They tend to get offended

So these three preachers walk into the White House for an argument with President Lincoln …

That’s not the start of a joke. It’s a true story, an eyewitness account from the Rev. Nathaniel Brown who was, in 1862, the editor of an abolitionist Baptist newspaper. He was part of a three-person delegation that met with Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation for a contentious discussion on its necessity, purpose and likely effects.

I posted Brown’s complete account four years ago, and I’m linking back to it today because:

1) Ta-Nehisi Coates has an excellent New York Times column today on the Emancipation Proclamation; and

2) it’s still incredibly awesome as a window into a key moment in American history.

Here’s a snippet:

The President said all his convictions and feelings were against slavery. “But,” said he, “I am not so certain that God’s views and feelings in respect to it are the same as mine. If his feelings were like mine, how could he have permitted it to remain so long? I am obliged to believe that God may not, after all, look upon it in the same light as I do.”

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Kevin Drum has two fine posts up on the enduring slander that poor people are freeloaders who pay no taxes in America: “The 51% Zombie Lie” and “Breaking Down the Lucky Duckies.”

In the latter he notes that any attempt to correct this constantly circulating lie produces a predictable reaction: “They tend to get offended — though somehow never quite offended enough to stop saying it.”

They get offended because that’s their job, that’s their hobby, that’s their drug, that’s their religion. Offended is what they do and why they do it and, increasingly, it is who they are.

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Mistermix at Balloon Juice points us to Andy Rutledge’s awesome tear-down and re-build of the way newspaper website are designed. Rutledge begins:

Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days.

In digital media—websites in particular—news outlets seldom if ever treat content with any sort of dignity and most news sites are wedded to a broken profit model that compels them to present a nearly unusable mishmash of pink noise…which they call content.

And from there he goes on to recommend a series of design changes incorporating those things that every reader of newspaper websites already knows, but that no designer of newspaper websites seems to have a clue about. If this perspective had had any influence in Gannett’s online division then I might still have a job.

Mistermix tosses in one of his pet peeves about newspaper websites:

… Newspapers ask that you register and harvest some personal information, yet they never seem to use it. I’ve never been pushed a targeted ad by my local newspaper – they’re a decade behind Google.

I’d add that they’re also a decade or more behind Amazon. What I see when I visit Amazon is not what you see when you visit there. The site is tailored to our preferences and habits based on our histories there.

As mistermix notes, newspaper sites capture all the same data, but they don’t do anything with it. A reader who visits their site every day just to check the business section sees exactly the same site as a reader who visits every day just to read the horoscope. And both readers see the same exact generic Internet ads. That’s just so … so … 20th century.