Mediaite » David Plotz

Slate Magazine Hangs Up And Listens To Logic

Panel Nerds — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:09:46 +0000

Who: Josh Levin, Mike Pesca and Stefan Fatsis, with guest- Nate Silver
What: Slate’s Hang Up and Listen, Live!
Where: City Winery
When: January 17, 2012
Thumbs: Up

“I don’t want it to sound like a tautology” isn’t the kind of concern audibly shared at most sports panels, but while explaining how bad defenses play bad defense leading to bad results on Slate‘s live “Hang Up and Listen” podcast, that was exactly what Mike Pesca was worried about. Rather than describe or comment on the action, their first discussion of the evening focused on whether the playoffs were too “irrational.” Logic and reason continued to play a significant role in their analysis. Stefan Fatsis sat at his laptop and quoted DVOA — Tim Tebow hadn’t just played another game, he’d widened his sample size — and Pesca railed against the “logical fallacies” in comparing arbitrary statistics.

All of that meshed perfectly with the addition of Nate Silver to the panel for an interview segment. Silver was choppier when discussing himself and his own progression, but became more animated and passionate when the discussion turned to his work with statistics and prediction models both in sports and politics. Just as Hang Up and Listen’s discussions shied away from stereotypical sports blowhard culture, Silver diverged from the pomposity of political punditry. Silver focused a great deal on explaining the limits of statistics, how important it is to know those limits exist, and accepting them. He cited his 2008 numbers which gave Hillary Clinton a 16% chance to win New Hampshire (as opposed to the 9% other polls were running.) On the one hand, he was 7 points higher than others; on the other hand, he had still only predicted a 16% chance.

The evening closed with a discussion on coaches. Here, too, the back and forth did not hinge on any particular coach, but asked the background question “Do coaches carry too much importance in our society?” Fatsis discussed his own experience coaching his daughter’s youth soccer team, and Josh Levin wondered whether college coaches were basking in the reflected veneer from youth coaches. Pesca called out football announcers for treating college coaches like ethical leaders, making explicit the division between Hang Up and Listen and mainstream sports coverage, a chasm that was implicit throughout the entire podcast taping.

What They Said

“They are, in audio form, what Slate aspires to be in print every day.”
- Slate’s Editor, David Plotz, introducing the live podcast.

“Some precedent is always broken, if you define things narrowly enough… eventually every player is a special snowflake”
- Nate Silver would have a problem with us claiming that this is the best Nate Silver quote to ever run second in the Panel Nerds’ “What They Said” section. In January.

“The enlightenment triumphed” – Josh Levin’s take on the Patriots sound defeat of the Tim Tebow led Denver Broncos
- Stefan Fatsis views Bill Belichick as a modern day Thomas Aquinas.

“You develop fluency… If you’ve learned Spanish, you should be able to learn Portugese.”
- Nate Silver’s analogy for how he used his baseball modeling in politics.

“It’s actually reasonable”
“No, it’s not. It would be reasonable if it were true”
– Stefan Fatsis and Mike Pesca debate the NFL’s explanation of the Greg Jennings non-fumble fumble.

What We Thought

The podcast did an excellent job of taking advantage of the live format, giving their live audience more than the people listening. For different segments, they had queued up video clips to show the crowd what they were referring to. The extra effort made being there more special.
Another thing that made being there more special is City Winery itself. We’d been there before, but we were again reminded how beautiful a space it is. If you’re in New York and have never been there, you should go.
As long time listeners of the podcast, we had imagined a mental picture of each correspondent. Incredibly, each member of the trio, matched our imagination and their roles on the podcast perfectly. Pesca and Fatsis faced each other, flanking Levin, seeming like a pocasting odd couple. Pesca, burlier, leaned back in his chair, freely sharing quips and jokes while Fatsis sat across from him, slighter, more serious, sitting at the front of his chair, with the kind of perfect posture from beginning to end that would make our mother proud.

PANEL RULES!
Some audience behavior seems to repeat itself panel after panel. We’ll be updating a running list of “PANEL RULES!” that will help ensure that you are not the dweeb of the Panel Nerds.
Panel Nerds don’t like…The Look Through
We’ve all been in conversation with someone in a crowd and we see their eyes search the room for other people to talk to rather than engage in the conversation at hand. Don’t ask the panelists if there are other Slate podcasters in the audience. Don’t look through them! Enjoy the podcasters sitting there in front of you.

Do Web Ads Give Newspapers — Or Bloggers — Any Hope?

Robert Quigley — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:07:06 +0000

For all of the advertising woes that printed newspapers have encountered over the past few years, it’s an open question what will happen to them as they shift their focus online. The New York Times‘ Stephanie Clifford (who has been turning out really fascinating stuff week after week lately) warns that the Web may not be the Promised Land of newspaper ad sales, but there are a few hopeful indicators.

According to Clifford, advertisers tend to use newspaper sites to make a one-time splash, as when Mercedes rolled out its new line of E-Class cars on the NYT, WSJ, and Washington Post websites this past summer. But once the splash has been made, they shift their resources to other, cheaper networks:

One reason newspaper sites do not appear to be bouncing back as much as the overall Internet is price: after advertisers introduce their splashy campaigns on news sites, they can follow up with cheaper ads all over the Web.

“You get the big audience reach on your national brands, and you guarantee that by buying USA Today or The Times or other properties. And a secondary buy, you buy inexpensive, low-c.p.m. ad networks,” said Mr. Saridakis, using the industry shorthand for cost per thousand times an ad is shown. A display ad that might cost $10 to $20 per thousand at a site like USAToday.com could cost around half that amount when it is bought across an ad network of similar sites.

“They’re basically trying to buy the same audience at a third of the price,” he said.

If bloggers reading this think they have cause to gloat, they don’t. What’s at stake here isn’t fancypants newspaper articles upheld by bloated staffs, but smart, effortfully generated content, period. If eyeballs are eyeballs are eyeballs, regardless of quality of product, why bother building up a brand, personal or institutional? Why analyze when you can copypasta? In short, what’s the point of trying if a pageview for a painstakingly written post has the same advertising value as an SEO-optimized 50 word rehash?

There’s a glimmer of hope in this Knight Digital Media Center writeup of a speech by Slate’s David Plotz:

More sophisticated ways of measuring usership and engagement will change focus from mass audience, Plotz believes, and that will make journalism better. Raw numbers create “pressure to produce one kind of story” that will draw hits. New metrics of engagement and behavior offer a “tremendous opportunity for Web journalism to escape the traffic” trap. He believes that will liberate Slate to “make a magazine that recognizes those dedicated readers.”

The fight at hand isn’t newspapers versus blogs versus splogs versus LOLcats, but between competing metrics. As long as CPM is the gold standard for online ads, advertisers will have a strong incentive to follow the eyeballs around, which they have the technology to do with a great degree of precision. Engagement-based metrics like Plotz advocates could free bloggers from the commoditization of their work, the lumping together of all types of content. But will they really be the metrics to win out in the end, or is that just a blogger’s pipe dream?

(image via artofthebiz)

Sign of the Times: Slate Kills “Today’s Papers”

Zeke Turner — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:59:00 +0000

A case of dog chases tail: Slate has refashioned it’s daily aggregation feature “Today’s Papers” because, well, newspapers have started delivering content at a faster, more consistent pace to keep up with their competition online. Woof.

“One of the great conveniences and frustrations of the Web recently has been the rise of the news aggregator,” wrote Slate editor in chief David Plotz to eulogize his 14-year-old aggregation feature, now obsolete, and announce the launch of its replacement — “The Slatest, The most important news and commentary to read right now.” And they do mean right now — like, right now — not just today. The Slatest also replaces “In Other Magazines,” a similar roundup for glossies.

Plotz remembers the early stages of aggregation:

“Today’s Papers” was hilariously backward by contemporary standards. The authors originally collected front pages by fax from newspapers that barely had online editions. (Our first “Today’s Papers” didn’t even have links.) But the column was an instant sensation for Slate, meeting a need our readers hadn’t even realized they had. It hooked an audience: William F. Buckley Jr. was particularly fervent, going into paroxysms if “Today’s Papers” arrived in his inbox late. “Today’s Papers” showed what Web news aggregation was supposed to be: It captured the media zeitgeist, it condensed everything you needed to know into a few paragraphs, and it was fast.

As he says, once Slate was eons ahead of the pack, and now the online magazine is being forced to evolve itself because of pressure from both sides — a print industry playing catch up and an increasingly multifarious and non-stop digital media.

“['Today's Papers'] doesn’t track the news as the day progresses, and it doesn’t encompass all the ways people get their news besides newspapers (blogs, Twitter, TV …),” wrote Plotz. “We’ve come to realize that we haven’t been doing the kind of aggregation most of our readers want.”

According to “The Slatest,” the kind of aggregation that readers want comes in three waves throughout the day: (1) in the morning to recap what the newspapers broke over night; (2) around noon to round-up blog coverage and ‘opinion maker’ spin; and then (3) in the evening to cap off the day’s coverage and preview what’s coming in the next news cycle. These three packets are part of an item called “The Slate Dozen,” basically a list of the most important stories at the time, á la Tina Brown‘s Cheat Sheet.

In addition to the rundown, “The Slatest” features a Twitter feed full of links posted by Slate staffers — the idea, Plotz says, is the bring readers into the intra-office link exchange that used to happen over email: “We realized that our readers might be just as interested in these stories as our colleagues. The items in the Twitter feed usually aren’t the latest news but, rather, the stories that baffle us, amaze us, make us crack up.” The Slatest also features a constantly updating box of headlines from all over — NYT most-mailed, HuffPo, Drudge, TMZ, among others.

Oh, and Plotz forgets to mention quite possibly the most valuable part of “The Slatest”: a huge (huge) ad for Jack Daniels in case all the news is making you thirsty.

See Plotz’s introductory column on Slate. And, from Brian Stelter, “Slate Replaces Newspaper Roundup With News Updates.”