Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, is probably public enemy number one in the publishing industry, and he’s at it again. Today he is introducing The Magazine, an iOS app and fortnightly¹ publication. Four articles every two weeks, $1.99 a month.

I’m downloading the app and will spend some time with it tonight, but perhaps the most interesting bit is Marco’s approach to acquiring great content. From the foreword of Issue 1:

…The Magazine operates under liberal author terms: authors retain ownership of their writing, and they may republish it on their own sites just one month after it appears here.

This is basically a pay wall wrapped in an app, and it may well work. I wonder, though, whether this boon to authors might not be detrimental to the outlet itself. The Magazine covers “meaningful editorial and big-picture articles.” That’s the stuff we can all wait a month to read.

But Marco views this as an experiment, and is putting his chips on the table:

If it doesn’t turn a profit within two months — just four issues — I’ll shut it down.

I bet it turns a profit this week.

Other World Computing dives into the pros and cons of Thunderbolt:

To paraphrase though, ‘with great power comes greater complexity’. This complexity is both in the implementation of Thunderbolt as well as considerations for when Thunderbolt is truly the ideal solution.

I got my 2011 iMac specifically because of the advent of Thunderbolt, and have felt like a dope ever since. My thinking was that I would use my iPad for all mobile computing and the iMac will be there for heavy lifting, like video and audio editing. Thunderbolt seemed to be the interface stopgap; if I needed fast drives or to hook up a deck, it would be there for me.

But Thunderbolt drives remain overpriced and hard to find. USB 3.0 SSDs are more reasonable and best my trusty FireWire 800, but now I need to get a Thunderbolt hub, none of which have shipped as promised.

Anyway, if you’re annoyed (like me) that Thunderbolt isn’t yet the way of the future, OWC offers some sound advice on how to stay calm and carry on.

I’ve grown quite fond of TextExpander over the past year, but never more so than when I’m blogging with Octopress. Slowly I’ve built up an arsenal of snippets to make writing posts easier. Allow me to explain the thinking behind a few.

If you’re impatient just head to the bottom of the article for download info. And if you’re uninterested in this blogging from blogging, I’ll see you at the next post.

Rake? What Rake?

The fastest way to start up a new post is to cd into your Octopress install in a Terminal and type rake new_post["Post Title"]. This generates a brand new .markdown file in your /source/_posts/ directory with filled in YAML front matter. So with my sample rake just a few sentences back, we would get a new file called 2012-10-10-post-title.markdown pre-populated with the following:

---
layout: post
title: "Post Title"
date: 2012-10-10 12:54
comments: true
categories: 
---

I never really enjoyed having to go to the command line just to start a new post. Worse, I usually don’t know what I want to call a post, nor what the URL should be right away, but I like getting that YAML filled in nonetheless. Lucky for me, all I need to do is create a file in the /source/_posts/ folder with the proper file naming convention and YAML filled in. Enter TextExpander.

Editing Text via FTP

Quick sidebar here. Back in August, Gabe over at Macdrifter gave an excellent overview of how he edits text via FTP. He provides detailed instructions to set up both Sublime Text 2 and BBEdit to work with text on an FTP server. I’ve tried both but prefer the latter, with one difference: I use TextWrangler.

TextWrangler is probably the best bargain on the Mac inasmuch as it’s free. It’s essentially a stripped down version of BBEdit, but the features it’s missing hardly hamper it, if you ask me. For example, it still connects via FTP or SFTP to the server and directory of your choosing.

Following Gabe’s instructions, I set up a path right to my source/_posts directory. Now, I can open from (⌘^O) or save to (⌘^S) my server right from the keyboard. Now all I need to do is properly format that YAML and URL.

A Simple and a Not-So-Simple YAML

Let me get this URL thingamajig out of the way. Here’s what the TextExpander snippet looks like:

%Y-%m-%d-%|.markdown

That gives you a file with today’s date and your cursor correctly placed so you can start typing the filename. Remember, all lowercase and no spaces. I use uurl to call this one when I’m saving a file.

Now, as to the YAML front matter. I’ve got a basic one that I call with yyaml. You can dig into the snippet at the bottom to really see what’s going on, but basically it gives you a blank YAML with the time and date pre-populated and the cursor positioned to give the post a title.

Most of my posts on the candler blog, however, are link posts. For those I have to add a line to my YAML for external-url. For that I now turn to an AppleScript snippet that fills in almost everything I need to post right away.

The groundwork for this was laid by Doug Stephen with his snippet to strip out some oddities from a URL and create a new link blog type post from it. In his method he actually modified his rake task to create link posts when he entered a title with a specific format, but that’s all command line-y, so it’s no good for me. The brilliance in his work was actually stripping out the long, useless additions URLs, especially from RSS feeds, tend to have. All of that has been retained in my tweak here.

So here’s the workflow I was looking for (and have actually achieved):

1. Find a cool story I want to link in Safari.
2. Select the text I plan to quote.
3. Fire up a blank TextWrangler document, type TextExpander snippet.
4. Editorialize as needed.

The following AppleScript, when saved as a snippet, does all of that, though it’s not the snippet I prefer.

on replaceCommasInStringWithHTMLEntity(theTitle)
	set rubyCommand to quote & "puts " & "'" & theTitle & "'" & ".gsub( /,/, ',' )" & quote
	set strippedTitle to do shell script "ruby -e " & rubyCommand
	return strippedTitle
end replaceCommasInStringWithHTMLEntity

on stripUTMFromURL(urlToStrip)
	set rubyCommand to quote & "puts " & "'" & urlToStrip & "'" & ".gsub( /\\?utm.*$/, '' )" & quote
	set strippedURL to do shell script "ruby -e " & rubyCommand
	return strippedURL
end stripUTMFromURL

tell application "Safari"
	set pageTitle to name of document 1
	set currentURL to URL of current tab of window 1
	set selectedText to (do JavaScript "window.getSelection().toString()" in document 1)
end tell

set pageTitle to replaceCommasInStringWithHTMLEntity(pageTitle)
set currentURL to stripUTMFromURL(currentURL)
set theDate to current date

return "---" & "
" & "layout: post" & "
" & "title: " & "\"" & pageTitle & "\"" & "
" & "date: " & (do shell script "date +%Y") & "-" & (do shell script "date +%m") & "-" & (do shell script "date +%d") & " " & (do shell script "date +%H") & ":" & (do shell script "date  +%M") & "
" & "comments: true" & "
" & "categories: " & "
" & "- " & "
" & "external-url: " & currentURL & "
" & "---" & "
" & "
" & "> " & selectedText

It works excellently, as advertised. And thanks to Doug Stephen’s work cluttered URLs come across clean. My one gripe was that, since the whole snippet is an AppleScript, the cursor cannot be placed within the YAML text. But I found a workaround.

Snippets All the Way Down

Until just yesterday, I had no idea one could embed a TextExpander snippet inside a TextExpander snippet. Let me say that again: you can embed a TextExpander snippet inside a TextExpander. And as many times as you like. It’s as easy as adding putting in a snippet placeholder.

With that in mind, I created separate snippets from the AppleScript above to get the page title, the URL and the selected text; three separate AppleScript snippets. Then I created my snippet for link post YAML front matter incorporating the snippets for title, URL and quoted text appropriately.

The main advantage here is that users of other static blogging engines can incorporate the AppleScript to fit their YAML template. Additionally, it’s much easier to change the text output from within TextExpander than to modify the ray AppleScript.

Download

I’m using Brett Terpstra’s nifty TextExpander tool to help you make some sense of the snippets I’ve listed above. You can see them all laid out here. Please note that I haven’t implemented Brett’s “prefix” system here, so the expansion abbreviations won’t change if you add commas as a prefix. I recommend downloading the snippets and adjusting their abbreviations as needed. Here’s the download link.

And that’s about it. Happy blogging.

Great post on Connect, a new site from the makers of Digital Photography Review:

But the reality is that photography has been changing and evolving for nearly two centuries, from its crude beginnings and complicated chemical processes only handled by professionals to the instantaneous and much more accessible digital world we’re living in today. The latest evolution of the medium, what’s been dubbed ‘mobile photography,’ is perhaps the most radical change to be seen yet – as it doesn’t just involve a change in how (and what) photos are taken, but also in the growing number of people taking them, and how they are now shared, consumed and ultimately viewed.

DPReview has been my go-to resource for all things photographic since before I got into DSLR photography. Glad to see they’re moving into mobile, just like photographers.

(via Daring Fireball.)

Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora:

This revenue stream is meaningful. I remember the many years I spent in a band when earning an additional thousand dollars a month would have been the difference between making music an avocation and a hobby. We’re talking here about the very real possibility of creating, for the first time ever, an actual musicians middle class.

Wow.

Pandora was founded on the principle of supporting artists and we’re proud to pay performance fees. We think artists could and should ultimately earn even more. But all of this revenue is coming from a single company. A predatory licensing fee orchestrated over ten years ago by the RIAA and their lobbyists in Washington has devastated internet radio. Few now deem it worthy of major investment, including most notably, virtually every major broadcaster. After spending years building an audience, the original three largest webcasters (AOL, Yahoo! LaunchCast and MSN) fled the business after the last rate hike was imposed. This is not a recipe for a sustainable industry. It is a destructive stranglehold that is putting at risk a much larger reward for musicians everywhere.

Piracy has long been the boogeyman of digital innovation. Westergren makes what sounds like a rock solid case that the RIAA’s futile efforts to crush piracy has turned out bad for artists and music-lovers alike.

Right now I’m finishing out a monthly subscription to Rdio and I often grab for Spotify¹ if Rdio isn’t cutting it, but Tim’s honesty and forthrightness may just bring me back to Pandora. I’ll have to give it another listen.

(via Daring Fireball.)

A dose of sanity from Gabe at Macdrifter:

Listen, nothing is perfect and everything is broken. But we live in a fascinating time just like our grandparents did and our grandchildren will. I’m trying hard to appreciate that reality. It’s easy to find flaws and it’s lazy to focus exclusively on them. There’s always going to be something great around the corner and it will probably be flawed. It will probably disappoint someone. The sky is never going to fall.

Every time Gabe writes one of these, it gives me pause. It causes me to think about what I’m doing with the candler blog and what I put out into the world.

Part of this is related to my own neuroses.¹ Nonetheless, this sentiment, that we all need to step back and take a breath every once in awhile, is one that I am usually too busy forming opinions on news and stuff to notice, and that’s a mistake. Bookmarking this one for a busy news day.

I’ll keep this brief. Here’s Anne Thompson:

Jay Penske, 33, told the LATimes that he intended to turn Variety, which has a staff of about 120, back into a must-read that is “absolutely fundamental and indispensable.” He did not detail what he wanted to do with the paper, but said that for now Variety and Finke’s Deadline will proceed to operate separately with some possible overlap in writers.

For now.

Daniel Zarick on Stanley Kubrick’s insistence on doing his own handheld camera work:

Many people want to become the director, the boss, the one who gets to sit back and tell everybody else what to do. Forget that. Let us be the ones who help execute the vision while also setting the vision.

There are probably a thousand stories in which Kubrick insisted something be done in a way that was inconvenient or even inconceivable. His work, obviously, speaks for itself.

And what a great three minutes it is.

(via CriterionCast.)

Ever since I picked apart coverage on The Verge, I’ve had the urge to go out and try to understand the word “exclusive,” whose use set off red sirens in my head for reasons I couldn’t articulate at the time.

I tried to describe it thusly last month: “To me…exclusive in a headline means more than just images, but analysis and original writing you won’t find anywhere else.” That was an oversimplification and at least one reader took note.

I’ve done a bit more thinking on the matter (in addition to research) and have come to the conclusion that the meaning of “exclusive” has been perverted to the point that it is basically useless. Allow me to share some of what I have learned.

The “Adverse Faction”

The Oxford English Dictionary lists many definitions for “exclusive.” For our purposes, lets go with the adjective under A.II.6.a:

In which others have no share, esp. of journalistic news or other published matter.

The noun form under III.B.4 is perhaps more instructive:

An article, news-item, etc., contributed exclusively to, or published exclusively by, a particular newspaper or periodical.

But the OED’s real charm, of course, is its citations. The earliest use of a journalistic “exclusive” they list is in the first issues of Punch, a humorous British weekly started in the mid-nineteenth century. Surely, though, this use predates it as Henry Mayhew’s brash magazine spent much of its inaugural year lampooning its dubious use elsewhere in printed media. Take this story filed in the August 28, 1841 issue:

AWFUL ACCIDENT.

Our reporter has just forwarded an authentic statement, in which he vouches, with every appearance of truth, that “Lord Melbourne dined at home on Wednesday last.” The neighbourhood is in an agonising state of excitement.

FURTHER PARTICULARS.

(Particularly exclusive.)

Our readers will be horrified to learn the above is not the whole extent of this alarming event. From a private source of the highest possible credit, we are informed that his “Lordship also took tea.”

And on and on joking about an inconsequential “exclusive” until:

THIRD EXPRESS.

Hurrah! Glorious news! There is no truth in the above fearful rumour; it is false from beginning to end, and, doubtless, had its vile origin from some of the “adverse faction,” as it is clearly of such a nature as to convulse the country.

In the December 4, 1841 issue, Punch takes more direct aim at a rival’s reportage:

“STUPID AS A ‘POST.’”

The Morning Post has made another blunder. Lord Abinger, it seems, is too Conservative to resign. After all the editorial boasting about “exclusive information,” “official intelligence,” &c. it is very evident that the “Morning Twaddler” must not be looked upon as a direction post.

Haven’t I heard this sort of media bickering elsewhere, recently? Ah yes, Gawker’s A.J. Daulerio sounded the same alarm this past Friday:

Today we’ve installed an editorial policy at Gawker which I hope will stick for some time: It’s about the word “Exclusive” being used in headlines and tags. It should be avoided at all costs, barring strange, unique circumstances wherein we feel it’s necessary to inform dumb readers that the story they are reading on this site was generated here and only here despite our dubious reputation as content remoras.

[…] This policy is not being put in place to undermine the work done here in the past; it’s more to prevent this site’s current iteration from adding additional levels of obnoxious dick-twirling often perpetrated by some other online gossip sweatshops that stumble upon BIG JUICY SCOOPS on an hourly basis because dimwitted celebrity horror shows just happen that frequently. I mean, seriously, you guys, just fuck TMZ in the mouth until they spit blood.

The word “exclusive” is nearly as old as big media rivalries,¹ but it has never carried any sort of gravitas that those who like to slap it in a headline seem to think it has. For big egos and bigger brands, it has long been a tool for editorial oneupmanship, but for readers it has always been valueless.

Plants, Scoops and Leaks

William Safire, who captured the Nixon quote at the top of this article in his book, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House, is perhaps best remembered for his weekly “On Language” column in The New York Times Magazine. He had a gift not only for the intricate and difficult work of lexicography, but for boiling hundreds, if not thousands of years of knowledge and usage down to a few enlightening sentences.

In Safire’s Political Dictionary, he lays out the following definition under the entry for “plant”:

In current political usage, a LEAK is usually deliberate (as in Daniel Ellsberg’s massive leak of the Pentagon Papers to the Times), sometimes inadvertent (as in Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage’s offhand mention to columnist Robert Novak of the CIA Valerie Plame Wilson’s recommendation to send her husband to Niger to check out a tip about the sale of uranium ore to Saddam Hussein). A plant is always deliberate, and connotes “control” of the reporter’s story; an exclusive has a more legitimate ring, although reporters left out are envious; a scoop is dated slang for what is now a beat, which carries the least stigma of deliberate origination by the source, and usually means the reporter dug out the information by his own enterprise.

An “exclusive,” then, is just another way of saying a story has been planted by whomever wants it to appear in whatever outlet seems most beneficial to them. It’s Gordon Gekko calling The Wall Street Journal and saying “Blue Horseshoe loves Anacott Steel.” Like I said of The Verge last month:

How does one outlet get two non-starter exclusives from the same company in one week? The only conclusion I can think of is that Amazon is leaking them stories they want out there.

The October 2012 cover of Vanity Fair is instructive:

Michael Lewis was embedded with President Barack Obama for months, allowing him access to the man no other journalist could possibly achieve through regular means. It’s not just the resulting story that is exclusive, but the access granted to Lewis and all the strings that come with it, as reported by Jeremy W. Peters at The New York Times:

Like other journalists who write about Washington and presidential politics, Mr. Lewis said that he had to submit to the widespread but rarely disclosed practice of quote approval.

During a discussion at Lincoln Center on Monday night with Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, Mr. Lewis volunteered to the audience that as a condition of cooperating with his story, the White House insisted on signing off on the quotes that would appear.

It doesn’t really matter where you come down on the validity of Lewis’s story; it is now a known fact that his source approved what appeared in print. This is what an “exclusive” looks like. A journalist and outlet was picked from among the many to reveal an otherwise unseen side of Obama. The “control,” as Safire would put it, was always in the hands of the source, not the journalist. Readers can be as discomfited as they like, these were the terms of what was clearly a mutually beneficial story.

Now let’s look at the other big story on VF’s cover. Listed as a “Special Report,” Maureen Orth’s article, “What Katie Didn’t Know: Marriage, Scientology-Style,” digs deep to reveal the lengths that Tom Cruise’s handlers went to find him a mate that wouldn’t embarrass the Church of Scientology.

Though private time with the President weeks before an election may be the weightier piece, Orth’s revelations required what most would consider grittier journalism. As Safire would put it, she dug out the information of her own enterprise. And yet her story, which no other outlet unearthed, doesn’t have “exclusive” in the headline. That’s because it would be in poor taste to gloat about what it really is: a “scoop.”

There is No Exclusive

This entire exercise, for me, has been to understand when and how to apply the word “exclusive” in my own work. After all, I’ve broken news here at the candler blog and at other outlets. I’ve never felt the need to write a headline with “exclusive” in it, even when the information I’m reporting is, in fact, unable to be found anywhere else. Am I doing it wrong, though?

At best, an exclusive is the result of a uniquely symbiotic relationship between source and journalist, with one extending a hand to the other for any number of reasons. It could be that the source wants to reach the widest possible audience, or a specific one, as in the case of Gordon Gekko and his man at The Journal. It doesn’t have to be all that nefarious, as in the case of Michael Lewis at Vanity Fair, whose access still told a compelling tale readers the world over are otherwise blind to, though one does have to wonder about what didn’t make the cut.²

At worst, the world of the exclusive is a dirty one in which media moguls use their brands and their checkbooks to battle it out publicly. In the entertainment world, a world I generally consider my beat, this plays itself out ludicrously on a daily basis, with outlets constantly reporting the same news as exclusives. No paper, tabloid or Web site seems ready to sit down and agree to terms for détente. And so the war trudges on, as outlets duke it out for readers and pageviews.

The truth, buried too deep for the average reader to care, is that “exclusive” is a holdover, a relic; the ink-stained wretches seem unwilling to let it fall to the wayside and their protégés and admirers seem fixated on letting the idiotic term find a home in our digital future. “Exclusive” is a way to dupe readers into taking you seriously, into believing that yours is the only page upon which they can devour the freshest and the latest. But that’s a lie. It always has been.

There is no great history to “exclusive” journalism. Ultimately, there is no exclusive journalism. It’s a term that was made up by publishers to nab an audience and further pirated by sources to communicate how best to spin the media in whichever direction they please.

So stop using it. All of you. Readers deserve better and this medium demands we provide it. Eventually they will flock elsewhere, where the stories are more substantive than the headlines.

Note: Some of the links in this story point to Amazon.com. These are affiliate links, and using them to shop for goods will support this site and the independent writing that appears here. I thank you in advance.