In February 2005, Human Rights Watch sent researchers Dr. Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault to Chad to talk with refugees who’d fled from the bombings and Janjawid militia attacks in Darfur. A pediatrician, Dr. Sparrow usually gives crayons and paper to children to entertain them while she interviews their parents. When she gave crayons to children who’ve fled Darfur, the results were harrowing and powerful.

Without prompting, the children drew scenes of horse-mounted militiamen riding into villages, large airplanes dropping bombs, and gun-wielding men raping women. The children’s drawings are a visual record of the atrocities committed in Darfur that aren’t available through any other medium. Human rights workers have received extensive testimony about bombing of villages and rape as a weapon, but these drawings provide visual evidence that international media organizations have not been able to provide, as they’ve been blocked by the Sudanese government from travelling in Darfur.

Realizing the importance of these drawings, Sparrow and Bercault started collecting school notebooks from children in refugee camps. They found in many of them that class notes suddenly gave way to sketches of battlefield scenes, burning huts and the destruction of villages. The two began interviewing children about their drawings:

Leila, Age 9
Human Rights Watch: What is going on here?
Leila: My hut burning after being hit by a bomb.
Human Rights Watch: And here? [Pointing to the drawing of what looks like an upside-down woman]
Leila: It’s a woman. She is dead.
Human Rights Watch: Why is her face colored in red?
Leila: Oh, because she has been shot in the face.
Human Rights Watch: What is this vehicle? Who is this in green?
Leila: That is a tank. The man in green is a soldier.

The researchers brought hundreds of drawings back to their offices. When I was at Human Rights Watch a week ago, there was a pile of these sketches on a conference room table, along side a pile of photographs from Janjawid militamen. What amazed me was how details in the children’s drawings echoed details from the photos - the stocks of the automatic rifles, the round shape of the houses, the posture of two gunmen riding on horseback. It was immediately clear to me that these drawings weren’t of weapons imagined by children, but eye witness accounts.

The New York Times will be running some of these pictures in their Sunday magazine, and German television will be featuring the images on a broadcast this weekend. Perhaps these images will help the world pay attention to the ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity taking place in Darfur and the refugee camps in Chad.

For more information:
HRW’s gallery of Darfur drawings
Articles from Human Rights Watch on Darfur
Passion of the Present - Online activists working to bring attention to the crisis in Darfur

Siim Teller appears to have picked up the LpkC idea (on his beautifully designed blog) and has run his own set of numbers, which appear to compare the circulation of Estonian newspapers and incoming Google links. Unfortunately, I don’t speak Estonian and can’t really tell you what he concludes, but perhaps someone who does speak the language can fill me in. It looks like the Postimees is the most popular Estonian newspaper, according to Google, but is slightly less popular than Siim’s own site!

Thanks to the help of friends at Technorati, I’ve been able to run numbers on most of the 150 top circulation newspapers in the US. For some papers, I continue to find no or few links on Technorati - I’ve hand-checked my script (which uses the Technorati API) to fill in values for sites that returned no links when searching the API. I’m at a bit of a loss with what to do for sites that return a list of links, but where Technorati’s site doesn’t return the “n links from m sites” information - for now, these sites are marked with a “0.1″ in my data set. (It is quite possible that I’m using the wrong URLs for these papers - if you see an error in the URLs I’m using, please let me know in my comments.)

The larger circulation newspapers appear to have, on average, more links per circulation than small papers. The mean LpkC for the top 20 papers by circulation is 15.10, the median is 6.42. Looking at the set of 111 papers for which Technorati turned up at least one link, the average is 4.45, mean 1.41. While that certainly suggests that bigger circulation newspapers are bloggier, the data is very messy and the correlation between circulation and LpkC is weak (R-squared = 0.23, p<0.001) - basically, there are lots of outliers in the data - big cirulation newspapers with low LpkC and small circulation papers with high LpkC.

The top 10 bloggiest papers in the US (as best as I can determine):
134.9 The Christian Science Monitor
62.89 The New York Times
40.32 The Washington Post
29.59 San Francisco Chronicle
18.76 The Boston Globe
18.40 The Washington Times
12.89 The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
12.07 The New York Post
11.69 The LA Times

Of those ten papers, CSM and the Washington Times both have circulations right around or under 100,000. Six (all the others the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) have cirulations above 500,000. (This is interesting - there are only 18 newspapers in the set that have circulations about 500k, and six make the top 10 list.)

Some noteable papers that just miss the top 10: the San Jose Mercury News (circulation 298,067, LpkC 11.69), the Providence Journal (236,476, 11.12), and the New Hampshire Union Leader (81,114, 10.98). While the Union Leader is the second-smallest newspaper in our set (next to the CSMonitor), it ranks 33rd in blog links.

The Providence Journal evidently has a set of very loyal bloggers (or a regular reader who is a prolific blogger) - it has 2630 incoming links from only 506 blogs, or 5.1 links per blog. (Average links per blog is 1.71, median is 1.53). Also high on this category are the Chattanooga Times Free Press (4.5), the Hartford Courant (4.05), Lincoln Journal Star (4.0) and Reading (PA) Eagle (4.0).

I included the Wall Street Journal in this set using “opinionjournal.com” - their publicly accessible Opinion pages site - as their URL. This is a partial solution to the “multiple URLs per paper” option, but I’ll need to do a complete set of URLs to treat all multiple URL-ed papers fairly. (Don’t wait up for this data - I’m on the road all of May…) Looking at this URL, the Journal gets an LpkC of 3.65, well below the mean and median for top-circulation papers, and 33rd overall in LpkC. While this is much higher than the score I initially tagged it with, it’s still surprisingly low given the paper’s large circulation and its influence outside the blogosphere.

Writing in the LSE Media Group Blog, David Brake observes that I’m unlikely to find UK newspapers “bloggier” than the Guardian, which he calculates as having an LpkC of 109.7. He’s right - the Guardian leads the pack, but British papers as a whole seem to be “bloggier” than US papers. Looking at the seven “quality” papers and four “popular” papers (as listed by the UK Audit Bureau of Circulation - and the classification is theirs, not mine), discarding zero values on Technorati, the mean LpkC for British papers is 20.97, median is 12.38, both of which are healthily above the values for the top 20 papers by circulation in the US.

The top 10 papers by LpkC, including the US and the UK, looks like this:

134.9 Christian Science Monitor
101.5 The Guardian
62.89 The New York Times
40.32 The Washington Post
29.59 San Francisco Chronicle
34.42 The Scotsman
29.59 Boston Globe
20.14 The Independent
18.40 The Washington Times
12.89 The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The Financial Times would place 11th, the Times of London 13th - 5 of the 13 bloggiest papers I’ve found are published in Britain. One possible explanation for this: perhaps Brits are more inclined towards media blogging than Yanks. I suspect there’s another answer - US bloggers often link to British newspapers for an “alternative perspective” on US stories, especially US involvement in international affairs. The large number of links to the Guardian - an unabashedly left-leaning paper - might reflect a large number of American liberals looking for alternative coverage in the British press.

Please keep the comments, questions and speculation coming…

Ethan’s Axiom #1: If you wish to be linked to by bloggers, write about blogging.

Ethan’s Axiom #2: Taking a swing at the Wall Street Journal never hurts your Technorati ranking.

It’s been very gratifying to see the links per circulation metric - or “El Pixie”, as Quinn has wonderfully dubbed it - make the rounds in the blogosphere. Part of the reason I post research in progress on my blog is that the web, as a whole, is a better review body than any set of colleagues (including my brilliant Berkman friends) could be.

But sometimes the blogosphere is unusually cooperative to this grateful researcher. Jay Rosen was interested in what the Wall Street Journal’s reaction would be to my claim that the Journal had a low lpkc score, and that said score was related to the Journal’s decision to make very little content available for free. So he asked Bill Grueskin, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Online what he thought. (You can do that when you’ve got the best media criticism blog on the web, as Jay does.)

Bill’s response, quoting from Jay’s post:

Jay: I don’t know enough about the methodology here to make a direct comment on the numbers. One thing I’d wonder is whether he’s including traffic to links from OpinionJournal.com, Dow Jones’ free website run by the Editorial Page. A quick keyword search for “OpinionJournal” on Technorati generates well over 3,000 links, and you get even more from searching for “Opinion Journal” (with a space). You’d also get more from including our other free sites, such as CareerJournal.com.

All that said, I don’t doubt we have fewer blog links than many free sites. We’ve taken steps to get more links, via our nightly emails to bloggers, our new page that displays all free stories, and we’ll initiate some more programs in the next few months. But look, when you ask people to pay for your content, you’re going to distribute less of it than when you give it away. I was no Macroeconomics 101 star, but even I can intuit that one.

And there are plenty of standards by which you can judge the impact of your journalism. Here’s another one: Around 10 p.m. Saturday, Wall Street Journal print reporter Susanne Craig broke the news on WSJ.com that Kenneth Langone is mounting a bid for the NY Stock Exchange. Atop today’s New York Times business section is the following, with a generous credit in the third paragraph: “The news was first reported … on the Web site of The Wall Street Journal.” That’s a link, too– one that doesn’t show up in a Technorati search, but that is visible to many people in our core audience.

In other words, take the links where you can get ‘em.

Jay emailed me last night and invited me to respond to Bill’s points. Here’s what I wrote:

As Grueskin suggests, I did not include OpinionJournal.com in the numbers I ran last week. I used what appeared to be the official news sites for the publications I considered, favoring a more popular URL over a less popular one when there was an obvious choice to be made - i.e., csmonitor.com rather than christiansciencemonitor.com. I’m running a larger set of numbers - all 150 newspapers that the Audit Bureau lists - today and plan on releasing those numbers in the next 48 hours or so. To do the Wall Street Journal - and several other papers - justice, I’ll likely need to tweak my numbers to consider multiple sites for media properties like the Journal that use several different URLs.

Giving the Journal the benefit of multiple URLs - wsj.com, wallstreetjournal.com, opinionjournal.com - their Technorati cosmos count increases to 8782. Given their large circulation, that’s still as LpkC of 4.17, which puts them between the Houston Chronicle and the Arizona Republic in the set of figures I posted last Thursday.

In other words, the Journal’s decision to put content behind a for-pay firewall has a definite influence on people’s linking practices. (The simple fact that eight times as many people link to their open opinion section as to their closed content section is also a likely indicator of this.) Clearly, the Journal has decided this is a tradeoff that makes business sense, as your interview with Grueskin elucidates. As Gen Kanai, commenting on my original post puts it: “Ethan, there’s a strong case for saying the exact opposite of your thesis: that the WSJ is the strongest presence online because they’re growing much faster than any other online news source AND they’re charging for their content. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but there was a recent interview with the head of the WSJ Interactive and he was basically very smug about the fact that his publication is a fee-service and that it had the highest growth rates in the industry.”

I’m in no way trying to say that the Journal is making a poor business decision, or that it’s not influential in a community outside the blogosphere, just that the Journal’s solution to the “how do we support a newspaper in the online age” question reduces its influence and impact amongst bloggers.

While I’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback - and some theorizing - on the Wall Street Journal’s low rank, I’ve gotten very little speculation on why the Christian Science Monitor - as well as the New York Times, Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle rank so high. I’d like to believe that the popularity of these papers is somehow connected to the fact that they do international news very well… but I don’t yet have numbers to support that suspicion. I’m working on a set of research scripts in preparation for a talk in Tokyo in early May and hope I will have more numbers before the talk.

Jay was good enough to offer his thoughts on why the Christian Science Monitor is so well-linked. Quoting from his email to me:

I think the reason why CSM ranks higher is that, organized by a logic other than market logic (a social gospel filtered through the peculiar history of that institution), it is more able to follow the advice of the influence model as Phil Meyer and Tim Porter sketch it. See:

http://www.timporter.com/firstdraft/archives/000413.html
http://www.timporter.com/firstdraft/archives/000425.html
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/6/ideas-essay-meyer.asp
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/03/29/nwsp_dwn.html

I think you would find that without necessarily having a whole model like Meyer’s, the editors’ thinking amounts to an approximation of what Meyer has in mind. Or much more in that direction, etc.

Also, the CSM is less likely to share a secular newsroom’s deafness to certain kinds of moral action questions that would interest a lot of the more influential poly blogs… like say UN scandals. Sometimes, Apartheid, this would cut left, sometimes right. Point is it’s a different cut on the news, and it tracks well with bloggers interests.

A cursory summary of the links Jay offers above: Phil Meyer, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina, has recently written a book called “The Vanishing Newspaper, Saving Journalism in the Information Age.” One of the key points of the book - which Meyer explores in the CJR piece - is that newspapers aren’t in the information, content or news business, but in the influence business. They offer influence that’s not for sale (their editorial content) and influence that is for sale (their ad space), and the quality of the former affects the value of the latter.

Meyer believes that print journalism is in a fatal decline - preciptated by the Internet - with most papers pursuing a strategy of “harvesting market position”:

Managers do it by raising prices and reducing quality so they can shell out the money and run. I know of no newspaper companies that are doing this consciously, but the behavior of most points in this direction: smaller newshole, lighter staffing, and reduced community service, leading, of course, to fading readership, declining circulation, and lost advertising. Plot it on a graph, and it looks like a death spiral.

Meyer believes that quality journalism will need to rely more and more on the non-profit sector for fiscal survival, pointing to the journalistic success of National Public Radio, and the Center for Public Integrity. While there are dangers in being beholden to foundations, he argues, they are no more severe than in being beholden to corporations. Ultimately, he argues, “The only way to save journalism is to develop a new model that finds profit in truth, vigilance, and social responsibility.” As Jay suggests, papers like the Monitor may be better positioned to pursue these new models than papers struggling to survive with less news, more ads, a smaller audience and decreased quality.

One of the most interesting responses to my post came from Ryan, a journalist with the Spokane Spokesman-Review, who blogs at The Dead Parrot Society:

My paper isn’t specifically listed in Zuckerman’s post, but based on our cosmos and a daily circ figure of 100,000, we have a ratio of 4.94. This makes us slightly non-bloggy. A few thoughts:

This is a bit frustrating, and maybe even a little embarrassing, because my paper has been at the forefront of the industry when it comes to embracing blogs internally. I was particularly proud of our election blog project last year, for example, and one of our opinion writers has put a lot of energy into developing a community around his blog, even convincing some readers to start blogs of their own…

But now we get to the elephant in our newsroom: The single biggest drag on our “bloggy” quotient is almost certainly our paid-content model. We have an awful lot of great free content, but business-side decisions put our print-first content behind a subscriber wall last year…

Actually, I put the Spokesman-Review’s LpkC a little lower - around 3.81. (I’m using the highest circulation reported by the Audit Bureau, not an average circulation.) But my more recent numbers - which now include about 100 of the top 150 papers - suggest that the median LpkC is around 1.93 (with the mean at 4.93), and that the Spokesman-Review ranks in the top third of American big-circulation newspapers - no mean feat, given the subscription firewall and the fact that the paper is not a “paper of record”.

(I’m about 12 hours away from posting new numbers - my friends at Technorati have been helping me resolve some technical issues, and I’ll share piping hot, fresh data with y’all tomorrow morning.)

Amy Gahran of Contentious was kind enough to blog my Christian Science Monitor idea yesterday both on her blog and on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits. And she went a wonderful step forward and asked Tom Regan, who runs CSM’s blogging, including his excellentMy American Experience blog, what he thought about my declaration of CSM’s blogginess. His answer includes the following:

That “mission” of the Monitor is every bit as important as making money – in fact, I can say after being here 10 years that it’s often more important than making money. It’s the reason I’m still here, since I’m not a Christian Scientist and have no link to the church other than I greatly enjoy working for its publishing arm.

We understand how the Internet helps us accomplish this goal, and that blogs are like a multiplier of the effect. As you said in your Poynter blog item, we also believe it’s going to help the bottom line in the long run as well.

But you should really read Amy’s whole post. Thanks, Amy for taking this idea and running with it. I guess this means I should actually finish the damned research this weekend, huh?

Thanks to everyone who’s linked to, or commented on, my early experiments with a blog link per circulation metric. Now that Quinn has pointed out that LpkC can be pronounced “El Pixie”, invoking images of a suave Latin leprechaun, I like the term much better.

A journalist emailed me earlier today, asking me to speculate on why the Christian Science Monitor has such disproportionate influence in the blogosphere. Here’s what I came up with:

- CSM adopted RSS very early on, and has been a fan of blogs since at least 2001 (Dave Winer observed in June 2001 that CSM was considering introducing a set of topical weblogs. He announced that CSM was “fully supporting” RSS on October 28, 2002, very early in the weblog syndication movement.) Because CSM was early to the game , bloggers have been reading the paper online for a long time and linking to it.

- CSM has astoundingly good international coverage - they maintain bureaus in 11 countries, which radically outpaces most newspapers. In 2002, the Monitor’s editor observed that CSM’s overseas presence was larger than all but 5 other US newspapers, and was more substantial than all three major US television networks. For bloggers like me who concentrate on international affairs, CSM (along with the BBC) are precious and popular resources.

- Becaue CSM invests so heavily in overseas reporters and stringers, they use comparatively little information from AP and Reuters, which large American newspapers rely heavily on for their overseas coverage. While AP and Reuters are likely blogged more often than CSM, they get blogged under the banner of each newspaper running their stories - a Reuters story on the Democratic Republic of Congo will get a few blog mentions under the New York Times, a few under the Globe, etc. But CSM’s content is unique, and uniquely associated with the csmonitor.com site in technorati.

Moving even further into the realm of pure speculation:

CSM stories often lead with a personal story - the experience of an individual person - rather than a statement of facts about an event. (Whether this is part of the CSM stylebook or just my observation of favorite CSM correspondents, I don’t know.) This, to me, seems like a very blogggy characteristic. Bloggers tend to be interested in good stories, not simple dry facts. It’s possible that the CSM’s style of reporting national and international news is unusually well suited for bloggers to pick these stories up.

I’ll add one more piece of idle speculation: one of the conclusions I drew from my experiments with media attention is that the BBC covers the world with a substantially different attention profile than all other media sources I explored. I would speculate that a profile of CSM’s coverage would look more like the BBC’s coverage and less like CNN’s coverage (for instance), with a similar heavy emphasis on the developing world. (Unfortunately, CSM’s search engine prevents me from running my GAP scripts on it and checking this hypothesis.)

CSM and BBC are both unusual in the sense that they are not purely market-driven media entities. BBC is supported by a license fee, CSM is supported by donations, as well as ad and subscription support, and published by the Church of Christ, Scientist. In both cases, the news bureaus - while not free of financial constraints - don’t have the pressure of a for-profit company demanding increased profits either through increased revenues or lowered costs. No, this doesn’t mean that all non-profit newspapers are worth reading or that papers owned by for-profits can’t do exemplary journalism. But it’s worth thinking about and looking into further.

A quick roundup of stories I’ll be watching over the weekend:

Severo Moto, leader-in-exile of Equatorial Guinea’s main opposition party, has disappeared. A central figure in last year’s bizarre coup plot - where Equatorial Guinea alleges that South African mercenaries, financed in part by Sir Mark Thatcher, were headed to Malabo, via Zimbabwe, to overthrow the government and install Moto as leader - Moto has not been seen in ten days, and speculation is growing that he may have been assasinated in Croatia or Italy. In the meantime, Equatorial Guinea has distinguished itself as one of the world’s most repressive countries, according to Freedom House. (Thanks to Ambiguous Adventure for the pointer to the Freedom House report.)

Despite protests and international concern, Togo’s interim president Abbas Bonfoh promised that Togo’s presidential elections would take place as planned, on Sunday. Yesterday, Togo’s Interior Minister Francois Boko held a surprise press conference, urging the government to delay the elections, warning of violence if polls were held this weekend - Bonfoh responded by promptly sacking Boko.

There are good reasons to believe that Sunday’s polls will not be free and fair and that there may well be violence. When Gnassingbe Eyadema died earlier this year, after ruling the nation for almost four decades, the Togolese government defied their constitution and installed Eyadema’s son, Faure, as president until international pressure forced him to step down. Faure Gnassingbé will now run against the opposition’s second-choice candidate, Emmanuel Akitani Bob, as opposition leader Gilchrist Olympio is not being allowed to participate in the elections. (Olympio has been living in Ghana and France since a 1992 assasination attempt forced him into exile. Togo’s election rules were changed in 2003 to require that any presidential candidate live in the country.) RSF is concerned that independent media outlets have been closed down prior to the election, and Head Heeb observes that there’s already been extensive pre-election violence.

Moving from small nations that few people read about to one that people can’t stop reading about: Rogers Cadenhead, blogger and geek, registered benedictxvi.com weeks before John Paul II’s death… along with ClementXV.com, InnocentXIV.com, LeoXIV.com, PaulVII.com and PiusXIII.com. Cadenhead was concerned that the domains would be bought up by pornographers, who have previously redirected domains like whitehouse.com to porn sites. Cadenhead is redirecting benedictxvi.com to Modest Needs, a matching service for small-scale charitable giving and reports today that the charity is receiving five times as many donations as on the average day. Dave Winer - Cadenhead’s friend and neighbor - has been urging him to use the domain for an independent journalism weblog focused on the new pope and his policies.

In the meantime, the new Pope has announced his email address - benedettoxvi@vatican.va.

All of which raises the interesting question: will future Popes look for original nom-de-Popes in the hopes of avoiding domain name conflicts?

I had an unexpected - and very pleasant - surprise Tuesday afternoon. I had a meeting scheduled with a friend who works on the web side of the Christian Science Monitor - when he arrived for our meeting, he had in tow Abraham McLaughlin, CSM’s Africa bureau chief and one of my favorite journalists. (One of the great things about being fans of journalists and academics rather than, say, atheletes or rock stars is that you sometimes get to have a cup of coffee with the people you root for. Meeting Abe is roughly as cool as meeting Bob Mould or Brett Farve.)

Our conversation covered all corners of the map, but one issue that particularly interested me was the disparity between CSM’s physical and virtual reach. It’s become a popular meme in the blogosphere that more people read the New York Times online than on paper. While that’s true, an order of magnitude more people read the Christian Science Monitor online than on paper. Digital Deliverance speculated a year ago that CSM had about 69,000 paper subscribers, and 1.7 million unique visitors per month to their website. In other words, by one count, roughly twenty-five times as many people read CSM online as on paper. (In case you haven’t been won over to CSM, you might want to read this article from the Newspaper Association of America which does an excellent job of summarizing just what’s so cool about this little paper.)

It’s hard to determine whether CSM has the largest disparity between online and offline readership because it’s very hard to get websites to divulge monthly viewership. But we can test another hypothesis - that CSM has the highest number of blog links per paper subscribers of any major US newspaper. Technorati lets us check total links from blogs, and the Audit Bureau of Circulation gives us the circulation of the 150 most widely read newspapers and the 100 most widely read daily papers in the US. CSM - with an estimated circulation of between 69,000 and 73,000 - has a smaller reach than the Sunday edition of the Green Bay Press Gazette. (Not to mention less than 2% of the Press Gazette’s coverage of the Packers.)

For instance, USA Today has the highest circulation of all US papers - 2,665,815. (It’s worth noting that circulation is a much smaller number than readership. The Audit Bureau estimates that 3.3 people read each copy of USA Today. Quickly scanning these readership numbers, I found a range of 2.4 readers per copy (the Detroit Free Press, the Hartford Courant) up to 4.4 readers per copy (the New York Times)). Technorati reported 17,800 links to URLs containing usatoday.com from 10,861 sources. This gives USA Today a link per thousand circulation (LpkC) score of 6.68.

By way of contrast, Christian Science Monitor, with 71,000 circulation (the midpoint of the estimates I could find) and 9,578 links from 4,636 sources has a LpkC score of 134.9, a score that’s more than double its nearest competitor, the New York Times with a score of 63.08.

I ran a quick set of numbers last night, considering the 20 highest circulation papers in the US, plus the 30th, 40th, etc., up to the New Hampshire Union Leader, the 150th highest circulation paper in the US. (Extrapolating from the data I have from the Audit Bureau, I’m estimating that Christian Science Monitor, with a circulation of 71,000, would rank 242nd in circulation amongst US newspapers.)

Technorati failed to give a useable response for several papers - this may have been a passing glitch, and I’m going to write a script tomorrow that lets me check these numbers automatically. For the 29 papers where I got a response from Technorati, the mean LpkC was 14.43. (Incidently, if anyone wants to come up with a pronounceable abbreviation, rather than “LpkC”, please go right ahead and post it in the comments…) But it’s substantially above the median - 3.26 and I end up seeing USA Today as the midpoint in my set between “bloggy” and “non-bloggy” newspapers.

The bloggiest newspapers I found were:
Christian Science Monitor - 134.90
New York Times - 63.08
Washington Post - 58.44
San Francisco Chronicle - 38.32
Boston Globe - 29.80
Seattle Post Intelligencer - 18.56
New York Post - 12.48
LA Times - 11.21

A couple of observations: A number of these papers - the NY Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times - are so-called “papers of record”. Their circulations include substantial readership out of their immediate geographic area, and they’re widely read internationally. It’s also interesting that some of the cities represented - Boston, San Francisco and Seattle, most notably - are deeply geeky cities, with large populations of technology workers who, I suspect, are more likely to blog than, say, the average steelworker. Finally, it’s worth noting that a couple of the papers included - the New York Post, the Boston Globe - are sometimes percieved as being ideologically-biased newspapers. It’s possible that conservative bloggers are seeking out the Post (and liberal bloggers the Globe) irrespective of their geography.

I’ve got a bit less certainty about the least bloggy newspapers - I used a sampling of low and medium circulation papers, rather than all papers, and I worry that, in one or two cases, I must be using the wrong URL to search for stories. (I don’t believe that only six links have been created to the Charleston Post and Courier since Technorati’s been tracking blog links. I suspect, instead, that Post and Courier stories get blogged under an URL other than charleston.net, the paper’s main URL.) But here’s the bottom 10 in my set:

Charleston Post and Courier - 0.06
New Hampshire Union Leader and Sunday News - 0.22
Middletown (NY) Times Herald-Record - 0.39
The Wall Street Journal - 0.40
Fort Myers News Press - 0.50
Atlanta Journal Constitution - 0.57
The Daily Oklahoman - 0.89
Canton Repository - 1.41
Newark Star-Ledger - 1.47
Investor’s Business Daily - 1.71

(Before anyone writes about the Charleston Post and Courier as the least bloggy paper in the nation, let me clarify. I considered only 32 of the 150 papers listed by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. As I said above, I suspect my data on Charleston may be off. And Technorati failed to give data on some of the papers considered. So there may well be a major paper less bloggy than Charleston that I haven’t found yet…)

Note the inclusion of the Wall Street Journal in this list. The Journal is notorious in the blogging community for hiding nearly all of its content behind a paid firewall. Despite the fact that it boasts the second-highest circulation of a US paper (2,106,774), it’s anemic in the blogosphere, with 910 links from 828 sources. Aside from the Journal and Investor’s Business Daily, the other papers on this list are regional newspapers without a national presence - whether or not the Canton Repository is a high-quality paper, even news junkies like me are largely unaware of it and unlikely to include it in our aggregators, unless we have an interest in events in Canton.

Two hypotheses I’d very much like to test: I suspect that many of the unbloggy newspapers don’t have RSS feeds (or have feeds that are hard to find, broken or badly implemented - i.e., a single feed for the entire paper.) And I suspect that inclusion or exclusion from Google News and Yahoo News has a tremendous impact on the “blogginess” of a newspaper.

With this data in hand, I’m pretty comfortable concluding that the Christian Science Monitor is uniquely influential in the blogosphere in proportion to its paper circulation. It’s also surprisingly influential in absolute blogosphere terms, ranking 7th in terms of total Technorati links, behind the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today and LA Times. It beats the Seattle Post Intelligencer (462,940 circulation), New York Post (686,207) and Chicago Tribune (963,927) in terms of Technorati links, despite having roughly one-tenth the paper circulation.

So what?

Well, almost all newspapers view the shift of readers from print to bits as something of a crisis. Newspapers know how to sell local, print ads and are now trying to figure out how to sell online ads to both a local and national market. And they’re trying to figure out how they advertise - at all - in RSS feeds. Some, like the WSJ, are putting content behind paid firewalls, or, like the NY Times, charging for access to archives. None of these systems is working especially well, and most mainstream journalists will tell you that they fear for the future of their publications.

The Christian Science Monitor must be facing an even more dramatic scenario than regional newspapers, which are still seeing some revenue from classified ads. CSM maintains several foreign bureaus, an expense most newspapers - tragically - have cut. Despite support from the Christian Science church, the paper is facing extreme financial hardship.

My numbers suggest that CSM is giving the blogosphere something that it’s not finding in other major newspapers - hence, the disproportionate linkage to CSM stories. And CSM is clearly reaching far more online users than paper readers. Is there a way for the Monitor to embrace it’s unique status and become the “official paper of the blogosphere”? Or is the Monitor slated to become one of the first - and most tragic - casualties of the move from paper to bits?

(Before anyone says it: yes, I’m interested in testing this idea outside of US newspapers - I need a single, reliable source for circulation statistics, though, and I need to think about how whether language will effect my technorati searches. If you’ve got a good source, please let me know. And if you’re interested in trying the 118 US newspapers I didn’t investigate, knock yourself out, and let me know how it goes - it’s probably going to be June before I have time to run the full data set.)

Bob Tedeschi, technology reporter for the New York Times, wrote an article on Monday about the financial troubles of online craft retailer Eziba, and their implications for artisans in the developing world. (The Times article will go under a for-pay firewall in a few days - this copy in the Wilmington Star may be remain unlocked.) Tedeschi implies that Eziba’s principals acted unethically during the company’s collapse by paying off a loan to a bank in Vermont rather than paying debts to artisan suppliers, including Rwandan genocide survivors.

In other words, this is exactly the sort of story I would blog. If it were true. Which it isn’t. I call attention to it not because it’s a good piece of journalism, but because it’s a hatchet job that includes major factual errors and unfairly characterizes the motives of key figures within Eziba.

Here’s the longest disclaimer I’ve ever put on a blog post: I was an investor in Eziba. My investments, totalling in the tens of thousands of dollars, were wiped out when Eziba was forced into bankruptcy earlier this year. I am a member of the board of the Eziba Artisans Trust, a nonprofit organization funded with Eziba founder’s stock (more on that later). Dozens of friends have worked for Eziba over the years, including some who were laid off when the company closed. Dick Sabot, the founder and chairman of the company, is one of my closest friends and was a board member of Geekcorps. Sherwood Guernsey, the attorney for Eziba, is my personal attorney and also a close friend and Geekcorps board member. In other words, I couldn’t have more conflicts of interest in writing about Eziba if I tried.

On the other hand, the fact that I’m so close to the story means that it’s been fairly easy to find some of the facts Tedeschi missed or ignored. (In some cases, I’ve got documents that contradict Tedeschi’s implications.)

Starting in 2000, Eziba imported handmade craft items from around the world and sold them online at prices that allowed the business to operate as a for-profit, and provide excellent wages for the artisans who sourced goods. In late 2004, the company began stumbling badly, due to operational errors (sending a huge shipment of catalogs to infrequent rather than frequent buyers) and the loss of a major line of credit.

Tedeschi begins his piece, “When Eziba, an online retailer, declared bankruptcy last year…”. This isn’t true. What Eziba did was an assignment for the benefit of creditors. ABC’s are an attractive way of winding down a company because they’re much faster - and much cheaper - than formal bankruptcy procedures. This was important to Dick and the other Eziba principals because it meant that creditors - including Rwandan genocide survivors - would get paid more quickly than they would in a formal bankruptcy.

Unfortunately, three of Eziba’s creditors filed petitions for involuntary bankruptcy. (None of these creditors, incidently, was an artisan or artisan group - they were all well-capitalized US firms.) So Eziba was forced into Chapter 7 bankruptcy. When a company is forced to liquidate, certain debts are paid first: employee salaries, state and federal taxes, fees to attorneys and bankruptcy trustees. Then secured creditors - i.e., creditors who have access to some sort of collateral - are paid next. Bankruptcy judges decide the order of payment for the remaining “ordinary” creditors.

Tedeschi implies that Eziba paid a $500,000 loan from Chittenden Bank - instead of paying other creditors - because Dick was afraid Chittenden would seize his personal assets. This is bullshit. The Chittenden loan was secured first by Eziba’s assets (which Overstock.com paid $500,000 for) before being secured by personal assets - had Eziba defaulted, Chittenden would have seized the corporation’s assets in a bankruptcy process, because, as a secured creditor, they were first in line. Because Sabot and others were hoping to rescue the company after ABC, they needed a relationship with a bank. Had they forced Chittenden to become a bankruptcy creditor, it’s very unlikely that the bank would have lent money to them in the future. So they paid Chittenden a) because they were the first creditor in line if the company underwent liquidation and b) because they needed Chittenden on their side to attempt to rescue the company.

But what about the genocide survivors? Didn’t the company principals have a moral responsibility to pay poor artisans before paying a US bank?

As it turns out, it’s one of the worst things Eziba could have done under US bankruptcy law. Once secured creditors and other special creditors (employees, taxes, etc.) are paid, bankruptcy judges work very hard to ensure that there are no preferential payments of debts. In other words, just because you always liked ABC Paper Company and hated the bastards at DEF Shipping, you can’t pay off ABC at the expense of DEF. To prevent this from happening, bankruptcy judges look very closely at all payments a company made prior to liquidating. If the company paid back debts preferentially, bankruptcy trustees send demand letters ordering those funds to be returned to the company so they can be distributed between all the creditors.

In other words, had Eziba paid artisans and not other creditors, those artisans - including the Rwandan genocide survivors - would find themselves in a legal morass, ordered to repay monies paid to them in the hopes of getting that money back through the bankruptcy process. Tedeschi doesn’t bother to explain this in his article - instead, he quotes a bankruptcy specialist at Harvard who simply gets it wrong. Elizabeth Warren is quoted as saying, ‘”Until it filed for bankruptcy, company management decided the order of payment,” she said in an interview. “They preferred the bank, while the artisans were shut out. They may have had business or personal reasons for doing that, but they didn’t have legal reasons.”‘

Yep, the company decides order of payment up until bankruptcy. But if you know that bankruptcy is a possibility, you want to avoid making preferential payments, because once liquidation begins those payments will be recalled. In this case, the recall of those payments would have dragged a bunch of lawyerless Rwandan basketweavers into a legal hell (in another country, in a foreign language). Arguably the moral thing to do in that case is not to pay those basketweavers. Or perhaps pay them and hire some US-based bankruptcy lawyers for them as well.

But hey, the way Tedeschi tells the story is quite a bit more compelling and gives the head of Overstock - who Tedeschi reminds us has a PhD in Moral Philosophy - a chance to sneer at Eziba’s motives. (Tedeschi doesn’t bother to tell us that Dick has worked in development economics, as an academic, world bank consultant and philanthropist, for nearly his entire professional life. Guess it doesn’t fit his narrative quite as neatly as the detail about Overstock’s CEO does.)

Here’s what Tedeschi doesn’t tell you. Dick and others have been paying artisans out of their own pockets rather than forcing them to wait through the bankruptcy process. I know this because I’m on the board of the Eziba Artisans Trust and I’ve signed board resolutions designed to let us use the Trust as a vehicle to pay debts owed to artisans. And, lest you think this was done in response to Tedeschi’s insinuations, we signed the document weeks back, when it became clear how long it would take to get artisans paid through the bankruptcy process.

Nobody’s happy when a business goes under, especially a business that was explicitly designed to benefit poor people in developing nations. But implying that Eziba’s principals were somehow trying to screw over the people they’d set up a business to benefit - when the facts demonstrate otherwise - is dishonest and shameful. For the price of a good (though demonstrably false) story, Tedeschi tarnishes the reputation of a group of people who tried very hard to do the right thing. He, and the Times, should be ashamed.

I received excellent feedback on the first draft of the technical guide to internet anonymity I wrote a few days back for Global Voices. One of the questions I was asked (multiple times, and sometimes quite forcefully!) was why I hadn’t included the Tor (The Onion Router) network in the draft document.

The simple answer: I hadn’t had time to play with the system yet, and couldn’t talk about it in other than theoretical terms. (And I have this thing about not praising or panning software without actually using it…)

But I had some “free” (heh) time this morning and wanted to fire it up so I could add a section to the document, and see if Tor is something I’d want to run on a regular basis.

I was pretty damned impressed with the ease of installation of Tor on my Mac. I was all set to blame the Tor folks for releasing a broken .dmg file (the format used for Mac installation packages), when I discovered that I couldn’t install any .dmgs after installing Apple’s 10.3.9 update - nice work, Apple. (If you’re getting this page as a response to a search query for error -536870208 after installing 10.3.9, try running Disk First Aid, fixing any permissions errors you encounter and restarting. Worked like a charm for me.) But Tor installed itself and Privoxy, an exemplary adblocker and proxy, with almost no intervention on my behalf. After a restart, I only had to change preferences in Firefox, setting 127.0.0.1:8118 as my proxy for HTTP and HTTPS, to get the system up and working.

(Uninstallation is another matter. The installer doesn’t have an uninstall option. And the Tor-FAQ wiki is less than helpful regarding uninstallation: “This depends entirely on how you installed it. If you installed a package, then hopefully your package has a way to uninstall itself. If you installed by source, I’m afraid there is no easy uninstall method. But on the bright side, by default it only installs into /usr/local/ and it should be pretty easy to notice things there.” Gee, thanks.)

Uninstallation aside, it’s pretty clear that the developers of Tor are thinking hard about usability - as I read the draft of the paper they’re now working on, Challenges in Low-Latency Anonymity, I felt a certain amount of contrition about the rant I wrote last week about usability and anonymity. (Only a little contrition. I am a blogger, after all.)

Paper authors Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson and Paul Syverson make it clear that usability is one of the major goals of the system:

“The ideal Tor network would be practical, useful and anonymous. When trade-offs arise between these properties, Tor’s research strategy has been to remain useful enough to attract many users, and practical enough to support them. Only subject to these constraints do we try to maximize anonymity.”

This isn’t just because Tor’s architects are trying to be nice to their users. It’s because no anonymity strategy works if there are insufficient users. If you’re the only user of a particular strategy, you’re pretty damned visible to someone doing network analysis.

“Usability for anonymity systems contributes to their security, because usability affects the possible anonymity set. Conversely, an unusable system attracts few users and thus can’t provide much anonymity.”

Because they’re worried about maintaining large networks of users and anonymizing servers, they’re also very concerned about who uses Tor. If all the users are bad guys, it’s unlikely that universities, ISPs and other organizations capable of hosting high-bandwidth nodes will continue to participate.

“…the network’s reputability affects its operator base: more people are willing to run a service if they believe it will be used by human rights workers than if they believe it will be used exclusively for disreputable ends… So the more cancer survivors on Tor, the better for the human rights activists. The more malicious hackers, the worse for the normal users.”

So how well does Tor work, from the perspective of someone trying to recommend tools to human rights workers? For the most part, it works really, really well. Using IPID and noreply, I checked the IP I appeared to be coming from a couple dozen times. Six different “exit nodes” registered, from around the world. (Oddly, the first was a Harvard server, which caused me to worry for a few seconds.)

Tor automatically generates a path through proxy servers, encrypting traffic so that each router only knows the next router in the chain, and doesn’t know the contents of your packets. I’m guessing that Tor maintains each of these chains for a few minutes, changing them if they get congested, or otherwise when they “time out” - I noticed that I had the same exit node for a couple minutes at a time. (It’s, of course, possible that the intervening chain changed and the exit stayed the same.)

The ever-changing IP addresses lead to some odd web behaviors. Google, which uses geolocation to determine what nation you’re coming from, has greeted me in English, Dutch, Japanese and German over the past four searches. (And, by the way, Google clearly is using different algorithms for different languages - I get very different results for searches involving “Tor” in countries where the word means “bridge”.) That’s okay - I keep meaning to brush up my language skills. But it looks like I’m not going to be an especially good Wikipedian while using Tor. I’m blocked from editing pages because I’m coming from an anonymous proxy. Logging into my user account doesn’t help - I’m still blocked. (Oddly, this turns on and off as well. Perhaps Wikipedia is only blocking certain Tor routers?) The block page invites me to email Jimmy Wales to request a block exception and tells me that if I’m really in so much danger that I need strong anonymity that I shouldn’t contribute to Wikipedia:

And Frontier, the weblog server that Harvard runs, fails utterly, complaining when I post that “the referrer did not match the expected referrer”.

Oh, and it’s slow. Noticeably slower than just using a single proxy, especially when accessing sites with a lot of images. (Flickr, for instance, is a miserable experience through Tor.) This makes sense - each file requested (each image) needs to get encrypted and decrypted several times. Even though each of those operations is pretty quick, they add up when you’re requesting a couple dozen images at a time.

But hey! Those are the only problems I’ve found. Super-complex javascript-dependent pages like gmail work just fine, and I can post to my WordPress blog just fine. And there are some lovely side effects to installing Tor and Privoxy - Privoxy does an astoundingly good job of blocking ads, so good that I’ll likely keep it running even when I disable Tor.

How useful is Tor for the theoretical whistleblower I talk about on Global Voices? Pretty darned useful. There’s three major drawbacks to the system for that imagined user:

Tor routers are vulnerable to blocking - a determined Internet censor could download Tor, watch what exit nodes get used and block those on a national level. The same problem exists with any anonymous proxy strategy, but the fact that there are only 100 Tor nodes means this is potentially a huge problem. Furthermore, it would require a very sophisticated user to keep Tor running once censors figured out how to block certain nodes. You would need to know what nodes are being blocked and then tell Tor to stop using those nodes for your messages.

That said, I’m impressed so far, and suspect that Tor will become increasingly popular for net surfing and publishing in highly monitored countries. I’ll be very interested to hear from my buddies at the Open Net Initiative whether they’re seeing active attempts to block Tor - I guarantee that we’ll see these efforts soon if Tor keeps growing.