Southern Bookman

Massive bird deaths sound alarm about disappearing plant, animal species

Birds dying by the thousands in the American Southwest give tragic confirmation to the latest UN alarm that biodiversity is collapsing.

For centuries, birds have migrated from Alaska and Canada to Central and South America at the end of summer in the northern hemisphere. Now, large numbers of flycatchers, swallows and warblers are falling out of the sky in New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Arizona and Nebraska, dying far short of their destinations, according to the Guardian.

That distressing news follows a United Nations report warning that the world is failing to halt the extinction of plant and animal species. Out of 20 goals set in 2010 to reverse humans' destruction of wildlife by 2020, only six have been met, and those partially, according to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The new findings follow an earlier UN report that 1 million plant and animal species are in danger of extinction.

The rapid decline in species since 1970 threaten  human existence, the UN says. Urbanization, the growth of agriculture, the loss of forests, plastic pollution, carbon emissions, climate change and invasive alien species have disrupted natural habitats. Overfishing and industrial wastes spewing into waterways have distressed the earth's oceans.

Climate change, and the wildfires in the Western United States, appear the main cause of the birds' deaths. The fires forced the birds away from pathways where food is plentiful, leaving them too undernourished to complete their journey.

Bird species are also threatened by climate change in Canada and the loss of their South American habitats to deforestation. A similar process is reducing the number of monarch butterflies.

New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert's Pulitzer Prize winning "The Sixth Extinction" warned in 2015 about the threat to humanity from the loss of plants and animals. But even as awareness of climate change grows, the loss of diversity receives little attention.

The UN report contained some good news: deforestation has lessened, more ocean and natural areas have received protection, and progress was made to halt invasive species. But lately, fires have spread across Brazil's Amazon jungle and Pantanal wetlands, as the western United States burns.

As with the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions, the world is running out of time to protect species that share the earth with us.

 

 

Temperatures quickly approaching threshold set by climate change treaty

As wildfires rage across the globe and heat records tumble, high temperatures are soaring rapidly toward the apocalyptic zone.

The world is pushing toward a 1.5-degree Celsius increase in temperatures over pre-industrial averages, the strictest limit set for this century by the Paris climate change agreement in 2015, according to a new report issued by the United Nations World Meterological Organization and other groups.

There's a 25 percent chance that the world will exceed the limit of 2.7 degrees Farenheit in the next four years, the Associated Press reported in an article published on the Huffington Post news site. The Paris treaty also set an upper goal of 2 degrees Celsius for the world to avoid climate change's worst effects.

Temperatures this summer reached 130 degrees in Death Valley, Calif., and 100 degrees in Siberia. As another heat wave pushes temperatures higher, wildfires continue in California, Washington and Oregon.

In Brazil, not only is the Amazon burning with worst fires than last year. Wildfires are also devastating Brazil's Pantanal, the world's largest wetlands, the New York Times reported.

Rising temperatures also bring worst hurricanes. Most of Lake Charles, La., remains without power after Hurricane Laura struck Aug. 27. The hurricane was the most powerful to ever strike the state, frequently ravaged by hurricanes.

Without major emissions reductions, temperatures could blaze far above the 1.5 Celsius threshold, making much of the world unlivable.

 

 

 

 

 

New York Times special section gives dramatic new perspectives on World War II

The Sunday New York Times' special section commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II was truly overwhelming.

Reading "lesser known stories" about the war that illuminated larger themes moved me emotionally the way movies or music do.

Tom Hanks' excellent introduction emphasized the sacrifices average Americans made to win the war. During the Depression and war years, U.S. citizens coped with diminished prosperity and limited consumer goods.

Countering nostalgia about "the good war," Hanks also evokes the horror of battle. One of our finest actors, Hanks shows that he's also an outstanding writer.

The section looked at the liberation of the Nazis' concentration camps, the firebombing of Tokyo, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan's colonization of Korea, the heroism of Indian and Nepalese soldiers in Britain's war effort, the horrible racism that black U.S. soldiers encountered when returning home, and the sickening internment of Japanese-American citizens.

Wonderful photos accompany the stories, and document the war's end and other major events.

My favorite stories were two uplifting ones: Ace Times sportswriter Jere Longman's profile of the Dutch track star Fanny Blankers-Koen, who won four gold medals at the 1948 Olympics in war-ravaged London, and writer Christina Brown Fisher's story about the Six Triple Eight, an American battalion of black women who diligently performed the duty of sorting mail for troops on the battle lines.

I've been a fan of fellow Louisianian and LSU alum Longman's work for years, especially when he's returned to his native state for stories.

A veteran of covering the Olympics, he displays his historical grasp of the Games in his piece on Koen, who dominated the first Olympics held since the 1936 Games in Hitler's Berlin. She competed in those Games too, drawing inspiration from U.S. star Jesse Owens, who also won four gold medals.

After the deprivations of the German-occupied  Netherlands during the war, the 30-year-old Koen, the mother of two children, won the 100-meter and 200-meter sprints, the 80-meter hurdles and anchored the Netherlands' gold-medal-winning 4x100 relay team.

Fisher's story focuses on the Six Triple Eight's dynamic leader, Charity Adams, and her skill in organizing the battalion's mail-sorting mission. The article highlights Adams' successful battles against racism and sexism. She truly is one of the war's unsung American heroes.

Another of my favorite Times writers, Tokyo bureau chief Motoko Rich, contributed a moving story about the 88-year-old  Katsumoto Saotome, a survivor of the Tokyo firebombing.

Saotome, who has devoted his life to documenting the horror of the bombings, carries no bitterness toward Americans. Rich's profile is a testament to the human spirit.

Rich, like Longman, is one of the veteran Times writers who have distinguished the newspaper's coverage for years. I first enjoyed Rich's stories when she covered the New York publishing industry before she moved on to general news. Rich is one of those rare reporters who can cover a range of stories, with outstanding writing ability as well as in-depth reporting.

The editor's introduction to the section says "these are tales that debunk the myths that have usurped the conflict's history, stories that haven't yet been enshrined in our collective memories."

That's overstated; the articles don't so much debunk myths as give deeper perspectives. And while stories like Koen's and the Six Triple Eight's are new, others re-examine well-known events, such as the fire-bombing of Tokyo.

While the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have received more attention, the fire bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities has received extensive coverage through the years.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks have been castigated as morally questionable, but the bombing of Tokyo hasn't received the same moral scrutiny, even seen as heroic.

Serious moral questions are raised in the Times' re-examination of the bombings, particularly the American strategy of incinerating civilian areas.

Gen. Curtis LeMay's "Operation Meetinghouse" campaign shifted from the previous strategy of dropping high-altitude bombs targeting war-production facilities. 

In the revised campaign, American bombers dropped low-level devices loaded with napalm on residential neighborhoods of mainly wooden residences. LeMay later led America's bombing of Vietnam, an echo of the campaign against Japan. 

Another myth undermined is that American soldiers gave beneficial treatment to Jewish Holocaust victims. An article by Jennifer Orth-Veillon documents mistreatment of Jewish concentration camp survivors by U.S. troops.

The most heart-rending articles uncover the terrible abuses of Japanese-American citizens not only during their wartime internment, but after the war's end.

With the "Unsung History" section, the Times fulfills its promise to show how lesser-known stories give greater understanding of the war. The dramatic photos and typography demonstrate that print can have dramatic power unmatched by an online screen.

The section proves the validity of Hanks' message, "We are still living the legacy of World War II."

 

 

W.H. Auden's "Sept. 1, 1939" speaks to present national emergency

After ignoring the Trump fog machine's malicious lies, I turned with hope and dread to September's arrival.

The foreboding and expectation recalled W.H. Auden's "Sept. 1, 1939," written as the world plunged toward World War II.

Auden's poem, which he disowned later in life, has the line "we must love one another or die," a pressing admonition for our times.

Writing about Hitler and Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, the poet praised and reproached America's complacent democracy. Little did he know the White House would be desecrated 80 years later by an idiotic, egomaniac American fascist.

The poem references the dives on New York's 52nd Street. Those jazz clubs where Charlie Parker played - Saturday marks the 100th anniversary of his birth in Kansas City - no longer exist.

Auden talks about New York's soulless skyscrapers, "the strength of Collective Man." Now, buildings at a height unimagined in Auden's time cast giant shadows over blighted streets where bebop was born.

Covid-19 has shuttered Auden's bars and theaters. After last spring's raging emergency, New York is one of the few places in America that has subdued the virus. The museums are reopening, but Broadway's lights remain shrouded in darkness.

People turn to poems like Auden's in times of national emergency. The popularity of "Sept. 1, 1939" soared after Sept. 11, 2001.  As another fateful September looms, the poem's message remains urgent.

 

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 by W.H. Auden
	I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work,' And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for the dumb? All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

William Styron's "The Confessions of Nat Turner" presaged today's cultural wars

Friday marks the 189th anniversary of the start of Nat Turner's rebellion, a four-day slave insurrection in 1831 that killed 60 white people in rural Southampton County, Va.

White novelist and Virginia native William Styron in 1967 published "The Confessions of Nat Turner," narrated by Turner, the revolt's leader.

Styron imagined much of Turner's character and the bloody events of the uprising, having little historical documentation beyond Turner's own confession in 1831 to prosecuting attorney Thomas Ruffin Gray, published a few years later as "The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va."

While Styron's book won the Pulitzer Prize and initially received acclaim from predominantly white critics, black intellectuals protested his depiction of Turner, the blacks who joined the rebellion and white slave owners. They claimed that Turner was a heroic black figure and that Styron reduced him to a cultural stereotype. Styron indignantly responded that Turner was virtually unknown, even among the black community, and that as a novelist he had the right to re-imagine historical events.

The black anger culminated in the 1968 book "William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond." In Styron's "This Quiet Dust," a 1982   collection of his non-fiction writing, the author said that his book "was the first novel in the long annals of American publishing to evoke such an immediate, entirely hostile attack."

Such attacks have become more frequent in recent years, with authors accused of cultural expropriation if they imagine characters of a different race, gender or sexual orientation. Styron's daughter, Alexandra, in a recent Atlantic essay compared the outrage over her father's book with that engendered recently by the publication of Jeanine Cummins' "American Dirt." 

In the essay, Alexandra Styron wondered if her father's book would even be published in today's cultural climate. She concluded that it would be, if written by a major author such as her father. But a little-known writer likely would be censored.

She points out that William Styron's close friend James Baldwin encouraged him to write the book and assume the voice of Nat Turner. Ralph Ellison also praised the book, as did black historian John Hope Franklin in a review in the Chicago Tribune, the only one written by a black writer in the thousands of newspapers that then existed.

Historian Eugene D. Genovese's defense of "The Confessions of Nat Turner" in The New York Review of Books ended the attacks on "The Confessions of Nat Turner."  The Marxist historian was known for his examination of slave life, "Roll Jordan Roll, The World the Slaves Made."

It must be admitted that the defense of Styron in a review revered among his intellectual circle looks like a closing of the ranks. While leftist, The New York Review was an organ of mostly white New York intellectuals who despite their liberal views on race closed their doors to many black writers.

Alexandra Styron admits her father' lack of humility in battling his critics. He felt the need to justify "The Confessions of Nat Turner" 15 years later in "This Quiet Dust." The title article, first published in Harper's magazine in 1965, tells about his visiting Southampton County in an effort to retrace Nat Turner's path. He republished the essay to counter black claims that he did insufficient historical research for the book.

The essay, which captures Southern whites' condescension toward blacks, shows Styron at his best.

After fruitless attempts to find surviving signs of the insurrection, Styron comes upon the ruins of the house he believes to be that of Margaret Whitehead, the only white directly killed by Turner. One of the black intellectuals' most heated criticisms of Styron was his imagined flirtation between Whitehead and Turner. 

In the novel, Turner reluctantly murders her at the instigation of another slave seeking to take over leadership of the revolt. Another violent black stereotype, the critics said.

Styron went on to write "Sophie's Choice." Although Harold Bloom accused Styron of antisemitism, the book escaped the controversy stirred by Nat Turner and gained widespread popularity, one of the last "literary" American novels that united the country's readership.

Supported by Henry Louis Gates and Spike Lee, and buoyed by Styron's enduring posthumous reputation, "The Confessions of Nat Turner" retains a strong readership, although it's generally avoided on high school and college curricula.

No doubt overly sensitive college students would object to its inclusion on class reading lists. Soon, no books will be acceptable, and English classes will be extinct.

"The Confessions of Nat Turner" drew the first shots in a cultural war that fully rages today.

 

ANWR oil drilling plan fans flames of climate change

Oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve would be the finale of the American frontier.

Donald Trump's Interior Secretary David Bernhardt on Monday opened the pristine 19-million acre ANWR to oil company leasing. The admnistration's act of vandalism sacrifices the sacred home of polar bears and caribou to corporate greed.

The action opens the entire 1.56-million acre coastal plain of the ANWR to leasing. Showing that the Trump administration will keep wreaking mischief even if it loses the election, Bernhardt wants the leasing done by the end of the year, making it difficult for Joe Biden to halt drilling. If Trump steals the election, oil wells will cover caribou nesting grounds.

Environmental groups will file suits to stop the action, and market forces might preserve the wildlife area. With the drop in oil prices and the technical difficulties of drilling in the ANWR, petroleum companies have expressed reluctance to bid on leases. Banks won't be eager to give loans for drilling.

Millions of barrels of oil reportedly lie beneath the ANWR, but those estimates might be understated. More seismic tests are required to determine the exact amount of petroleum there, but Bernhardt is pushing ahead anyway.

With the world reeling from climate change, the Trump administration pours more fuel on the fire.

 

 

Pete Hamill's death brings sorrow for lost era of American literature

Pete Hamill, who died this week at age 85, was the last lion of a great age of American literature.

Hamill and other writers who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s were known for their "new journalism," in which novelistic techniques were employed in the reporting of actual events. But they also wrote novels, short stories and essays, following Gore Vidal's dictum that writing is writing, and a good writer should be proficient in every genre.

The era brought abuses; New Journalism stars were accused of inventing scenes and dialogue in presenting situations believed to be factual. But, overall, the era raised journalism to a high literary level, and energized the novel.

Hamill, and his sometimes competitor, sometimes colleague Jimmy Breslin, raised the literary quality of New York newspapers, especially the now struggling tabloids The New York Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton, and the Daily News. Before owned by Rupert Murdoch, who ousted Hamill as editor, the Post was a literary liberal daily, owned by Dorothy Schiff. 

Before writing for New York tabloids, Breslin was a star of the old broadsheet Herald-Tribune, which despite its star writers succumbed to the New York City newspaper strike of the 1960s. That strike killed off a number of New York papers. For years a bastion of liberal Republicanism, the Herald-Tribune gave beneficial competition to The New York Times.

I was amazed at reading in Hamill's obituaries that he published short stories in The New York Post and Daily News, like Isaac Bashevis Singer contributing Yiddish stories to the Jewish Forward.

While the New York Times sometimes publishes fiction, it's hard to imagine a writer today finding a steady outlet for short stories in a newspaper.

Along with Hamill, like Breslin best known for his newspaper columns, the era gave us New Journalism pioneer and Herald Tribune stalwart Thomas Wolfe, novelist and ground-breaking journalist Norman Mailer, cultural critic Dwight MacDonald, jazz critic and free speech champion Nat Hentoff, political journalism chronicler Timothy Crouse, columnist Murray Kempton and the satirical gonzo malcontent, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Along with courageous reporting on the Vietnam War, racial discrimination, economic inequities and American and international politics, a dazzling group of rock critics emerged: The Village Voice's Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs of Creem and Rolling Stone, and Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph J. Gleason who shifted from jazz to rock, especially covering the San Francisco psychedelic scene.

Along with Thompson and Crouse, Rolling Stone developed writers like Joe Eszterhas, Cameron Crowe and P.J. O'Rourke, who evolved into a compelling conservative/libertarian critic.

The scene was hetero-male-dominated, but Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Mary McGrory, Eve Babitz, Vivian Gornick, Ellen Willis, Jill Johnston and others broke through the boys' club.

For those of us longing for literary glory in stifling Southern towns, magazines and newspapers from New York City were like oxygen tanks sent to those drowning beneath the sea.

Harold Hayes' Esquire, Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone, Willie Morris' Harper's, Clay Felker's New York magazine, Dan Wolf's Village Voice, I.F. Stone's Weekly and George Plimpton's Paris Review allowed us to claim membership in a hip, urban community.

While my conservative alma mater LSU swung to frat parties on football weekends and a general complacency, it offered outlets for European films, avant-garde music and literature beyond the bounds of our English course curricula. (My French teacher, a nice Southern lady, was shocked when I asked about Rimbaud.)

Vietnam Moratorium Day brought out a surprisingly large crowd, filling the Parade Grounds where compulsory ROTC cadets drilled in years past. Withstanding the taunts of flat-topped frat boys, many held small wooden crosses in support of anti-war speakers.

Even after the slaying of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and the election of Richard Nixon, those writers gave us hope for a better America. My sadness at Hamill's death is intensified by the knowledge that those dreams crashed. But even in these dark days, the heroic life of Hamill inspires us to keep the flame alive.

 

 

Isabel Wilkerson vs. Margaret Sullivan

Two prominent women journalists displayed jarring disparities in separate "Fresh Air" interviews this week.

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, promoting her new book "Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy," frequently used the embarrassing empty phrases "sort of" and "you know." An interview transcript revealed that she used "you know" in nearly every sentence and "sort of " often to unnecessarily qualify factual information.

The next day, black journalist Isabel Wilkerson delivered flawless English in promoting her new book, "Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents." A former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of the acclaimed "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration," Wilkerson conveyed complex information without faltering.

Sullivan's interview was conducted by "Fresh Air's" Dave Davies, who himself resorted to frequent "you knows." Here is one of Sullivan's statements, lamenting the loss of cultural critics at the Buffalo News, where Sullivan served as managing editor before a stint as The New York Times' readers' advocate and her job at the Washington Post.

"Our arts and our culture and, you know, sort of our society as a community, I think becomes less knitted together and weakened."

In contrast, here is a passage from Wilkerson, in response to Terry Gross' question about Wilkerson citing a Nigerian playwright who said there are no blacks in Africa.

"It's so shocking to our ears, because, of course, we say that there is an entire subcontinent of people who we would view as Black, but what she was saying was that until you come to the United States, they themselves do not see themselves as Black, they are Igbo ... or they are Yoruba or whatever it is that they are in terms of their ethnicity and identity.

It is only when they enter into a multilayered caste structure ... a hierarchy such as this, do they then have to think of themselves as Black. But back where they are from, they do not have to think of themselves as Black, because Black is not the primary metric of determining one's identity."

Sullivan is part of the white dominant caste that Wilkerson examines, yet showed less command of the language than Wilkerson, who fought to overcome racism as a member of an oppressed lower caste. Sullivan's vital message and impressive gathering of information were uncut by the verbal tics that made her sound more like a high school sophomore than a distinguished author.

While Gross and Wilkerson didn't discuss the discrimination against white and black women by the white-male dominated hierarchy, Sullivan unconsciously showed that even successful women lack full confidence. The "sort of" also denotes a need to qualify statements, a manifestation of the "on the other hand" objectivity now under fire in newsrooms.

Wilkerson gave some dismaying examples of how prejudice hampered her career. In one incident, a white male interview subject refused to believe she represented The New York Times.

Some blacks see the use of perfect grammar and spelling as sanctioning the white hierarchy. Academic debates are raging over "prescriptive" vs. "descriptive" linguistics.

Wilkerson, while exposing the devastation of America's caste system, eloquently uses the dominant caste's language, which has led to her success. "Caste" received a glowing review Wednesday from New York Times critic Dwight Garner,  a member of the white male establishment.

Sullivan's tics might be seen as minor. Yet, they undermined the authority of her arguments. Her "you knows" and "sort ofs" detracted from her alarming message about the decline of local journalism.

Wilkerson's perfect diction echoes the complaint that blacks have to perform better to succeed. As Sullivan promotes her important book, she should consult a voice coach to improve her speaking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sara Mayeux's "Free Justice" exposes failures of public defender system

The Supreme Court's 1963 Gideon V. Wainwright decision was hailed as a landmark of American democracy for guaranteeing poor defendants' rights to legal defense.

New York Times reporter Anthony Lewis' book about the case, "Gideon's Trumpet," heralded the decision as fulfilling the American commitment to equal justice, enshrined in the Constitution. Lewis's best-seller became a staple of high school civics classes, when they still existed.

Sara Mayeux's "Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in 20th Century America," exposes the failed promise of the Gideon decision.

As the Vanderbilt law and history professor chronicles, the decades following Gideon brought mass incarceration of poor defendants, mainly blacks, even for minor drug infractions.

With inadequate financing and inconsistent legislative support, especially in the South, the public-defender reforms promised by Gideon remain unrealized. The author with impressive research into a variety of state and local legal systems, shows how the U.S. legal system fell short of carrying out Gideon's ideals.

(Disclaimer: the author is my daughter. I think the book's importance warrants a review, overriding any concerns about fatherly pride affecting my views.)

"Free Justice," published by North Carolina Press, indicts the disparity in justice across the country. States like California have a long history of commitment to the public defender system, while others, mainly in the South, fail to carry out their constitutionally mandated duty.

In looking at the 20th century history of public defender successes and failures, Sara gives an in-depth history of American jurisprudence. While the writing at times is academic, her profiles of leading figures in the public defender movement are gems of popular history. Her at times satirical humor lighten the discussions of legal theory.

The book, pointed toward lawyers and law students, builds an impressive case for improving the public defender system. Readers interested in the legal system will find "Free Justice" a valuable history of American law.

 

 

Former Deadspin writers say "hey kids, let's form a web site." It's called Defector.

Estranged former Deadspin writers have formed a new online venture called Defector Media.

Defector Media will be owned by 19 out of 20 of the writers who quit Deadspin in November in a dispute with G/O Media, the web site's new owner. Each writer will own 5 percent of Defector Media, with rights to their own work, acccording to media reports.

Unlike Deadspin, a hallmark of the old free Internet, Defector will operate under a subscription model, rather than depending on ads. A subscription will cost $8 a month, with an annual discount.

In contrast to the Athletic, also a subscription model, Defector hasn't received any outside funding from venture capitalists. In a new take on the collective format, the writers are the sole investors. For more on the new site, here is a Slate interview with writer Maitreyi Anantharaman,

Fans of edgy writers like Drew Magary, Diane Moskowitz, David Roth and Ray Ratto have already given the site 7,000 subscriptions. Returning to the mix that ran the writers afoul of C/O Media, Defector will cover pop culture and politics as well as sports. C/O demanded that the then Deadspin writers focus on sports, which led to the mass resignations.

While looking at TV, films and social media, Defector will be sports-oriented, which will put it in competition with Athletic, as well as the still existent but struggling Deadspin, ESPN, Bleacher Report, MLB.com and the wounded former giant Sports Illustrated. Local newspaper that fought off the Athletic's staff raids will also have to keep an eye on the new site's reporting on local teams.

Led by Editor-in-Chief Tom Ley and business leader Jasper Wang, a Bain and Co. alum, Defector will begin podcasts next month, with the web site going online in September.

Defector represents another move away from the ad-based online model, which gave free access to viewers. Now, with a few holdouts like the New York Review of Books, Salon and others, most media companies have a paid subscription model, most successfully The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. A few local newspapers are also trying to generate online subscriptions.

The now dominant subscription model will bring greater competition and fragmentation. How much can consumers afford with the increasing number of TV streaming channels and media sites charging for articles?

Defector looks like a variation on the Substack model of authors receiving direct pay for their work. Such collectives have been tried before; here in Atlanta, "Like the Dew" was an online pioneer of the model. As local newspapers collapse, similar collectives have popped up around the country. Some are trying to survive as nonprofits.

Readers and viewers have a greater variety of choices than in the old days of one dominant local newspaper, three newsweeklies and three networks. Whether this results in a better informed public remains in question.