Shortsighted ∞

Katherine Bagley, reporting for InsideClimate News:

The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. No decision has been made about the fate of the Green Blog, which is edited from the environment desk.

A Times editor goes on to explain to Bagley that because news reporting is so interdisciplinary now, their environmental reporting won’t suffer. I’m calling bullshit on this one. They’d never make that claim about the metro desk or Washington bureau. 

(Via Steve Silberman.)

What Will It Take to Solve Climate Change? ∞

David Biello, writing for Scientific American:

According to a new analysis published online in Environmental Research Letters on January 9, the world now likely needs 12 wedges [a reduction of 1 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions maintained for 50 years] just to get back to the business-as-usual scenario outlined by Socolow and Pacala in 2004. Add another nine billion ton wedges if you want to stabilize emissions at last year’s levels, and add another 10 if you’d like to keep greenhouse gas concentrations from rising above 500 parts-per-million. Already, concentrations are at 394 ppm, up from 280 ppm before the dawn of widespread fossil fuel burning. That’s if you also want the global economy to continue to grow at the same time.

Ironic ∞

A gas station in Australia had to stop serving gasoline on January 7 because the fuel was vaporizing in the extreme heat.

Depends on how you define "neutral" ∞

James Halloway, reporting for Ars Technica on a new “carbon neutral” office building in San Diego that uses fuel cells for electricity:

Hines intends to buy directed biogas from sources such as water treatment facilities, landfills, and livestock farms—greenhouse gases that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. Yet the issue is muddied by the fact that the US does not yet have a distribution network dedicated to a biogas. The building will actually run on normal gas, but it will offset what it uses with biogas, introduced into the same networks that feed it where possible.

I’m going to go ahead and call this a loophole. Offsets like this are tricky to monitor and susceptible to liberal interpretations. 

Nine City-Building Projects to Watch For in 2013 ∞

PSM reader Philip Grupe pointed me to this article in the Urban Times. It’s a great collection of grand projects both proposed and underway.

That said, what a terrible title. You’re certainly not going to “watch” these projects progress in 2013, nor will you see any of them finish. “City building” takes an awfully long time, a fact that’s reinforced by the reported completion dates—some are 20 years in the future. A lot could change between now and then.

More importantly, I would argue that the time to “watch” city building projects is in the years and decades after they’ve been built. We can’t obsess over the new and shiny at the expense of learning lessons from the past.

Is San Francisco The Brooklyn To Silicon Valley's Unbuilt Manhattan? ∞

Ken Layne, writing for The Awl:

Meanwhile, the areas around and in between the tech giants of Silicon Valley are mostly ready to be razed and rebuilt. There are miles and miles of half-empty retail space, hideous 1970s’ two-story apartment complexes, most of it lacking the basic human infrastructure of public transportation, playgrounds, bicycle and running and walking paths, outdoor cafes and blocks loaded with bars and late-night restaurants. This is where the new metropolis must be built, in this unloved but sunny valley.

Australian weather service introduces a new color ∞

Peter Hannam, reporting for the Sydney Morning Herald:

The Bureau of Meteorology’s interactive weather forecasting chart has added new colours – deep purple and pink – to extend its previous temperature range that had been capped at 50 degrees.

The range now extends to 54 degrees – well above the all-time record temperature of 50.7 degrees reached on January 2, 1960 at Oodnadatta Airport in South Australia – and, perhaps worringly, the forecast outlook is starting to deploy the new colours.

That’s nearly 130˚ F to us Americans, and damned hot to us all.

Happy birthday, London Underground ∞

Zachary M. Seward, writing for Quartz:

The London Underground celebrates its 150th birthday today, marking the anniversary of the first trip on the tube, between Paddington and Farringdon. The tube is arguably best known for its iconic map, created by Harry Beck in 1931 and adopted as the official map in 1933. Here’s a look at how the map evolved over time.

Sutro Sam ∞

Peter Fimrite, reporting for SFGate:

Naturalists and wildlife aficionados are atwitter about the unexplained presence of a river otter at the ruins of Sutro Baths, the first of the furry mammals seen in San Francisco in at least a half century.

On the last 75 years ∞

Anil Dash:

There’s nothing intrinsic about small towns & cities that requires them to be built around cars. That’s an invention of the last ~75 years.

Dash isn’t wrong, but the way small towns and cities have grown around the car in the last 75 years has been natural. Something has to topple the centrality of the car for that to change.

Why hyperlocal won’t save newspapers (and what will)

Stack of newspapers

Newspapers are in a tight spot. Advertising revenues have been declining for 11 years straight, and classified ads have all but vanished in the face of Craigslist and eBay. The move online hasn’t been smooth for them, either. First, they gave away their product, hoping to make it up on volume with increased ad sales. That hasn’t exactly worked—for every $1 newspaper websites bring in, they have lost $25 in print advertising. The only bright spot is subscriptions, which have miraculously held steady. Many papers are trimming their publication schedules—the New Orleans Times-Picayune the most recently notable of them—leading many communities to fear the ultimate demise of important institutions.

Whenever a business or industry falls on hard times, people trip over themselves to propose turnaround plans. Newspapers are no exception, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be left out of the fray.¹ My diagnosis? Too many newspapers have placed their bets on intensely local coverage, or hyperlocal as they call it in the biz. That’s a mistake. To remain profitable, they need to concentrate on a particular topic instead of a geographic region.

That epiphany occurred to me Christmas morning over a bowl of cereal at my in-laws. I was flipping through the Houston Chronicle when I noticed the paper had branded their energy coverage, FuelFix. Not the best name, but it’s a sound idea. Houston is a major hub for the oil and gas industry, and Chronicle reporters have spent years, even decades reporting on it. Who else would be so positioned to cover the industry?

The Chronicle isn’t the first paper to experiment with trade-specific coverage. The New York Times has done the same thing with financial firms and DealBook, to much success. By providing consistent, nearly obsessive coverage of an industry, both papers attract new readers and new advertisers interested in reaching a targeted audience.

Those two data points made me realize that most papers have it all wrong, at least as far as profitability is concerned. Hyperlocal coverage will never be profitable enough. On a local level, there’s simply not enough news worth paying for. Try too hard and you end up with stories like this. Subscribers will never fill the void—there simply aren’t enough people willing to pay for local news, especially when they can get the basics on TV, for free.² Hyperlocal won’t attract enough advertisers, either. The local advertising pie just isn’t that big.

This is where trade publication sections like FuelFix and DealBook come in. Revenues from their higher ad rates (and, yes, maybe even new subscribers) can subsidize the rest of the paper. It’s a new twist on an old model. In the past, classifieds and legal notices kept the rest of the paper afloat. Today, trade sections can serve the same role.

New York and Houston aren’t the only cities with papers that could benefit from a trade publication model. The Detroit Free Press already closely covers the auto industry, but it could do more. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel could dig deep into manufacturing. The Chicago Tribune might look at commodities or financial firms outside of New York. The San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle could step up their tech coverage, too. There’s a lot of competition in that sector already, but it is highly profitable. And if that fails, there’s still a chance for them in biotech. Not all papers can follow this model, but having some survivors is better than none.

With profits from the trade side, newspapers could continue covering the less profitable—but arguably more important—stories. It makes business sense, too. Without the rest of the newspaper, the trade section loses some of its credibility. It would be just another trade publication.

This plan isn’t problem free. Like in the past, advertising-editorial conflicts could scuttle the whole experiment. But unlike other proposed new business models, that devil is well known. Newspapers have managed such conflicts by erecting firewalls between advertising and editorial sections. The same could be done with trade sections by separating the two newsrooms. Even better, papers could spin them off the trade sections into wholly-owned subsidiaries and let the profits flow back to the regular news side. It might be enough to let newspapers live to die another day.

  1. I have my reasons for wanting venerable papers to survive. For one, I worked as a science reporter for Chicago Tribune in the summer of 2008. In my childhood, I spent many mornings and evenings reading the local papers. And as an adult, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of print journalism—there are simply some stories better told and better remembered in written form. ↩
  2. I’d be surprised if the other option—providing deep insights on the news—would change the equation, at least on a local level. ↩

Photo by jeffeaton.

Darkened cities ∞

Photographer Thierry Cohen imagined—in visual form, of course—what the night sky would look like in various cities if the lights went out.

The Dish going independent ∞

Independent journalism is a pet interest of mine, for obvious reasons. Like Andrew Sullivan, the prospect of publishing whatever you like whenever you want was what first drew me to blogging in the first place. But as most independent bloggers find, realities set in and costs quickly mount.

One solution is to throw in with a major publication, which Sullivan did for a number of years. It worked well and the site grew, but now he and his staff are casting off on their own, citing a desire for independence. Their model? Reader support through subscriptions. I wish them the best of luck.

The world in words ∞

A map of the world, created by replacing each country or continent with the word most commonly found in the Wikipedia article of its history. War seems to be a common theme, which probably tells us a bit about both the history of the world and the interests of Wikipedia editors.

(Via Ed Yong.)

Tuning in through trees ∞

We often disguise antennas as trees, but as Geoff Manaugh learned from an old Scientific American article, the opposite is also true:

General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army’s Chief Signal Officer, made his “strange discovery,” as SciAm phrases it, while sitting in “a little portable house erected in thick woods near the edge of the District of Columbia,” listening to signals “received through an oak tree for an antenna.” This realization, that “trees—all trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature’s own wireless towers and antenna combined.” 

A dot for every person ∞

Brandon Martin-Anderson of the MIT Media Lab mapped every person in the U.S. 308,450,225 of us. From a wide angle, it doesn’t look very different from other density maps. But zoom in and you’ll see a different story. 

(Since it’s based on the Census, each dot isn’t an actual address or location. Rather, since Census data is anonymized at the block level, the map is more of a geographic jitter plot.)