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Dispatches from the looking-foolish arena

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Ever had one of those rage-inducing battles? One of those conducted fiercely (however cool the tech-support guy’s voice may be on the phone) with some new add-on to your own personal information technology universe? Say, an extra so-called “peripheral” for your laptop - which you consider central, of course. Or a fresh piece of software that refuses point-blank to gel with your existing system.

Well, consider the level of corporate frustration that’s boiled up at the Department of Homeland Security, where newly-bought electronic communications are proving infuriatingly bad at, well … communicating.

 

The crisis has been occasioned by the admittedly pretty ridiculous idea of having a “virtual patrol” of the US - Mexico border. It comes on top of the already clearly fatuous notion of building a fence to keep out illegal immigrants from the south. This is proceeding fast (despite all the well-worn evidence that walls never work in sealing borders) with 800 feet stretches of concrete and steel being installed every day. It’s become largely a public relations exercise to meet the Administration’s stated aim of installing 70 miles of new barrier this fiscal year.

 

In the specious words of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff (above left, with his boss), “I thought it was important as a matter of regaining credibility with the American people to show that when we make a promise we’re going to do something to carry out that promise”. Yeah, right.

 

But there’s more. In addition to this earthbound clumsiness, the Department has wanted to monitor the desert area around Nogales, Arizona with an electronic surveillance system. It’s all part of an overall project named SBInet (based on the acronym Secure Border Initiative).

 

It involves an ambitious intermeshing of sensors, 98-feet towers pulsing out radar signals, Wi Fi hook-ups and video cameras that should automatically zoom in on any suspected movement in the target territory. Trouble is  … the disparate elements of the system are finding it impossible to talk to each other, or at least to talk to each other swiftly enough to allow any meaningful action to be taken.

 

What actually transpires is often the binary-processing equivalent of the following thoughts: “Is that an immigrant - or a rattlesnake - that just crossed Ground-sensor No 57B? ... Hang on, here’s a webcam, swinging and zooming to check on it ... We’ll see in a minute … Ah well. Nice image, but whatever was there before has gone now”.

 

The SBInet system, already costing $8 billion in taxpayers’ money, but expected to balloon to $30 billion according to Homeland Security’s own Inspector General, comes from the often-favored giant aircraft and military contractor, the Boeing Company.

 

Boeing is now on notice to get its act together more quickly. Having already been disappointed that the system wasn’t effective by the deadline of last June – DHS is telling the corporation to demonstrate that its system is now capable of operating properly for 30 consecutive days. Or else what, I wonder? The Administration will go find another supplier? Fat chance, I’d say.

 

 

 

MORE FLAILING ABOUT FOR TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS, THIS TIME FROM YAHOO! – If you remember it, that’s the once-mighty internet company that thought its future lay in being an online entertainment center (and hiring a Chief Executive from Hollywood, the recently-departed Terry Semel) only to discover that searching quickly and effectively across cyberspace is what consumers really want.

 

Yahoo yesterday unveiled improvements to its search engine technology, now calling it - with somewhat muted originality - the New Yahoo Search, with Yahoo Search Assist. (Classic marketing echoes here, reminiscent of “New, Improved Tide, with added color-safe bleach”.)

 

It’s a pity that the ballyahoo-ed new features are remarkably like those already rolled out months ago by the market leader Google, and by even the fifth- placed Ask.com.

 

 

 

AS YAHOO DEMONSTRATES, THE LOOKING-FOOLISH ARENA CAN OFTEN include the highly venerated. A former Executive Editor of that self-styled “journal of record”, The New York Times, Joe Lelyveld used to go bonkers, quite rightly, about the embarrassing misspellings in his paper. And the current incumbent, Bill Keller (above right) has embarked on a crusade to stamp them out - urged on by the persnickety new Public Editor Clark Hoyt (whose wife happens to be a journalism professor as well as a USA Today editor).

 

Sometimes, though, the Times’ misspellings can be entertaining in themselves. Or its corrections can. One of the best this year was occasioned by, in the paper’s own poignant words, an article which was “about mourning for Gerald R Ford in California”, but which unfortunately “misspelled the name of the city where the Ford family lived. It is Palm Desert, not Palm Dessert”.

 

Still, throughout the wide world of journalism nothing compares for spelling howlers with Britain’s The Guardian, which became so notorious for misspellings that the satrirical magazine Private Eye in the 1970s labeled it “The Grauniad” (which was initially a one-off mangling created by the unfortunate paper itself in its own columns). In conversation members of London’s literariat still call it the “Grauniad” as a matter of course, affectionately or not.

 

Things are little changed now since the slip-shod reputation was first earned. Recently a fulsome Guardian correction paragraph almost reveled in what it called “several spectacular misspellings”. The paper's setting-straight of its own record was hilariously relentless:

 

"Clare, not Clair, College is in Cambridge.
Princes Risborough, not Prince Risborough, is in Buckinghamshire.
Salisbury, not Sailsbury, is in neither Whitshire not Whitleshire but in Wiltshire.
And the adjoining county is Dorset – not Dorest."

 

 

 

JUST SOMETIMES, HIGH-TECH PROGRESS CAN - ALMOST PARADOXICALLY -  REVERSE a growing trend. You know how the loss of audiences for traditional media like TV has led to desperate cutbacks in serious production – notably in news and public affairs programming? And especially that sad barometer, the falling number of overseas bureaus being maintained by the major networks.

 

Well, now ABC News executives have started investing again in foreign news-centers – albeit in smaller dollar amounts than before. They are setting up seven new one-person bureaus in Rio de Janeiro, Dubai, both New Delhi and Mumbai in India, Jakarta, Seoul and Nairobi -- and in the process they are taking full advantage of new, cheaper and more light-weight digital news-gathering equipment.

 

“Technology now makes it possible for us to have bureaus without a receptionist, three edit suites and studio cameras and so on," says the news division’s president David Westin.

 

I think on balance it’s an excellent and encouraging development. But I have a word of warning about one-person news operations. I once sat at the hub of a global network comprising 70 overseas journalists who were expected to function as their own camera-persons, when I was Assignment Editor for Video News International, a company that the New York Times bought in its first flush of interest in transforming itself into a digital, multi-media organization.

 

The cost-saving path, as many bean-counters see it, does not necessarily bring the best returns. In the end, and very simply, it’s asking a lot of any journalist to expect her or him  to simultaneously pose questions, frame interviewees, capture illustrative scenes and sequences, balance the sound, log the shots and prepare and deliver a script.

 

Many talented individuals can do all these things – some can even do them all at once. Very few can do them all well.