I haven’t worked with Jack. I barely know him. We’ve met twice, both times at an investigative journalism conference, where people hover around him in ever-tightening orbits until they get to talk with him, and I skulk around with the other young journalists waiting for our openings. I enjoyed meeting him; he’s a nice guy. It’s an odd feeling referring to him as “Jack” in a public setting like this, because that makes it sound like we’re buddies. We do follow each other on Twitter, which might have sounded like weird nonsense a few years ago, but which now means something. (I consider it a badge of honor, no matter how easy it is to hit the “follow” button; as far as I know, Jack is careful about whom he follows.)

Four people were laid off at Slate yesterday, and Jack Shafer was one of them. Shafer is good at Twitter, and the news is still bouncing around over there. It’s gotten a lot of attention among the chattering classes.

While we’re talking about layoffs, also yesterday, 20 people lost their jobs at newspapers around St Louis, and the Bay Area News Group announced 120 would be cut during an upcoming consolidation. Media is a tricky business these days.

What might might explain the widespread public reaction to the Slate layoffs are that these are journalists with a national audience whose personalities came through in their work. Mass layoffs at newspapers can still feel anonymous (unless, of course, you’re the laid-off or in their circle of friends and family). But guys like Noah and Shafer, who I’ve been reading since college more than a decade ago, bring the concept of professional instability back into sharp relief.

They’ve had an opportunity many other journalists would love to have, and I’d say they earned it. Juliette Lapidos is a sharp, efficient observer; check out her recent piece on the politics of Parks and Recreation, one of those I-wish-I’d-written-that articles. I happen to follow June Thomas on Twitter, where she has an offbeat kind of charm and seems to watch a lot of television. It was Tim Noah who got me hooked on Slate. His forthcoming book on inequality in America will surely be required reading. Though he ranges widely and seems to have had a much different background than me, reading him on topics like class and status was to be reminded of where I came from (or don’t come from). And if any one writer kept me coming back to Slate as an avid reader, it was Shafer.

Shafer has written about this sort of thing in the past. Earlier this summer, he even collected two columns‘ worth of notes from journalists who’d been fired! A couple years ago, he wrote about the wave of buyouts across media, which is now uncomfortably resonant:

The “retirement” of the buyout brigade has the added benefit of loosening the ugly stranglehold the boomers have over the press. I may be risking self-extermination by advocating wholesale boomer expulsion, but there are just too many of us—especially the older variety—in top slots for journalism’s good. The sheer weight of our presence blocks the promotion of the next generation of talented journalists to the most desirable beats.

We like our nice salaries, we enjoy our benefits and vacation time, we dig our place in the pecking order, and we expect to live forever. So why should we leave? Our intransigence not only gives our product a rancid boomer tang—who can blame nonboomers for being repulsed?—it tends to stifle innovation.

Ouch! But Classic Jack. Shafer didn’t fall into that professional groove (nor his colleagues), and his point is as easily applied to tenured professors or others who ease into a late-mid-career doldrum. I don’t think anyone, young or old, begrudged his role at Slate, except maybe Rupert Murdoch, if Murdoch deigned to notice. And as the American Journalism Review profile published yesterday points out, he writes like a much younger writer. (Aside: a favorite part of that piece is the sullen-sounding contribution from Tom Goldstein, dean of the journalism school I attended despite carefully reading Shafer’s thoughtful evaluation of j-schools.)

So I figure Jack Shafer will land on his feet. It might take some time, as these things do. He’s gotten more positive recommendations and fantasy job offers in the last day than I’ve gotten my whole life. If I had the right publication and a budget, I’d hire him. (Fantasy job offer.) Wouldn’t you? Look at the tweets where people imagine Jack’s reaction to the outpouring of online adoration, or how he should be the one to cover it, or where he should go next. It’s like people have a Jack Shafer Platonic Ideal and finally have a reason to spill it all over Twitter. I smell a fan-fiction opportunity here. Jack, capitalize on this.

And so, for whatever it’s worth, even though last night Jim Cramer tweeted the following,

Hitting the night spots in Bismarck. Shocked about Shafer, loved that guy.

24 August 2011 6:08 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@jimcramer

Jim Cramer

I muddle on somehow and continue to refer to Shafer in the present tense.

**********************

Wait! I do have something specific to thank Jack Shafer for:

Last Sunday, as Tripoli was overrun with rebel fighters, I ruminated:

Curious what will they do with Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber returned to Gaddafi's benevolent embrace.

21 August 2011 3:12 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@telesle

Tim Lesle

Which Jack then re-tweeted (technically modify-tweeted, if you wondered what the MT meant):

MT @telesle: What will they do with Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber returned to Gaddafi's benevolent embrace.

21 August 2011 3:13 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@jackshafer

Jack Shafer

And that was then retweeted by someone on Twitter called @morgfair:

Who turns out to be Morgan Fairchild. And then she followed me. Welcome aboard, Morgan! I’m not sure how to describe what I’m feeling,* but I appreciate the follow.

And we still don’t know what will happen with al-Megrahi.

Good luck, Jack!

*Update: It’s cool! In retrospect, I think I’m just humble-bragging.

You can read it here: The Toiletization of the West

Both Shane Bauer’s and today’s piece by Daniel Lametti in Slate share many of the same ideas: the Sikirov research, the first-world/third-world toilet divide, the physiological contortions spurred by modern toiletry, and of course the perching experiment. To be fair, I don’t think you could write about this stuff without mentioning these very things, so the overlap is unsurprising. If anything, Bauer advances a decidedly post-colonial argument: the appeal of anti-natural toilet design as civilizing agent. Meanwhile, Lametti reminds us of the capitalists and their toilet entrepreneurship.

When Bauer and his friends were captured by Iran, I searched for some of his work out of curiosity, and discovered this essay.* (I knew of a few of Bauer’s projects, having met him once or twice at Berkeley, where our interest in photojournalism overlapped.) I found it strangely resonant at the time, as many people on Twitter are finding Lametti’s piece today. Maybe it revived, for me, the suppressed, culturally jarring memory of a Chinese railway bathroom lined with doorless squat stalls. Or maybe it’s just because everyone poops and is secretly fascinated by it.

______________________________________________________________________

*N.B. for F.C.: I’m assuming it’s the same Shane Bauer due to the mention of spending time in the Middle East; his living in California; the fact that his fellow prisoner, Josh Fattal, is listed on the About page; and the site affiliating itself with the Aprovecho Research Center in Oregon, where Fattal was once a staffer. Please let me know if it’s a different Shane Bauer.

Lynn Hirschberg’s final celebrity profile for the NYT Magazine knocks the musician M.I.A. down a notch or two on the credibility scale. M.I.A., aka Maya Arulpragasam, comes across as possibly well-meaning, but also self-righteous and misguided. (And reminds us of how much we love the term “radical chic.”) Hirschberg includes little observations that, if left out of the story, would have given it a much different tone. Perhaps most-cited is the following:

“I kind of want to be an outsider,” [M.I.A.] said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

Ah, the perilous fry. So tasty, yet, as NY Mag’s Vulture blog and others have realized, shot through with the risk of unflattering revelation if eaten in the presence of Ms. Hirschberg.

How might the french-fry phrasing sound if combined with other quotes set down for posterity? Would it be so bad?

________________________________

“I’m as devastated as you are by what I’ve seen here today,” said BP’s Tony Haywood, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

“I feel your pain,” said Bill Clinton, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

“All we are saying is give peace a chance,” said John Lennon, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

“We tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco,” said Sarah Palin, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

“The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die,” said Ted Kennedy, eating a truffle-flavored French Fry.

“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” said George W. Bush, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

“Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the,”’ said Mary McCarthy, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

“My failures have made me look at myself in a way I never wanted to before,” said Tiger Woods, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

“I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum which is what I am,” said Terry Malloy, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

“To have served in this office is to have felt a very personal sense of kinship with each and every American,” said Richard Nixon, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

“As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again,” said Scarlett O’Hara, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

“Please, sir, I want some more,” said Oliver Twist, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

So if you’re going to stick with the same train, there’s nothing to be done but hoist up the cars, roll out the old wheels, and install a new set that fits the tracks.

Photo by Nathan Messer used under Creative Commons.

———

I’ve been thinking about that lately as the media froths in frenzied anticipation of an Apple tablet. The tablet, for which we all have high hopes, is being heralded as the latest thing to save (print) media. Surely it will change how we interact with media online, and it will no doubt provide many opportunities for innovation. But it’s all left me with a nagging question. How are we going to do it?

If these media outlets are serious about going through with this, then creating a feature-rich publication full of interactive graphics and video on a regular basis means fundamentally altering the process from story conception through reporting and into design, editing, and production. (Even more so if they want to maintain editorial standards using the same, probably reduced, staff.) It means people who’ve spent a career working in print have to figure out which combination of media work best to tell a specific story and how producing that works, shepherding the print story through the process along with, say, a video or an interactive Flash application.

For the last few years, I’ve helped teach dozens of journalists how to plan for, use, edit, and integrate multiple media (video, audio, photo, Flash, etc) at the Knight Digital Media Center at Berkeley’s journalism school. They come from news organizations wrestling with their online presence and product. Yes, participants pick up concrete skills, and some actually develop and use them when they return to their newsrooms. But what I consider the key benefit of the experience is the understanding they gain of of the relative strengths and weaknesses of specific forms and when best to use them, a kind of literacy of multimedia journalism. They learn that some things that look easy to make are actually quite hard, sometimes things that seem hard to do can be done relatively easily, and most of it takes more time than they thought. All of it useful whether they are producing it themselves, or commissioning and overseeing these kinds of projects.

When I was a geology student, the more I learned about rocks and earth systems and what goes into making the planet work, the more my perspective on the landscape changed. There was the view as I used to see it, and the view as a geologist sees it. Happens all the time, as someone develops a relationship with a set of knowledge or a craft. After the KDMC workshop, people who arrived with little or no experience could begin to figure out how a video story was shot or a radio piece was put together because they had come to understand the tools and the process.

Anyway, back to gauge breaks and bogey replacements. The media organization is the train. There’s a fixed destination (millions of adoring readers and viability, if not profit). They can see a route that will lead them there. But there’s a border where the track is interrupted. On one side, the tracks are the traditional methods that they’ve employed for years, and on the other the tracks are a different size, a larger set of responsibilities and new methods of production. Hesitate too long at the border and risk being left behind; push forward without planning and risk jumping the tracks entirely. I’m curious to see how they do it, whether they re-tool their organizations, and what it might mean for me as a freelancer. How are they going to change the wheels?

NOTA BENE

• I’m not saying everyone needs to take the KDMC workshop. But I do believe that editors are going to have to expand their sensibilities and come to a better understanding of timing. It’s one thing to rewrite a section at the last minute, another to re-edit an audio story or re-cut narration at the same time. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it can happen. In individual fields—a radio station, a design firm, a news broadcast—they might be able to do handle that element easily. But here it’s a question of timing the tides so that all boats rise together.
• The general manager of FOLIO magazine, Tony Silber, has a 2010 prediction: “Staff sizes will rebound as managers realize that staffs designed for print can’t do print and a whole host of new initiatives on top of that, at least not effectively.” I agree about the second part, but we’ll see about the first, whether media organizations will invest in more people for regular production. (Incidentally, in that same feature, Bob Cohn, at the Atlantic, makes a hesitant case for collaboration, an issue that desperately needs addressing at another time.)
• If all this tablet stuff works out, expect a resurgence in Flash. Some people are very anti-Flash. If you have the option of using Flash or not, often people will advise against it. It’s long been a kind of black box for metrics and contents aren’t picked up by search engines. But we can hope for innovations on that front, because it sounds like these tablet apps will be built in Adobe AIR, which a contact at Adobe says ought to be known simply as Flash for the desktop. (Tweetdeck, if you use that, is an AIR app.)
• Why hasn’t more of this type of stuff been done already? While the physical engagement of a tablet and the user experience will be new, especially in terms of getting around some HTML design constraints, many of the component features won’t: video, Flash, etc. I guess the tablet has finally spurred media outlets to seriously think about enriching their online arms. Please send me examples of outlets that currently make good use of multimedia, if you have them (other than the New York Times).
• And as tablet anticipation goes up, Jack Shafer at Slate inevitably bats it down.
• Disclosure: I have a freelance relationship with Wired Magazine, another of the expected tablet publications. My views in no way represent those of Wired or Condé Nast, and are not informed by any special insight as a result of that relationship. I have no knowledge of what any publishing groups with tablet plans are doing beyond what they have publicly announced.
• I still believe text and informational graphics are the most efficient mode of communication for media producers and consumers. Just thought I’d throw that in. That’s like the number one thing for people jumping into multimedia to remember. But that doesn’t mean it’s always the best way to tell a story. Otherwise we’d never see photo essays.
• BONUS: For some mind-numbing fun, see the CIA’s thorough list of how much rail each country has and what size gauges they use.

Umbrellas are one of the things I remember from Korea, Japan and China. As a boy, I think I was surprised to see people using umbrellas when it wasn’t raining. But some do use them when it’s sunny, so encountering people using umbrellas to shield themselves on a bright day at Tiananmen wouldn’t be so strange. At least, not until they turn out to be plain-clothes security agents.

If you haven’t seen his Hannah and Her Sisters, I’m spoiling things a bit by putting it here; I think of this as the climax of that movie, though we can debate that.

But when I watched it—and, especially, heard it—I couldn’t help thinking of Ira Glass. The tone, the delivery, the tics and timing of the narration. The actual story, as told. I suspect that our Mr. Glass learned a lesson in storytelling from Mr. Allen’s films (as many others have).

In fact, the pacing and sequence reminded me of how Glass structures his stories. As Glass said in an interview conducted for Current, a public broadcasting publication:

This is the structure of the stories on our show: There’s an anecdote–a sequence of events. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And the reason why that’s powerful, I think, is because there is something about the momentum, especially in a medium where you can’t see anything, especially in radio. That you just want to know what happens next. It’s irresistible. You just cannot help but want to know what happens next.

Then, there’s the part of the story where I make some really big statement like there’s something about the kindness of strangers. Because you can’t just have an anecdote. It’s got to mean something. You can have people read the little story from the Bible, but unless you tell them, you know, the lesson they’re trying to draw from it, it’s not a real sermon. And radio, in particular, is a very didactic medium.

The way that we’re taught to listen to it is, I think, largely from news shows, where they’re constantly telling you: here’s what happens, here’s what it means. And so we’re used to that. And if I didn’t say, “There’s something about the kindness of strangers,” this story just would not be as satisfying.

So the way that my staff and I talk about stories is we talk about, okay, what’s the anecdote and then where’s the moment of reflection. And we structure the stories like that, over and over and over.

Now watch listen to that scene with Woody again.

Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine featured a profile of the physicist, now in his 80s, as its cover story. He’s been ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Study for the last several decades.

I liked the piece. There are some questions, which I’ve heard a couple of editors express, about why he merited such a long profile, and the cover, no less. But that’s really a question of editorial inclinations.

The great strength of the article is the sensitive portrayal of Dyson himself. He is a character, a charming and sweet man whose life experience reads like fiction. Nicholas Dawidoff, who wrote the piece, describes Dyson’s smile, and his laugh, “so hearty it shakes him,” which is absolutely true. The global warming controversy seems secondary, though I’d guess it was originally the big reason this story was picked up by the magazine. Ultimately, we have this story of a man who is happy with his life, and has always done whatever suited him, rather than whatever the establishment expected. After all, he did switch from being an Englishman to being an American, and from mathematics to physics to activism and writing.

I interviewed Dyson almost nine years ago, in April 2001. As the years pass, I keep thinking how fortunate I am that my first in-depth, sit-down interview with anyone was with him.

You can see a kind of blueprint for the magazine story in my interview, from the series of Dyson’s greatest hits of applied scientific craziness (Project Orion, the so-called Dyson sphere, major genetic re-engineering), to his deep sense of humanity and obligation to the less fortunate.

I was also introduced to Dyson’s skepticism in that interview. He criticized people who were wary of genetically modified foods. He applauded gentrification. He recounted a story about NASA’s emphasis on public relations over science. He dismissed sustainability, “because what does it mean?” As far as Dyson was concerned, “sustainability” was—and, one could contend, still is—vague enough to mean whatever its promoters want.

You can download my interview, conducted for the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science, as a PDF here.

***********
At the bottom of my web site, in the footer section, there is a phrase: “It is a great big world.” After my interview with Dyson, as I was about to leave, Dyson told me about flying to China, and sitting next to a boy who spent most of the trip staring out the window. At one point, the boy turned to him, and said, “It’s a great big world!.” Indeed, it is. Easy to forget.

At the time, the media company rented 30,000 square feet at $100 per square foot (triple-net), while most office real estate at the time was about $50 per square foot. The deal nearly doubled Bloomberg’s footprint in the city as reporters and salespeople moved into a sleek waterfront place. Again, the Times:

The offices have floor-to-ceiling glass walls, natural lighting, operable windows, historic trusses and views of the bay, Treasure Island and the Bay Bridge. The development’s bayside history walk wraps around the building and boats will be able to pull up to the dock.

And, true, it’s all there–ferries docked below the desks, stunning bay views, and the lavatory is positively space-aged. One analyst suggested they got a great deal, saying:

“I feel anyone who has not locked up their space for the next couple of years should do so because rents are going higher,” she said. “In recent years, there has been a move to get away from fancy offices, particularly among the law firms. We seem to have passed that.”

What a long, strange trip it’s been. Eighteen months later, San Francisco, while not lacking for lawyers, might have fewer than expected after the collapse of Heller Ehrman and Thelen; and a casual glance at rental rates shows even for Class A office space as low as $25, suggesting that now might be the time to lock up space for the next couple of years.

***

I wish I had a photo of the Bloomberg office to show you. Scores of twinned screen Bloomberg terminals in long rows, all facing Treasure Island; a glass-walled conference room, full of more twin-screened terminals facing a pair of large screens embedded into the wall; a full, free cafe with coffee, juice, and cappuccino machines, fresh fruit, and rotating silver snack stands full of Kettle Chips and Swedish fish. This is the life, no? Still, during the hours I was there, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was in a supervillain’s lair, the control room from which a plot for global domination is hatched and executed. All that was missing was the classic Mercator projection map of the planet, outsized letters spelling SPECTRE, and, of course, Ernst Stavro Blofeld in one of his various guises, along with his fluffy cat.

So many things to love here:

• the “estimated two to three thousand home computer owners in the Bay Area”
• the newspaper guy saying “and we’re not in it to make money. We’re probably not going to lose a lot, but we’re not going to make much either.”
• that the newspaper vendor is safe in his job, “for the moment”
• that the reporter could be seen as believing it’s just the vendor who has to be worried
• or maybe just that these two minutes of reportage, seen from a contemporary perspective, are shot through with a dreadful kind of irony.

Welcome to the future.

A few days ago, the AP’s Daisy Nguyen published a report on the trend of building suburban-style developments around the world. Developers in China and India and Africa are looking to Southern California (pictured above, partially) for a growth model. While this should be alarming to anyone concerned about resources and climate change (and willing, if you’re an American, to adopt the do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do ethos), it’s a classic example of how growing middle class populations are importing elements of American life. The article describes, for example, a community outside of Shanghai:

Grassy front lawns and driveways lead to pastel-colored homes that mimic French, Italian or Spanish architectural styles. Customized kitchens, screening rooms and basement wine cellars are very different from Chairman Mao’s vision of communal living.

“It’s hard to tell you’re not in Southern California,” [Pasadena-based architect Andy] Feola said.

On the highways outside of cities like Beijing and Delhi, I zipped past billboards that advertised gated communities, some with McMansions and garages large enough for SUVs. They seemed out of place, but such are our preconceptions of places like China and India. (And, to an extent, disappointments–who travels around the globe to hang out in suburbs?) But they wouldn’t build them if there were no demand. As affluence increases, so does the market.

From the environmental perspective, one would hope sustainable design could mitigate the negative effects of such development. Whether that is being applied in a robust way remains to be seen. But for some, it seems, the prospect of mass suburbanization should go full steam ahead. In my favorite quote from the story, one American architecture professor said: “It’s too bad that we as Americans are turning away from suburban sprawl as Asia adopts it.”

Regarding green development–in China, anyway–an article last week in the Christian Science Monitor noted that one grand project has stumbled. The correspondent, Simon Montlake, describes the situation of Dongtan, a planned eco-city outside of Shanghai that was being designed by the engineering firm Arup. (A related article published in The Telegraph last October is well worth a read, too.)

Dongtan’s plan hits all the right sustainability buttons: energy from waste, recycling, limited carbon emissions, density, energy-efficient buildings, etc. You may have seen the feature on this project, “Pop-Up Cities: China Builds a Bright Green Metropolis”, in Wired last year. I’ve been in touch with Arup employees in the past and they seemed devoted to making this work, not just in terms of design, but socially and economically. It’s tough when, after a streak of good press, something comes along to trip up a project. (Last year, Conde Nast was particularly good to Arup, with the Wired feature and a New Yorker feature.)

One of the main sources for the Monitor article was Kira Gould, the communications director at William McDonough + Partners. Montlake briefly mentioned the Huangbaiyu Cradle to Cradle Village project:

On a more modest scale, William McDonough + Partners designed an ecovillage of 400 households in northeast China, of which 42 houses have been built. The plan called for affordable solar-powered bungalows using local materials in a bid to free more land for farming. Instead, the developer built suburban-style tract homes that most local families have shunned, according to a PBS documentary earlier this year.

Ms. Gould concedes that mistakes were made in the design and construction of Huangbaiyu, the village. One complaint was that it didn’t create enough jobs. But that was never part of the project, says Gould. “We came to learn that economic development and sustainable development were often being used interchangeably,” she says.

To give you an idea of what that looks like, we have this:

I should remark on a couple of points here, especially the take-away from my PBS report, as described in the article. I wrote a comment on the Monitor’s site a couple of days ago. (Shannon May, who studied the village, also wrote an interesting comment on the selfish reasons that have motivated Western firms to attempt green development in China.) My comment hasn’t yet been published; I’d guess the comment moderators have been short-staffed due to the holidays. In the meantime, here it is:

I’d like to thank Simon Montlake and the Monitor for mentioning the investigative piece I completed for FRONTLINE/World (PBS) earlier this year. But I must clarify one point raised in this article about my story.

The residents of this farming village currently live spread out in a long valley, near their crops, with livestock on their property. The plan created by William McDonough and his partners on this project outlined a single, dense community for the entire village.

While it is the case that the local developer built suburban-style tract homes, it is fair to say he did so based on the plan he received. (His modifications of details of the design are a point to debate.)

The planners recognized, before construction began, that the yards of the new houses would be smaller than those that currently exist. As noted in the narrative that accompanied the master plan: “The yards may be too small to support the number of livestock that currently occupy many yards in the village.” In practice, this meant the farmers could not keep their livestock–a major source of income–if they moved in.

And that, simply, is why no one wanted to. There was a fundamental flaw in the design: it neglected to account for this basic element of village life. The cause of this oversight is, to some extent, a mystery because no one from William McDonough + Partners would comment for my story. But the more important point to remember here is that villagers saw that this eco-village would require them to trade in their lives as farmers for lives in factories or offices or whatever would fit this suburban-style tract home design.

Who could blame the villagers, then, for hoping that some new jobs would come along with this high-profile international eco-village project, since participating in it would force them to give up their old ones?

Update: Nothing to update, which is my point. It is the 12th of January, and they’ve not included my comment. I have re-submitted.

Update: Comment now online at Monitor’s web site. 13 Jan 09.

Although the story is dominated by the so-called “talent,” the story was pitched, shot, and structured by Sonia Narang, who has a year-long fellowship at NBC. She produced it. (If you want to hear funny stories about your favorite television news personalities, by the way, talk to a producer.) Or as they say at NBC, Sonia DJ’ed the piece. “DJ” standing for “digital journalist,” which is what we all are turning into, I hear.

If they include a credit for caption writer, maybe I can get a little nod. I took a stab at the early version of the script and, this being national television news, tried to write something appropriately clichéd and bombastic. A few relics of that since-buried text were used in the online story caption, which can be rather hard to find, actually.

Update: Aired on Today show last Saturday, December 27th.

Dale has worked with the architect William McDonough for several years. Since 2000, she has been the director of community design at William McDonough + Partners. Dale is of medium height, with blonde hair and rectangular glasses. She looks just like her picture. A couple of days earlier, she stood up during the question-and-answer section of the panel I participated in at Greenbuild’s International Forum. She didn’t have questions so much as comments, which I described in a previous post. In a nutshell, neither Dale nor anyone from McDonough + Partners, was especially happy with my FRONTLINE/World story on the Huangbaiyu Cradle to Cradle Village Project in China.

She started by saying she knew I had mentioned her on my blog. When I asked what she thought of what I’d written, she said she hadn’t read it (she later clarified that it was printed out for her). But she did want to follow up on some of the points I made in my blog post, and gave some additional information about the role of William McDonough + Partners in the Huangbaiyu project. She did most of the talking. Our conversation was probably about 20 minutes, maybe a little longer. I spoke briefly with Kira Gould, the director of communications for the firm, soon after, and then once more, briefly with Dale. For those interested in the details, I’ve outlined the points they made, as well as some questions and responses, after the jump.

On translation: During the Q&A and in my earlier post, the problem of translation came up. On stage and on my blog, I said that there were fluent Chinese speakers deeply involved in the project. But Diane Dale, in our later conversation, told me it was more complicated than that: it wasn’t a language problem, it was a problem of cultural translation.

According to Dale, Wang Miansheng—who is currently the managing director of the China-US Center for Sustainable Development, an organization involved in the coordination and execution of the Huangbaiyu Cradle to Cradle model village—took great pride in his translation. In particular, she said that his translation was an almost exact, one-to-one linguistic conversion from Mandarin to English, and vice versa.

To illustrate, Dale told me the story of receiving a compliment from a Chinese woman. Wang translated it into English, and Dale’s response, which was translated back, was a simple thank you. The Chinese woman was offended. Dale later learned, she told me, that she should have replied with a modest, “Oh, no, no, no.” By acknowledging and accepting the compliment, Dale came across as arrogant. She said Wang interceded in no way.

I asked Dale why Wang did not caution her when she might come across as offensive. It seems, I added, that a translator would mention nuances of culture to avoid fundamental misunderstandings like this.

As Dale put it, Wang didn’t “editorialize” by including cultural connotations in his translation. He took great pride in that, she said.

She added that the translations were given with a “spirit of optimism.” There was “lots of optimistic color” to the translation, as well as a “desire to do well.”

On the firm’s role: Dale said that foreign firms have limited control over their projects in China. As she put it, “Do you know foreigners are not allowed to do conceptual design?” She also said that some firms do have control, depending on the relationship.

On studying other models: During the Q&A, one of the first questions came from an American architect who asked if the Huangbaiyu designers had done any research on rural models of development in China. I replied that none of my reporting indicates they did this kind of research.

Dale addressed this point. “It is a recent phenomenon, rural planning,” she said. She described their plans for Huangbiayu as “a pioneering event.”

On previously addressing the shortcomings in Huangbaiyu: Dale said she gave a talk entitled “A Tale of Two Cities” that discussed what went wrong in Huangbaiyu. She said I should have found this talk on my own.

On why the firm chose not to comment for my story: According to Kira Gould, neither she nor Dale had worked on the project, so they needed to study up on the project. They were unable to learn enough in time to respond to my queries. And, she added, “Bill just didn’t want to.”

On Timothy Lesle:
Dale’s “criticism of [my] criticism was that [I] was looking for something to criticize.”

After reviewing my notes and contacting Shannon May (the anthropology doctoral candidate who has now spent years studying the issues, interviewing and shadowing participants on both continents, and living in the village), I am left with more questions than answers as a result of this encounter.

On translation: From Dale’s explanation, my resulting question is not so much about Wang’s choices as a translator, but how it was received. If there was no editorializing of the translation, what does it mean when the translation is delivered with “lots of optimistic color”? Did the optimistic translation cause her or her colleagues any alarm?

As Shannon May wrote to me:

She’s contradicting herself. Was it always straight translation or with “optimistic color”? Having been in the room during many sessions with Miansheng, Bill, Dai Xiaolong [the local developer] and other Chinese officials, I’d say that the translation was always pretty accurate. But that the people were often just talking past each other. Xie [Xie Baoxing, a local official] would say, “the entire village believes in and supports sustainable development”, but no one would ask him how he knows that, or what that means. Dai would say that he “knows everything about sustainable development” but no one asked him how, or what he knew. The list is endless. No one ever asked for evidence, or for numbers. It was always all vision, always all salesmanship and no *work*. 

On the firm’s role: Who better to tell me what kinds of constraints William McDonough + Partners had to work under than William McDonough + Partners? But they did not comment. No one from the China-US Center, which Gould offered up as an alternative source in their stead, ever mentioned this constraint. And, as Dale pointed out, some firms do have control over projects they work on in China.

No American ever mentioned this. No Chinese ever mentioned this. So how would one know? Dai Xiaolong, the developer, described the American involvement thusly: “All the American side did was to point here and to point there without actual investment. It is not my own project.”

Shannon May:

I’m confused by what she means by conceptual design here. It is accurate that there must be a locally certified architect who is the signatory on the final construction drawings. But that is not conceptual design, but construction. There are dozens and dozens of foreign architecture firms in China, building in China, and they have control over the buildings they were hired to build. Yes, there must be a Chinese certified architect signing the construction plans, but that has nothing to do with what the design is. Firms often draw up the construction drawings themselves, give them to their Chinese partner, have them reprint and sign. There’s no lack of control just because of the signatory.

When May points out that these restrictions don’t apply to the act of designing, this is significant because it has been established that the design is fundamentally unacceptable to the farmers in Huangbaiyu.

I asked Dale why, if they knew they had no power over the project, they stayed with it; why they kept both McDonough and his firm’s name closely associated with it; and why McDonough himself had taken credit for the project in high-profile venues (e.g., Newsweek, the TED Conference) before it fell apart. She paused then answered: “I am very comfortable and very proud of the work that Bill McDonough has done”

On studying other models: In response to Dale’s point that there were few existing rural models available to them during the design, May notes that any project needs in-depth research into how the affected community lives, its history, future projections, and other issues. “This is the same if a new neighborhood is being developed in Beijing or Huangbaiyu.” She adds that it’s the data that differs, not the process.

May admires the premise of bringing principles of urban planning to rural development in China. But in regard to this particular project, May wrote, William McDonough + Partners simply tried to apply existing urban planning principles to this new rural context without collecting any data or asking questions. 

May continued:

When [Dale] says that it was a pioneering event, she is right, but that it was a pioneering event for her firm, and so they made mistakes. I don’t think that everyone would have. Or made the same ones. This situation was not fated, which is what she seems to keep implying. As if they can’t be held responsible because there is no way it could have been different. The gods have spoken. It’s a classic way of deflecting responsibility. 

A couple of hours before I left Boston, I ran into the architect who originally asked the question about whether William McDonough + Partners had looked at other models of rural planning in China. I relayed Dale’s response that there were few or no models when they started.

He looked at me and asked, “What about those five thousand years of Chinese history?”

On previously addressing the shortcomings in Huangbaiyu: May told me she was unaware of a speech by Dale with the title “A Tale of Two Cities.” Neither of us have found it, which is not to say that it does not exist. We have simply been unable to find it.

On why the firm chose not to comment to me: That, as Gould said, she and Dale had to get caught up on what happened in Huangbaiyu is puzzling. After all, Dale earlier told me she had delivered a talk on what went wrong. That suggests that she did, perhaps, have some sense of what happened in Huangbaiyu. Why would she need to study more? Or, why didn’t she simply send me the text of the speech?

McDonough’s not wanting to talk to me will have to speak for itself.

On Timothy Lesle: William McDonough + Partners had ample opportunity to comment. I volunteered to go to the San Francisco office. I offered to fly to their headquarters in Virginia. I tracked Kira Gould down at a conference last year to ask, in person, for their participation. When I first had the notion of doing the story, almost two years ago, a colleague approached William McDonough at the World Economic Forum on my behalf (the funding and reporting wouldn’t actually start until about six months later). If they had given me any information appropriate to telling the story, I would have included it. As it stands, every point that Dale has mentioned to me after the story was published has been exculpatory, shifting responsibility away from William McDonough + Partners. Fair enough.

But to come up to me nine months after publication and say I should have included point X or point Y is a little disingenuous. As I said to Dale, I respect your perspectives as participants and experts, and I was seeking that expert perspective for my story. It was not my decision for them to decline to comment.

Still, they can make their voices heard, especially in regard to Green Dreams. If Diane Dale or her colleagues have anything to add to the story, I invite them to submit a comment to the FRONTLINE/World page where the story lives.

In fact, I extended that invitation to Dale toward the end of our encounter at Greenbuild.

Her response?

“I would rather not.”