Quotulatiousness

December 5, 2021

Will publishers move back to actually printing their own books?

Filed under: Books, Business, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte explains some of the issues publishers face in getting their books printed, as most publishers outsourced the actual physical work of printing and binding many years back:

Offset printing.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.

I had a serious conversation with another publisher this week about the need for publishers to start printing their own books.

Those familiar with publishing history will know that from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, most publishers printed their own books. Ownership of a press, as much as anything, was what made a publisher a publisher. In the course of the twentieth century, it was decided that publishing books and printing books were different businesses. Virtually all publishers outsourced their printing to high-volume printing specialists who were constantly upgrading their equipment, and who, theoretically, at least, were better, faster, and cheaper than in-house printing operations.

[…]

Apart from that handful of artisans, today’s book publisher can no more operate a printing press than a backhoe. He or she outsources printing to specialists on a project-by-project basis.

The options for large-scale quality printing are increasingly scarce, thanks to a lot of consolidation in the printing business. Smaller shops (like the artisans) only do paperbacks; hardcovers require a lot of expensive binding equipment. If a publisher wants a big run of a hardcover title, the most likely printers are the industry giants: R.R. Donnelley (above) or CJK Group in the US; Friesens and Marquis in Canada. These companies all use huge offset web presses that are big as gymnasiums and only economically efficient at higher quantities (i.e., in the thousands). The technology involves metal plates and rubber mats and massive rolls of paper (if you’re interested, read more here) and the quality is first rate.

I should have said that the only options for a big run of hardcovers in Canada are Friesens in Altona, Manitoba and Marquis in Montmagny, Quebec. There are no hardcover printing options in Ontario, where so many publishers are concentrated (although Marquis does have a plant in Toronto).

[…]

The reason publishers are now talking about doing their own printing is that it is increasingly difficult to get time on any kind of press. Friesens, when Sutherland House started a few years ago, could usually do a job for us in eight weeks. There were seasons — the dead of winter, the height of summer — when they could deliver even faster and we’d get a discount because their presses weren’t especially busy. COVID-19 changed all that.

People have been buying more books during the pandemic, and publishers have been printing more. Friesens is now fully booked six to eight months out; its fall 2022 schedule is already crowded. The US printers we use as alternatives to Friesens are similarly backed up.

It’s making the decision to print in hardcover hazardous. It used to be that if you printed a few thousand copies of a new book in hardcover and it was in danger of selling out, you could get back on press in six to eight weeks, maybe less, and continue to fill orders. Now, if that original press run is selling fast, you might have to wait six to eight months to print a second edition. You’ll be out-of-print for most of that time, and all momentum will be lost. Some publishers are thus moving immediately to digital paperback formats (none of the digital printers have hardcover binderies) for their second editions, even if it’s only weeks into a book’s life. There is more availability at digital printers, so resorting to the digital paperback format allows you to keep your momentum.

QotD: The oddity about online ads

Filed under: Business, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve often thought it odd that many companies and publications seemingly believe that the way to charm customers, or ostensible customers, is to make them resent pretty much any interaction with their websites.

David Thompson commenting on “Thrilling Content Goes Here”, DavidThompson, 2021-08-30.

December 3, 2021

A bureaucratic mandate for never-ending intervention — induced offensensitivity

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Europe, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theodore Dalrymple notes the increasing reach of the bureaucracy in policing everyday language in a supposed attempt to protect the easily offended feelings of minority groups, but really in yet another way to increase the role of bureaucrats (and their staffing and budget allocations):

Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm

Underlying the bureaucratic desire to reform language are two assumptions: first that it is the duty of bureaucrats to prevent offense to people occasioned by the use of certain words, and second that they know what words will give offence to people.

Of course, there are only certain categories of people who needed to be protected from taking offence: that is because, in the estimate of their would-be and self-appointed protectors, they are very delicate and can easily be tipped into depression or states of mind even worse than depression.

Whether it is flattering, condescending or downright insulting to consider people so delicate that they cannot hear certain words that were hitherto considered innocuous, I leave to readers to decide. For myself, I think that to regard people as psychological eggshells is demeaning to them, but other may think differently.

But the question still arises as to whether the people supposedly in need of bureaucratic intervention actually do take offence at the allegedly offensive words, such as Christmas, when they are uttered.

This is not as straightforward a question as might at first appear, for people can be taught or encouraged to be easily offended, especially if they will derive certain advantages, political, social or even financial, from being, or claiming to be, offended. If you pay someone to be ill, he will be ill; if you pay someone to be offended, he will be offended.

It is in the interests of bureaucracies that the population should become hypersensitive, for then it will run to the bureaucrats for so-called protection from offensiveness.

A hypersensitive population creates endless work for the bureaucrat to do: he will have constantly to adjudicate between the claims of those who have taken, and those who have allegedly given, offence. Conflict and stoked-up anger are to him what fertilizer is to corn.

For much of the population, hypersensitivity becomes a duty, a pleasure and a sign of superiority of mind and moral awareness. In addition, it is an instrument of power. And, of course, habit becomes character. What may have started out as play-acting becomes, with repetition, deadly sincerity.

People who have had to be taught what microaggressions are because they have not noticed them eventually come to believe in their reality and that that they have been subjected to them. Then they start to magnify them in their minds until they seem to them very serious: they become self-proclaimed victims.

There are two things that victims seek in our law-saturated world: revenge and compensation. Neither of these things can be achieved without the aid of a large apparatus of bureaucrats (civil-litigation lawyers are bureaucrats of superior intelligence who are usually endowed also with a modicum of imagination).

November 28, 2021

QotD: Hidden political pay-offs as “book advances”

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Anyway, as I’ve complained many times before, these “advances” given to leftwing figures are not advances at all.

True advances are, well, advances against expected future royalties. That’s why they’re called “advances”.

People expect that a J.K. Rowling book will produce at least $5 million in royalties, so you give her a $5 million advance on those royalties. You’re giving her a payment on her royalties in advance of actually seeing those sales.

But you do expect them.

You don’t pay her fresh royalties until the royalties she generates exceeds the initial advance on royalties you paid her.

When she makes $5 million and one hundred dollars, you send her a fresh check for one hundred dollars.

When these major media conglomerates, all left-leaning and most with business before the government, give millions to Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden and Andrew Cuomo, there is no one at that company that expects the books will ever make that much in royalties.

They’re just payoffs. Or disguised political donations.

It’s not an “advance” if you cannot show a plausible stream of sales which will meet or exceed that “advance”.

Personally, I’d love to see some kind of law on this subject to force these large media corporations to prove that they have a genuine, rational belief that a Hunter Biden book will make $10 million in sales (which would justify a million dollar advance, assuming a royalty of 10%).

And I’d like to see their corporate officers sign certifications for the government that they’re not fudging the numbers. And that they understand that there might be prosecutions for perjury if they do lie about expected future royalties.

Much like people in the financial sector are constantly required to sign.

Why should media corporations be immune from such requirements?

And I’d love to see these disguised campaign donations treated and limited just like actual campaign donations.

Or, better yet: No “advances” for serving politicians, declared politicians who are running, or any politician ten years after his term of service ends. They can just take their royalty checks as royalties actually accrue.

If Hunter Biden really sells $10 million in books — LOL — then he’ll get that million dollars eventually in royalty payments. They’ll just come over the course of a year or two rather than all at once in an “advance” on future earnings.

If not — then not.

This isn’t stopping them from getting paid for books they sell — it’s to stop mega-media-corporations with business before the government, and a strong desire to pay off politicians they like, from giving “advances” to favored politicians that bear no relationship whatsoever to the actual expected royalties the books will generate.

Ace, “Ethics Agency Might Claw Back Cuomo’s $5 Million ‘Advance’ For His ‘Book'”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2021-08-27.

November 27, 2021

Americans fear the power of “Big Oil” and other cartels. Canadians rejoice under the buttery thumb of “Big Dairy”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Food, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Jen Gerson hates Canada’s supply management “system” with the heat of a thousand suns. And she’s perfectly right to do so:

Former federal Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer, paid tool of Big Dairy, chugs some milk during a Press Gallery speech in 2017. I’ve called him the “Milk Dud” ever since.
Screencapture from a CTV video uploaded to YouTube.

Many of you readers have listened to the likes of me complain about supply management over the years, but for those of you whose eyes glazed over until you started to notice your rent money disappearing into your grocery bill, here’s a very quick primer.

The supply management system insulates eggs, dairy, and poultry from the vicissitudes of the free market, assuring established farmers in these few sectors a guaranteed return to produce a pre-ordained supply of these products. The federal and provincial governments oversee the system via various dairy commissions.

Some government involvement in dairy has been a feature of our agricultural system since the late 19th century, however the system as it exists today came into effect in the ’70s. It consists, broadly, of three policy mechanisms. Prices are set internally to assure farmers receive a healthy profit for their labour, farmers are protected from competition though ruinous import tariffs, and then supply is managed via a quota system.

As one might expect, this has created extraordinary economic distortions, assuring that a container of milk in Canada is radically more expensive than an identical product south of the border. (Yes, American milk is subsidized too, although less than it once was. And from a consumer’s perspective, so what? If the Americans want to subsidize cheap milk to send north, all the better for shoppers.)

In order to keep production at a steady level, the system has to keep newer, cheaper players from entering the market, and this is accomplished via a quota system that has led to absurd economic incentives and outcomes. According to this report from the Canadian West Foundation from 2016, the quota was valued at about $28,000 per cow. That means that the value of the right to own one milk-producing cow far outweighed the actual value of the animal — and someone seeking to start a dairy farm would need to pay for millions of dollars worth of quota in addition to cows, land, food, and farm equipment.

The quotas themselves are a multi-billion dollar racket; this is roughly akin to the way a license to run a taxi costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cities, many multiples of the value of the car itself. When a government creates a regulatory system that imposes artificial scarcity, the value of the thing regulated radically increases.

Since the supply management system was introduced, much of the agriculture has consolidated; this, combined with the value of the quotas they possess mean that most dairy farms — far from being quaint, picturesque family homesteads — are multi-million dollar operations, with farmers themselves making six-figure profits after paying their own wages.

The system has also proved a obstacle in multiple free-trade deals, arguably making it difficult for other agriculture sectors to compete globally.

And who pays for all of this?

Well, of course, you do.

How Andrew Cuomo got megabucks for his (ghostwritten) book on the pandemic

Filed under: Books, Business, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest issue of the SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte details how former New York state Governor Andrew Cuomo managed to get a $5.1 million advance from Random Penguin for a book that was mostly written by Cuomo staff members and an outside ghostwriter:

Penguin Random House contacted Cuomo’s agent about writing a book on March 19, 2020, about three weeks after the first COVID-19 case landed in New York. Cuomo was a TV darling in the early days of the pandemic. On July 1, his agent got back to Penguin Random House to say he’d written 70,000 words and he was ready to make a deal. How did a governor of America’s hardest-hit pandemic state produce a fat manuscript in three months flat? It appears he had his staff and a ghostwriter author the book for him, in violation of state ethics prohibitions against the use of any state resources or personnel to produce the book.

Meanwhile, Cuomo’s office was churning out doctored statistics to make his pandemic policies, particularly around nursing homes, look better than they deserved.

July 8, Cuomo’s book went to auction. Penguin Random House kicked things off with a $750,000 offer and wound up winning with a bid of $5.1-million. It was a triumph for Cuomo, and not his first in the publishing world: about seven years ago, he took HarperCollins for a $700,000 advance on what the New Republic called an “overlong … cliché-ridden, and hopelessly dull” memoir, All Things Possible. That one sold 4,000 copies in hardcover, a number that would warrant an advance of maybe $10,000.

Several weeks after the auction, Cuomo was asked by the media if he got a lot of money to write the book. “Well,” he replied. “Only if I sell a lot of copies.” Which is not how it works. Advances are non-returnable, and he’d banked $3.1 of the $5.1 before publication. The rest of Cuomo’s advance was spread out over two more years, presumably for tax purposes.

Weeks after the grandly titled American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic was released in October 2020, Cuomo was hit with the first of a long series of sexual harassment allegations. He was forced to resign in August 2021. By then, it had also emerged that Cuomo’s office had covered up roughly half of the fatalities among state nursing home residents during the pandemic.

American Crisis managed to sell at least ten times more copies than Cuomo’s previous book, which is progress, I suppose, but still a nightmare for his publisher. A sale of 50,000 copies might warrant a solid six-figure advance. But $5.1 million? Disastrous.

QotD: The zombie that used to be Abercrombie & Fitch

Filed under: Business, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back when Abercrombie & Fitch was the NYC outfiter for affluent sportsmen, it carried high end guns and fishing tackle and outdoor equipment. Its Madison Avenue store had a shooting range and a casting pool on the roof. Griffin & Howe custom rifles, London best shotguns, and Payne fly rods were waiting there for sale. Alas! the real Abercrombie & Fitch died in the mid-1970s.

The name changed hands repeatedly and was revived in the late 1990s as a completely different kind of entity. The new revival markets sissy fashions to metrosexuals. It’s rather as if after Papa Hemingway shot himself, his name was sold repeatedly, and revived decades later as “Ernestine Hemingway”, an authoress of Gay Romance Novels.

David Zincavage, “From the Good Old Days: Abercrombie & Fitch, Change Sucks”, Never Yet Melted, 2021-08-24.

November 25, 2021

QotD: Corporate coercion can be just as dangerous as state coercion

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So many libertarians […] have a simplistic, dare I say dualistic notion about bad-things-done-by-private-business and bad-things-done-by-the-state. One is met with “so start up a rival company” the other with “an outrageous example of state overreach that must be opposed politically.”

And in an ideal world, yes, that makes sense. We do not live in anything resembling an ideal world.

In an era when three (two really) credit card companies and a handful of payment processors have an off-switch for pretty much any on-line business they take a dislike to (unless they are called Apple or Amazon), as more and more of the economy goes virtual, what we have is turn-key tyranny for sale to the highest bidder, and the highest bidder is always going to be a state. I am uncertain what the solution is, but as we do not live in a “free market”, not convinced “so go set up your own global credit card and payment processing network” adds anything meaningful to the discussion. It is a bit like saying when the local electric provider turns off the power in your office (or home) because they disapprove of what you are doing “so go set up your own electric supply company”, as if that would be allowed to happen.

Perry de Havilland, “This is what so many libertarians cannot understand …”, Samizdata, 2021-08-22.

November 21, 2021

QotD: Britain’s middle class after WW1

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the most important developments in England during the past twenty years has been the upward and downward extension of the middle class. It has happened on such a scale as to make the old classification of society into capitalists, proletarians and petit bourgeois (small property-owners) almost obsolete.

England is a country in which property and financial power are concentrated in very few hands. Few people in modern England own anything at all, except clothes, furniture and possibly a house. The peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being destroyed, the small business-man is diminishing in numbers. But at the same time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large salaries. And these in turn call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, etc., etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.

But much more important than this is the spread of middle-class ideas and habits among the working class. The British working class are now better off in almost all ways than they were thirty years ago. This is partly due to the efforts of the Trade Unions, but partly to the mere advance of physical science. It is not always realized that within rather narrow limits the standard of life of a country can rise without a corresponding rise in real-wages. Up to a point, civilization can lift itself up by its boot-tags. However unjustly society is organized, certain technical advances are bound to benefit the whole community, because certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A millionaire cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for other people. Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free education of a kind. Public education in England has been meanly starved of money, but it has nevertheless improved, largely owing to the devoted efforts of the teachers, and the habit of reading has become enormously more widespread. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes. And the differences in their way of life have been diminished by the mass-production of cheap clothes and improvements in housing. So far as outward appearance goes, the clothes of rich and poor, especially in the case of women, differ far less than they did thirty or even fifteen years ago. As to housing, England still has slums which are a blot on civilization, but much building has been done during the past ten years, largely by the local authorities. The modern council house, with its bathroom and electric light, is smaller than the stockbroker’s villa, but it is recognizably the same kind of house, which the farm labourer’s cottage is not. A person who has grown up in a council housing estate is likely to be – indeed, visibly is – more middle class in outlook than a person who has grown up in a slum.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

November 16, 2021

Mike Solana interviews Chris Best, the co-founder and CEO of Substack

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Not long after I started hearing about Substack, some of my favourite writers and bloggers began to move their work to the new platform. I now subscribe to more than a dozen Substack authors, although being a penniless blogger, I’m restricted to the free offerings in each case. Thus far I’m definitely seeing Substack as a positive influence in the online world, so this Mike Solana post was of some interest to me:

MIKE SOLANA: In your and Hamish McKenzie’s recent essay, “The internet needs better rules, not stricter referees”, you say Substack is changing the publishing model. Before we get into all that, how would you characterize the publishing landscape before Substack?

CHRIS BEST: My general story on this is we’re coming out of an age of attention-monster social media. People used to get bored. People used to have this problem of like, I don’t know what to do with my time. Then the internet, and especially the mobile internet, took over ALL of our time and attention. It filled up every crevice in our life.

In the first phase of that — the attention suck — it was like this giant land grab. If you were making something that competed for attention space, you wanted to grab as much as possible, as quickly as possible, because there’s only so much. You were competing for people’s 10 minutes while they were waiting in line at the grocery store or whatever. So publishers made content free, and they made it as broadly-compelling as possible. The goal was to grab as much attention as possible in the lowest friction way possible, and to turn that attention into money through advertising.

And listen, none of that was nefarious. None of that was like, people with tented fingers going, “Aha! This will create something bad!” But when you create a system like this, you end up with a certain incentive structure. Then, if you build your algorithms to serve your business model, the incentive structure you create for people participating in your network drives a certain sort of behavior.

The platforms all optimized for things that brought cheap engagement at all costs, that interaction weighed to some of the worst aspects of human nature, and drove emergent behavior that gave us many of the things we see today. The legacy media just got totally steamrolled by all of this, and lives in the world created by these platforms.

SOLANA: Do you really feel that Substack is completely protected from this scaled advertising dynamic with its subscription model? There are a lot of legacy media institutions that have subscriptions, and have had subscriptions for the last 10 or 20 years, in addition to running ads. Personally, I’m also getting requests to run ads on Pirate Wires fairly often. I’m not biting, which maybe answers my question before I’ve asked it, but … do you really see this all changing?

BEST: I think the subscription model is necessary, but not sufficient, right? First of all, as a writer, that you can actually make real money doing this is by itself a big deal. I’ve convinced a lot of people to do subscription instead of ads, and usually they come back to me later like, “Thank you, you changed my life. I can’t believe I was ever thinking the other thing.”

People tend to think about this like, “I could make money with ads. I could make money with subscriptions. Two moneys is better than one money.” But when you’re making the best possible product to drive subscriptions, what you end up having to write is qualitatively different — and better — than the thing you’d have to do to drive the most ad revenue.

If you want to earn and keep the trust of a relatively small number of people who value your writing really deeply, deeply enough to pay for it, and you want that number to grow, the work you do in that world is different than the work you do if you’re like, “I need to get as many people to hear my Casper mattress ad read as possible.”

However, to your point, it’s not enough. One of the big problems with Substack now is people are like, “Great, we’ve got this place where the incentive structure works differently, and I want create this better product to earn and keep the trust of my subscribers … but the way that people find out about my stuff is still on Twitter.”

So we’re kind of downstream from this, you know, attention sewage factory of incentives. I think for Substack to live up to the idea of letting readers take back their mind, and their attention, and helping us all create this kind of alternate universe of content with different laws of physics … we need to do more on that front.

November 15, 2021

Sarah Hoyt on what happens when the wheels come off

Filed under: Business, Europe, Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt considers the supply chain chaos we’re seeing these days and reminisces about what happened in Portugal when the bakers went on strike, disrupting bread deliveries for most of the country:

Let me explain: to some extent this plan is always stupid because humans are resourceful. Even back in the seventies, in Portugal when the bakers kept going on strike (and to understand how much this touched the normal person, you have to understand that back then we were used to getting our bread delivered to the door before we woke up. Tie a bag to the back door, leave a note of what you wanted, wake up to crackling fresh rolls and baguettes. This is one the things I really missed when I moved here. Then I found bread machines, and made do.) The first couple of weeks were pandemonium and people were deeply unhappy because their routine — worse, their waking up routine — was disrupted.

And then things … changed. So, some people started making their own bread. Some people started making their own bread, other people heard and suddenly they were showing up at the back door and placing an order for the morning, then coming in the morning and knocking a certain way to receive your order. It was annoying, but life went on, and not everyone had to bake their own bread anyway.

Oh, and bonus, you didn’t have to pay taxes on the bread you sold. You were obliging your neighbors, and if they wanted to give you some money in return to help with expenses, it would be rude to refuse. (And since everyone was doing it, they couldn’t chase everyone, even in a tiny country.) Oh, and to understand this one, and the reason I use this expense, I don’t think people in Portugal had baked their own bread (Other than farmers making broa [Portuguese cornbread]) since before Roman times. Artisanal bread wasn’t a thing. But people found a way.

I do realize with so much of our manufacturing in China, and the supply problems, etc, it seems like the world is coming down on top of our heads.

But people find a way. Look, in Cuba, a tiny country, they’ve kept 1950s cars going all these decades. They might be repaired with washing machine parts, but they keep going.

The US is a huge country, with a ton more resources, and perhaps genetically (As we’re immigrants or descended thereof) more adaptable people.

We’re in the first shock, so not much being done to get around this cr*p inflicted on us from above. But in a month or two, probably before the anger reaches the level (alas) that #teamheadsonpikes comes out to play, we’ll adapt, improvise, overcome.

People are already buying direct from farmers. I have no idea how the Christmas gift shopping is going, because since the kids haven’t been little, we usually pick ONE interesting or meaningful thing for them, and anyway, Dan and I always want the same “A book and a music-vehicle (used to be a CD)”. This year, with worry over selling the house, etc. I haven’t even looked. I keep hearing it will be lean, but I suspect Americans will make more stuff/etsy will have a boom year. And life will move on. Heck, I know someone considering going into 3D printing to make those pieces that are stuck in containers or that China is not sending off, or whatever, to repair your car/washing machine/air conditioning. Yeah, copyright problems, but if you market it as a “Stop gap while you wait” and market to local repairmen? I bet it works.

The point is we’re not Portuguese or Cubans. Not a small country, easily stomped. Out in the heartland, people will go over, go under, get around almost by default.

November 14, 2021

The Media — declining to report the news and instead depleting the strategic reserve of Narrativium

Filed under: Business, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

This week’s excerpt from Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish explores the many, many ways that the mainstream media have been actively abandoning any semblance of informing their audience and instead now concentrate almost exclusively on propagandizing them:

The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

You know the situation is bad when Andrew Sullivan references Donald Trump without a sneer!

We found out this week, for example, that a key figure in the emergence of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, has been indicted for lying to the FBI. He is also charged with asking a Clinton crony, Charles Dolan Jr: “Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.”

The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian — touted across all media, including the Washington Post — has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors’ notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: “No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.

This doesn’t mean that Trump wasn’t eager for Russian help. But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.

Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate”, even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.

As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.

November 13, 2021

The unrealistic expectations society has of minimum-wage security guards

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As a teenager, I worked several months as a security guard. In the 1970s in Ontario, to work as a security guard you basically needed to be physically fit (to a not-very-high standard), to pass a police background check and to be 18 or over. The jobs I worked were usually overnight shifts at upscale apartment buildings, industrial facilities and fill-in shifts at retail malls to cover for regular security staff vacations (plus one really interesting midnight shift on a ship docked in Toronto harbour). I think I was paid $3 per hour, and 99% of the time the work wasn’t worth any more than that. It’s that 1% of situations where the company hiring security guards might wish they’d invested in better-trained staff. According to Joshua Hind‘s article in The Line, the standards for security guards have been improved in the many years since my time, but that 1% is still a big issue:

While some of the best minds in the field of crowd management and event safety weigh in on the probable causes of the crowd surge, a new article in Rolling Stone has turned a spotlight on the security guards, and the culpability of private security in general, a high turnover, low-wage business focused on filling orders with warm bodies, seemingly regardless of their actual experience or competency. In Canada, security work is one of the easiest routes to employment for young people and particularly recent immigrants with little Canadian work experience, but, when it comes to live events, it’s also an often impossible mix of customer support, crowd management, law enforcement, and emergency medical services that requires years of training and on-the-ground experience to do well.

The apparent failures of this type of security, which is often referred to as “contract security” (not be confused with “private security”, which usually means expensive bodyguards), are not unique to Houston. I’ve been working in large public events for more than 20 years and contract security has always been one of the great planning dilemmas. If you want to get insured, you need lots of security, but every one of those guards must be treated as part asset and part liability.

Event sites, especially festivals with multiple stages, are expansive (the site in Houston was over 1,000,000 square feet in total space), and a well-designed event site, just like a well-designed building, needs plenty of entrances and exits, each of which must be adequately staffed. Guards are needed in front of the stage, in the crowd, at backstage access points, and around critical infrastructure. On top of all that you also need a team of roving guards to patrol the site looking for issues. Add it up and a large event site could have dozens or hundreds of security guards doing a variety of jobs, all of which fall under the catch-all description of “security”. On a big summer weekend at the height of event season, a large city like Toronto might have thousands of guards working dozens of sites. How do you find that many good people who can bear the responsibility of preserving public safety? Generally, you don’t.

It only requires a two-week commitment and a little patience to become a security guard in Ontario. So long as you have a clean criminal record, you can sign up for the required training: 40 hours on law and security, plus another 30-40 hours of first aid. This training is often performed by the very companies that do the hiring, which can greatly affect priorities in accurate skills testing. Hit all those marks and mere weeks after deciding to become a security guard you could be faced with a horde of concertgoers busting through the fence you’ve just been ordered to protect.

When I started in live events, it was all on the technical side, setting up lighting, sound and stages, and I didn’t pay much attention to what happened on the other side of the crowd barrier. About 15 years ago I started working on Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s overnight outdoor art event, and it was during those long nights watching hundreds of thousands and then millions of people that I developed a sense of how they act in large groups and how unpredictable they can be. This isn’t meant to sound like a superpower, it’s just a honed instinct. It took me well over a decade of steady work and constant observation to develop some ability to sense when a crowd might turn ugly. That experience can’t be replicated with two weeks of training, but that’s exactly what’s often expected of security guards.

November 9, 2021

QotD: Hollywood in the late Golden Age

Filed under: Business, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In certain ways, Hollywood today is just like it was a half-century ago. It’s a company town, a plantation devoted to the manufacture of cultural commodities designed to please the largest possible number of people. Then as now, nearly all of the films produced there fit neatly into the pigeonholes of a limited number of highly stylized genres: gangster movies, costume dramas, romantic comedies, Westerns.

The main difference between then and now is that in the old days, such films were mass-produced on the assembly lines of the major studios. Americans of all ages went to the movies at least once a week, and they expected to see something different every time they went. Hence the studio system, which ground out product fast enough to meet the omnivorous demand. Except for the occasional Gone With the Wind, the modern Spielberg-style “event” movies that now dominate Hollywood filmmaking didn’t exist. You went to the movies not to see Spider-Man or Lord of the Rings, but simply to see a show. If the show in question was a Western or a mystery, that was good; if it starred John Wayne or Robert Mitchum, that was better. But nobody went out of his way to see a Wayne Western directed by Howard Hawks, much less a Mitchum mystery directed by Jacques Tourneur. You took what you got, and if what you got happened to be a Red River or Out of the Past, then you got lucky.

That’s why so many of the best films made in Hollywood in the Forties and Fifties were Westerns and mysteries. Precisely because they were commodities, their makers tended to be ignored by the front office. So long as your last picture turned a profit, however small, you got to make another one. If the movies in which you specialized were low-budget genre pictures for which demand was more or less constant, all that mattered was that you stay more or less within the accepted conventions of the genre, and the conventions of the Western and the mystery happened to be wonderfully well-suited to the artful telling of serious stories that were both entertaining and cheap to produce. The art, of course, was optional, and most such movies were as forgettable as a Law and Order rerun, but some of them were as good — and as serious — as a movie can be.

Terry Teachout, “What Randolph Scott Knew”, American Cowboy, 2005-12-23.

November 7, 2021

Apparently we need to block the “Random Penguin & Schuster” merger to protect the 0.001%

Filed under: Books, Business, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the most recent SHuSH newsletter from Kenneth Whyte, the US Department of Justice case against allowing the proposed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster is examined in some detail:

On Tuesday, the US Justice Department (DOJ) filed suit to block Penguin Random House from purchasing its rival, Simon & Schuster, for $2.18 billion. It promises to be a fascinating case, in part because there’s so much at stake for the two firms involved, and also because of the unusual angle from which the DOJ is attacking the file.

As one of two US agencies responsible for enforcing antitrust law (the other is the Federal Trade Commission), the DOJ believes the proposed deal, struck last year, would leave Penguin Random House, already the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, “towering over its rivals”. The combined entity would have revenues more than twice its next closest competitor, and “outsized influence over who and what is published, and how much authors are paid for their work”.

Bertelsmann, owner of Penguin Random House, and Viacom, owner of Simon & Schuster, promise to fight the DOJ in court. They acknowledge that the Big Five Publishers, a grouping that also includes Hachette, HarperCollins, and Macmillan, will be a Big Four after the merger, but maintain that these firms plus new publishing entrants, such as Amazon, and an abundance of small and midsize publishers will provide sufficient competition for authors and books. “The publishing industry is, and following this transaction will remain, a vibrant and highly competitive environment,” they said in a joint statement.

So far, so ordinary corporate behaviour. Who or what do we need to protect, beyond hoping to maintain something vaguely resembling a competitive marketplace for books? A tiny sub-set of authors:

With this suit, the DOJ is taking a narrower approach. One test of whether a merger results in illegal market dominance is spelled out in the Horizontal Merger Guidelines jointly issued by the DOJ and the FTC: it asks if the combined firm would be in a position to increase its profits by imposing a price cut — a small but significant and lasting price cut — on one of its suppliers. In other words, if the new and enlarged Penguin Random House is better able than the old Penguin Random House to squeeze one supplier on one product line, the merger is illegal.

To apply this test to the deal, the DOJ needs to identify which supplier and which product line is vulnerable if the firms are allowed to merge. It has a range of options. Book publishing is a complicated marketplace, with many suppliers and product lines. Publishers sell books to retailers, and market books to consumers; they buy distribution services, printing, advertising, editorial services, and so on. The DOJ might have argued that a merged Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster would have the muscle to make its printers or copyeditors reduce their rates. Or that it could force retailers to accept smaller cuts of sales revenue.

Instead, the DOJ put its chips on the discreet line of business in which authors supply manuscripts to publishing houses. Its complaint says that the combined firm would have the power to improve its profits by significantly and permanently lowering the advances it pays to authors for the rights to publish their books.

Advances, notes the DOJ, provide the bulk of author income at the Big Five publishing houses (few authors earn out their advances and collect further royalties). Were Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster to combine, there would be nothing to deter it “from imposing a small, but significant, and non-transitory decrease in advances”. And if it did so, the complaint maintains, authors would have nowhere to turn. The DOJ ignores the existence of the other three members of the Big Five. It admits that the US has 3,000 small and mid-size houses but, these, according to the complaint, are economically irrelevant, mere “farm teams” for the big houses. Self-publishing, it adds, is not a serious alternative.

That may sound like the DOJ is suing to stop this merger on behalf of the writing community, a heartwarming notion, but it’s not. The lawsuit is primarily concerned with a small subset of writers: those who produce “anticipated top-selling books”. According to the complaint, there exists a small but definable market for “anticipated top-selling books”. It represents a distinct line of commerce, as required under the Clayton Act, and that is the real focus of the complaint.

The DOJ is going to war for sellers of “anticipated top-selling books”, the .001% of the publishing world.

Its lawyers foresee a time when Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster will target John Grisham and his ilk with lower advances, and John Grisham will have no choice but to accept. So far as the DOJ is concerned, that is how this merger fails the Horizontal Merger Guidelines, and why it is illegal. The phrase “anticipated top-selling books” appears 29 times in a 26-page document.

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