The money war...

I like this. So true, so true...

I think I like ShareThis better...

You'll note that I've removed "Add to Any" and have added "ShareThis" instead. More an aesthetic decision than anything else. Plus, "ShareThis" has a few more options.

A better blog...

I have learned two things today. Neither of them have allowed me to advance on my assignments. However, they are pretty cool and very "new media," so I don't feel totally useless.

The first was to set my blog so that titles appear for each blog post. This allows for the creation of permalinks--dedicated unique addresses (links) assigned to each invidual post (as opposed to just one address for the entire blog). This means I can now send out links to specific posts.

The second thing I learned was how to add "Add to Any" to my blog. After each post, you will now see a little box that says "Share/Save." (It's also what you see in the image above.) This will allow readers to share my blog on Facebook or Twitter, as well as other social Web applications.

While I recognize this is pretty amateurish stuff for hardcore bloggers, I must say I'm pretty chuffed with myself for sorting this out.

So now, dear readers, share away!

J-school cover girl...

Wow, I'm on the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's Career Services Web page! The school hosted a career fair two weeks ago, and to stand out from the crowd, I ordered a lei from Hawaii to wear to the event. I was noticed. You can check out the site at http://snurl.com/fo4ui. (You'll have to scroll along a bit...)

New School haters in the Twitterverse

(Photo taken from the Daily News Web site)

So that was quick. Now check out what some of the haters in the Twitterverse had to say about the New School students. Stunning! (All of these posts were taken from a TweetDeck search.)

protest at the new school? wtf. get a job hippies
desusnice, Fri 10 Apr 12:01

the socialist pieces of scum occupying the new school are the REAL pigs- not the policemen #NSIE
talster, Fri 10 Apr 12:23

I would love to know what is so atrocious at New School they feel the need to overtake the building. Seriously? Still doesn't excuse NYU.
sueelio, Fri 10 Apr 12:31

Okay New School kids, I understand you're upset, but no one is taking you seriously anymore. http://moourl.com/4wxl4
dayla, Fri 10 Apr 12:36

new school protesters-- if you are so anti-capitalism just move to a commune and stop bothering the rest of us #NSIE #newschool
talster, Fri 10 Apr 12:37

Spoiled New School kids lose. FAIL. http://tinyurl.com/cca6po
waityourarobot, Fri 10 Apr 12:38

Bored cops pepper spray bored New School students. Oh New York. http://tr.im/izFf
youLukas, Fri 10 Apr 12:38

Another revolution at the New School is apparently underway. I am feeling not revolutionary today so they better finish up soon.
andreagl, Fri 10 Apr 12:49

The college brats "occupying" a New School building got their heads swiftly beat in by the NYPD. I hope this protesting trend dies off soon.
gregchiasson, Fri 10 Apr 12:52

This gal talster was especially offended (and offensive). She kept her rants up while many tweeted, retweeted and moved on. (And get this, she's not some crotchety geezer shaking a cane at them youngins. Check her out here http://twitter.com/talster.) Here's more of what she said:

#NSIE you broke into a bldg,took down a cleaner&a security guard, hurt a policeman and NOW youre crying that they used mace?! gimme a break!
talster, Fri 10 Apr 12:49

oh, BOOHOO... they deserve it!! RT @studentactivism: Campus paper says one New School arrestee was "bleeding from his forehead" at booking
talster, Fri 10 Apr 13:00

@tomaplomb how ab being disgusted at the students for breaking into a building, hurting an innocent cleaner&taking his phone, then a guard?
talster, Fri 10 13:04

Given the current state of affairs in this country, and in this city, especially, I'm surprised that there are still folks who take up these rather negative attitudes. I'm just impressed that the young protesters care enough about their cause to unstrap their wrists from the keyboard and pry their bottoms from chairs long enough to hit the streets (or take over a building). But that's my take on things.

Twitter coverage of New School protests

I can't get down to this site, but here are some Twitter feeds coming in from the New School protest!

This is a little bit insane...





Higher Education
Journalism Bust, J-School Boom
Lauren Streib, 04.06.09, 3:00 PM ET

When the current class of optimists from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism prepared for their March job fair, some were stunned to learn that, along with The New York Times, Forbes, Dow Jones and other national publications, they'd also been signed up for interviews with Cat Fancy, a lively consumer magazine "for people interested in all phases of cat ownership."

It was, of course, a prank. But it's easy to understand the confusion. The Pew Research Center estimates 5,000 newspaper jobs were lost in 2008. Since 2001, more than 10,000 newspaper journalists have lost work, leaving the total count of those still employed at 47,000 nationwide. It's getting worse, fast. Erica Smith, who runs the online layoff tracker Paper Cuts, counts nearly 7,500 newsroom jobs lost so far this year.

Yet punishing times for journalism have been an unlikely boon for journalism schools. Would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins hiding out from the bad economy or learning new skills to compete stormed the admissions offices of top-tier programs last fall. Columbia, Stanford and NYU applications increased 38%, 20% and 6%, respectively, from the previous year. Same thing at state schools. The University of Colorado (up 11%), University of North Carolina (up 14%) and University of Maryland (up 25%) all saw gains. "I'm amazed that enrollment continues to be so healthy," says Associate Professor Stephen Solomon at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Costs are up too. The average price for graduate school and living expenses has reached $31,000 per year. This despite earnings for journalists with a graduate degree averaging just $40,000 in 2007 ($10,000 more than for those with just bachelor's degrees).

"I've never met a single person in 35 years who went into journalism out of pure economic reason," explains Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. "It doesn't make us recession-proof, but it makes us less recession responsive."

What are all these people going to do for a living? Some may actually get jobs in journalism. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2016 the number of positions for entry-level reporters and news anchors will increase 2%, while those for experienced writers and editors will grow 10%. Expect trade publications, freelance work and digital media to supply the bulk of the jobs.

And, perhaps, academia. Old media expatriates looking for a life after layoffs and buyouts are flooding schools looking for work. Brooke Kroeger, director of the Carter Journalism Institute at NYU, says interest in teaching has tripled in the last five years. Columbia's Lemann says he receives several e-mails every day. Says Neil Henry, interim dean and professor at the Berkeley School of Journalism: "It's becoming increasingly common and it is difficult emotionally to deal with."

Luckily, all those new students should create need for more professors. And, it turns out, Cat Fancy is hiring. Parent company BowTie, Inc., has openings for an associate book editor and summer magazine/book editing interns. Interested? http://www.bowtieinc.com/bowtieinc/joblist.aspx

Original link http://snurl.com/fkd5

In writing this, I am avoiding a very heavy assignment due tomorrow morning. Around the corner from 29, even I am proof that old habits die hard.

Some musings... There is a panic, among journalists and people who care about journalism, about the state of the industry. Papers are collapsing. Newspaper people are getting laid off. Veteran journos are looking to 12-year-olds for advice about Twitter.

Everyone wants to know how to make money with the Web. Is it possible? How do we do it? Some people say that non-profits are the way to go. But then those opposed to the .org model believe non-for-profit endeavors will eventually fall victim to the desires of whoever does provide the money (as if that doesn't happen with corporate news organizations already).

All of the chatter is rather maddening and it's clear that no one has a clue. Everyone says some "out-of-the-box" thinking is in order, but all anyone is doing is repeating and reorganizing various elements of tired ideas IN the box.

But let's say this: Let's say that newspapers as a concept are dead. Then what? Let's accept that NO ONE in the future will ever read a newspaper. THEN WHAT?

OR

Let's say advertising CAN'T make papers profitable anymore. It's just not an option. Then what? Where does the money come from? Doesn't anyone think that having a business model effectively based on ONE form of revenue INHERENTLY FLAWED? So now what?

I think if we start to imagine a world without newspapers, we'd get much closer to real solutions. Because right now, most people are trying desperately to cling to the notion at the other end of the idea spectrum. If the truth (or solution) is somewhere between the extremes, let's start at the polar opposite of a world WITH papers, then work our to the middle.

And in terms of money, let's cut out the whole notion of advertising. Surely there are products that rely income generated for its value and not for it's power to distribute tag-along information. So how do we make news more valuable? A very tough question...

So I guess the point of my ramble, aside from avoiding my work, is that I haven't really heard too many new ideas about the direction of journalism from anyone in the field. They are all too terrified, or too trapped in their own panic, to start asking the scary questions that might lead to real solutions (not that I am suggesting I know better, or even that my two measly ideas mean anything). But I do think it would be good to start hearing a little dialectic about all this. It just doesn't make sense to feel more secure clinging to a crumbling cliff than taking a leap, possibly into the unknown, for the chance of a new and different landing.

If you were unable to watch the blog live, go here to see it in its complete form. http://snurl.com/eveao. Kind of neat, right?

So this is a new toy. I'm going to live blog an event today at the J-school. The founders of Global Post, a new international news organization, will come to school and tell us about their venture. Hear what they have to say here. (Assuming all this HTML code works...)

OK, OK, I know it's not healthy to dwell on bad news, but I had to share this Facebook message I just got from my friend, Andrea, who works at a newspaper in St. Louis.

Duuuuuude!
I totally forgot you were going to J-school! Holy buckets. Didn't you get the news flash? Journalism's dead, baby. Even still, I'd have to imagine a degree from Columbia's gotta get you a pretty sweet gig somewhere. Weren't you looking into magazine writing or something? I can absolutely, unwaveringly tell you that newspapers are dead. We've had three layoffs in the past six months, and we're now being forced to take weeklong, unpaid furloughs... and our contract with XXXXX is up in June.
Needless to say, I'm over it. I have been for more than a year, but I didn't get my shit together enough to transition to another profession until last fall. That's when I started studying for the law school admissions test. I'm now shockingly neck-deep in acceptances (I may have applied to a few too many schools...) and trying to decide between Portland, Denver and Seattle.

I met Andrea five years ago when she came to Kona to work for the West Hawaii Today. She stayed there a year or two, then took the gig in St. Louis.

In an interesting sidenote, another ex-West Hawaii Today reporter, a young lady originally from Hilo, who wound up in New Mexico, is also attempting to get into law school.

OK, OK. I know I haven't been too enthused about journalism school of late, or even just journalism, but look at this! Can you really blame me?!


If you want to check out the full page and see the answer to "How does a young, laid-off journalist recover?" (that was verbatim), go here http://tinyurl.com/db874h .
I just don't know what to say...

I am endlessly amazed at how small the world can be.

So yesterday, I met up with a classmate from Emerson, with whom I studied film. Troy was in town working on a television series, a fact I learned from his Facebook status message. (He, in the last 9 years, or so, has become something of an expert on childbirth and he has produced several series for places like the Discovery Channel.) We met at the bus station because he was pressed for time and had to get to a location in New Jersey, but we did have a good chance to catch up.

Troy is doing this TV stuff, which is neat, but more interestingly, he's become a medium. (Read about him here http://www.troyparkinson.com/) Like the kind that receive messages from dead people. He started developing his medium skills in Boston ("Everyone can do it--it's like a muscle that can be exercised," he says), unbeknownst to me, and others, and now he's got a Web site, does a radio show, is writing a book and has been featured on Fargo (where he's from) news.

Random, right?

Then he tells me he was just in Hawaii for five weeks, waiting for a baby to be born (so he could tape the process). Not only was he in Hawaii, but he was in Kona, my home town!

Troy stayed at the Dragonfly Ranch and loved it. He said he also really loved Hawaii because, unlike in Fargo, where he is a somewhat cautious about with whom he shares his spiritual work, people in Hawaii really dig stuff like crystals, tarot cards, aura readings and talking to dolphins. He became the in-house medium and it was good.

Now, among the guests at the Dragonfly Ranch for whom Troy read was Ian Usher. Mr. Usher, an Englishman, sold his life on eBay and is aiming to achieve 100 goals in 100 weeks. (Learn more at http://www.100goals100weeks.com) However, oddly enough, I had already heard about Mr. Usher because my friend Karin, a journalist in Hawaii, wrote about him here http://www.hawaii247.org/2009/01/18/man-with-a-lot-of-goals-visits-big-island/ .

But to top it all off, Mr. Usher was quite impressed with Troy's reading, so he blogged about it here http://100goals100weeks.blogspot.com/2009/01/mystic-reading-with-troy.html !

So to sum up: We're all connected and the Internet is amazing.

I keep the Merriam-Webster Online Web site open almost all the time when I read or write. At a fancy-pants school like Columbia, I double my efforts to be sure that I am using a word accurately, and that I look up words I don't know to expand my vocabulary.

So today I went to the site to find something and this was at the top of the page, in the "Open Dictionary" section:

red bottomosity

noun:
State of humiliation

I am clearly not the only one who invents words and phrases.

There's a lot happening with me in New York these days. The new semester has just started. I have piles of work to do and I'm preparing for life after j-school, which I look forward to tremendously. I'm in a pretty good mood these days, though; this can be attributed to finally seeing the back end of my miserable reporting class (I won't moan about it here, but not to put to fine a point on it, it was was shit) and having a very good break. I played tourist in New York, finally, then my old pal, Kev Dogg, came out from Los Angeles. Together, we drove up to Boston to see Heather, my college roommate, and some of the gang from the Emerson days. Few in my current life--which is filled with fresh-faced 22-year-olds--realize that when I went to school, I was the baby. With the old crowd, I was the baby again, and that was nice.

Being back in Boston also gave me the chance to kind of think about how life seems to progress for most people. Kev Dogg is a reasonably successful production manager in Hollywood, but he often finds his work unrewarding and is frustrated with his personal life. Heather lives in the sticks with her fiancé and they have a nice home, lots of furniture, regular jobs, a small business detailing cars and a bearded iguana named Pete. Mike, another of the crowd, recently married a chemist (I think--she does something with science) and was Manager of the Year at the hotel where he works. Of course, all this life stuff went on while I was out travelling and generally getting into mischief. It was a bit weird to see how much our lives had diverged, but it was also very reassuring, comforting even, that it's still so easy for all of us to hang out. It was also interesting to realize that despite our very different experiences, none of us has changed especially, nor were we certain about the future. It is as if we had all fallen into our situations by chance and were waiting for a nudge into whatever is next. There is an anxiety in that and we all feel it. Somehow, this made me feel better about taking out a lot of money to attend a school I don't particularly like and having doubts about what I am doing.

After Boston, I went up to Canada with a very nice Frenchman, Romain. We caught a rideshare up and stayed with one of his high school friends who has been studying aeronautic engineering in Montréal for the past four-and-a-half years. She lives just outside the city center and played a brilliant tour guide. We also went up to Mont Tremblant, a ski resort area an hour north of the city. This was the result of whim, on my part, to go dog-sledding, which was an excellent, though irresponsibly costly, pursuit. It was also viciously cold in Québec--the intensity of which I had never experienced before in my life. For the dog-sledding adventure, I wore three pairs of socks, including one, heavy, wooly pair, tights, under wool long-johns, under jeans, under a rented pair of ski pants, as well as several sweaters and a snow jacket.


Exhibit A:




Yes, that's frost on my hair and ice on my eyelashes.

So here I am back in school now. I've decided to make more of an effort to keep up with my blog. While I believe my writing has improved here, I see the need for a daily habit, just to keep at it. Plus, there's an awful lot going on at Columbia, so it's not that I suffer a lack of subject matter. However, my new aim is less to be a journalist and more to be a writer. Given the current state of the journalism industry, I am starting to think that I may not be well-suited for the cut-throat, alcohol-soaked and surprising shallow world of reporting. Thus, to come closer to my personal aims, I am focusing more on developing a keen eye through which to observe the world, a unique voice with which to describe it and lastly, an active mind, connected to a human heart, through which process it all. I assure you the last mentioned is not, generally speaking, ever addressed at the mighty, mighty Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, much to my naive chagrin.
Now let's talk about yesterday.

Gwen Ifill came to school. She's on a book tour (she's got a book called The Breakthrough: Race and Politics in the Age of Obama) , but showed up at Columbia for an 8:15 a.m. session. The student center where she spoke was full, most impressive given that journalism students tend not to be (sober) morning people (myself, proudly, excluded).

She talked about all sorts of things--how she got her start, about being a black reporter and how one goes about covering politics--then she opened the floor for questions. None of these were particularly earth-shattering. They mostly were about race and the fact that I can't remember them without referring to my notes means that they are probably not worth repeating. But Ms. Ifill was super sharp, very charming and down-to-earth.

Something I had hoped she would address was Obama's bi-racialness. There is so much talk about the "black man," we forget altogether, so it seems, that Obama is just as white and he is black. Not only that, his father was from Africa. This, to me, makes Obama, not at all an African-American in the traditional sense (though clearly the literal sense). As a half-Chinese/half-Irish American, I'm a bit put off by all this: It makes it crystal clear that race is PURELY a matter of color and only color. Now, of course, Obama himself might identify himself as being an "African-American," but really, that would have been a choice he made. In theory, he could have just a legitimately declared himself a "White-American," though few others would have accepted this. For all this talk about progress this country has made when it comes to racism, here is a bald example of how we really do only think in terms of color. And that's just sad.

However, I didn't ask Ms. Ifill about this. The conversation flowed away from this subject by the time I had the courage to speak up, I asked her what she thought about Sarkozy's plan to inject 600 million euro into France's print media industry by modernizing the presses, cutting delivery costs and giving a subscription (of choice) to every French citizen when they turn 18 (I particularly like this last aspect). This notion rubbed Ms. Ifill the wrong way and she jokingly asked, before I clarified, if he was giving out subscriptions to government-run papers (of which I don't believe France has any).

"This is a business," she stated firmly, bristling at the thought the government might get involved with the media, even as its industry is collapsing. (And this is not to say I agree with the current proposed bail-outs. Generally, I don't. But then again, I don't really see the auto industry playing the same cultural role as the media, which I believe to be the greatest engine for creating a well-informed public.) Ironically, my question came right after a comment she made about the dangers of a public becoming increasingly specialized in their consumption habits because of the Internet and how we have to somehow think of a solution to increase a vital readership. When I pointed this out, she just repeated that media is a business and it behooves us as journalists to figure it out how to reach our audiences.

Good luck, America.

But in all events, life is good and things, for me at least, look up.

When I was 7 or 8, I learned that my father dreamt in black and white. I found it very upsetting. I always dreamt in color as bright as it is in waking life and it disturbed me to think that Dad's dream machine was faulty. I was sure he must have been brain damaged.

"You only dream in black and white?! WHY?!" I demanded. He thought about it for a moment and said, "Well, I didn't grow up with color TV like you did."

I didn't buy it.

"Yeah, but you had color when you were a kid!" I argued, convinced he was inventing answers in to cover up some serious personal flaw. What did TV have to do with dreaming, anyway, I reasoned.

So recently, I was reading the New York Times and look what I found. The old man was onto something!

December 2, 2008

Really?

The Claim: Some People Dream Only in Black and White
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

THE FACTS
In an age of high-definition television and vivid cinematography, it might seem peculiar to think that anyone would experience colorless dreams.

For many people, the dream state can be the most turbulent, emotionally intense part of the day. Falling, flying, failing exams and being chased are among the most frequently reported themes when people are asked in studies to describe their dreams. And yet for a small segment of the population, drifting off at night means reverting to a world of monochromatic hues.

Childhood exposure to black-and-white television seems to be the common denominator. A study published this year, for example, found that people 25 and younger say they almost never dream in black and white. But people over 55 who grew up with little access to color television reported dreaming in black and white about a quarter of the time. Over all, 12 percent of people dream entirely in black and white.

Go back a half-century, and television’s impact on our closed-eye experiences becomes even clearer. In the 1940s, studies showed that three-quarters of Americans, including college students, reported “rarely” or “never” seeing any color in their dreams. Now, those numbers are reversed.

THE BOTTOM LINE

A small percentage of people dream in black and white.

I woke up this morning with messages from a from a former student, and his dad, announcing that they have both joined the wonderful world of Twitter.

What?! I have been technologically outdone by a 12-year-old AND his middle-aged father?!

(OK, now I realize, some of you might not even know what Twitter is, which means that you have ALSO been outdone by a 12-year-old and his middle-aged father, but like, BY A LOT. But that's alright. Twitter is kind of like a blog, except all the messages are very short and you send them to your Web page via text messages from your phone.)

So, feeling very unhip and pressured to do what the cool kids are doing, I went an signed myself up for my own Twitter account. You can check it out at http://twitter.com/mailecannon .

However, I also found that Twitter is friendly with Blogger, so anyone using Blogger can add a Twitter box to their side bar. (Yes, go look at the side bar.)

So now, anything I send to Twitter will be instantly sent to my blog here at MonkeyPrints. (Take that 12-year-old boy and middle-aged dad! I see your Twitter and raise you one Blogger widget!)

This means of course that I will be updating my blog more often, but that those posts will be shorter, and probably less well written.

Wicked.

It's looking bleak, folks. Bleak, bleak, bleak...

November 30, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

A Penny for My Thoughts?

By MAUREEN DOWD
PASADENA, Calif.

I visited the future, and it was wearing a bow tie and calling itself “Thomas Edison.”

The newspaper business is not only crumpling up, James Macpherson informed me here, it is probably holding “a one-way ticket to Bangalore.”

Macpherson — bow-tied and white-haired but boyish-looking at 53 — should know. He pioneered “glocal” news — outsourcing Pasadena coverage to India at Pasadena Now, his daily online “newspaperless,” as he likes to call it. Indians are writing about everything from the Pasadena Christmas tree-lighting ceremony to kitchen remodeling to city debates about eliminating plastic shopping bags.

“Everyone has to get ready for what’s inevitable — like King Canute and the tide coming in — and that’s really my message to the industry,” the editor and publisher said. “Many newspapers are dead men walking. They’re going to be replaced by smaller, nimbler, multiple Internet-centric kinds of things such as what I’m pioneering.”

I wondered how long it would be before some guy in Bangalore was writing my column about President Obama.

“In brutal terms,” said Macpherson, whose father was a typesetter, printer and photographer, “it’s going to get to the point where saving the industry may require some people losing their jobs. The newspaper industry is coming to a General Motors moment — except there’s no one to bail them out.” He said it would be “irresponsible” for newspapers not to explore offshoring options.

He said he got the idea to outsource about a year ago, sitting in his Pasadena home, where he puts out Pasadena Now with his wife, Candice Merrill. Macpherson had worked in the ’90s for designers like Richard Tyler and Alan Flusser, and had outsourced some of his clothing manufacturing to Vietnam.

So, he thought, “Where can I get people who can write the word for less?” In a move that sounded so preposterous it became a Stephen Colbert skit, he put an ad on Craigslist for Indian reporters and got a flood of responses.

He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.

“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”

A penny for your thoughts? Now I knew my days were numbered.

I checked in with one of his workers in Mysore City in southern India, 40-year-old G. Sreejayanthi, who puts together Pasadena events listings. She said she had a full-time job in India and didn’t think of herself as a journalist. “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always,” she wrote back. “Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”

Macpherson admits you can lose something in the translation — the Pasadena City Council Webcast that the Indian reporters now watch once missed two African-American lawmakers walking out in protest — but says the question is, how significant is it?

At first the reaction to covering Pasadena from 8,000 miles away and 13.5 hours ahead was “absolutely brutal,” Macpherson recalled. Journalism professors keened and Larry Wilson, the public editor at The Pasadena Star-News, called it “nutty.”

But then in October, Dean Singleton, The Associated Press’s chairman and the head of the MediaNews Group — which counts The Pasadena Star-News, The Denver Post and The Detroit News in its stable of 54 daily newspapers — told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that his company was looking into outsourcing almost every aspect of publishing, including possibly having one news desk for all of his papers, “maybe even offshore.”

Noting that most preproduction work for MediaNews’s papers in California is already outsourced to India, cutting costs by 65 percent, Singleton advised, “If you need to offshore it, offshore it,” and said after the speech, “In today’s world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn’t matter.”

Macpherson feels “vindicated,” but also “conflicted” about the idea of having an American newspaper industry fueled by Indian labor. “I mean, I am an American too,” he said. “I had two ancestors in the Revolutionary War. My mother was in the Daughters of the American Revolution.”

It’s not easy being a visionary, he said: “I have essentially been five years ahead of the world for a long time, and that’s a horrible address at which to live because people look at you, you know, like you’re nuts.”

So here's something I know about news production: When someone chooses a photo to be put in a newspaper or on a Web site, they generally choose from a series provided by a photographer, or a newswire, such as the Associated Press. Generally speaking, the person doing the choosing must choose the best photo from a particular series--one that fits the story well and does justice to the subject (for example, you'd probably choose an image of a politician smiling over an image of the same person mid-yawn, or if it's a lady figure, you might choose a photo that didn't accentuate a double-chin, etc.).

Take a look at this photo from the New York Times today. Can you imagine what the OTHER photos in the series must have looked like?!

I'm in New York! It's awesome!

Here's something from the NYT. It's a doozy...

Dr. Doom
By STEPHEN MIHM
Published: August 15, 2008

On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession. He laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The audience seemed skeptical, even dismissive. As Roubini stepped down from the lectern after his talk, the moderator of the event quipped, “I think perhaps we will need a stiff drink after that.” People laughed — and not without reason. At the time, unemployment and inflation remained low, and the economy, while weak, was still growing, despite rising oil prices and a softening housing market. And then there was the espouser of doom himself: Roubini was known to be a perpetual pessimist, what economists call a “permabear.” When the economist Anirvan Banerji delivered his response to Roubini’s talk, he noted that Roubini’s predictions did not make use of mathematical models and dismissed his hunches as those of a career naysayer.

But Roubini was soon vindicated. In the year that followed, subprime lenders began entering bankruptcy, hedge funds began going under and the stock market plunged. There was declining employment, a deteriorating dollar, ever-increasing evidence of a huge housing bust and a growing air of panic in financial markets as the credit crisis deepened. By late summer, the Federal Reserve was rushing to the rescue, making the first of many unorthodox interventions in the economy, including cutting the lending rate by 50 basis points and buying up tens of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities. When Roubini returned to the I.M.F. last September, he delivered a second talk, predicting a growing crisis of solvency that would infect every sector of the financial system. This time, no one laughed. “He sounded like a madman in 2006,” recalls the I.M.F. economist Prakash Loungani, who invited Roubini on both occasions. “He was a prophet when he returned in 2007.”

Over the past year, whenever optimists have declared the worst of the economic crisis behind us, Roubini has countered with steadfast pessimism. In February, when the conventional wisdom held that the venerable investment firms of Wall Street would weather the crisis, Roubini warned that one or more of them would go “belly up” — and six weeks later, Bear Stearns collapsed. Following the Fed’s further extraordinary actions in the spring — including making lines of credit available to selected investment banks and brokerage houses — many economists made note of the ensuing economic rally and proclaimed the credit crisis over and a recession averted. Roubini, who dismissed the rally as nothing more than a “delusional complacency” encouraged by a “bunch of self-serving spinmasters,” stuck to his script of “nightmare” events: waves of corporate bankrupticies, collapses in markets like commercial real estate and municipal bonds and, most alarming, the possible bankruptcy of a large regional or national bank that would trigger a panic by depositors. Not all of these developments have come to pass (and perhaps never will), but the demise last month of the California bank IndyMac — one of the largest such failures in U.S. history — drew only more attention to Roubini’s seeming prescience.

As a result, Roubini, a respected but formerly obscure academic, has become a major figure in the public debate about the economy: the seer who saw it coming. He has been summoned to speak before Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum at Davos. He is now a sought-after adviser, spending much of his time shuttling between meetings with central bank governors and finance ministers in Europe and Asia. Though he continues to issue colorful doomsday prophecies of a decidedly nonmainstream sort — especially on his popular and polemical blog, where he offers visions of “equity market slaughter” and the “Coming Systemic Bust of the U.S. Banking System” — the mainstream economic establishment appears to be moving closer, however fitfully, to his way of seeing things. “I have in the last few months become more pessimistic than the consensus,” the former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers told me earlier this year. “Certainly, Nouriel’s writings have been a contributor to that.”

On a cold and dreary day last winter, I met Roubini over lunch in the TriBeCa neighborhood of New York City. “I’m not a pessimist by nature,” he insisted. “I’m not someone who sees things in a bleak way.” Just looking at him, I found the assertion hard to credit. With a dour manner and an aura of gloom about him, Roubini gives the impression of being permanently pained, as if the burden of what he knows is almost too much for him to bear. He rarely smiles, and when he does, his face, topped by an unruly mop of brown hair, contorts into something more closely resembling a grimace.

When I pressed him on his claim that he wasn’t pessimistic, he paused for a moment and then relented a little. “I have more concerns about potential risks and vulnerabilities than most people,” he said, with glum understatement. But these concerns, he argued, make him more of a realist than a pessimist and put him in the role of the cleareyed outsider — unsettling complacency and puncturing pieties.

Roubini, who is 50, has been an outsider his entire life. He was born in Istanbul, the child of Iranian Jews, and his family moved to Tehran when he was 2, then to Tel Aviv and finally to Italy, where he grew up and attended college. He moved to the United States to pursue his doctorate in international economics at Harvard. Along the way he became fluent in Farsi, Hebrew, Italian and English. His accent, an inimitable polyglot growl, radiates a weariness that comes with being what he calls a “global nomad.”

As a graduate student at Harvard, Roubini was an unusual talent, according to his adviser, the Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs. He was as comfortable in the world of arcane mathematics as he was studying political and economic institutions. “It’s a mix of skills that rarely comes packaged in one person,” Sachs told me. After completing his Ph.D. in 1988, Roubini joined the economics department at Yale, where he first met and began sharing ideas with Robert Shiller, the economist now known for his prescient warnings about the 1990s tech bubble.

The ’90s were an eventful time for an international economist like Roubini. Throughout the decade, one emerging economy after another was beset by crisis, beginning with Mexico’s in 1994. Panics swept Asia, including Thailand, Indonesia and Korea, in 1997 and 1998. The economies of Brazil and Russia imploded in 1998. Argentina’s followed in 2000. Roubini began studying these countries and soon identified what he saw as their common weaknesses. On the eve of the crises that befell them, he noticed, most had huge current-account deficits (meaning, basically, that they spent far more than they made), and they typically financed these deficits by borrowing from abroad in ways that exposed them to the national equivalent of bank runs. Most of these countries also had poorly regulated banking systems plagued by excessive borrowing and reckless lending. Corporate governance was often weak, with cronyism in abundance.

Roubini’s work was distinguished not only by his conclusions but also by his approach. By making extensive use of transnational comparisons and historical analogies, he was employing a subjective, nontechnical framework, the sort embraced by popular economists like the Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz in order to reach a nonacademic audience. Roubini takes pains to note that he remains a rigorous scholarly economist — “When I weigh evidence,” he told me, “I’m drawing on 20 years of accumulated experience using models” — but his approach is not the contemporary scholarly ideal in which an economist builds a model in order to constrain his subjective impressions and abide by a discrete set of data. As Shiller told me, “Nouriel has a different way of seeing things than most economists: he gets into everything.”

Roubini likens his style to that of a policy maker like Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman who was said (perhaps apocryphally) to pore over vast quantities of technical economic data while sitting in the bathtub, looking to sniff out where the economy was headed. Roubini also cites, as a more ideologically congenial example, the sweeping, cosmopolitan approach of the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes, whom Roubini, with only slight exaggeration, calls “the most brilliant economist who never wrote down an equation.” The book that Roubini ultimately wrote (with the economist Brad Setser) on the emerging market crises, “Bailouts or Bail-Ins?” contains not a single equation in its 400-plus pages.

After analyzing the markets that collapsed in the ’90s, Roubini set out to determine which country’s economy would be the next to succumb to the same pressures. His surprising answer: the United States’. “The United States,” Roubini remembers thinking, “looked like the biggest emerging market of all.” Of course, the United States wasn’t an emerging market; it was (and still is) the largest economy in the world. But Roubini was unnerved by what he saw in the U.S. economy, in particular its 2004 current-account deficit of $600 billion. He began writing extensively about the dangers of that deficit and then branched out, researching the various effects of the credit boom — including the biggest housing bubble in the nation’s history — that began after the Federal Reserve cut rates to close to zero in 2003. Roubini became convinced that the housing bubble was going to pop.

By late 2004 he had started to write about a “nightmare hard landing scenario for the United States.” He predicted that foreign investors would stop financing the fiscal and current-account deficit and abandon the dollar, wreaking havoc on the economy. He said that these problems, which he called the “twin financial train wrecks,” might manifest themselves in 2005 or, at the latest, 2006. “You have been warned here first,” he wrote ominously on his blog. But by the end of 2006, the train wrecks hadn’t occurred.

Recessions are signal events in any modern economy. And yet remarkably, the profession of economics is quite bad at predicting them. A recent study looked at “consensus forecasts” (the predictions of large groups of economists) that were made in advance of 60 different national recessions that hit around the world in the ’90s: in 97 percent of the cases, the study found, the economists failed to predict the coming contraction a year in advance. On those rare occasions when economists did successfully predict recessions, they significantly underestimated the severity of the downturns. Worse, many of the economists failed to anticipate recessions that occurred as soon as two months later.

The dismal science, it seems, is an optimistic profession. Many economists, Roubini among them, argue that some of the optimism is built into the very machinery, the mathematics, of modern economic theory. Econometric models typically rely on the assumption that the near future is likely to be similar to the recent past, and thus it is rare that the models anticipate breaks in the economy. And if the models can’t foresee a relatively minor break like a recession, they have even more trouble modeling and predicting a major rupture like a full-blown financial crisis. Only a handful of 20th-century economists have even bothered to study financial panics. (The most notable example is probably the late economist Hyman Minksy, of whom Roubini is an avid reader.) “These are things most economists barely understand,” Roubini told me. “We’re in uncharted territory where standard economic theory isn’t helpful.”

True though this may be, Roubini’s critics do not agree that his approach is any more accurate. Anirvan Banerji, the economist who challenged Roubini’s first I.M.F. talk, points out that Roubini has been peddling pessimism for years; Banerji contends that Roubini’s apparent foresight is nothing more than an unhappy coincidence of events. “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” he told me. “The justification for his bearish call has evolved over the years,” Banerji went on, ticking off the different reasons that Roubini has used to justify his predictions of recessions and crises: rising trade deficits, exploding current-account deficits, Hurricane Katrina, soaring oil prices. All of Roubini’s predictions, Banerji observed, have been based on analogies with past experience. “This forecasting by analogy is a tempting thing to do,” he said. “But you have to pick the right analogy. The danger of this more subjective approach is that instead of letting the objective facts shape your views, you will choose the facts that confirm your existing views.”

Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard who has known Roubini for decades, told me that he sees great value in Roubini’s willingness to entertain possible situations that are far outside the consensus view of most economists. “If you’re sitting around at the European Central Bank,” he said, “and you’re asking what’s the worst thing that could happen, the first thing people will say is, ‘Let’s see what Nouriel says.’ ” But Rogoff cautioned against equating that skill with forecasting. Roubini, in other words, might be the kind of economist you want to consult about the possibility of the collapse of the municipal-bond market, but he is not necessarily the kind you ask to predict, say, the rise in global demand for paper clips.

His defenders contend that Roubini is not unduly pessimistic. Jeffrey Sachs, his former adviser, told me that “if the underlying conditions call for optimism, Nouriel would be optimistic.” And to be sure, Roubini is capable of being optimistic — or at least of steering clear of absolute worst-case prognostications. He agrees, for example, with the conventional economic wisdom that oil will drop below $100 a barrel in the coming months as global demand weakens. “I’m not comfortable saying that we’re going to end up in the Great Depression,” he told me. “I’m a reasonable person.”

What economic developments does Roubini see on the horizon? And what does he think we should do about them? The first step, he told me in a recent conversation, is to acknowledge the extent of the problem. “We are in a recession, and denying it is nonsense,” he said. When Jim Nussle, the White House budget director, announced last month that the nation had “avoided a recession,” Roubini was incredulous. For months, he has been predicting that the United States will suffer through an 18-month recession that will eventually rank as the “worst since the Great Depression.” Though he is confident that the economy will enter a technical recovery toward the end of next year, he says that job losses, corporate bankruptcies and other drags on growth will continue to take a toll for years.

Roubini has counseled various policy makers, including Federal Reserve governors and senior Treasury Department officials, to mount an aggressive response to the crisis. He applauded when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to 2 percent from 5.25 percent beginning last summer. He also supported the Fed’s willingness to engineer a takeover of Bear Stearns. Roubini argues that the Fed’s actions averted catastrophe, though he says he believes that future bailouts should focus on mortgage owners, not investors. Accordingly, he sees the choice facing the United States as stark but simple: either the government backs up a trillion-plus dollars’ worth of high-risk mortgages (in exchange for the lenders’ agreement to reduce monthly mortgage payments), or the banks and other institutions holding those mortgages — or the complex securities derived from them — go under. “You either nationalize the banks or you nationalize the mortgages,” he said. “Otherwise, they’re all toast.”

For months Roubini has been arguing that the true cost of the housing crisis will not be a mere $300 billion — the amount allowed for by the housing legislation sponsored by Representative Barney Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd — but something between a trillion and a trillion and a half dollars. But most important, in Roubini’s opinion, is to realize that the problem is deeper than the housing crisis. “Reckless people have deluded themselves that this was a subprime crisis,” he told me. “But we have problems with credit-card debt, student-loan debt, auto loans, commercial real estate loans, home-equity loans, corporate debt and loans that financed leveraged buyouts.” All of these forms of debt, he argues, suffer from some or all of the same traits that first surfaced in the housing market: shoddy underwriting, securitization, negligence on the part of the credit-rating agencies and lax government oversight. “We have a subprime financial system,” he said, “not a subprime mortgage market.”

Roubini argues that most of the losses from this bad debt have yet to be written off, and the toll from bad commercial real estate loans alone may help send hundreds of local banks into the arms of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. “A good third of the regional banks won’t make it,” he predicted. In turn, these bailouts will add hundreds of billions of dollars to an already gargantuan federal debt, and someone, somewhere, is going to have to finance that debt, along with all the other debt accumulated by consumers and corporations. “Our biggest financiers are China, Russia and the gulf states,” Roubini noted. “These are rivals, not allies.”

The United States, Roubini went on, will likely muddle through the crisis but will emerge from it a different nation, with a different place in the world. “Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers,” he said, pausing to let out a resigned sigh. “This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.”

Stephen Mihm, an assistant professor of economic history at the University of Georgia, is the author of “A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men and the Making of the United States.” His last feature article for the magazine was about North Korean counterfeiting.