After the Seagulls

 Pismo Beach

"There’s an old joke that consultants are like seagulls - they fly in, make lots of noise, mess everything up and then fly out. That’s pretty much what tech has done to media industries - it changes everything and then it leaves..." -- Benedict Evans.

Not to gang up on consultants or the tech industry, but that pretty much sums them up. Of course there's the odd seagull who contributes something useful, but the sight of them approaching means either trouble or it's the 7th inning at the ballpark where the Giants play baseball.

(For undetermined reasons, the seagulls all show up during the 7th inning stretch at that location, eager to scoop up all the half-eaten hot dogs and garlic fries before the crowd leaves and human clean-up crew arrives.)

In the Internet Age for media, consultants invariably brought variations of the Agile development process, with post-its, power points and recommendations related to expensive hardware/software schemes.

Once they'd had their way with us, most of the media companies I worked for either went out of business or went back to what we were doing before they showed up.

Of course there are two sides to every equation, and I served as a consultant myself for a number of years. One company hired me to use my journalistic interviewing skills. My assignment was to interview authors who had perfected the self-publishing process to become best-selling authors.

I carefully interviewed each one, inducing them to spill their secrets, and soon a fairly substantial body of knowledge existed on the company's website.

Apparently I was too good at my assignment, however. Because the company suddenly stopped assigning me any more interviews, just as I was getting to enjoy the work immensely. No one ever called or explained what had happened but when I checked the website, it turned out that the company had automated my interviewing techniques. So I'd been replaced by an algorithm.

A more straight-forward experience happened when a billionaire recruited me to leave Stanford to join his online media aggregation firm. "I want to study your brain and write a program duplicating it."

I consented as the financial terms were substantially more lucrative than my salary as a visiting professor on The Farm.

Long story short, maybe it was my brain or the software duplicate, but neither could prevent that company from filing for Chapter 11.

Thus it went, chapter by chapter of my illustrious career, for which just last year I was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the main professional association for journalists. It was quite an honor and I was grateful for the recognition.

The only problem is a novel coronavirus (remember that?) came along so they had to cancel the awards ceremony before I could give my speech, which might have been either a tearjerker or a stink bomber.

"Oh well," I told my grandchildren, "At least the plaque should be nice." They excitedly checked the mailbox for days in anticipation.

Only problem? No plaque ever arrived. Eventually I heard one of the grandkids say to another, "You know what Mom says. Grandpa is full of stories that may or may not be true."

***

The news:

* Laws to keep guns away from children can save lives. States should embrace them. (Edit Bd/WaPo)

* Biden and Democrats Detail Plans to Raise Taxes on Multinational Firms -- Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the U.S. would support a global minimum tax, while top Democrats unveiled their own plan to raise taxes on multinational firms. (NYT)

* Jack Wade Whitton was arrested last week after he was identified as the Trump fan captured on film dragging a D.C. police officer by the neck down the steps of the Capitol and into a violent mob on Jan. 6. Online sleuths nicknamed the suspect "Scallops" because of his distinctive grey backpack. Federal prosecutors want Whitton held until trial. [HuffPost]

* California is nearing four million vaccine doses administered in the state, a target that would allow the state to reopen more broadly. [Los Angeles Times ]

* Many people living in homeless shelters and on the street have not received the federal stimulus checks they’re entitled to, stymied by misinformation and bureaucracy. (NYT)

* A new virus variant that is thought to have been behind the surge of cases in India was detected in the Bay Area. It is believed to be the first time the variant has been detected in the U.S. [The Hill]

* FREDERICK, Md. (AP) — A Navy medic shot and critically wounded two people at a Maryland business park Tuesday, then fled to a nearby Army base where he was shot and killed, police and U.S. Navy officials said. (AP)

* South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) and other Republicans have latched on to an extremely narrow definition of infrastructure: one that only includes fossil fuels. (HuffPost)

* Officials eye youth sports as possible engine of variant-driven outbreaks (WaPo)

* 'The Most Unsafe Workplace’? Parliament, Australian Women Say (NYT)

* Carbon dioxide spikes to critical record, halfway to doubling preindustrial levels (WaPo)

* Dog DNA Test Rattles Secrets From Buddy’s Family Tree (WSJ)

* Let Us Now Praise Tiny Ants -- Even in the densest human habitations, there are orders of magnitude more ants than there are of us, doing the hard work of making our crumbs disappear. (NYT)

* A video captured off Dana Point in Orange County showed hundreds of dolphins swimming along the coast. [SFGate]

* The Suez Canal Authority is considering expanding the southern section of the waterway where the container ship Ever Given became stranded, its chairman said on Tuesday. (Reuters) (Ya' think? -- DW)

* Report: Today Not One You Will Remember (The Onion)

***

(NOTE: Thanks to Peter Brantley for pointing me to the seagull joke.)

From the SPJ NorCal in 2020 (allegedly):

"David Weir wins the Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement award. For 50 years, Weir has been a force for public interest journalism. He inspired a culture of investigative reporting at Rolling Stone and in 1975 broke “The Inside Story of the Patty Hearst Kidnapping,” still considered one of the magazine’s biggest scoops. He co-founded the Emeryville-based Center for Investigative Reporting and launched a diversity-in-journalism fund at San Francisco State University, named for his old friend Raul Ramirez. More recently, Weir has mentored and inspired the next generation of investigative reporters as KQED’s senior editor for digital news. At KQED, Weir pushed to sue public agencies who preferred to conduct the people’s business in the shadows, resulting in a successful lawsuit against the city of Hayward that exposed questionable contracts funneled to the former police chief’s husband. Weir is not a boisterous advocate, but rather a soft-spoken editor who leads by example and whose work has had an outsized impact on local journalism."

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