Saturday, June 07, 2025

The Painted Box

Among my possessions is a painted cardboard box. It’s pastel green and dates from the 1960s, when I went away to college. I guess my parents painted the box in an effort to strengthen it.

Inside were many copies of stories I wrote for the Michigan Daily. There also was a copy of Life magazine with a story about student protestors, which included a photo of me being arrested.

It was 1968 and the campuses were erupting with similar protests all over the country. This was one of the times I mixed my new role as a journalist with political activism, and wouldn’t you know, it ended up memorialized by Life magazine.

Of course, at the time, I was proud of what I’d done. The charges of trespassing on public property, to which I pled, carried no actual penalty beyond a day’s labor in a local park.

But I and my fellow convicts refused to cut down the trees as we were instructed to do, as part of an an environmental protest. Thinking back on it, we must have been one big royal pain in the ass for the authorities.

They chose to ignore the fact we didn’t serve our sentence, turning instead to more pressing matters, such as the bombing of the local CIA office, which led to the indictment of John Sinclair, and brought John Lennon to Ann Arbor to sing in his support.

One thing led to another for me and within a few years I was somewhat improbably editing pieces Lennon and Yoko Ono produced for SunDance magazine out in San Francisco.

A few more years and I was a reporter at Rolling Stone.

At the bottom of the files in the box was my FBI file, which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The Bureau kept track of me starting with that arrest in college and my work for an underground paper in Ann Arbor. It tracked me as I relocated to San Francisco to work at SunDance and throughout the years at Rolling Stone.

Including my stories on the FBI’s COINTELPRO illegalities.

Much of the information in that file is blacked out in the classic way the FBI redacted files prior to releasing them under the FOIA, but there was nothing in there of any consequence.

So that old cardboard box painted pastel green contains a lot of memories, too many really, so I closed it back up and put it away for another day.

(I’ve published different versions of this one over the years.)

HEADLINES:

      • American Seclusion (Atlantic)

      • Mistakenly Deported Man Is Returned to U.S. (NYT)

      • Trump tells CNN he’s ‘not even thinking about Elon’ and won’t speak to him ‘for a while’ (CNN)

      • From bros to foes: how the unlikely Trump-Musk relationship imploded (Reuters)

      • Trump Threatens Musk Contracts as Feud Escalates (NYT)

      • Trump and Musk break up, and Washington holds its breath (AP)

      • Musk says Trump is named in Epstein files (The Hill)

      • Trump administration races to fix a big mistake: DOGE fired too many people (WP)

      • Every Election Is Now Existential (Atlantic)

      • The emperor has no tanks (Financial Times)

      • Immigrants in America are being abducted and disappearing as the Trump administration wages its aggressive deportation campaign with little oversight. But is it a crime? We spoke with academics and researchers who study how rogue states “disappear” people. [HuffPost]

      • New Travel Ban Prompts Fear and Frustration for U.S. Immigrants (NYT)

      • More Americans disapprove than approve of the job Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing as U.S. health secretary (Pew)

      • Deadly Russian bombardment of Ukraine further dampens hopes for peace (AP)

      • What unites countries under Trump’s travel ban is American imperialism (Guardian)

      • When Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon Tenure Started Going Sideways (Atlantic)

      • Xi’s Message to Trump: Rein In the Hawks Trying to Derail the Truce (NYT)

      • Israel confirms it is arming Hamas rivals in operation opposition calls ‘complete madness’ (CNN)

      • University of Michigan using undercover investigators to surveil student Gaza protesters (Guardian)

      • US health care is rife with high costs and deep inequities, and that’s no accident – a public health historian explains how the system was shaped to serve profit and politicians (Conversation)

      • Scientists Discover Natural Molecule That Reverses Cognitive Decline (SciTechDaily)

      • What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works (Atlantic)

      • OpenAI is storing deleted ChatGPT conversations as part of its NYT lawsuit (Verge)

      • How much information do LLMs really memorize? Now we know, thanks to Meta, Google, Nvidia and Cornell (VentureBeat)

      • Anthropic researchers predict a ‘pretty terrible decade’ for humans as AI could wipe out white collar jobs (Fortune)

      • FEMA Chief Confused By Wind (The Onion)

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Friday, June 06, 2025

What Does Data Think?

In most of the media companies that employed me in the early years of the web, one of my responsibilities was supervising the metrics department.

In case that sounds like a big deal, this was well before the days of data scientists and multi-variable analysis; in most cases the metrics department in those media companies consisted of a lone individual.

And that person often felt like no one was listening to them.

After all, much more significant than the actual numbers he or she gathered was figuring out how to interpret that data. In and of themselves, of course, the numbers were neutral. But the people we worked with had a wide variety of opinions over what those numbers actually meant.

Was our audience growing? Which types of content were most successful? What was success in this type of media environment anyway? Which metric mattered most?

Occasionally, especially in the early years, we would publish a story that “broke the servers,” i.e., generated more traffic than our system could handle. There was little debate on those occasions over whether we had a winner, particularly because additional things tended to happen to support the data.

Things like attention from other media outlets, tons of email from subscribers and a boost to whatever financial metric we were tracking.

But these experiences caused me to eventually draw a few conclusions about people in general:

  • Most people are not very good at math.

  • Most of us see what we want to see in the numbers and don’t see what we don’t want to see.

  • Most of us don’t change our behavior or opinions even when the numbers say we should.

In the end, I wondered, what did the data itself think about all of this human frailty? That is one reason I have long been curious about the coming of generative artificial intelligence — we may find out the answer to that question.

Addendum 2025; I guess we’re finding out now.

(This is originally from 2023.)

Meanwhile, a family note:



Congratulations James! 

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Thursday, June 05, 2025

Friends & Family

First off, thanks to Laurie Sigillito of the Local NEWS Network (LNN) for promoting yesterday’s essay, “Simple Lives” on LinkedIn.

LNN is a media tech startup I’ve been working with the past few years. It has been widely reported that local newspapers are disappearing; LNN provides a creative solution through its digital network delivering local news and local advertising to communities that otherwise would exist in a news desert.

One of my many essays on local news is “Invisible Ink.”

Next, another on my short list of beloved clients, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), has opened up a new channel here on Substack called Structural Zero.

Check out the post, “Dictatorships Create a Lot of Data,” by Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s founder. The article explains how the group obtains and analyzes large databases of human right abuses in the quest for justice and accountability in the U.S. and around the world.

I’ve written about HRDAG in the past, including a post called “Making a Difference.”

Finally, on a personal level, today is a special day because my oldest grandson, James Tiglao, is graduating from high school. James is not only a very good student and a top athlete (crew), he is a genuinely good young man of high character and integrity. He is soft-spoken and modest as he steadily accomplishes great things. He’s been accepted for admission to U-C Davis and we are all very proud of him. I’ll be attending the ceremony in San Jose this afternoon.

HEADLINES:

 

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Wednesday, June 04, 2025

James graduation



 

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Simple Lives


If I could add them all up, the people I've interviewed in my career number in the many hundreds, maybe a thousand. I don’t know how many people's stories I've collected or how many quotes I've selected.

You'd think interviewing would all boil down to a formula, but it doesn't, at least not for me. Everyone is different; everyone's story is unique.

These days (circa 2012) I do a few interviews in person each week, a few others by phone, and a few others by email. I interview self-published authors for an ebook distributor, starting with a phone interview, followed by a Q&A in email.

That way there's no need to take notes or use a recorder, nor are there any worries about misquoting someone.

Still, even when the structure of an interview falls into a familiar pattern, because you are having a similar conversation to others about similar topics or ideas, the unique ways people see the world and tell their stories reshapes even familiar territory into new terrain.

That's one reason I like being a journalist. Being exposed to multiple perspectives on all kinds of things helps keep me from falling into a rut of unexamined thinking, or descending into the echo chamber of group-think.

At least I hope it does.

It might seem to some that the interviews I used to do of famous and prominent people for bigger publications like Rolling Stone or Salon about weighty topics were more important than my current short blog profiles of startups or ebook authors.

But I don't see it that way. A person's story is their story, whether they are powerful or unknown, whether the narrative seems complex or relatively simple.

And although everyone has a story, relatively few of them get told.

(This essay is from 13 years ago.)

HEADLINES:

MUSIC VIDEO:

Vince Gill sings 'What You Give Away' 

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Tuesday, June 03, 2025

Origin Story -- Salon


David Talbot is best-known as the founder of Salon, which from a journalistic perspective was one of the more important startups to emerge in the early days of the web.

Talbot had been an editor at Mother Jones and the San Francisco Examiner, where he ran the Sunday magazine, but he had a bigger dream -- to start his own publication.

I'd talked this over with him for some years until finally in 1995 he got his chance. Richard Gingras, then an executive at Apple, staked him with a small pot of money and with that, David gave notice at the Examiner.

There wasn't very much funding at all but Talbot somehow convinced three colleagues -- editors Gary Kamiya and Andrew Ross and designer Mignon Khargie -- to give up their steady jobs and join him in his quest.

The group was rounded out by publisher David Zweig, bringing the staff to five and they settled pro-bono into an architect's office down on the waterfront.

At Talbot's invitation, I joined them too, not on the creative side but on the business side. That made sense because I was just coming off a stint as EVP of KQED, the large public broadcasting company in Northern California, and I knew my way around the Bay Area fundraising world.

While the other journalists, none of whom had a clue about business, developed an editorial plan, I helped Zweig establish a business plan, which proved to be a daunting task. First and foremost, the team needed much more money, so I set about meeting with potential investors in San Francisco bars with a Mac laptop furnished by Gingras. It was loaded with a prototype of the magazine.

What made all of this complicated is that Salon would be on the web, at that time a nascent, unstable platform that as yet was devoid of any real journalism.

While I was able to convince a few investors to kick in $25,000 apiece, much more significantly I told an old friend and former writing partner, New York Times tech reporter John Markoff, what Talbot & crew were up to. Like any good journalist, he saw that this might make a good story.

Meanwhile, we were able to find two major investors -- investment banker Bill Hambrecht and Adobe co-founder John Warnock. They both agreed to get involved, more because they shared the magazine's progressive political vision than any hope they would recoup their multi-million dollar investments.

But Markoff’s article was the key. When the magazine launched, it proved to be an instant sensation, and over the years through many ups and downs it has persisted, though it has never to my knowledge actually turned a profit.

But profits aside, the reason Salon mattered is it was one of the first sites featuring original content, proving that traditional journalism could compete with the free-for-all that characterized the early Web. (Microsoft launched a similar site called Slate the following year. It persists too.)

After Salon launched, I left to join HotWired and return to my first and true love -- journalism. But then I rejoined Salon a few years later as Investigative Editor/Managing Editor and Washington bureau chief and finally SVP during its heyday of the Clinton impeachment drama, including the Henry Hyde story.

Over the 30 years since Salon launched, several people have mistakenly referred to me as one of the founders of Salon. I was more like what in basketball is known as the Sixth Man during that launch period in the fall of 1995.

And I played a key role.

A whole slew of other talented people joined Salon’s team early on. But recently as I was cleaning out my possessions I discovered a relic from the earliest days of Salon. It was what must have been one of its first phone directories, a plain piece of paper with the staff's phone extensions in the architect's office down by the Bay.

On it were eight names -- one Gary, one Andrew, one Mignon and three Davids -- Talbot, Zweig and Weir. The other two were Laura Miller and Cynthia Joyce.

Oh, and there was also a printer called Gingras, but that is for another story.

HEADLINES:

 

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Monday, June 02, 2025

The Sixth Chick

On an otherwise unremarkable afternoon, I watched what appeared to be a lone quail pick its way down a hillside, turning first this way, then that, gradually charting a zig-zag course west to east, north to south across the field.

As I was wattching, five chicks came into view following their mother. They too turned from west to east, north to south, replicating her course almost perfectly.

I’m sure there were slight deviations in their paths but I didn’t notice anything dramatic. They were a team — one big one leading the way, five little ones following and learning in the process.

As they gradually snaked their way out of view, something else caught my eye. It was a sixth chick, far behind, lurching wildly from further up the hill. This one didn’t replicate the path of its mother and siblings.

Instead it forged its own route as it raced to catch up with the clutch.

That sixth chick, always somehow out of step. We’ve probably all known one.

HEADLINES:

  • Deep cuts erode the foundations of US public health system, end progress, threaten worse to come (AP)

  • An astonishing raid deep inside Russia rewrites the rules of war (Economist)

  • Rival Victory Claims as Poland’s Presidential Election Goes Down to Wire (NYT)

  • Homeland Security Cops Invade NY Congressman’s Office, Handcuff Aide (Mother Jones)

  • Can Trump fix the national debt? Republican senators, many investors and even Elon Musk have doubts (AP)

  • How a small wine company complicated Trump’s sweeping tariff plans (WP)

  • Saudi Arabia says Israel shows 'extremism' by blocking West Bank visit (Reuters)

  • Discrimination cases unravel as Trump scraps core civil rights tenet (WP)

  • Jamie Dimon says China isn’t America’s biggest threat. It’s ‘the enemy within’ (CNN))

  • Trump’s Playbook to Cripple “60 Minutes” and the Press (New Yorker)

  • Boulder attack updates: 6 injured in 'act of terror' with 'makeshift flamethrower' (ABC)

  • Gay history was made in D.C. At times, it was dispiriting — but also uplifting. (WP)

  • ‘Copy’ Of Magna Carta Bought By Harvard For $27 Found To Be Real (The Onion

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Sunday, June 01, 2025

Secrets and Lies


One of the questions journalists frequently get asked is how we get people to tell us things, especially the things it would be in their best interest not to disclose. The simplest answer is: “We ask.”

Most people will want to talk to you when you tell them you are doing a story, even if they shouldn’t. And asking simple, open-ended questions is by far the easiest way to gather information.

Remember this: Most people most of the time don’t want to lie.

But sometimes they do.

So how do you tell when someone is lying? Well, one way is to ask questions about minor details of the person’s life. And if you’ve done your homework you already know the answers to those types of questions.

Add them into the mix, because they should be easy for your subject to answer as long as he or she is being honest. But often people will lie about these little things because they’re trying to cover up bigger things.

One lie leads to another.

All of this requires a certain amount of discipline on the journalist’s part. So you have to avoid falling into the trap of lying yourself. When I conduct journalism ethics seminars, one issue that often comes up is whether it is okay to misrepresent yourself in order to get a story.

Except in extreme cases, I don’t think that it is okay. Working undercover, some journalists have uncovered huge scandals, but in my opinion that happens at the sacrifice of a greater goal. We are supposed to be about the truth — not just getting big stories — so if we get information by misrepresenting ourselves we are subverting one of the core values that legitimize our work.

It’s not that we have to be squeaky-clean in everything do as journalists — far from it — but if your story eventually ends up in court you have to be able to look the judge and jury in the eye and say you believe the information you gathered is accurate and that you gathered it in legitimate ways.

(“Reporter’s Notebook” is an occasional series based on my lectures over many years at Stanford, U-C Berkeley and San Francisco State.)

HEADLINES:

  • 31 dead after Israeli forces attack near Gaza aid centre, says Hamas-run health ministry (BBC)

  • Ukraine targets 4 Russian airfields in major drone attack, source says (ABC)

  • China accuses Pete Hegseth of sowing division in Asia in speech ‘filled with provocations’ (Guardian)

  • Universities quietly negotiating with White House aide to try to avoid Harvard’s fate, source says (CNN)

  • Why Trump’s push for ‘gold-standard science’ has researchers alarmed (WP)

  • Hamas makes hostage pledge but demands changes to US Gaza ceasefire plan (BBC)

  • White House to pull NASA nominee Isaacman (Semafor)

  • US lawyer sanctioned after caught using ChatGPT for court brief (Guardian)

  • It’s called the Library of Congress. But Trump claims it’s his. (WP)

  • Iran has amassed even more near weapons-grade uranium, UN watchdog says (AP)

  • US sends nuclear deal proposal to Iran (BBC)

  • Ukraine keeps Russia guessing (Reuters)

  • The Unqualified Hacks Hijacking Our Public Health (The Nation)

  • CDC contradicts RFK Jr. on COVID vaccine for kids (Axios)

  • R.F.K., Jr., vs. the C.D.C. (New Yorker)

  • AI is upending the job market, even at AI companies (Business Insider)

  • Revealing signs of AI in the White House MAHA Report (WP)

  • Tariff-Strained Apple Announces 7,083-Piece iPhone Kit (The Onion)

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