Insomniactive

The NYT continues to do as much as anyone with data-driven stories. Today on A1 was a feature about the rise and concomitant de-stigmatization of food stamp usage across the country. But the interactive map on the NYT web site tells the stories behind the story.

In Texas, the Rio Grande Valley is predictable tale of woe; Hidalgo County has the largest percentage of food stamp recipients of any county in the U.S. with over 500k residents (29% vs. a national average of 11.5%).

Closer to home, the story is more surprising. Travis County, which most of us tend to regard as a relatively insulated economic island, didn’t fare so well. Between 2007 and 2009, food stamp usage went up 50% in Travis, a rate of change that landed it in the 82nd percentile across all counties in the nation (average was 34%). Adjacent Williamson County-home of Dell-is far worse, still: up 100%, ranking it 48th out of 3,136 counties nationwide (98th percentile), and the third largest of the bottom 50 counties.

So, poverty-wise: what’s the matter with Central Texas? Kudos to the NYT for providing the starting point to investigate the question.

In Commonweal, Andrew Bacevich asks, essentially, “why not Mexico instead of Afghanistan?” A thought-provoking companion piece to David Loyn’s In Afghanistan: 200 Years of British, Russian, and American Occupation.

NYT media axe David Carr happened to be in the offices of The Texas Tribune when the terrible news broke in Ft. Hood. His piece is up on the NYT site.

In my not-so-humble and entirely un-objective opinion, The Texas Tribune opened with one helluva week. These are stories you simply will not see anywhere else. Consider, in no particular order:

Emily Ramshaw on the (over)use of passive restraints in Texas classrooms, and the head scratch-inducing conundrum of paying state psychiatrists a lot of money to work insanity-inducing hours to help make their patients more sane

Abby Rapaport on the reality tv show which doubles as the Texas State Board of Education, as well as the curious puzzle of the Texas dropout problem (together with Brian Thevenot, whom I’ll get to momentarily)

Morgan Smith on a brief history of fratricide in Texas politics (not that plenty of matri-types haven’t been in the mix)

Reeve Hamilton on the existential question of the difference between a pundit and several other words that begin with a p. Reeve is also our guide to what’s happening around the state before breakfast and just after lunch.

Ross Ramsey, Jim Henson, and Daron Shaw on Rick’s lead over Kay, what Texans are concerned about, and why all polls will leave the majority of interested parties with something to bitch about (largely because the majority of interested parties won’t be in the lead). Ross also broke the story about the party switch by Jim Hopson that had Democrats crying in their beer-before noon.

Elise Hu on the daily tug and pull of Texas politics, as well as a video about our fledgling enterprise which we will play over…and over…and over…in service of funding said fledgling enterprise, if nothing else.

Matt Stiles on the Houston mayor’s race and, more importantly, why he is the Overlord of All Texas Data

And yesterday, there was my personal favorite so far, Brian Thevenot’s article about the specter of electronic reading devices in Texas classrooms.

Brian comes to Texas from the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, where he was the member of two Pulitzer-winning teams and a finalist for the third. He will be The Trib’s axe on public education, and taught me a lot in this piece To wit:

That scenario represents the ideal — to some, at least — and may yet be years away. The changes thus far have come slowly, navigating a thicket of big-money politics and curriculum wars surrounding the nation’s second biggest textbook market. At the core of the new order, resulting from new legislation, lie three fundamental transfers of power and money:

• from the State Board of Education to the Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency;
• from three major textbook conglomerates to a broad array of computer hardware and digital content providers;
• and from the state to school districts….

The new rules mark a stark departure from the state’s unique and comparatively one-size-fits-all textbook adoption process, one stretching back to 1918 when voters approved a constitutional amendment mandating the state provide free textbooks to all…

Most states allow local school districts to buy their own instructional materials, in print or otherwise. Twenty-two states have similar statewide adoption processes, Givens explained in an interview, but none has held the reigns of curriculum and money so tightly as Texas. Here, school districts never see the bill for textbooks, which some argue has limited downward free-market pressure on prices. The state traditionally provides only a limited menu of books to districts, then writes checks based on local choices…

“Texas is the only state that pays directly,” Givens said. “So this is the first time, after they go through the process, that we’ll actually be sending money to districts out of the textbook fund. That’s the fundamental shift.”

The opening of the textbook fund for technology purchases takes on more significance in the context of the state’s historically paltry financing of technology infrastructure. Districts have been lobbying for years to increase a state technology allotment of $30 per child, a pittance compared to state financing of books.

I have a feeling I’m going to learn a lot from this team. Congrats on a great launch.

In case you’ve had the good fortune to spend the Great Recession on a desert island, here’s a snippet from the Columbia Journalism Review that summarizes the media landscape to which you have returned:

American journalism is at a transformational moment, in which the era of dominant newspapers and influential network news divisions is rapidly giving way to one in which the gathering and distribution of news is more widely dispersed. As almost everyone knows, the economic foundation of the nation’s newspapers, long supported by advertising, is collapsing, and newspapers themselves, which have been the country’s chief source of independent reporting, are shrinking—literally. Fewer journalists are reporting less news in fewer pages, and the hegemony that near-monopoly metropolitan newspapers enjoyed during the last third of the twentieth century, even as their primary audience eroded, is ending.

I find this interesting primarily because of the source. The passage comes from a long report with an immodest title: “The Reconstruction of American Journalism.” The authors—Leonard Downie, Jr. and Michael Schudson—are not exactly tattooed and pierced denizens of Netroots Nation but, rather, the former editor of the Washington Post and a Columbia J-School professor, respectively.

I do not agree with all of Downie’s and Schudson’s prescriptions for lifting America from our media malaise. But I heartily endorse what strikes me as their central premise:

The days of a kind of news media paternalism or patronage that produced journalism in the public interest, whether or not it contributed to the bottom line, are largely gone. American society must take some collective responsibility for supporting independent news reporting in this new environment—as society has, at much greater expense, for public needs like education, health care, scientific advancement, and cultural preservation…

Which brings me to our own fledgling enterprise: The Texas Tribune.

In my day job, I’m a venture capitalist, so like much else in my life, this endeavor was born out of a quest for financial gain. In 2007, it struck my partners and me that the steady decline of the once-nearly-$60-billion American newspaper industry should present some financial opportunities for firms like ours. That turned out to be true—sort of—and our analysis of the newspaper business continues to inform our media investing strategy. But I couldn’t shake a personal conclusion that didn’t have anything to do with enriching myself: that the abundance of public service journalism that prevailed in the period between the Kennedy and Bush 43 inaugurations was a historical accident, unlikely to ever repeat. Like the guy who realizes late in life that he’s been speaking prose all along, I was in my forties before I realized that I had grown up in a now-ended Golden Age.

I also concluded that capital-j Journalism—roughly the equivalent of Alex Jones’s “iron core” in his book, Losing the News—is a public good. The corollary to this conclusion is that the commercial press is too fragile for our democracy to rely on for all the news and information that we require to function as responsible citizens. It’s the ultimate case of bad things happening to good people. Most of the thousands of journalists who entered the business in the past few decades think of (or thought of) themselves as public servants. But the three revenue sources on which they relied to support their good work—subscriptions, classifieds, and display advertising—have all gone spectacularly awry due not just to a terrible economy, but also to the arrival of cheaper alternatives.

Students of introductory microeconomics are taught that public goods have a number of characteristics, two of which are most relevant to Journalism. First, public goods are non-rivalrous: I can consume all I want without leaving any less for you. Second, market forces alone will not produce public goods in sufficient quantity (imagine a world in which indigent health care, national defense, and clean air were left entirely to the discipline of the market).

The provider of most public goods is government. But even though the U.S. ranks somewhere between Burkina Faso and Uranus in our per-capita federal spending on public media, Congress will not come rushing to the aid of Journalism anytime soon. There are simply too many competing priorities, and the deficit hawk in me recoils at proposing another one. Besides, obvious fox-in-the-henhouse issues arise—to mix animal metaphors—from government watchdogs funded out of government coffers.

So with both commercial and governmental fixes in serious question, maybe that leaves you and me. Well, me, anyway—I’m in for the proverbial penny and pound. You, I trust, will be won over in time by the good work of privately funded public media efforts like ours.

Thanks for your interest in The Texas Tribune. Seeing this day arrive is one of the true highlights of my life. I think we will succeed. And if I’m wrong, it won’t be for lack of effort.

In a supposed debate between the old and the new, at least the following was concluded:

Both sides agreed that good journalism, foreign reporting and freedom of the press should be preserved, but none could provide a way to fund the future of the industry. The recent loss of ad revenues and circulation and massive layoffs have shown us that even the traditional media doesn’t have a clue.

In such discussions, public media seems to take on a Lord Voldemort kind of quality-That Which Shall Not Be Named.

In paidcontent, Andrew Clark presents a trenchant view of Murdoch and his minions’ attack on Marissa Mayer and GOOG’s “promiscuity.” Pretty ironic, as Jack Shafer points out:

“If the WSJ didn’t want any of its stories in any way visible on Google, all it would need to do is write a little bit of code into its pages and they wouldn’t be found by web crawlers,” says Jack Shafer, media critic at the online news magazine Slate.

Shafer argues that Murdoch is hardly a moral arbiter of fair compensation for journalistic output, given his willingness to start price wars on Fleet Street against weaker rivals: “It’s quite funny that Murdoch talks about not paying for journalism cheapening it, when he was responsible for driving the price down of all newspapers in the UK.”

If Shafer had had the pleasure of going to college in San Antonio with me in the mid-80s, he would have also remembered that Murdoch’s peeps showed their defense of righteousness by running headlines which would have made the National Enquirer blanch, day after day, in the now defunct San Antonio Light.

There are two pretty delectable ironies here. One is the Murdoch henchman’s use of the word “promiscuity” in a derisive fashion. (I’d say “how very British, except that he’s an Aussie). Revenue promiscuity is precisely what newspapers never figured out, while Google did in spades. Which brings us to the second irony. After spending gazillions of dollars developing superior technology for search, which is after all the core function online life, GOOG provides that function for free. So tell me again where news providers’ sense of righteously indignant entitlement comes from?