MediaFlect

The David Halberstam I knew was all the things people have written about him since his death in a car accident this week: overbearing, a great reporter, quick-witted, pedantic, perhaps with a high opinion of himself. To me, he was also generous beyond reason.

While I was working for Newsweek’s Japanese edition in 1987, we decided to do a Q&A with Halberstam, as he had just published The Reckoning, considered the definitive tome about the rise of Japanese automakers at the expense of Detroit. It wasn’t hard to find him – he was in the Manhattan phone book. I called him up, and my bureau chief, Fukiko Aoki (Pete Hamill’s wife, by the way), and I went over to his lovely high-ceilinged apartment, complete with an inside terrace and a floor-to-ceiling bay window, on west 67th Street. He was gracious and well-informed, and intelligent, and gave good sound bite answers. (I’ve scanned the interview as I submitted it to my editors — there are 6 pages, you can get by swapping in the page number in the url. A piece of the way it appeared is in the image, above.) I remember him being extremely complimentary of Hideko Takayama, with whom I later worked in the Newsweek Tokyo bureau, for the tremendous help and research she had done for him on his book.

Halberstam and I kept marginally in touch, and a couple years later, when I was applying for a Fulbright fellowship, a good friend well-versed in academe asked if I knew any high-profile journalists with name recognition who could write a recommendation. I asked David, and much to my surprise, he most generously said he liked me, thought I was a “smart kid,” and “yes.” In person, he talked exactly the same way he did on air, droning in his deep, booming voice, seeming to lecture, talking in long sentences with lots of commas and few periods, and absolutely not liking to be interrupted. He took a recommendation I had written for him, rewrote it beautifully, and sent it in. I got the fellowship and went to study at Tokyo’s Sophia University for a year.

While I was in Japan, David came over on a tour – he was something of a celebrity there – and while he didn’t schedule me in, we did bump into each other at an event he was headlining. I said “hi,” as he walked through the halls with a leading politician he was interviewing. He winked and nodded – odd gestures for him, I thought – and kept walking.

Throughout the years, I would occasionally do a little something for Daviod – send him a fact or a contact for something he was working on. A number of years after the Fulbright, I called to ask him something, and he very gruffly hung up the phone, very unfriendly. I wasn’t sure what I had done to piss him off. Perhaps I had not done enough for him? Maybe he was just in a bad mood that day. I never knew, and never asked. I would occasionally see him walking around the neighborhood after 1997, when I joined ABC News, with offices on west 66th Street, but there was never a flash of recognition from him, and I never tried very hard to say “hi.” I did see him in the building occasionally, when he was going for an interview on Nightline or one of the other shows. Even when he said “hi” in the ABC halls, I don’t think he knew who I was.

What is most tangible to me, though, is his generosity in doing something for someone he didn’t know very well and whom he didn’t have to help. I’m not sure I would have gotten the fellowship – a wonderful experience, and chance to really learn Japanese – without his generosity.

Longtime media critic Michael Wolff, currently of Vanity Fair, tells fashion, celebrity and media pub Women’s Wear Daily he’s “unfailingly courteous” everywhere he goes, responding to some diners who were apparently offended by his behavior in a restaurant. This video (via FishbowlNY)– shot on my camera by Dylan Stableford at a breakfast we both attended — shows that Michael also knows how to mix it up.

Michael also tried to pry information out of me at the event to corroborate rumors that offers had been made to buy mediabistro, where I was editorial director. I demurred.

Pulitzers are announced. Surprisingly, Wall Street Journal is the only one with two, this time — one for backdating of stock options, the other for coverage of China. Maybe business journalism really is the new sexy beat.

And they’re heavy on NY-area, as usual, and East Coast, as well.

PC Mag’s Lance Ulanoff, whom I admire, has a cranky piece about Assignment Zero that finishes by proclaiming that “in the end … we’ll learn the truth about the wisdom of crowds — there is none.”

Lance is being more close-minded that the guy running the “crowdsourced” journalism project, NYU’s Jay Rosen, whom I spoke with last week over coffee and Thursday morning to see how I might be involved. Rosen acknowledges that he, himself, doesn’t know if this form of journalism will work. But, posits Jay, rather than just proclaiming its glory or lack thereof, doesn’t it make sense to try it out? Isn’t, he notes, that what tenure is supposed be for – so scholars can risk failure in pursuit of knowledge?

Rosen is doing this project with that kind of spirit – see what comes of it, and then move on from there. He acknowledges that there have been missteps already, just weeks into the project, and he knows that whatever is produced from what Ulanoff calls the “unwashed masses” will be far from perfect. I, too, expressed my skepticism to Rosen, asking why anyone would spend their time and energy on this, how it’s different than just trying to get folks to contribute for free, how people will be given incentives to participate or even be held to account for accuracy. Rosen occasionally hesitated, and acknowledged he didn’t always have perfect answers to these questions, but expressed confidence that folks will want to try helping this new idea.

Despite my questions, I am choosing to get involved for that very reason, to see where this may lead. I do have some selfish reasons – to make new contacts, to do some reporting I can use elsewhere – but also some intellectual, even academic ones: to be involved in an experiment being led by someone else I admire. I also plan, in a few weeks, to talk to Rosen about how this all becomes self-sustaining and ask some hard, financial questions.

Meanwhile, as for Ulanoff’s complaint that the assigned stories are all a bunch of self-serving navel-gazing about crowd-sourcing itself, he is missing the point. And, frankly, that may be Assignment Zero’s fault for not better describing the project in an easily accessible way on its website. The reasons all the reporting is being done about this topic, is because a) it seemed a good candidate for a topic because folks involved in the project are by virtue of their involvement interested, and b) it will feed a Wired.com story planned for the beginning of June, about the phenomenon of crowdsourcing. There are some official “editors” through which this material is to be funneled, as Ulanoff notes. They (we) may be able to make something better than hash out of whatever mish-mosh of stuff we get. And it may, ultimately, die due to lack of interest as Ulanoff predicts. But is that a reason not to at least give it a shot and see what can or might be done?