ARTS & FARCES internet

I’m really glad to see Jerry Michalski regularly writing online again. Even his throw-away stuff is full of valuable insight.

In “Again: what’s so difficult about abundance?” he makes the fine point that sustainable businesses can be created around abundance rather than the artificial scarcity taught in business schools.

It drives me nuts that scarcity is seen as such a fundamental requirement for creating a business. Sure, there are plenty of businesses built around scarce resources, and sure, Dave’s time and my time are scarce, but that’s no proof that businesses can’t cruise along profitably creating voluntary loyalty by knowing their customers better, never betraying them, always being available and fixing problems, responding more quickly than others…. you get the picture. But go to business school and what they teach you is how to create artificial scarcity. That’s the kind of thinking that got us into the present mess.

One of the things that impresses me deeply about working at Utne is that everyone—the business side, the editorial side, everyone—goes out of their way to help our readers whenever we can.

Unlike almost all publications, Utne‘s editorial product is based on abundance. We wouldn’t exist without the alternative, non-corporate media and we revel in that, never forgetting it. And we spend a lot of time nurturing that seedbed where we can (we’ll start discussing our nominees for this year’s Utne Independent Press Awards next week).

With that frame of reference, I’ve been watching the hand-wringing in the corporate media about the presence of a handful of carefully selected webloggers at the Democratic National Convention. What I see is a drawbridge syndrome: we’re pros, they’re not; keep the riff-raff out of our serious business. Nevermind that the corporate media (and both major political parties) have done absolutely nothing to tell the political or electoral story of the country in close to two generations.

Nothing typifies this drawbridge syndrome more than Alex S. Jones’s “Bloggers Are the Sizzle, Not the Steak” in the Los Angles Times. Carrying the subhead, “Convention seats do not turn Internet gossips into journalists,” the basic point of the piece is that bloggers don’t report and “see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject.” Instead of pointing to any number of major stories that broke in the blogosphere this year, I’d just say the best webloggers refuse to be consigned to the role of stenographer, something Jones claims we should all be comfortable with in our media diets.

I imagine the professional journalists on the eve of the 1960 Democratic Convention felt about Norman Mailer pretty much the same way today’s pros feel about the webloggers 40-some years later.

I’m actually excited that Utne was credentialed and will have two journalists in and around the convention. But not for the reasons you may think. I’m excited because one of our (now-former) online editorial interns, with nothing more than permission, took it upon himself to get the publication credentialed and will, along with another former intern, be providing us with regular reporting from the convention. The stories we’ll be telling will be the smaller but no less important ones, the ones the big guys tend to miss or can’t be bothered with. We’ll be doing, as Craig Cox, our former managing editor, said: “looking at the New York Times and not doing that.”