Thunder flashed through the trees. Karen could hear cries of fear, but she couldn't...she could never make out the faces in her dreams....
Lightning snapped in half a tree in the distance and she sat up straight in her bed, soaked in sweaty fear...."What happened that night? Why can't I remember?" she rubbed her bloodshot eyes, distraught that she had not been able to sleep for the last seven months. She glanced at the clock, a blurry glare in her tear stained eyes. A loud knock sounded at the door. Startled, she hesitated before throwing back the covers and walking towards the door on wobbly legs. She looked into the peephole and saw a distorted figure of a man standing in the hallway. "Ralph." Even in the moonlight she could see that Ralph Cooke's dark black hair was disheveled and gleamed in the moonlight. His hazel eyes had a look of deep worry.
If only I knew where I came from, she thought. Was she married? Was she in love? If so, she was in a lot of trouble. She was beginning to fall for that overprotective cop who always seemed to come when she needed him most.
"Karen!! Open up!" His deep, throaty voice yelled impatiently, frantically through her door. She always had the feeling that he somehow felt responsible for her. Like it was somehow his fault that she was left for dead in the icy cold waters of the ocean.
"I'm about to come in!"
She opened the door just before he began to ram the door.
"Karen!" He looked around the room, walking past her to make sure no one was there.
Thunder flashed and light flooded into the room, making Karen look even more terrified than she looked when he first saw her.
"Are you alright?" It seemed that those were always the words he used whenever he saw her.
Ralph thought back to the night he’d first met Karen. It was a cold December night on the coast of Maine. As he drove alongside the rocky coast his eyes met the steep cliff, reminding him yet again of his late fiancé Anna’s death. Goosebumps rose on his arms as he remembered how cold and lifeless Anna’s body was when he found her body.
The radio had interrupted his thoughts. A call came in that a woman had been found just barely alive at the bottom of a rocky cliff and she was beginning to respond to police questions.
"Anna??!! No, I saw her body myself. I identified her body." He shook his head in disbelief, wondering if he’d heard right.
'I must be drinking too much coffee,' he thought as he answered a response into the radio. The voice confirmed what he heard and he sped out toward a stretch of beach not far from the site where his Anna was found.
They had to take a boat to reach the small stretch of beach at the bottom of the cliff. Large boulders lay on one side of the beach. On one of the rocks sat a ghostly looking woman, shivering in a white nightgown.
A white nightgown, he thought. Nausea swept over him as the memories of that horrible night flashed before him. Anna was seen walking outside in the freezing rain in a white satin nightgown.
Get yourself together, Ralph. You can do this.
Fighting for composure, he’d walked in the direction of the lady.
His breath unexpectedly caught in his throat. Even though her skin was almost blue from exposure, she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever laid eyes on. He felt guilty for thinking like that when his wife had been dead for only a year...but he was a man after all. A man who spent entirely too much of his time chasing after bad guys and coming home to an empty bed every night.
When he got to the edge of the water she was sitting there staring at angry waters as blue as her eyes.
"Ma'am, are you alright?" Scared sky blue eyes stared at him in confusion.
"I don't know. I don't remember my name." She winced and he saw that she had a large bruise on the side of her head.
His partner Tom walked up and said, "Jane Doe must've washed up here. She's in pretty bad shape. She has serious bruises and lacerations. We're waiting for the ambulance to carry her to the hospital. I think she has some broken bones. It seems that someone tried to murder her. She's quite lucky."
Ever since then he'd watched over her. Even named her Karen and got her an apartment across from his. He’d felt that somehow his wife's death had some connection with Karen's mysterious circumstances and wanted to keep her close by. As time went on, his interest in her went far beyond concern and police protection. He was beginning to have strong feelings for her. But how could he develop feelings for a woman with no history? Was she married, did she have children? No one knew. It was as if she never existed.
Now, eight months later, there were no leads in the case. He was just starting to think that she would never remember anything when she started having dreams a few weeks ago.
As he stood in the doorway, he couldn't help thinking about how sexy she looked with her long dark red hair hanging damp and rumpled against her shoulders, and her black silk pajamas plastered to her shapely body. He fought against the urge to kiss her and settled for touching her shoulders to steady her instead.
"I'm alright, Ralph. I had one of those dreams again."
As he gently pulled her into his arms, she closed her eyes and sighed.
Some sort of secret signal went out, and everyone and their neighbor has posted a “death of newspapers” story since the beginning of the year, myself included. Polymeme, which is increasingly my go-to, first thing in the morning read, has listed at least a dozen stories this month, and their “media” tag includes roughly 50% crisis stories.
Rather than offering a taxonomy of depressing media stories, I’d prefer to point to the best of the bunch, a piece in the New Republic by Professor Paul Starr. Starr won the Pulitzer for his brilliant “The Creation of the Media“, which tracks the emergence of newspapers, telegraphs and radio in the US, England and Europe, and he’s got a historical perspective on media issues that many of the other authors opining - myself included - lack.
Starr offers the argument that the newspaper as the authoritative source for the media we need to participate in a democratic society may have had their moment in history. Starr sees papers as critical market intermediaries, matching buyers and sellers in specific localities. That market logic led them beyond just covering news to cover softer topics like arts and sports, hoping to broaden their audience, and led directly to a shift away from partisan journalism and towards standards of journalistic objectivity. (If you’re going to function as an effective market-maker, it’s no good to alienate half the population that doesn’t share your political views.)
While newspapers held this intermediary position - and especially when they were monopolies - they could hardly avoid making money. (Had Starr attempted to analyze the finances of my local newspaper, as I did some weeks back, he would have been unsurprised that the paper charged steep, monopoly rents to local advertisers, and probably would be unsurprised that the paper - independent of the corporate apparatus that supports it - is profitable.) But the Internet is the great disintermediator, and eventually it will no longer be possible to cross-subsidize public interest journalism with classified ads and four-color grocery store fliers.
Starr’s worry, like mine, is on the future of “difficult journalism” - deep investigative work focused on state capitals, on city finances and on international coverage. His worry - as politicians and businesspeople understand that the press is no longer watching, it becomes more tempting to bend the rules. Hence, his subtitle: “Hello to a New Era of Corruption”.
I’m particularly gratified to see Starr focus on something I’ve been thinking of as “the problem of choice”, noting that we read news differently online and offline. Starr believes that we’re losing something when we stop reading offline and primarily read online - we are less likely to have the same knowledge as our neighbors and more likely to become ideologically polarized:
Online, by contrast, [news consumers] do not necessarily see what would be front-page news in their city, and so they are likely to become less informed about news and politics as the reading of newspapers drops. On the other hand, just as more partisan viewers have more to watch on cable than on network television, so partisans have more to read and to discuss online than in the typical local newspaper. As a result, to the extent that the Internet replaces newspapers as a source of news, it may add to the tendencies that Prior has identified–greater disparities in knowledge between news dropouts and news junkies, as well as greater ideological polarization in both the news-attentive public and the news media.
Ultimately, Starr declares news to be a “public good”, both in the sense that it’s a neccesity for a participatory society and in the sense that it is a non-rivalrous good (if you read a news story, you don’t prevent me from reading it as well.) He notes that public goods are notoriously hard to produce, and that the temptation is to ask governments to do it for us. The downside, obviously, is that this makes it very difficult to cover a government critically. Starr sides with those who see non-profit models for journalism, but not without a great deal of caution and concern. Mostly, his prediction is that the newspaper as we know it - the main arbiter of what is and isn’t news in a particular location at a particular time - is gone and no one is sure what’s going to replace it.
Not happy news, by any means, but better argued and structured that any of the other essays on the topic I’ve read.
While there’s no shortage of folks drafting eulogies for the newspaper, no one has told the geeks who work inside newspapers. I doubt that the NYTimes techies were reacting to my rant about the architecture of serendipity, and the ways in which the paper frontpage forces serendipity, they’ve rolled out a very clever article skimmer. It doesn’t provide quite as much “bait” to hook you on a story as front-page blurbs do, but vastly more than the online edition does. And it’s got all sorts of clever keyboard commands that make browsing easier.
It’s possible that the NYTimes geeks may not be the folks who figure out how to unlock the potential of that remarkable newsgathering organization. The Times has released a collection of developer APIs, allowing access to very useful widgets, like the Times People pages. The examples offered of what one can do with these tools are pretty weak at present, but I know that I’ve printed out the API documentation and am sleeping with it under my pillow in the hopes of coming up with an innovative new ap.
It’s not just US newspapers that are innovating. My friend Mohamed Nanabhay of Al Jazeera talks to the Journalism.co.uk blog about technical innovation at the Qatar news company. Al Jazeera is sharing video content with the Independent newspaper in the UK, releasing lots of material under Creative Commons and partnering with Ushahidi to visualize violence during the recent Gaza conflict. Most folks in the US, I find, misunderstand Al Jazeera so badly that they won’t look to the company for journalistic innovation, which is a shame, as Mohamed and his team are one of the groups that understands that media companies need to break disciplinary boundaries and find new ways to deliver news around the world.