Local journos are falling down on the job in reporting the history and true extent of the latest string of incidents plaguing the “embattled” TTC.

Drivers on cellphones

The Sun thought it had a killer scoop in the form of a photo of a bus driver sending or receiving a text message at the wheel. I have witnessed this myself. But I have been documenting every driver I see using an iPod, a phone, or anything like it for two full years. I’ve also intervened against extending cellphone service to the subway because it will tempt drivers and conductors to actually use their cellphones while operating a moving train. (They already do that, in fact; ask me for specifics.)

In other words, the problem is ongoing and is not a one-time gotcha! just because the Sun finagled a juicy photo. There are serious issues endemic to the TTC’s drivers – especially new, younger drivers, who have a sense of entitlement and are neurologically incapable of being disconnected from their friends and their status updates for 15 minutes, let alone a full shift.

I contacted most journos covering this story for the Sun, the Globe, and the Star, and was either ignored or accused of “shopping around” my considerable database of sightings. (The journo who used that term, Kelly Grant of the Globe, doubted the accuracy of my reporting but claimed she would file an information request to obtain complaints the public lodged with the TTC. Publishing unverified complaints based on TTC documentation hardly seems more reliable than publishing a journalist’s observations, especially since I offered to authorize the TTC to release to Grant all its responses to my reports.) One journo from the Star responded by mail, but did not follow up after I called her back.

Given a choice between one-time coverage and following an endemic issue to its root, local papers chose the former. It would not surprise me to learn that no local reporters have heard of the memo that was sent to divisions recently about cellphone usage, the contents of which I have already confirmed. Then again, I am apparently the only one who actually cares that many TTC drivers operate vehicles while distracted and have done so for years. And I’m the only journalist who documents it when drivers issue threats and make false statements to Transit Control after I catch them. (It definitely is a question of catching them, but really, why should it be?)

Prediction: We’ll eventually have our first fatality caused by a distracted bus or streetcar driver, the shit will hit the fan, and nobody but me will have actual data on the incidence and duration of the problem. And since I’m not working at a paper and that paper didn’t originate the data, journos will pretend that data do not exist.

Newspaper litter

The Sun and the Star fell prey to a TTC soft-news propaganda campaign in which new chair Karen Stintz complains about cleanliness of the system to reporters and picks up stray newspapers in their presence. (In the Star, Stintz self-incriminates thus: “Somewhere over the Don Valley River, she spots two discarded Metro newspapers, and snatches them up for later disposal. ‘We need to lead the change,’ she says.”)

A journalist who actually knew the lay of the land or who had done some research would know that the TTC not only permits the distribution of free periodicals on its property but took $1.3 million from Metro for the privilege (PDF). Most newspapers littering buses, streetcars, and subways are copies of Metro, in my observation. Here’s a single car’s haul one late evening:

The new chair wants you to believe she’s cracking down on litter on the system even while its chief polluter bought the system off. Only the TTC would be so self-destructive as to take a million-dollar bribe from a newspaper publisher to enable the defilement of its own public infrastructure. Only Toronto journalists would refuse to cover what easily amounts to a scandal.

Subway emergencies

This week, the subway was – again – shut down during rush hour and – again – TTC couldn’t manage to tell everyone what was going on. A seasoned reporter would have remembered the TTC’s earlier promises, predating the customer-service panel, to set up procedures to keep this lack of communication from recurring.

But that same reporter would also know that the OneStop advertising screens found in some subway stations are, by contract, useless for emergency warnings because that same contract does not even specify how much of the screen will not be devoted to advertising. (Their sole reason for existence is advertising.)

The self-destructive TTC still doesn’t have a way to take over the entire screen when something goes wrong, as the Star managed to admit. During the G20, I witnessed many people standing for minutes trying to read emergency announcements paged line-by-line across the bottom of the screen while advertisements and other chrome displayed without interruption on most of the available real estate.

These failings have been discussed at the Commission before, but that same Commission rubber-stamped a renewal of the contract with no provisos to limit advertising or go full-screen for TTC’s own needs. (I was there and I watched the rubber-stamping happen.)

Those screens, meanwhile, are useless to anyone more than six feet away from them (that means essentially everyone on a platform or on a train), aren’t in all stations, are hidden downstairs after you’ve already paid your fare, and don’t work for blind people, an issue that keeps popping up years after the TTC blew 400 grand to lose a previous legal battle on that front. (As the TTC should know by now, one human-rights complaint can ruin your whole day.)

But again, you’d need to have experience and topic knowledge to know any of that. You’d have to be willing to maintain files, to write stories based on information you did not personally dig up, and to write unflattering articles if that’s where the news points you. You’d have to be willing to commit journalism, which, when it comes to the TTC, nobody at any local newspaper is.

Denton in the Journal, 2010.11.01:

For Mr. Denton, the journey to a new format began in October2009. The company was one of the first to post that the “balloon boy” incident – when two Colorado parents claimed their son was floating away in a helium balloon – was a hoax. But the balloon-boy item kept falling off the page because of the reverse chronological format, he said.

Brian Stelter in the Times, 2011.02.09: “[I]n Gawker’s old layout, the story would have swiftly slid down the page, overtaken by more recent posts.”

And these are supposed to be technically sophisticated people. I gather neither had ever encountered the WordPress sticky post, available since Version 2.7.

The best design magazine ever continues its decline.

Nº 76

The Music Special Issue achieved the near-impossible: It had almost no articles of interest. (Your £17 well spent?)

• Matthew Carter explains his process of developing a wood typeface, Van Lanen, in an article that would have fared better online if only Eye weren’t clueless about the Web. I suppose if you put the magazine’s online version of the story together with the available Flickr photos you might arrive at a reasonable simulacrum of a legitimate online article.

• I have no hesitation at all in thanking editor-for-life John L. Walters for his visually ravishing profile of the man who may be the sole visual ravisher in music packaging, Gerard Saint of Big Active. If this guy isn’t a genius, I’m Barney Bubbles.

  
  

• Columbia art director Alex Steinweiss’s constructivist album covers from the ’40s and ’50s are well presented and easy for budding design students to copy. Neville Brody would wear that mantle 40 years later. And I quite liked the way Vaughan Oliver dismantled his own design aura as he described the process of codesigning a Pixies box set. (Typical Eye copy-editing: “[T]hey had no idea of what it could look like. They generally describe it in terms of size: ‘It’s yay high’. ”)

• Zoë (never Zoe) Street Howe’s piece on heavy-metal umlaut smells like it was cribbed from one of Wikipedia’s most popular articles.

• The Story of Graphic Design receives a review (by Heller, inevitably) so savage it could be seen as a typical Heller backlash against an author who beat Heller to an original idea. (He’s committed that sin before.) That still may be true, but his criticism of the book is justified.

Nº 77

• Andrew Losowsky’s examination of photographers’ evolution toward capturing sound along with images suffers not only from ambiguous British single quotation marks but a pseudo-objective style that betrays the facts of its own topic.

  The lede describes how shooter Joe Weiss decided, of his own initiative, to retrace his steps and conduct interviews (on MiniDisc) at an orphanage where he had previously shot photographs for “a newspaper assignment.”

  Losowsky continues for a page and a half in the same vein, featuring photographers and editors who extol the virtues of “audio slideshows” – of which “[a]t one point the [San Jose] Mercury News was producing more than 100… a month.” Which was it? The paper was producing them – or photographers were expected to do well more than twice the work for less than twice the pay? Vincent Laforêt observes: “I don’t know that any publications are ready to help defray any of those costs – in fact, it seems that they want photographers to shoot both stills and video for the same price. That’s not going to be sustainable for anyone.”

  Actually, it’s perfectly sustainable for the publications underpaying for twice the work, but that kind of basic economic analysis, built into his subjects’ own statements, is missing from Losowsky’s piece, which pretends that the artistic win of photographers’ spreading their wings into “audio slideshows” and video is enough of an achievement that we don’t have to talk about who pays for it. The article is mostly about newspapers, and it is newspapers that are engaging in a kind of ongoing structural abuse of freelance photographers.

  And in any event, half the quotes in the piece seem to be copied and pasted from blogs, E-mails, or both, an ever-spreading deficiency of this ever-lazier magazine and its editor.

  I thought it was well established by now that the early-Aughties “converged newsroom” was a fraud.

• Ten full pages are squandered on reviews of iPad apps – not all of which are related to photography, making them pointless. Then again, so is the idea of reviewing iPad apps in print. Surely this is unlike documenting Web sites and Web development in books, because such documentation is not a review.

  The futility of this article was worsened by editor-for-life John L. Walters’s refusal to actually edit bratty “reviews” by the six contributors. (One of those in full: “Football is evil.”) Nor did he bother to rein in their generally unrestrained raves, written in vague press-release English (Danzico: “I nearly couldn’t tear myself away from the magic that is Flipboard to write this review”).

• Issue 77: Eye’s Greatest Hits.

  • Time for an interview (by starfucker Walters) with somebody who’s already famous. This issue: Paula Scher. I’m sure her large-format graphics, wood-type-like posters, and hand-drawn maps are a complete surprise to anyone who spends £17 an issue on a design magazine.

  • By the same token, we were clearly overdue for an analysis of Penguin book design, this time glossed as a profile of its young art director, David Pearson. (Later, in the book-reviews section, a piece on Puffin by Design.)

  • Then I guess we need a piece about Marian Bantjes.

• John Ridpath’s roundup of artisanal cycling magazines leaves out Dandyhorse. Then again, his topic is on artisanal cycling magazines by designers.

• Visual Editions’ imprint of Tristram Shandy is given a near-unintelligible photo treatment, with book pages depicted in photographs that are out of focus.

  

  (Article is unbylined, photographer uncredited.)

• If you were photographing a Chinese replica of this famous building, would you call it “the United States Presidential White House”? And how much would you be paying for a book if its price were listed as “€49.80, chf88”?

Queerty is one of innumerable ill-coded, undesigned, copy-error-ridden “LGBT” news Web sites. Everything from its markup to its spelling to its typography to its URLs is atrocious. Now the site has surpassed its own broad-based technical and editorial failings by venturing into the raging seas of defamation.

In its post about a lawsuit against failing gay miniconglomerate Regent Entertainment, I see a host of legal risks taken by the site and the post author (apparently Sean Carnage [no relation; né Carney]):

• Details of a lawsuit, which contains allegations unproven in court, were reported as fact (23 counts). There was no statement that the allegations remain unproven.

• The post makes 18 of its own allegations without seeking comment from the respondents, plus one other allegation so legally devastating it stands as its own inducement to sue for libel irrespective of everything else.

• The writer gloats about the bonanza he scored by ordering the original lawsuit papers, but documents no attempt to seek comment from the respondents on each and every factual allegation, nor on overall themes.

• The writer makes direct and indirect statements about the legal culpability of some 21 third parties.

• Respondents in the lawsuit are described, in Queerty’s own original wording, in ways that reasonable juries might consider defamatory (six times).

• I see two apparent factual errors that cast subjects in an unflattering light, possibly to a legally defamatory degree.

Queerty and Carnage have little in the way of obvious defences.

• A defence of news reporting is put in jeopardy by typically sloppy copy-editing, in which numerous dollar amounts are listed as “0” or “0,000” (also “ billion” [sic]). Numbers in general are so inaccurately reported as to be unreported (e.g., “To no one’s surprise, the aesthetically-deficient Regent catalog eventually fetched well under million leaving Merrill million in the hole” – itself a statement the writer did not verify).

• That same defence is jeopardized by the writer’s admission he interviewed third parties with an axe to grind against Regent but none of its principals or anyone named in the lawsuit.

Regent was already guilty of sending Carnage a clearly spurious cease-and-desist letter alleging defamation, which itself was probably legally meaningless because it did not meet the service standards in place in California. (You can’t just E-mail statements of claim; they have to be delivered by messenger, registered mail, or other prescribed means.) In the way that stopped clocks are right twice a day, Regent could still succeed in a new defamation complaint against Queerty and Carnage – perhaps on 70 or more counts.

This, you see, is why online “gay journalism” is a mockery of itself and its own heritage.

Come out tomorrow night (2011.02.10; doors 1900, show 2000) to watch me give an Ignite presentation – finally – on why computers cannot read this sign:

Spoiler alert for catchphrase of the evening: “Mongolian cheesemonger.”

UPDATE (2011.02.11) The star of the show was clearly Cassie McDaniel, who achieved the impossible: An unflustered, unhurried, measured delivery. Her custom-made slides, derived from her A List Apart article, were lovely and showed just the right amount of information to be understood at a glance (necessary since we’re there to listen). Surely this is how it’s done.

Me? I was fine. She was better.

(UPDATED) Apple COO Tim Cook is now running the company – again – because Steve is away – again – on medical leave. Cook is a workaholic gay man, according to a report from Gawker that quite clearly is accurate to anyone versed in the Kremlinology of reporting on gay celebrities. (It’s reporting, not “outing.”)

From any rational cultural perspective, Cook is homosexual, not gay, but the distinction crushes to dust under the onslaught of the men of the computer press. I didn’t read any claims that Gawker got it wrong, because on this score, its record is perfect. (Did they get it wrong with Anderson Cooper [q.v.]? Do you really think Anderson Cooper and Tim Cook aren’t gay? Where’s your “proof”?)

Instead, the narrative holds that the subject should never be discussed at all. The Macalope was first to fall on his antlers shouting about how unimportant it all is. (Because that’s what we do with a topic of no importance: We shout it down.)

[I]f there’s one thing that people need to know, it’s the sexual orientation of all the executives of the company that makes their phone or their computer…. Seriously, try to imagine any of this being written about a straight executive.

Hats off to the Macalope for aiding and abetting the closet without even knowing it. (Surely the worst way.)

We don’t write “about a straight executive” as such because the closet maintains every such executive already is straight unless you can provide a signed confession of the sort produced at gunpoint by prisoners of war. (Even then the Macalope wouldn’t report who signed it or where to load it in a browser.)

When you tell us it’s wrong to report on gay public figures, you are telling gays not to come out of the closet and journalists not to report the truth. (What you’re telling us as gay journalists is even worse.)

When you insist being gay couldn’t possibly matter less, what you actually insist is that the subject never be brought up in the first place. You do this even though the Macalope’s imagined straight executive takes his wife to the Christmas party and his daughter to work on that annual day, wears a wedding ring because marriage is legal for his superior caste, sets up an iPad on his desk just to run a slideshow of family photographs, has his daughter’s picture as his iPhone lock screen, fills his Facebook and Flickr streams with vacation photos of the happy opposite-sex family, and talks about them nonstop when he isn’t running his business. Get him drunk enough at the Christmas party and he’ll admit the first thing he noticed about his future wife was her rack, but it’s all very wholesome and natural.

The Macalope is the kind of ruminant who believes straight people have lives but all we have is “sexuality.” Obviously it follows that reporting on gay sexuality is one step removed from pornography. Especially for gay males, the most troubling group on earth for the heterosexualist male technology journalist.

And then, right on cue, came Miguel Helft’s profile of Tim Cook in the Times, a paper that for decades – well before Helft’s arrival – deliberately elided the truth about gay lives. The context is this: Gawker scooped everybody on the truth, which the mightiest paper in America rushed to cover up.

Just as TMZ broke the story of Michael Jackson’s death, which incumbent reporters refused to repeat until one of their own dared to do so, the epitome of establishment journalism refuses even to discuss a germane fact about a de facto CEO because a blog it looks down on reported it first. In the intertwined Kremlinologies of reporting on gays and Apple, the company gave Helft the perfect dodge – as ever, it refused to comment.

Helft did not knowingly evade the issue. He didn’t have to; Apple blanketed him with silence. (“I did not interview him for this article,” Helft told me.) Effects are what matter, not intent, and the effect here is to use the full weight of the most powerful journalistic organ in the United States to suppress the truth. That’s what the Times does.

Helft went on to demonstrate his misunderstanding of the issue and his ignorance of his paper’s institutional record: “[W]e generally do not report things that we cannot confirm ourselves,” he wrote. Again, journalists seem to think the only way to “confirm” if someone’s gay is through a signed confession, or, failing that, a statement read from a script at a press conference. Having no interview gives the Times a pretext to hide the truth.

Helft continues:

Incidentally, some of his former close colleagues, who[m] I did interview, told me they never saw him with a male or female partner and that even they didn’t know his sexual orientation.

If that were really the criterion, the Times wouldn’t have pretended Susan Sontag wasn’t Annie Leibovitz’s lover. She was: “With Susan, it was a love story,” Leibovitz eventually stated. (Michael Bronski: “[E]ven though Sontag or Leibovitz were never connected romantically with men, spent a huge amount of social and working time together, lived right next to one another, and for 20 years were rumoured to be lovers, the New York Times could not ‘substantiate’ any relationship.”)

Sontag and Leibovitz’s being seen together was one of those many ways of confirming Sontag’s homosexuality without a signed confession, but that too wasn’t enough. In practice, being seen with a same-sex partner and never being seen mean the same thing to the Times. In neither case is the “evidence” good enough to report.

John Gruber, who writes the most important Macintosh site and never mentions gay at all (even with an obvious news hook), made a similar category error: “I don’t believe I’ve written anything about Jobs’s spouse or children, either,” he told me. Jobs’s girlfriends (and estranged daughter) have been covered in the press, but neither of those, nor who Cook is seen with, says anything about being gay. (Single people still have a sexual orientation.)

All those examples do is raise the bar on the evidence needed to “prove” Tim Cook is gay – unattested observations by “former close colleagues,” a spouse, “children.” What next?

Bronski again: “The mainstream press, out of a misplaced sense of decorum, will often not speak of homosexual romantic lives of certain well-liked public figures and simply ignore the obvious. This is especially true when the public figure shows any reticence about showing some aspects of their private life.”

The technology business and its press are run by heterosexualist men who style themselves liberal. They tell themselves they’re pro-gay even while remaining ignorant of our lives and the press’s generations of lies and omissions about us.

The technology press thinks it is striking a brave chord for equality when it whines, at roughly-eight-month intervals, that “too few” women work in its industry. (The male technology press has one “progressive” issue.) But when a competing news outlet with an attitude they dislike scoops them on a story that calls their ethics into question, these bleeding-edge journalists revert to what journalists have done since time immemorial: They erase us.

“It’s discriminatory,” the Macalope cries, “and it’s a childish invasion of someone’s privacy.” Remember: What you have is a life, but all we have is a secret you want us to keep to ourselves.

Updates

• (2011.08.25) Steve Jobs resigned as Apple CEO yesterday, no doubt due to poor health. Tim Cook is now Apple CEO. Journalists can’t ignore the elephant in the room now that he’s running at $74 billion company.

  Respected technology journalist Felix Salmon has echoed the sentiment that talking about Cook’s being gay isn’t outing, it’s reporting. Vicious attacks followed my original post here (most egregiously by soi-disant pundits like Jason Snell and Glenn Fleishman), which otherwise-decent people allowed to pass. Sometimes bullies get away with it; sometimes it does not get better.

  But we all can change and grow. Salmon’s generous coverage gives ignorant technology journalists another chance to enter the 21st century, report facts rather than suppress them, and cease defending the indefensible. These journos, who style themselves liberal and nonhomophobic, have one more chance to learn the truth about a group they tell themselves they defend but don’t.

• (2014.10.31) We were right all along. Defenders of the closet – including the nastiest, Glenn Fleishman – were not.

An Australian bobsleigh team (led by a ginger) needs a new Web site (q.v.).

Mr. HEATH SPENCE

Yes, Australia has a bobsleigh team. I shit you not. They’ve got crap equipment and can barely rub a couple of centimes together, but for today, all I’m looking for is volunteers to do a quick pro bono redesign of one team’s site.

Why? Because it’s preposterous! (Why else would you do it?) Also, it would be nice to put Australia on the medal platform in Sochi, Russia, in 2014. Because in Soviet Russia, Australia bobsleds you!

I listen to the various good-news podcasts for Web developers produced and co-hosted by Dan Benjamin. The Big Web Show is the most important of those, in part because Zeldman sits in the co-host chair. I also listen to the Marc Maron comedy podcast entitled WTF.

Benjamin’s podcasts don’t get press. Maron’s does, and every article says the same thing: Comedian guests barely bother to crack wise and instead have honest and true discussions about their lives. (The best example is the Dane Cook interview, not the Robin Williams one.) Maron’s show reminds us of something the 21st century wants us to forget: Behind each persona is a person. And if that person is halfway creative, nine times out of ten something has gone wrong along the way.

You’d never know this from listening to Benjamin’s podcasts. They stay relentlessly upbeat. Now, why? Because Dan Benjamin, whom I haven’t met, is a member of that rare and baffling class, the sweetie. (He had to sit there and think about letting me use the word “shitty” in a comment on his blog. Even devout churchgoers say “shit.”) Dan Benjamin is a preternaturally nice, optimistic, happy person. His partner Zeldman is a mensch. I’ve spent a lot of time in his company and I know he doesn’t dwell on “negative” things. (Incidentally, if that’s the first word that springs to mind to describe anything vaguely upsetting, then you really need to read and understand this post, because you are not being honest, least of all to yourself.)

The Benjamin podcasts feature one interchangeably sunny and constructive Internet success story after another. They perpetuate the mythology of the Web worker who is so happy and well-adjusted they might as well be a robot. It isn’t a coincidence that Aspergerians and autistics are often quite content, too; technically proficient or obsessive people always have something to talk about other than themselves. What the Benjamin podcasts give us is a discussion of what the guest does, not who he or she is. The podcasts, like American talk shows, give guests a venue to plug their projects while steering clear of their real lives.

It’s more insidious in the podcast case because, unlike with Hollywood talk shows, there isn’t a talent agency’s (female or gay-male) publicist hovering offstage making sure you stay away from off-message topics like the guest’s obvious homosexuality, his past or ongoing drug addiction, his recent divorce filing, who he blew to land his first role, or his placement in the hierarchy of the Church of Scientology. Breezy, positive tech podcasts practise genteel self-censorship. They do that because the entire culture is one of news you can use.

When I’ve written articles for Zeldman or appeared at his conferences and failed to regurgitate the recommended daily allowance of information the audience can immediately put to use, I’ve been criticized for it. I would like to suggest that some problems are worth discussing even if they cannot presently be solved. Now imagine if I dared to get up there and talk about the rest of my life. (When I did that at @media, it was edited out of the ultimate podcast.)

With Maron’s guests, we already know what they do as comedians, save for the occasional producer or writer previously visible solely to insiders. But almost the same thing applies to Benjamin’s guests: We already know what they do because, by definition, listeners have access to their entire output. (We can read their blogs and buy their apps.) Maron finds out what they do as people; tech podcasts stay on message, making them structurally comparable to American right-wing talk radio.

The guest, not the medium, is the message, and if you aren’t interviewing the guest about his or her life, you are wasting our time. Thinking back to the people I’ve met, tell me why I haven’t heard any interviews exploring:

• To what extent that tall blond designer’s career choices have been directed by his Mormonism.

• Why does a cerebral and articulate young developer spend his best years in Japan? (Is he a rice queen?)

• How that hot-blooded European playboy got fed up with his country of birth, to which he feels no allegiance whatsoever and whose Katzenjammer-like language even he finds gruesome.

• How life is treating the beloved former developer, now a theorist in urban informatics, since he got himself off that godforsaken ice floe.

• What that Web-standards evangelist has to say about her borderline personality disorder and the way it disrupted the lives of dozens of her colleagues during her sequence of public suicide threats.

• What happened to the starter marriages of two high-profile men – that Left Coast developer and the Web’s best graphic designer. (Why does the latter have such an affinity for gore – horror – Hallowe’en?)

• That visual artist/developer’s life-affirming conquest of drug addiction, and why he actually is a bit tired of being addressed by the diminutive even he uses online.

• What it’s like being married to a physicist who’s a girl.

• How that chain-smoking German manages to be more British than the British.

• Why does that editor at a major technical publishing house call up his authors just when their books are on press to berate them for being the most difficult author they’d ever worked with? (Hint: This didn’t happen only to me.)

• And, Number 1 with a bullet: Why aren’t you a success? Everyone else here is. (Restated: Why are you such a failure? Nobody else here is.)

There is no way even to list those topics without using the format of the gossip-column blind item. But this is not gossip; it is the experience of labour, triumph, strife, heartache, reward, adversity. It is the guest’s life experience. What it isn’t is their latest technology product. I could not possibly care less. Why do you care? Do you even know?

Bullish, on-message technology podcasts that treat people like the latest gadget defeat the purpose of inviting people onto the show in the first place. Tech podcasts are a mutual admiration society I consider harmful. To paraphrase Sinéad O’Connor, success has made a failure of our home.