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ARLINGTON, Va. — In most newsrooms, the joke would have been obvious.
On Gawker’s “big board,” reporters can check the most-viewed articles, a list updated hourly.
It was April Fools’ Day last year, and Politico’s top two editors sent an e-mail message to their staff advising of a new 5 a.m. start time for all reporters.
“These pre-sunrise hours are often the best time to reach top officials or their aides,” the editors wrote, adding that reporters should try to carve out personal time “if you need it,” in the midafternoon when Internet traffic slows down.
But rather than laugh, more than a few reporters stared at the e-mail message in a panicked state of disbelief.
“There were several people who didn’t think it was a joke. One girl actually cried,” said Anne Schroeder Mullins, who wrote for Politico until May, when she left to start her own public relations firm. “I definitely had people coming up to me asking me if it was true.”
Such is the state of the media business these days: frantic and fatigued. Young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news — anything that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their way.
Tracking how many people view articles, and then rewarding — or shaming — writers based on those results has become increasingly common in old and new media newsrooms. The Christian Science Monitor now sends a daily e-mail message to its staff that lists the number of page views for each article on the paper’s Web site that day.
The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all display a “most viewed” list on their home pages. Some media outlets, including Bloomberg News and Gawker Media, now pay writers based in part on how many readers click on their articles.
Once only wire-service journalists had their output measured this way. And in a media environment crowded with virtual content farms where no detail is too small to report as long as it was reported there first, Politico stands out for its frenetic pace or, in the euphemism preferred by its editors, “high metabolism.”
The top editors, who rise as early as 4:30 a.m., expect such volume and speed from their reporters because they believe Politico’s very existence depends, in large part, on how quickly it can tell readers something, anything they did not know.
“At a paper, your only real stress point is in the evening when you’re actually sitting there on deadline, trying to file,” said Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor, in an interview from the publication’s offices just across the Potomac River from downtown Washington.
“Now at any point in the day starting at 5 in the morning, there can be that same level of intensity and pressure to get something out.” (Not all reporters are expected to be on their game by dawn, Mr. VandeHei added, noting that many work a traditional 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. newspaper day.)
At Gawker Media’s offices in Manhattan, a flat-screen television mounted on the wall displays the 10 most-viewed articles across all Gawker’s Web sites. The author’s last name, along with the number of page views that hour and over all are prominently shown in real time on the screen, which Gawker has named the “big board.”
“Sometimes one sees writers just standing before it, like early hominids in front of a monolith,” said Nick Denton, Gawker Media’s founder. Mr. Denton said not all writers have warmed to the concept. “But the best exclusives do get rewarded,” he added, noting that bonuses for writers are calculated in part based on page views.
The pace has led to substantial turnover in staff at digital news organizations. Departures at Politico lately have been particularly high, with roughly a dozen reporters leaving in the first half of the year — a big number for a newsroom that has only about 70 reporters and editors. At Gawker, it is not uncommon for editors to stay on the job for just a year.
Physically exhausting assembly-line jobs these are not. But the workloads for many young journalists are heavy enough that signs of strain are evident.
“When my students come back to visit, they carry the exhaustion of a person who’s been working for a decade, not a couple of years,” said Duy Linh Tu, coordinator of the digital media program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. “I worry about burnout.”
In Washington, the news cycle promises to become even more frenzied as outlets like The Huffington Post expand their operations there. The Atlantic Media Company, which publishes the National Journal and The Atlantic, plans to hire 30 new journalists for a new venture set to open this fall that will publish breaking news and analysis online.
At Politico, Mr. VandeHei, who has been known to pace between rows of reporters’ desks asking who has broken news lately, said editors experimented with monitoring how many articles reporters were writing, but decided that raw numbers did not give a full picture of a reporter’s performance. -
MAYWOOD, Calif. — Not once, not twice, but three times in the last two weeks, Andrew Quezada says, he was stopped and questioned by the authorities here.
“I’m walking along at night carrying an overstuffed bag,” he said, describing two of the incidents. “I look suspicious. This shows the sheriff’s department is doing its job.”
Chalk up another Maywood resident who approves of this city’s unusual experience in municipal governing. City officials last month fired all of Maywood’s employees and outsourced their jobs.
While many communities are fearfully contemplating extensive cuts, Maywood says it is the first city in the nation in the current downturn to take an ax to everyone.
The school crossing guards were let go. Parking enforcement was contracted out, City Hall workers dismissed, street maintenance workers made redundant. The public safety duties of the Police Department were handed over to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
At first, people in this poor, long-troubled and heavily Hispanic city southeast of Los Angeles braced for anarchy.
Senior citizens were afraid they would be assaulted as they walked down the street. Parents worried the parks would be shut and their children would have nowhere to safely play. Landlords said their tenants had begun suggesting that without city-run services they would no longer feel obliged to pay rent.
The apocalypse never arrived. In fact, it seems this city was so bad at being a city that outsourcing — so far, at least — is being viewed as an act of municipal genius.
“We don’t want to be the model for other cities to lay off their employees,” said Magdalena Prado, a spokeswoman for the city who works on contract. “But our residents have been somewhat pleased.”
That includes Mayor Ana Rosa Rizo, who was gratified to see her husband get a parking ticket on July 1, hours after the Police Department had been disbanded. The ticket was issued by enforcement clerks for the neighboring city of Bell, which is being paid about $50,000 a month by Maywood to perform various services.
The reaction is all the more remarkable because this is not a feel-good city. City Council hearings run hot, council members face repeated recall efforts and city officials fight in public. “You single-handedly destroyed the city,” the city treasurer told the City Council at its most recent meeting.
Four years ago, in what was probably the high-water mark of acrimony in Maywood, a deputy city clerk was arrested and accused of soliciting a hit man to kill a city councilman. The deputy clerk, Hector Duarte, was concerned that his salary might be reduced or his job eliminated during a previous round of bad fiscal times; he was sentenced to a year in jail and six months of anger management counseling.
This time, the councilman, Felipe Aguirre, has received no threats and has seen remarkably little anger. “This is a very bad economy,” said Mr. Aguirre, who like the mayor and fellow council members receives a stipend from the city of $347 every two weeks. Even if city employees lose their benefits, he said, “very good workers are still going to hang around.”
Jose B. Garcia, an assistant city planner, will now be working on contract. “I still have a job,” he said. “In that sense, I can’t complain too much.”
Maywood, which covers slightly more than one square mile, is one of the most densely populated cities in the country. The official population of 30,000 is believed to considerably understate the actual total of about 50,000.
It has some of the ills that plague other cities. Property taxes, a primary source of revenue, have declined to $900,000 from $1.2 million in 2007. Sales taxes have also dropped. But Maywood’s biggest problem by far has been its police department. -
Monica Long had expected a routine appointment. But here she was sitting in her new oncologist’s office, and he was delivering deeply disturbing news.
Pathologists at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan examine slides of breast tissue.
Nearly a year earlier, in 2007, a pathologist at a small hospital in Cheboygan, Mich., had found the earliest stage of breast cancer from a biopsy. Extensive surgery followed, leaving Ms. Long’s right breast missing a golf-ball-size chunk.
Now she was being told the pathologist had made a mistake. Her new doctor was certain she never had the disease, called ductal carcinoma in situ, or D.C.I.S. It had all been unnecessary — the surgery, the radiation, the drugs and, worst of all, the fear.
“Psychologically, it’s horrible,” Ms. Long said. “I never should have had to go through what I did.”
Like most women, Ms. Long had regarded the breast biopsy as the gold standard, an infallible way to identify cancer. “I thought it was pretty cut and dried,” said Ms. Long, who is a registered nurse.
As it turns out, diagnosing the earliest stage of breast cancer can be surprisingly difficult, prone to both outright error and case-by-case disagreement over whether a cluster of cells is benign or malignant, according to an examination of breast cancer cases by The New York Times.
Advances in mammography and other imaging technology over the past 30 years have meant that pathologists must render opinions on ever smaller breast lesions, some the size of a few grains of salt. Discerning the difference between some benign lesions and early stage breast cancer is a particularly challenging area of pathology, according to medical records and interviews with doctors and patients.
Diagnosing D.C.I.S. “is a 30-year history of confusion, differences of opinion and under- and overtreatment,” said Dr. Shahla Masood, the head of pathology at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Jacksonville. “There are studies that show that diagnosing these borderline breast lesions occasionally comes down to the flip of a coin.”
There is an increasing recognition of the problems, and the federal government is now financing a nationwide study of variations in breast pathology, based on concerns that 17 percent of D.C.I.S. cases identified by a commonly used needle biopsy may be misdiagnosed. Despite this, there are no mandated diagnostic standards or requirements that pathologists performing the work have any specialized expertise, meaning that the chances of getting an accurate diagnosis vary from hospital to hospital.
Dr. Linh Vi, the pathologist at Cheboygan Memorial Hospital who diagnosed D.C.I.S. in Ms. Long, was not board certified and has said he reads about 50 breast biopsies a year, far short of the experience that leading pathologists say is needed in dealing with the nuances of difficult breast cancer cases. In responding to a lawsuit brought by Ms. Long, Dr. Vi maintains that she had cancer and that two board-certified pathologists at a neighboring hospital concurred with his diagnosis.
Yet several leading experts who reviewed Ms. Long’s case disagreed, with one saying flatly that her local pathologists “blew the diagnosis.”
The questions that often surround D.C.I.S. diagnoses take on added significance when combined with criticism that it is both overdiagnosed and overtreated in the United States — concerns that helped fuel the recent controversy over the routine use of mammograms for women in their 40s.
The United States Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel that issues guidelines on cancer screening, found last November that the downside of routine annual mammograms for younger women might offset the benefits of early detection. The panel specifically referred to overdiagnosis of D.C.I.S., as well as benign but atypical breast lesions that left undetected would never cause problems.
D.C.I.S., which is also called Stage 0 or noninvasive cancer, was a rare diagnosis before mammograms began to be widely used in the 1980s. Until then, breast pathology typically involved reading tissue from palpable lumps. The diagnoses — usually invasive cancer, a benign fibroid tumor or a cyst — were often obvious.
Today, D.C.I.S. is diagnosed in more than 50,000 women a year in this country alone. The abnormal cells, which are encased in breast ducts, are removed before they develop into invasive cancer. There are estimates that if left untreated, it will turn into invasive cancer 30 percent of the time, though it could take decades in some cases.
Concerned about the accuracy of breast pathology, the College of American Pathologists said it would start a voluntary certification program for pathologists who read breast tissue. Among its requirements is that the pathologists must read 250 breast cases a year.
“There’s no question there’s a problem, and that’s why we’re starting this certificate program,” said Dr. James L. Connolly, director of anatomic pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
While the program has not started yet, it is still controversial. -
BEIJING — Mao slept here. So, too, did the imperial eunuchs who found themselves unemployed after China’s last emperor was sent packing. For much of the last 700 years, however, the most prominent residents of the quarter just north of the Forbidden City have been a pair of massive brick towers whose drums and bells helped Beijing’s citizenry keep track of the hour.
These days, those who reside in the neighborhood known as Gulou are anxiously counting the days until construction crews begin turning its 32 charmingly decrepit acres into a polished tourist attraction called Beijing Time Cultural City.
Anchored by the ancient Drum and Bell Towers, the $73 million redevelopment will include courtyard homes for the rich, a “timekeeping” museum and an underground mall, presumably well stocked with Rolexes and Cartiers — or perhaps their more affordable counterfeit cousins.
Since the project was announced in January, historians have been sounding the alarm. So, too, have the expatriates who cherish the area’s old Beijing authenticity. “When they’re done, the place is going to look like Universal Studios,” said Robin Foo, a Brunei-born Chinese architect who has spent the last six years turning a local Yuan dynasty temple into a swank cafe and catering hall.
But the outrage is harder to find among the thousands of poor families who live in the ramshackle collection of gray brick houses topped with wavy roof tiles. “Tear the whole place down,” said Zhou Meihua, 72, who shares a 20-square-foot pair of rooms with three generations of family members. “If we get enough compensation, we’ll happily move out.”
Government officials tend to stoke such sentiments by failing to update old neighborhoods in a way that preserves their existing fabric.
Instead, they seize property in parts of the city they deem “unhygienic and unsafe,” rezone much of it as commercial property and sell it for huge profits. The concession to history often consists of a few new buildings with upturned eaves and garishly painted timber slapped on concrete facades.
Local officials often claim that the need to renew old areas requires their destruction, critics say. Over the past two months, a huge section of old homes just north of Gulou was bulldozed to make way for the construction of a nearby subway station.
“This is not about preserving a historic monument. It’s about saving a living, breathing community that has evolved organically over hundreds of years,” said Yao Yuan, a Peking University professor who specializes in urban planning.
For preservationists, the challenge is to convince local power brokers that there is still money to be made by modernizing old single-story homes, block by block, and then allowing some of the original residents — and their old Beijing ways — to remain. Keep the charm, they say, and the tourists and tax revenue will follow.
For He Shuzhong, a lawyer who runs the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, that means bringing up his favorite analogy about a tattered Ming dynasty chair that would have immense value if spruced up.
One can easily toss away the chair and buy a plastic one, he tells poker-faced officials, but if it were repaired and cleaned, the Ming chair would be worth 10,000 plastic chairs. “It’s the same thing for these old neighborhoods,” Mr. He said, gesticulating with urgency. “They are our unique heritage that cannot be replaced.”
So far, such arguments have had limited impact on this redevelopment-crazed city. In recent years, two-thirds of Beijing’s 3,000 narrow lanes, known as hutongs, have been subsumed by mega-developments, many of them in neighborhoods that were officially designated preservation zones.
Government-affiliated builders either ignore the law or use words like “historic” and “restoration” to describe patently new construction. Critics say the most egregious example of this trend can be seen just south of Tiananmen Square, where the city’s most fabled shopping district, Qianmen, was replaced by a soulless but expensive facsimile of its former hurly-burly self.
“The renovation of Qianmen wasn’t about preserving history, but about creating a fake Hollywood version of it,” said Mr. Yao, the urban planning professor. -
KABUL, Afghanistan — American, European and other foreign leaders met here Tuesday to pledge anew their support for Afghanistan, agree to entrust it with more spending decisions, and embrace its president’s commitment for Afghan forces to take charge of security by 2014. They acknowledged that neither the public in their own countries nor the Afghan people had much patience left.
The transition timetable, which President Hamid Karzai outlined last year, is nonbinding and essentially unenforceable, and much depends on how and when responsibilities will be transferred. The conference’s final statement stopped short of any firm commitment to the timetable, instead expressing “support for the president of Afghanistan’s objective.”
The most concrete commitment was a promise to increase to 50 percent the proportion of international development funds to be disbursed through Afghanistan’s own budgeting process, a change to be made over the next two years and a huge shift from the current situation. Now, many donor countries send money directly to individual ministries or to nongovernmental organizations, undercutting the government’s ability to plan how to use the funds. Critics of the move pointed out that most Afghan ministries had proved unable to spend the money they already got.
Mr. Karzai promised to make concrete efforts to reduce corruption and find a way to end the fighting in his country, echoing pledges in the past. He painted a picture of a country that could flourish, lifting its “people from poverty to prosperity and from insecurity to stability.”
“Our vision is to be the peaceful meeting place of civilizations,” he said in an address. “Our location in the center of the new Silk Road makes us a convergence point of regional and global economic interests.”
Whether Afghanistan can get there without an enormous infusion of further foreign aid and the presence of a significant number of foreign troops seems doubtful — at least for the next few years. That point was underscored by the vague language around the timeline for handing over security responsibility.
The security transition timetable, though not the main focus of this meeting, was perhaps the most significant element for NATO leaders, most of whom will face election challenges well before 2014. The Western European democracies with the most troops in the country — Britain, France and Germany — are under great domestic pressure to reduce their presence, while the United States, which has by far the heaviest military presence, is hewing to a “conditions based” approach that allows its forces to slow any drawdowns in areas where the insurgency appears more tenacious or where Afghan troops and the police appear to have inadequate capabilities.
But for all players, shifting security to Afghan control is the basis of the exit plan.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledged the unpopularity of the war in remarks to foreign leaders.
“We know the road ahead will not be easy,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Citizens of many nations represented here, including my own, wonder whether success is even possible — and if so, whether we all have the commitment to achieve it.”
But, she said, the Afghans had presented the most detailed plans yet for how to hand off control to Afghan security forces.
“Today was a real turning point,” Mrs. Clinton said.
The overall significance of the conference was hard to gauge because much of the final communiqué was a list of boards and commissions to be created, laws to be drafted and enforced, and schedules to be fleshed out. The same themes, if not always the exact pledges, have been sounded many times before by Mr. Karzai’s government, to little effect.
Mr. Karzai spoke only briefly about the reintegration of the Taliban and reconciliation with them, although it is a major effort of his government and of considerable concern to many Afghans and to foreign troops who are fighting here. The sparse commentary seemed to signal that months of Afghan government consultations, done internally and with foreign allies, had not produced consensus on exactly how to proceed.
The criticism of the plan to send more money through the budget process was pointed.
“The government cannot even spend its own annual government budget,” said Mohammed Younus Fakoor, a political analyst who commented on the independent television network Tolo. “How will they be able to spend more of the donors’ money?”
The concerns of women were a special focus for Mrs. Clinton, who has made women’s rights, especially in the developing world, a recurring theme. She met with leaders among Afghan women before the conference began to discuss their concerns that the peace effort with the Taliban would lead to renewed disenfranchisement for many women.
Fouzia Kofi, a former deputy speaker in the Afghan Parliament, said she was concerned by recent signals from Mr. Karzai’s government. If the reconciliation process is mishandled, she warned, it could “take the country back hundreds of years.”
Arezo Qani, who works with disadvantaged women in northern Afghanistan, expressed fears that rearming local militias, something the United States has pushed, would also threaten women. And she said women should be consulted in the drafting of new laws.
Mrs. Clinton assured them that protecting women’s rights was a “personal commitment of mine.” While she said the United States was open to an Afghan-led reconciliation, she added that “it can’t come at the cost of women’s lives.”
Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting.
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