Brits, I would be happy to have them flail indefinitely.  But, independent media isn’t alone at having improvised models for impact.  As embodied by the Bill O’Reilly’s of the world taunting and ranting their way to prominence, or Barack Obama’s campaign releasing a 13 minute long propaganda documentary that in only a day has been viewed by 600,000 people, people who aren’t commited to truth first and foremost are gaining strength in this media system as well.

The Times is certainly an imperfect institution, but it’s important that they accept the new media system and engage it.  It needs to embrace the diversity of the web and push it to be more accountable, more truthful, more substantive.  And it can’t do that marching in a straight line.

Welcome to the new site.

This is the fourth iteration of my personal blog, but the first hosted at Andrewgolis.com.  The design is actually a throwback to the second iteration of the site, hosted at blogspot back in 2006.  My hope is that it’s clean and simple and readable.  I’m sure I’ll be tweaking as I go, but I love it out of the box too.

Everything you read at my old wordpress site – new media analysis, political musings, and youtube videos – will be here.  Enjoy.

Oh thank god.  Otherwise I’d have to put up blog posts.

Since delicious’s relaunch, the automatic link blogging doesn’t seem to be working.  So check my delicious page for all the latest and greatest until I get things working again.

The guys from predictify.com asked me to be their “VIP” this week.  Essentially, that means my mug is featured on their homepage with the question I’m posing to the community:

With the help of an email list estimated to have over 5 million addresses, Barack Obama has shattered fundraising records, mounted an unprecedented offline organizing effort, and stayed in almost daily contact with his most fervent supporters. By election day in November, that list could easily double or triple in size.

If he wins, will Obama take the list with him to the White House to activate his base; hand it over to the DNC; or, as did Howard Dean in 2004, spin the group off into an independent grassroots organizing effort?

Micah Sifry’s brilliant essay, “Obama’s Organization, and the Future of American Politics,” was the inspiration.  If for some reason you didn’t read it when I fawned over it in my del.icio.us links, do it now.  It’s simple an essential piece of movement analysis to understand the political moment in which we find ourselves.

I’ll be fascinated to watch their community hash this out.  I did, after all, in a past life design and help build a political prediction site of my own.

What’s your prediction?  What will Obama do with that list?

The subtitle of this blog is “mostly links,” and that’s because I have a day job that isn’t blogging (but instead managing a network of blogs) so it’s often difficult for me to shift in and out of writing mode and provide you with any unique insights you couldn’t just find from reading the articles I’m reading.

But I recognize that the last two weeks or so the blog could easily be called “almost completely links.” Between a week of vacation, four nights in Austin for Netroots Nation, a few days in between to transition and a week after to get my bearings back at TPM, things have been quite busy.

But, this week hopefully I’ll be able to find time to start writing again, probably to share some thoughts that have been marinating on the progressive movement’s awful but inevitable choice between justice and progress, mainstream media’s painfully slow emergence into the hyperlink economy of web media, and the Obama Campaigns coming decision on movement management.  Movement and new media analysis, woo!

Thanks to the growing number of you that are reading, I’ll work to start getting the thoughts flowing again.

PS: Just figured out how to blog from my iPhone.  Expect some fun stuff to pop up here as a result.

Update: H/T to Matt Cordell, who originally came up with the Monty/Churchill concept. Also, thanks for reading the site Matt.  You’ve doubled my traffic.

You decide.

This will be my last dog post.  Back to work and back to very serious/important new media blogging.

Check out that farmer’s tan!

Monty declares victory on the green in Oak Bluffs before going to the beach to learn to swim.

The lady is working on her book, I’m mostly playing scrabulous.  Life is good.