Seeing

On a rainy Saturday afternoon, just after the sun had poked its head out from behind the clouds overhead, I had a chat with London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, about the importance of artists to the spirit of a city. She was particularly interested in how creative people can capture the essence of a place and reflect it back to its residents.

The occasion for our conversation was the opening of a retrospective exhibit of images by photographers from a special edition of BIG magazine 20 years ago. I was part of the team that produced that issue, which contained snapshots in time of the city in 2004. Many of the artists included new images for this show, which produced a somewhat nostalgic, then-and-now impression on the visitors.

In her remarks, before a lively gathering of families and artists who had come out despite the rain, Breed discussed the work of the photographer David Johnson, who died recently at the age of 97. Among his many accomplishments, which included iconic civil rights movement photos, Johnson had chronicled life and jazz in the Fillmore District in the mid-20th century.

After her remarks, which were brief and refreshingly apolitical, Breed walked over to where I was sitting to introduce herself. She is young (49), black, and soft-spoken. She grew up in the housing projects that used to dot the Western Addition, including the Fillmore District before urban renewal displaced most of the black residents living there.

When Breed was born in the mid-1970s, roughly 13.5 percent of the residents were black; today that number is down to about 5 percent.

I mentioned her that I too had lived in the Fillmore in the 70s and worked at SunDance magazine and that I remember a number of black-owned businesses, notably a bar, Minnie’s Can-Do, at the corner of Fillmore and Pine. Local musicians played there all the time.

We compared notes for a while longer— she a young woman wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt; me an elderly man spinning tales of when I worked at Rolling Stone magazine — both feeling bittersweet about the past but hopeful about the future given the spirit of creativity all around us.

(The SF_retake exhibit is curated by Maren Levinson, David Peters and Rhonda Rubinstein, and will be at the Harvey Milk Center for the next few weeks. Mary Spicer and Marc Weidenbaum were also part of the core BIG team and the planning for the exhibit.)

HEADLINES:

• Michael Cohen set to testify at Trump hush money trial Monday (CNN)

• Stormy Daniels’s Brutal Mockery of Trump Makes Conviction More Likely (New Republic)

• Judge warns Michael Cohen to stop talking about Trump hush money case (ABC)

• 4 reasons this year’s presidential election could blow up America as we know it (The Hill)

• Israeli tanks captured the main road dividing the eastern and western halves of Rafah, effectively encircling the entire eastern side of the city in the southern Gaza Strip. (Reuters)

• Battles rage around Rafah’s edge as more than 100,000 flee the city (WP)

• The Biden-Netanyahu relationship is strained like never before (AP)

• Appeals court upholds Steve Bannon’s conviction for defying Jan. 6 probe (Politico)

• The Tiny Nation at the Vanguard of Mining the Ocean Floor (NYT)

• How Can Ukrainian Drones Keep Dropping Grenades Into Open Tank Hatches? (Forbes)

• Meet My AI Friends —Our columnist spent the past month hanging out with 18 A.I. companions. They critiqued his clothes, chatted among themselves and hinted at a very different future. (NYT)

• Leaked Deck Reveals How OpenAI Is Pitching Publisher Partnerships (Adweek)

• A Beginner’s Guide to Using AI: Your First 10 Hours (WSJ)

• OpenAI claims r/ChatGPT subreddit infringed its copyright. (Verge)

• Kamala Harris Plays Hooky To Sit In ‘Price Is Right’ Studio Audience (The Onion)

Careers.8

 (This is the eighth and final part in a series. Read Part One and Part Two and Part Three and Part Four and Part Five and Part Six and Part Seven.)

Why, one might ask, would I go into so much detail about my half-century+ in journalism? As they often say on TV, that’s a good question.

My reason is simple. By sheer coincidence, my experiences in journalism paralleled almost perfectly the rise and fall of journalism as a profession during the lat 20th and early 21st centuries.

Thus I have tried to produce a narrative of those changes that can serve as a personal version of the historical record.

During my last dozen years before retiring, I briefly held jobs at startups Predictify and GreatNonProfits, consulted for clients including Wikimedia Foundation, which publishes Wikipedia, a wonderful French company called Smub, and worked as a media analyst/blogger for BNET and 7X7.

In the last two positions, I met and interviewed some of the founders of Twitter, Lyft, Airbnb, Uber, Nextdoor, Getaround and dozens of other companies as the age of social media came into being.

Occasionally, I put my investigator hat back on; for example, I wrote a report that of the 44 board members of the largest social media companies early on, none were women. This despite the fact that over half of their customers were women.

As I reached the age of 65, further employment opportunities seemed to be limited, so I decided to retire. This was early in 2013.

Retirement didn’t suit me and within months I had rejoined KQED as a part-time blogger. The public media company had a large radio and TV footprint, but only a minor web presence.

Then I applied for and got a job as senior editor, digital news at KQED, and assembled a team of writers and producers that built a large digital audience to complement the legacy broadcast services.

We also started an ad hoc investigative team at KQED that produced award-winning reports on police violence, sexual abuse, and official corruption.

Finally, in late 2019, health issues forced me to retire for good, 53 years after I had started at the age of 18.

HEADLINES:

• Trump attorney blights Stormy Daniels’s credibility in tempestuous cross-exam (The Hill)

• Top Republicans, led by Trump, refuse to commit to accept 2024 election results (WP)

• Why disinformation is more dangerous than ever (Economist)

• Greene's rebellion sparks new talk of consequences for House GOP rebels (Politico)

• Biden says US won’t supply weapons for Israel to attack Rafah, in warning to ally (AP)

• Netanyahu says Israel can ‘stand alone’ after Biden threatens to halt U.S. arms (WP)

• Turning Point or Breaking Point? Biden’s Pause on Weapons Tests Ties to Israel. (NYT)

• Israeli forces massed tanks close to built-up areas of Rafah, after US President Joe Biden vowed to withhold weapons from Israel if its forces launched a major invasion of the southern Gaza city. (Reuters)

• Rafah: UN says 80,000 have fled Gaza city as Israeli strikes intensify (BBC)

• The world’s economic order is breaking down (Economist)

• Ukraine’s investigative journalists are facing intimidation (Politico)

• Ultrasound technology is used in many ways. Addiction is the next frontier. (WP)

• America’s unseen book bans: the long history of censorship in prisons (Guardian)

• AI is disrupting the local news industry. Will it unlock growth or be an existential threat? (Poynter)

• ‘Indestructible’ 3-fingered robot hand being tested by Google’s Deepmind (Interesting Engineering)

• Digital recreations of dead people need urgent regulation, AI ethicists say (Guardian)

• Trump Drapes Jacket Over Head So Nobody Can Tell He’s Sleeping In Court (The Onion)

Careers.7

 This is the seventh in a series. Read Part One and Part Two and Part Three and Part Four and Part Five and Part Six.)

My years at Stanford teaching public interest journalism were terrific. I met many young journalists who’d grown up all over the world but shared the common goal to start a career in this very difficult profession.

It was becoming clear during this period that Google was not really a search company but a media company sucking up all the online advertising income it could find, while traditional media were in steep decline.

Facebook launched and it followed the same business path as Google, vacuuming up advertising revenue based on personal data users gave away freely in order to expand their social networks.

In 2005, I rejoined the private-sector fray, at a start-up called Keep Media, where we explored the new lexicon of content surfacing, categorization, and interactivity with user-created content.

The company, which was started by entrepreneur Louis Borders, rebranded itself MyWire, but eventually met the fate of most startups — extinction.

By this point, I was resigned to the undeniable fact that my “career” had devolved into chaos. Along the way, over the years, there had been too many other projects to list, but a few were teaching memoir-writing to boomers; acting as the interim managing editor for the Stanford Social Innovation Review; guest-editing at Business 2.0; working as an investigator for the victim families of 9/11; serving as interim editorial director at CIR; editing some investigative articles post 9/11 for The Nation; guest editing a special issue of BIG magazine and writing editorials and sitting on the Editorial Board of the San Francisco Examiner.

In the more distant past was a decade of screenwriting and consulting in Hollywood, plus 14 years of teaching at U-C, Berkeley's journalism school. For many years, I also traveled internationally and spoke at conferences, mostly about global environmental problems. During all this time, I tried to balance the journalistic requirement to remain aloof from direct activism with my penchant to be involved in my communities in every way possible. Not an easy act to master, and I don't think I did it all that well most of the time.

This long, unpredictable voyage has as much been a private search for my writing voice as a career, and finding ways to support my family, and therefore, to be a productive member of our society, as opposed to what else I might otherwise have turned into. 

That same quest continues in this space, unabated. At this point, all I really wish to do is write.

(Tomorrow: The conclusion.)

HEADLINES:

• U.S. Stalls Weapons Shipment to Israel in Bid to Stop Rafah Offensive (WSJ)

• House quickly kills Marjorie Taylor Greene's effort to oust Speaker Johnson (ABC)

• Biden Looks to Thwart Surge of Chinese Imports (NYT)

• US weighs upgrade for Vietnam to 'market economy' status (Reuters)

• Israeli Tanks Enter Rafah as Cease-Fire Talks Resume in Cairo (NYT)

• On Campus and in Gaza, Chaos Threatens Biden’s Campaign (WSJ)

• Peace starts with Palestine’s UN membership (Al Jazeera)

• Russian missiles and drones struck nearly a dozen Ukrainian critical infrastructure facilities in a major airstrike, causing damage at three thermal power plants. (Reuters)

• Scientists are starting to decode what sperm whales are saying (WP)

• New York may become the first state to bar gun companies from selling pistols that can easily be converted into machine guns. The proposed law takes aim squarely at Glock. [HuffPost]

• Georgia appeals court agrees to review ruling allowing Fani Willis to stay on Trump election case (AP)

• Astronomers finally detect a rocky planet with an atmosphere (NBC)

• Conservatives trashed NPR's new CEO for being 'woke.' But the truth is far more complex. (USA Today)

• The name change for the Boy Scouts to Scouting America comes as the organization emerges from bankruptcy following a flood of sexual abuse claims and seeks to focus on inclusion. The president of the organization said that membership is at historic lows. [AP]

• How climate change is raising the risks of another pandemic (WP)

• OpenAI Is ‘Exploring’ How to Responsibly Generate AI Porn (Wired)

• Impact of AI on Local News Models (Northwestern)

• Biden touts new Microsoft AI center on site of Trump’s failed Foxconn deal (WP)

• Google DeepMind’s Groundbreaking AI for Protein Structure Can Now Model DNA (Wired)

• Trump Helps Pay Legal Bills With New Gig As CNN Contributor (The Onion)

Careers.6

(This is the sixth in a series. Read Part One and Part Two and Part Three and Part Four and Part Five.)

As I met with various contacts and former colleagues seeking a new job in 2001, one of my more enigmatic friends, Ken Kelley, introduced me to a young couple, Tom and Heather Hartle, who had moved here from Michigan, where they had created a successful city magazine called Hour Detroit.

The Hartles asked me to help them launch 7X7, a new city magazine for San Francisco. We did launch to a lot of fanfare a week before the 9/11 attacks. New York's economy was injured in the attack; San Francisco's tourist-based economy essentially collapsed. 

Despite that unfortunate timing, we were able to produce some great issues of 7X7. Local businesses as well as national accounts flocked to advertise in with us, including many of the best downtown restaurants, but because they were largely empty at the time they “paid” us with trade.

Thus, we the staff embers of the magazine, could eat and drink almost at will in great restaurants night after night. So we did. The magazine couldn’t afford to pay us, so we deferred our salaries and partied like we were back in the era of the Barbary Coast.

All of it was fun — probably too much fun — but I couldn’t afford to work for free indefinitely. I’d taken out a $100,000 equity loan on my house — a rash move I’d never done before.

That would prove to be a disaster financially and personally.

In the spring of 2002, I accepted a three-year visiting professor position at Stanford, where I could keep a close eye on how the collision between traditional journalism and digital technology was unfolding. 

(To be continued.)

HEADLINES:

• Stormy Daniels describes meeting Trump during occasionally graphic testimony in hush money trial (AP)

• Stormy Daniels takes the witness stand (WP)

• Stormy Daniels Takes the Stand (New Yorker)

• Trump classified documents trial in Florida postponed indefinitely (CNBC)

• Trump Desperately Tries to Toss Entire Case After Stormy Condom Detail (New Republic)

• Judge denies mistrial request after Stormy Daniels details alleged sex with Trump (WP)

• Georgia appeals court will review decision that allowed Fani Willis to stay on Trump's Fulton County case (CBS)

• Pro-Palestine protests: How some universities reached deals with students (Al Jazeera)

• The Israeli military orders civilians to evacuate eastern Rafah as airstrikes escalate. (NYT)

• After the war, what kind of future awaits Israelis and Palestinians? (WP)

• Israeli forces take control of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing with Egypt (AP)

• Americans’ Changing Relationship With Local News (Pew)

• Enough With Saving the Honeybees (Atlantic)

• Remnants of a Legendary Typeface Have Been Rescued From the River Thames (ArtNet)

• OpenAI working on new AI image detection tools (Verge)

• New AI search engine Upend emerges from stealth, powered by 100 LLMs (VentureBeat)

• The courtroom is stunned after Trump and Daniels’ 18-year-old love child, Maurice, burst into courtroom. (The Onion)

 

Careers.5

(This is the fifth in a series. Read Part One and Part Two and Part Three and Part Four.)

In 1999-2000 as Salon’s bureau chief in Washington, D.C., I supervised a staff that included the young reporters Alicia Montgomery and Jake Tapper. I also edited a fascinating debate-style series of columns between David Horowitz on the right and Joe Conason on the left.

Earlier in 1999, we had run the controversial story aboutHenry Hyde, the Republican chair of the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. We disclosed that Hyde had had his own affair with a younger woman just like Clinton. That expose effectively undermined the case against Clinton and doomed it to failure.

The year I spent in D.C. was the only one of my 50+ year career based outside of California, and it opened my eyes to the radical differences between media outlets on the west coast and the east coast. In California we were acutely aware of ourselves as outsiders, while in Washington and New York, journalists aspired to be insiders.

As for me, office politics back at Salon headquarters made my position untenable, so by a year later, I was back in the Bay Area, at Excite@Home, where I was managing a large staff of producers, writers, designers, and editors.

That company had been created by venture capitalists mushing together two very different companies with different cultures and different business plans. Thus, it was doomed from the start, though I of course didn’t know that when I took the job.

Talk about dot.bust! Excite@Home collapsed dramatically, and ended up as a cautionary tale on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

So by early in 2001 I was unemployed once again.

HEADLINES:

• Israel begins military operation in Rafah, hours after Hamas agrees to a cease-fire (AP)

• Cheers, Fears and ‘Le Wokisme’: How the World Sees U.S. Campus Protests (NYT)

• I’ve read student protesters’ manifestos. This is ugly stuff. Clueless, too (WP)

• Dozens Are Arrested in Pro-Palestinian Protest at Art Institute of Chicago (NYT)

• U.S. put a hold on an ammunition shipment to Israel (Axios)

• This obscure N.Y. election law is at the heart of Trump’s hush money trial (WP)

• Judge threatens jail if Donald Trump violates ‘hush money’ gag order (Financial Times)

• Comptroller says Trump didn't direct him to set up hush money repayments (ABC)

• Social Security and Medicare finances look grim as overall debt piles up (WP)

• As China and Iran hunt for dissidents in the US, the FBI is racing to counter the threat (AP)

• How Putin is forging a harsh Russian society that threatens the global order (WP)

• With a vest and a voice, helpers escort kids through San Francisco’s broken Tenderloin streets (AP)

• When Prison and Mental Illness Amount to a Death Sentence (NYT)

• Fish are shrinking around the world. Here’s why scientists are worried. (WP)

• Is AI about to kill what’s left of journalism? (Financial Times)

• Musk is raising $6B for AI startup. (TechCrunch)

• Alembic Launches Its New Causality Engine Supercomputer Based on NVIDIA Platform (BusinessWire)

• Poll Finds Most Americans Want Immigration Reform That Includes Making Up New Last Names For People Again (The Onion)

Careers.4

(This is the fourth in a series. Read Part One and Part Two and Part Three.)

All of this constant change in my career was exciting, but it was taking a toll on me and my family. More on that another time.

In the wake of being laid off from Wired Digital, I did a bit of consulting for the @Home network and did what I always did between jobs — meet with friends. Other people called it networking; I called it lunch. This transition turned out to be a bit more difficult. I ran down various leads, but nothing really seemed to fit well. Then, David Talbot called and asked me to come back to Salon, now a daily news website that was finding its voice covering the scandals engulfing the Clinton presidency. He asked me to do several jobs -- managing editor, investigative editor, senior VP for content. 

I said yes, though doing so meant I had to turn down two new, more lucrative consulting gigs that had taken months to land. Being at Salon the second time was a lot more fun, at least initially, because I got back to my investigative journalism roots, now as an editor, and was able to hire the best factchecker I knew, Daryl Lindsay, to join me there.

Our biggest hit was the Henry Hyde story, written by Talbot, edited by a bunch of us, and promoted by all. Before that story was published, I checked with the deans of prominent journalism programs about the ethics of our decision, and was assured we were on solid ground. This helped later when we were subjected to a barrage of media criticism, as well as death threats, bomb threats, etc.

Salon aimed to go public, too, and eventually did, thanks to its principal financial backers, John Warnock and William Hambrecht. But, as part of becoming a publicly-traded company (briefly, as it turns out, since the company would be delisted during the dot.bust), my own role there changed. Daryl and I ended up opening a Washington, D.C., office for Salon in summer 1999. 

(To be continued.)

HEADLINES:

• Israeli authorities raid Al Jazeera after shutdown order (Reuters)

• Al Jazeera condemns Israeli government decision to shut down local offices (Al Jazeera)

• Israel shuts Kerem Shalom crossing after Hamas fires rockets (BBC)

• Parts of Gaza in ‘Full-Blown Famine,’ U.N. Aid Official Says (NYT)

• Campuses are wrestling with the politics of war. So are we. (WP)

• In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction. (New Yorker)

• USC closes campus, police tear down pro-Palestinian encampment (USA Today)

• Dozens Arrested at U.Va. as Other Protests Disrupt Graduations (NYT)

• A group of Republicans has united to defend the legitimacy of US elections and those who run them (AP)

• 6 months out, a tight presidential race with battle between issues and attributes (ABC)

• Trump escalates attacks on prosecutors, says Democrats run ‘a Gestapo administration’ (WP)

• Just How Dangerous Is Europe’s Rising Far Right? (NYT)

• Brittney Griner’s ordeal riveted the nation. Now she tells her own story. (WP)

• Your AI-native startup ain’t the same as a typical SaaS company (TechCrunch)

• Generative AI will be designing new drugs all on its own in the near future (CNBC)

• Columbia University Gives Students Option To Finish Classes From Prison (The Onion)

 

Careers.3

 (This is the third in a series. Read Part One and Part Two.)

While I was licking my wounds from another unwanted job loss, this time from KQED, a group of reporters headed by a friend, David Talbot, quit the San Francisco Examiner to try and start a web-based magazine, to be called Salon Magazine. 

David asked me to join them, mainly as a business consultant, so I did for three months that fall until we had managed to raise enough money and conclude a big marketing deal with Borders Books to be able to launch.

Then, I got a call from HotWired, the online offshoot of Wired magazine, founded by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf. Would I like to become a producer for a new daily political website called The Netizen?

You bet. I was getting a little tired of the business side, which, though fascinating in its own right, can't compete with the thrill of creating content. We launched The Netizen in a few weeks, and for the next six months I presided over a chaotic product that really was the brainchild of Louis Rossetto, though he spent his days editing his magazine, not producing content on the web.

Louis and I clashed over the politics of the site. He's a brilliant iconoclast, a libertarian, a former college Republican. As for me, when I was in college, I was a radical anti-war and civil rights activist, and arrested on occasion. But somehow we enjoyed the intellectual debate over the content my team produced, at least most of the time.

So I didn't know what to think when he called me to his office one day; maybe I'd crossed a line and was going to be fired. Nope. He asked me to become the V-P of content management for HotWired, which meant overseeing all of HotWired’s websites, and all the web producers on the front edge of what Louis called a digital revolution. This was not entirely hyperbole.

But his vision for his company was seriously inflated. We tried to go public twice and failed. Not long after that, the investors took over the company, and booted most of us, including Louis, out.

Once again, for the sixth time in eight years, I was in the market for a new job.

(Part Four tomorrow.)

HEADLINES:

• Hopes of Gaza ceasefire rise as Hamas delegation arrives in Cairo (Guardian)

• Evacuations ordered, homes damaged in Texas as rivers surge to Hurricane Harvey levels. And more rain is on the way (CNN)

• Israeli Officials Weigh Sharing Power With Arab States in Postwar Gaza (NYT)

• Decades after Kent State shooting, the tragic legacy shapes its activism (WP)

• How US campus protests over Gaza differ from Vietnam war era (Reuters)

• Why Biden finally decided to speak out on college protest violence (Politico)

• Edgy calm on campuses follows arrests and deals to end student protests (WP)

• Calls to Divest From Israel Put Students and Donors on Collision Course (NYT)

• Trump vows to fight 'anti-white feeling' in US. His allies have a plan (Reuters)

• U.S. Approved More Weapons for Ukraine. Now It’s a Race Against Time. (NYT)

• Talks with Russia inevitable, Ukraine officials say (Reuters)

• Why RAG won’t solve generative AI’s hallucination problem (TechCrunch)

• OpenAI's Sora makes its first official music video (New Atlas)

• We Can't Imagine the Future of AI (Reason)

• Orangutan Stuns Researchers By Using Rogaine To Fix Bald Spot (The Onion)