I want to do a couple of posts on the LA Times, triggered in part by the Hiltzek news, over the next few days.

There are two issues here, one petty and one serious. Let me get the petty issue out of the way first, and then let’s spend some quality time on the serious one. This overlaps my professional life enough that I want to both approach it with care, but also to claim a little bit of authority in that much of what I’ve done for the last three years has been to advise major companies – including one publisher – on how to respond to “Web 2.0” and the rise of “social media” – like blogs.The petty issue is pretty simple; the LA Times gave a column to a business writer who was well-credentialed (a Pulitzer, no less) and aggressive, but whose politics and worldview were, in my eyes, so doctrinaire that very little of what he wrote was original; we could have cut-and-pasted policy papers from SEIU and press releases from the state Democratic party and had an equivalent level of analysis (note that both the SEIU and Democratic party do engage in analysis – often very good analysis, but it’s deeply partisan analysis). He was, to boot argumentative and rude, and when challenged, was fundamentally just irrational and bizarre.

So I disagree with him on some policy issues, don’t think much of his analysis, and found his behavior bad enough that I’d probably have banned him from Winds.

And then there was the sockpuppetry. He lost his column over that, was moved to sports, and over the intervening time has managed to position himself to get his column back, starting next month.

We’ll see whether his analysis has become more interesting, and whether he has begin to ‘get’ the kind of behavior that’s needed in the world of journalism 2.0, where the audience gets to talk back. I hope he does, on all counts, and sincerely hope that his column is a fruitful source of thought and debate over the state of things here in California – which are troubling.

That’s the petty stuff. Take a look at these posts on this site and on Patterico’s site for an overview. I can’t link you to Hiltzik’s side of things, or to the Times’, because you won’t find it on the LA Times – his old blog, and all discussion around this issue, appear to have vanished (or at least I can’t find them using the Times’ search engine).

For the serious stuff, I’d like to dig into this whole episode from the point of view of a Web 2.0 strategist, and offer the Times what I hope they will take as constructive criticism. Because, Lord knows, they need it.

By the current social media playbook, they have done pretty much everything wrong, and continue to do so. Now, I don’t think that social media is the automatic answer to any question, but one point I make to my clients is that regardless of what you want or how well you think it applies, your customers, employees, and stakeholders are increasingly used to engaging via social media – and they increasingly get that kind of engagement from other brands they are involved with. So even if you don’t plan to make it central to your brand presence, you need to figure out how to react to people who think you are.

So – late on Friday I went over to Jamie Gold’s blog and left a comment critical of the decision, in light of the history. It was a comment from the petty side of the issue (my disagreements with Hiltzik’s analysis and behavior). As of today (Sunday night) it’s not there. I doubt it will be there in 24 hours, although I hope it will.

Here’s why. The first thing all my clients say when we talk about allowing user-generated content onto their websites is “What about people who don’t like us? Won’t they say mean things?”

Yes, they will. And if you’re smart, you’ll engage those mean things in a thoughtful and engaging way, and if you do that well, you can make a critic into a fan. here’s what I consider to be the gold standard for that kind of online aikido:

Forget the brilliant execution (and resources) behind this video – think about the attitude that looked at a petty criticism like that and saw in it an opportunity.

People want to engage with the ‘megaphones’ that are in all our lives; on a micro scale, having this blog has introduced me to people interested in engaging with me. People want – and increasingly expect – engaged conversation with the people they see on TV, read in their newspapers, or even – God forbid – elect to office.

In the next few posts, I want to go through the history of the Times around this one issue and try and highlight what they did badly, and make suggestions about what they could have done that would have made it better. I’ll be interested in hearing what you folks all think.

Patterico points out to me that LA Times sockpuppet master Michael Hiltzik is getting his business column back.

Here’s Times Reader’s Rep Jamie Gold:

A 27-year Times veteran, Michael has distinguished himself since returning to Business a year ago (after a brief stint in Sports) with smart, analytical stories, many of which have been followed by our competitors.

Now the facts of that little hiatus were somewhat more complex. Here’s former editor Dean Baquet (as cited at Patterico):

Baquet called Hiltzik’s undoing a professional tragedy, but said he knew immediately that – regardless of what the blogosphere thought – Hiltzik’s use of pseudonyms to post favorable comments about himself and disparage his critics violated Times ethics. Baquet said he wasn’t certain sure how to punish Hiltzik until he read about Ken Lay’s trial last week and thought how the Enron saga would make great fodder for a business columnist. He realized then, Baquet said, that his business columnist – Hiltzik – could no longer write credibly about duplicity in the business world. There’s no place, he said, for dishonesty under the Times banner.

Well, hey – Baquet’s gone, so why does that matter?

Well, in a comment I left on Gold’s blog – a comment that has yet to see the light of day – I said:

“It’s somehow perfect timing that a dishonest reporter is brought back to cover business at a time when dishonesty is so much a part of the story.

Look, I’d kind of like the LA Times to survive; when will it become apparent to the powers-that-be there that what you are selling me is credible information.

And reporters like Hiltzik – who have shown that they have a – broad – set of values about candor and honesty don’t help convince people like me that the apples in your produce stand don’t have worms in them.

Oh – and were you not going to mention why?

MD”

The media keep thinking they can sell us catfood and tell us it’s sushi. Until they stop doing that, the floor is going to slope downward pretty steeply for them as institutions.

That’s depressing to me. Los Angeles needs a strong voice. It hasn’t had one for years, and it looks today like it will be years until we get one.

Inspired by this strip at Day By Day:

Over at ExposureManager, we’ve just launched a new service for photoblogs called “BuyThisImage!” (notice the button below this image). I’ll use this as a testbed, and donate all the net proceeds to the best organization I can find that promotes human rights in Cuba. Leave suggestions in the comments.

I’ll take a moment and break my self-imposed silence (I decided I’d take off from blogging for three weeks while I deal with the blog move – it’s been weird…) and add my reminder to the remembrances of Pearl Harbor that have floated around the blogs. Not as many as in the past, and I think that outside the milblogs, there’s a real fatigue about issues of war and peace that has settled over not only the blogs but the commentariat as a whole.

That’s worrisome, because to paraphrase – we may be tired of war, but that doesn’t mean war is tired of us.

Here’s a quote from my local paper, the ever-thinning Daily Breeze:

When the distant drone of warplanes broke the peace of morning on that “day of infamy” 67 years ago, 19-year-old Seaman 1st Class Leonard Brugnola was sitting in a church pew, awaiting the morning service in Aiea, a hillside enclave overlooking the Pacific Fleet.

And when the first torpedoes splashed into the placid blue waters of Pearl Harbor, piercing the hulls of American warships, Fred Dietrich was on duty in the engine room of the USS Phoenix, where he served as a machinist.

“I was there that morning, and I won’t ever forget what happened,” Brugnola says. “The smell of burning oil, the cries for help – those things don’t leave you.”

Yet “Never Forget,” the rallying cry of millions of war veterans, is slowly fading for the witnesses of the sneak attack that propelled the U.S. into global conflict in 1941.

Now, nearly seven decades later, both longtime South Bay residents are among the few living survivors who saw the dawn of the war for America.

Their ranks thinned by age and time, World War II veterans are dying at a rate of 900 a day. Many fear the personal accounts of heroism and bravery that serve as living American history may slip away with them.

New soldiers, with equally-strong new memories, are taking their place. And their stories are equally a part of our patrimony and so our patriotism.

Today,Code Pink is holding its annual Los Angeles event: “War is SO Over: Prepare for PEACE!”

We can only hope…

It’s early Thanksgiving morning, and everyone else is asleep. I’ve washed the pots and pans from the dishes we prepped last night, and before the holiday madhouse begins, I thought I’d take a moment to express my public thanks – as opposed to the private ones I’ll be making at supper later today.

I am first and foremost thankful to the great nation that I’m a part of; humanity’s hopes given material shape. No one will kick in my door today, no matter what I write here, and I do not need to censor what I say or think because I fear what will happen if I do not. Rent Perseopolis sometime soon, and appreciate what we have achieved here.

I am thankful that we all see what we have achieved as a nation is imperfect and flawed, because that means that all of us follow the standards of being uncertain in our rightness and so willing to listen and learn. And because it gives all of us purpose in contributing however we can to making things better.

I am thankful for everyone who has struggled and suffered to give me and mine what we all enjoy today. From the earliest immigrants to the Founders to the poor soldiers of the Revolution and every soldier and worker and shopkeeper and engineer and lawyer – and yes, even every politician. We live on the shoulders of giants, and we all have a patrimony that we should be grateful for and thinking hard how we can improve.

I am thankful today for the women and men who endure hardship in my name; who wear the colors of my country and who have chosen to stand between my family and those who would harm them. Their mistakes are mine – because they are grounded in the political leaders I and others like me have chosen – and their honor is their own.

I am impossibly grateful for the explosion of ideas – good, bad, and insane – that have sprouted as all of us have been given the ability to speak out using tools like this blog. I have thought more, learned more, been more outraged, and seen my fellow humans better in the last six years of my life than in the other 49.

And I’m thankful for this place, where I’ve been able to think out loud, been challenged, corrected, changed my mind and stood firm and where I’ve forged my deepest friendships. I have learned so much here over the last few years, and that is the greatest gift of all to me – to refresh my ability to learn, to refresh my beginner’s mind.

Finally, and personally, I will thank my family – because they are my family and I’m so grateful to them for loving and accepting me – and because for all the crazy fits and starts, we have done three things very right – my son Eric who is far away, and his brothers Luc and Isaac who are asleep close at hand – who have grown into such wonderful young men and boys that I cannot find words enough to express how proud I am of them. So I’m thankful for Tenacious G, who married into this complex, crazy mess and to the boy’s two biological moms, who joined me in deciding that we were all parents first.

OK, enough of this – I’ve got stuffing to finish! Don’t forget to scroll down and donate to Project Valour-IT and give some wounded soldiers something to be thankful for today.

Update 2: It’s almost Thanksgiving and this is about to wrap up – if I can ask you to reach and consider donating if you haven’t – or consider on the the eBay auctions that are being held to benefit Valour-IT – everything you spend will go to helping wounded soldiers.

Update: We need more donors!! Donate, comment, and recognize that you’re doing a Really Good Thing.

Even before I had a soldier of my own, I’ve been a big supporter of Soldier’s Angels, the peer-to-peer organization that allows each of us to support the men and women of our military.

They are the kind of organization that is a no-brainer to get behind, regardless of your politics – because it’s about providing support to the soldiers and their families.

Right now, they are running a fundraiser for Project Valour-IT, which provides speech-controlled laptops to wounded soldiers. I was at an event where Chuck Z talked about what it meant to him, as a wounded and recovering solder – to suddenly be able to send and get email, to surf the web, to write letters. What it meant to no longer be helpless in one area of his life and to begin the long walk to independence and recovery of himself. When you listen to stories like that, it’s suddenly easy to understand why this is important.

Every day, from now to Thanksgiving, I’ll bump this post…when we’ve raised over $2,500 from this blog, I’ll stop.

Winds of Change mission statement 2.0:

What challenges will face the U.S., the West, the rest of the world that aren’t being discussed everywhere every day?

What opportunities exist – to these challenges or the widely discussed ones – that should be pursued?

What isn’t being talked about in the chattering class that should be? Winds should be a place where questions that are slightly off-center can be asked, and where answers that aren’t obvious should be proposed.

For the next four years, we’re going to hear endless partisan chatter from people who care a lot about it in publications and on sites where that is the focus. Winds isn’t one of those sites, and “impeaching Obama” or “destroying the GOP” aren’t going to be core topics here.

The goal for Winds, as I see it, is to be a place for interesting conversation about issues that possibly shows them in a new light.

Note that interesting conversation comes first; that means respectful engagement with the rest of us.

To that end, we’re working on Winds 2.0 which I hope will launch in early December (my attention and time are the throttling issues). I hope we’ll have an interesting lineup of writers (a lot of whom are people you se here today) and I truly hope that those of you who have participated will continue to do so, and will step up and occasionally author a piece here.

There will be some new rules – we’ll require registration from commenters – and, I hope, some new ideas.

Since I only have a limited about of bandwidth to devote to Winds, it will have to be split between blogging and managing the changeover. So both will get less than I’d like.

If you have author privileges at Winds today, please read this, think about it a bit, and drop me a note that sets out your interest in participating and some of the ideas you’d like to bring to the table.

While Winds isn’t a hugely popular blog, it’s got a pretty respectable level of traffic, and I’d like to see if we can find some smaller, interesting bloggers and reach out to them about joining us here – either by moving here, or by using it like Totten does as a way to put interesting posts out into the world and pull more people to his blog. So what new voices are out there that we ought to reach out to?

My goal is to port the site to the new platform (which will be MT 4.2 based) by the 1st week in December, then spend December establishing the lineup of authors and start the new year with a refurbished set of digs (and maybe Diggs) for all of us.

I’d bookmarked this to blog, finally got some time, and discovered that Ann Althouse had written pretty much word for word what I intended to write:

Deal with it, you candy-asses. If you eat meat, something like that is going on in the background for you too.

Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan has been arrested by Iranian security (h/t Harry’s Place).

Hoder – as he was widely known in the blogs is another OG blogger who has lived in Canada for some time to keep himself out of the hands of the Iranian police. While anti-mullah, he’s resolutely pro-Iranian, and we’ve actually knocked heads a bit on that.

The Guardian writes:

A prominent Iranian blogger has been arrested in Tehran and accused of spying for Israel after visiting the country with the aim of being “a bridge between Iranian and Israeli people”.

Hossein Derakhshan, 33, was reported by the Iranian website Jahan News to have confessed during initial interrogations to being involved in espionage.

The Jahan News site, which is widely believed to be linked to the Iranian intelligence services, also said he had been described in Jewish newspaper articles as a “friend of Israel”.

Derakhshan is known in Iran as the Blogfather after effectively launching the country’s craze for blogging. He has claimed 20,000 people a day read his postings.

He holds joint Iranian-Canadian citizenship and left Tehran for Toronto in 2000 after hardline opponents of then president, Mohammad Khatami, closed down the reformist newspapers he worked on. He also lived in London for a while.

Derakhshan had returned to Tehran three weeks ago. His blogs, in Persian and English, have been suspended.

…that’s not my heavy breathing in the background, it’s windy as heck (which is why the fires were so much trouble).