Travel and the baby brain

Noa, baby of wonder

Taking "baby consciousness" with us (Photo by Julien Haler)

The longer the childhood, the smarter the creature. That’s one of science’s core findings about the development of the baby brain as reported by psychologist Alison Gopnik in her recent TED talk, “What Do Babies Think?“. Humans, who take years to mature, construct cities, which chickens, which take months, wind up in soup.

Gopnik calls it “baby consciousness,” a phrase so giddily Zen it makes me giggle. It’s a development-specific mindset we lose as we grow and our heads are no longer stuffed full of tapioca. People peg toddlers as daft and scatterbrained, and it’s hard not to agree with that assessment when you observe a two-year-old do things like throw dried dog poo at the wall or try to fit a sandwich in the DVD player drawer.

But Gopnik, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the co-author of The Scientist in the Crib, says the truth about baby brains is just the opposite: “Babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing, but they are very good at taking in lots of information at lots of different sources at once… When we say babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we’re really saying is they’re bad at not paying attention.”

They’re starstruck with all the things there are to see and process. They’re high on learning. They’re in that deliciously primordial state that travelers know well, when everything is fresh and even meaningless details are noticed and interpreted.

There’s something to be said for this. When we go to a new place, our frame of reference is reset to zero. We bring with us our animal instincts for survival, of course. Even toddlers are self-protective. But everything we experience becomes a teachable moment.

Kids on Fort Sumter Ferry

Wide open, soaking it in: Fort Sumter Ferry, Charleston, 2011

Our gullible states are never higher than when we’re traveling. I remember dining once with some fellow writers at The Cricketers, a country pub owned by Jamie Oliver’s family, and after the meal, the waitress had a quirky way of serving tea. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but for the story’s sake, let’s say it involved wiping every exposed surface of the teapot with a moist rag after every single pour. Well, one of my companions was a first-time visitor to England, and when the waitress left the room, she leaned over and piped up conspiratorially: “They sure do pour tea funny here in England,” she protested, and took a sip. It took some minutes for me to politely persuade her that, no, what she had just witnessed was the peculiarity of one near-freak server at one country inn and was not representative of an entire nationality. The realization of her broad-stroke misinterpretation slowly lit her face like the dawn.

When we travel, our mind state tricks us into thinking everything we see is somehow typical of the new place we’re exploring. The stereotype of tourists as gullible morons, as infants with credit cards, is by no means particular to Americans because it’s well-earned by the borderlessness of human behavior. It’s what potentially makes travelers so annoying — and easy to swindle.

Try it the next time a visitor comes to your town. Invent some myth about your home that would make a fabulist blush: that there’s an Italian Heritage parade down your Main Street every Sunday afternoon or there’s a law making it illegal to serve steak with A-1 sauce — whatever Mike Daisey-ism you dare. Because everything about the destination is new to a tourist, just as the entire world is fresh to a baby, they will most likely trust you, their host and surrogate parent.

Travel regresses us to childhood. Is it any wonder that so many of us travel in our 20s, when we’ve just left that larval childhood stage but have not yet grown into the ill-fitting uniform of full adulthood? Is it any wonder so many travelers put a high priority on intensely sensory experiences such as drinking, sex, panoramic views, and extreme sports — pursuits that please our primal natures?

Gopnik knocks her point home in a way that make me think of a backpack as the next logical accessory after diapers:

If we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think cases where we’re put into a new situation that we’ve never been in before. When we fall in love with someone new, or when we’re in a new city for the first time. What happens then is not that our consciousness contracts — it expands. So that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home…. So what’s it like to be a baby? It’s like being in love in Paris for the first time after you’ve had three double espressos.

Personally, I’m for it. Peace and wisdom flower in an open mind. We travel to grow.

Hold onto that wonder, travelers. Always see the world with your baby brains.

Jason Cochran with Mickey Mouse

Vacation as never-ending childhood: I rest my case


Welcome to the Low Self-Esteem Economy

Clip Art suited man extending middle finger

"At our company, you're Number One!"

By now you’ve probably heard about this week’s news gossip that some business are now demanding the Facebook passwords of new job applicants so they can snoop around their private lives and approve of their private lives before hiring them. The media is noticeably short on names of specific companies that are actually doing it, but the debate has been opened — if you consider radio-button Internet polls to be debate.

Still, about 10 percent of people who responded to this Detroit Free Press poll said that, sure, they’d be wiling to surrender private password information in order get that elusive job. Granted, this is in Detroit, one of the most arid wastelands of the American employment ecosystem, and where people have lost dignity in a thousand ways long before clicking “vote.”

We’re sacrificing dignity because if we don’t, we won’t eat. Welcome to the new Low Self-Esteem Economy, in which the feeling that we’re lucky to get crumbs is a commodity employers can cash in.

The Huffington Post is building a news empire partly on the back of free labor; it doesn’t pay many of its writers and aggregates stories from other places. (It’s by no means the only publication doing this.) When a strike was called by the Newspaper Guild of America against it last year, its in-house flack said, “nearly all of our bloggers are happy with the arrangement, and happy to access the platform and the huge audience it brings.” Arianna Huffington herself, a famous liberal, blurted out a decidedly un-liberal denigration of a labor dispute, telling the media, ““Go ahead! Go on strike! What does it matter?… [N]o one really notices!” Maybe she was right. Five months later, the boycott was called off.

The message, of course, is that reporters and writers are lucky to get published at all. To accept any of this, you have to first accept that you’re not worth better.

I’m not sticking a knife in these companies for trying to get something out of people. I suppose that testing the limits of exploitation is the American way. It’s the bottom line of the free market system: Try to bleed profit out the other guy to the point where he cries foul — and there you find your market price.

I’m saying, with great concern, that we are happy to go along with it now. We are afraid to cry foul lest we go jobless.

A few people are objecting. There’s the former intern at The Charlie Rose Show who’s suing over alleged wage law violations. Who knows how much traction that’ll get, because as a culture, we accept no-wage situations when we’re beginning our careers. (I myself had two internships in the media when I was starting out; one at The Village Voice was unpaid, which I left the minute I landed a paid one at Entertainment Weekly, which indeed turned into an actual job with benefits.)

The trouble is that more and more of us are being told by powerful businesses that because the economy remains in a muddle, we’re all the equivalent of rank beginners.

Can you imagine if, say, Ernest Hemingway’s publishers refused to pay him for his first book, The Sun Also Rises, because he was “lucky” to see his name on a book at all?

If you have a great job right now, congratulations. Don’t brag too much about it, because many businesses already have us making huge sacrifices to retain our paychecks. We’re doing the work of all those who were fired in recent years. The trouble is that that employers have learned how to squeeze more out of us. While many of us toil to take one for the team, quaking in fear of retrenchment, the reality is that right now, corporations are recording record profit margins.

Economists fear that skeleton crew staffing has become the “new normal,” and that employers have seen they can wring maximum profits from minimum resources by demanded sacrifices from all. The Sword of Damocles, that mythic motivator that feeds on groveling, convinces us to give a lot of things we didn’t have to give up 10 years ago. Since businesses are racking up profits, why sheath the sword and hire more people again? Just as businesses have learned to operate under these lean circumstances, our tolerance as workers may have stretched so far it can never snap back to normal again.

What we’re seeing is a transfer of blue-collar terrors to white-collar résumés. Factory workers lived with oppression for generations, and they struggled with ways to fight back for just as long because often, there were few alternatives in their towns. Now cubicle professionals are being stretched to their hourly limit, losing already dwindling benefits, or donating labor without pay because the employers have convinced them they’re blessed for the privilege. It’s the old story with new middle-class players.

But, just as American factory workers learned long ago, it’s hard not to notice where the fruit of our labors is going.

I can only hope we’re nearing the end of this period an American industry that is underwritten by the low self-esteem of its workers. As the economy firms up, it will be more difficult for employers to hold onto this “new normal” of under-staffing and perennial internships. There comes a point, as people age and see their professional dreams wither, that they refuse to believe the manipulative lie that they’re simply lucky to have a job at all.

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Vacation days around the world

Food for thought: Most American businesses only give about 10 days of vacation a year, and they don't even have to do that. Also: When you're dead, you're dead forever. (Source: CNN)


The State Department STEPs up outreach to travelers

State Department's passport mascot

Out of character? The State Department sends this passport mascot to trade shows to encourage applications

Last weekend at the New York Times Travel Show, a well-dressed young woman spotted my press credentials and introduced herself. She was from the State Department, she said, and she’d like to bring me over to Deputy Assistant Secretary Brenda Sprague.

I admit I was taken aback. Usually, when someone from the government taps you for a little chat, it’s not a good thing. But it’s precisely that mistrust of bureaucracy that the State Department appears eager to correct as soon as possible. In a surprising turn, the Obama administration’s State Department is making a true effort to reach out to travelers.

On the road, I’m always jealous of the travelers from Australia and New Zealand. When they need something from their government, it’s often a breeze. Their taxes are repaid with international support. Someone answers their calls at their diplomatic outposts. It seems like wherever they venture, they can all but pop into the nearest embassy for a beer and a back rub whenever they’re bored.  Here in New York, I’ve even attended boozy Friday afternoon wine mixers at the Australian consulate.

But U.S. consulates and embassies are never welcome a weary traveler, not even if they were born with the privilege of carrying a passport with a bald eagle stamped on the cover. Indeed, the diplomatic fortresses we build abroad, such as the bunker on London’s Grosvenor Square and the $750 million citadel in Baghdad, are resolutely intent on keeping us out. They are designed out of an imperialistic marriage between pessimism and industry, and they’re geared to making inroads for business but halting independent Americans at the machine gun-guarded door. People around the world are confronted by those impassive slabs and wonder what sort of dastardly machinations are being hatched within.

A degree of detachment makes often makes sense, of course, either for security reasons or simply because they’re routinely swarmed with visa-seekers. In Krakow, I remember having to pick my way through a mob of what appeared to be boisterous protesters, only to realize when I got to its head that they were actually jostling for a spot in the queue for a paperwork blessing by my country’s invisible bureaucrats.

At the Travel Show, the State Department representative proudly told me that they were attending the show to get the word out about STEP, or the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program. This long-overdue program is designed to supply citizens with a level of hospitable consular support that other nations take for granted. If a traveler can surmount their malaise at registering their whereabouts with the federal government, they can receive email updates about local security warnings, and if the worst happens, as during the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, American seekers will actually come knocking on doors to make sure you’re all right.

The public relations push hasn’t stopped there. Today, the State Department held a live chat about keeping safe over Spring Break. This is a topic that travel journalists are often asked to hit this time of year. (Here I am on CBS last year talking about the same subject, spending much energy to gently assure viewers that Mexico is hardly a nefarious underworld of malfeasance.) So it’s gratifying to see the government trying to anticipate our questions for a change.

Mind you, I still don’t take my government’s word as the only word that matters. I have found that Australia’s list of travel warnings is often less politicized (or at least, politicized in different ways) than our State Department’s travel warnings. But the outreach is important to me. It’s encouraging to have an administration that values international travel or at the very least acknowledges that some of us are doing it.

You might have noticed that the White House has also been much more attentive to communicating with citizens on the same level that we communicate with ourselves. It’s tweeting now, it’s pumping out annotated live streams of important speeches, and it’s beavering away on Facebook.

Uncle Sam may not be ready to invite the masses inside for free Big Macs and Cokes, and behind the scenes he’s still an imperialistic fellow who’s more interested in fostering business deals than helping backpackers, but at least he’s working harder to repaint his impenetrable bunkers in a cheerier shade.

 

 

 


Stap Vinnig Oor: Round the world during the Web’s infancy

Stap Vinnig Oor: Jason Cochran's World Tour

The logo for one of the original travel blogs

“One day, not very long ago, I noticed I’d never been to the Pyramids. So I quit my job, left my apartment, and made a list of places I’d always wanted to go. And here’s the proof.”

That was how I kicked off the webpage documenting the round-the-world trip I took years ago. It was 1998. People were still paying for Netscape. Few of us used the Web regularly, and all of us had dialup, but I was determined to try it: I documented my journey online as I went. I’m ashamed to admit I began by using Courier.

Everyone logs their trips online now, but no one was doing it then. I was a pioneer. It took real effort. Flashpacking didn’t exist. I had to seek out Internet cafés and without WordPress or Blogspot to rely upon, I had to hand-code everything in basic HTML, and I was forced to seek out crude FTP programs (Fetch!) to get my writing online.

I didn’t put my travels online for Web fame or to garner a following, the way so many backpackers do now. There were no affiliates or appeals for free lodging, and I was years away from collecting my first paycheck for travel writing. Then, it was simply so my family and friends could follow along and know I wasn’t lying dead in some South African ditch. It also saved money at the STD ISD in India if I could simply upload some writing and pictures for everyone to follow. (I also tacked on a first-person account of 9/11 two years later because I didn’t know where else to post it at the time. That’s republished here.)

Technology and I have progressed somewhat, to say the least, but for all these years I have left my online diary online, quietly stashed in a corner of the Internet as a sort of museum of myself and of travel blogging.

I invite you to peer into the past to see how I did my online Web journal. There is some stuff that could really get me in trouble here, but just remember how young I was. Read about hippo attacks, angry mobs in Jordan, and false positives for syphilis. Learn about the traumatic event that made me call my RTW journey Stap Vinnig Oor.

Here’s the link, for as long as it lasts. Go:

Stap Vinnig Oor: Jason Cochran’s World Tour

It’s as much a journey into the Web’s past as it is a trip around our planet.

Jason Cochran at the Monsoon Palace in Udaipur, India

Me at the Monsoon Palace in Udaipur, India


Who is this Paul McCartney guy?

who is paul mccartney tweets

He's the walrus, and he's still missing, apparently.

The weirdest thing happened when Google came in: Cultural literacy went out. When I was 19, the Web was in its infancy, but I daresay my knowledge of my culture was much broader and deeper than nearly any 19-year-old I know today. Last night on the Grammys, when Paul McCartney took the stage, legions of incurious young people took to Twitter to wonder aloud who he was. Universally, they had the same self-defense.

“That happened before I was born.”

As if that’s an excuse. The Beatles were before my time, too, but I still know about them. In fact, there are a lot of things that happened before my time that I still know about, including but not limited to the Civil War, Warren G. Harding, the World’s Columbian Exposition, and the Stage Door Canteen.

Lest this come across as a Get Off My Lawn rant, I think there may be a cultural reason for the self-enforced stupidity we’re seeing in American youth, and moreover, for a stubborn failure to perceive that mouth-breathing ignorance as a failing. When I was a kid, we had three network channels, plus a few random channels in the double digits where you would find grainy re-runs of The Brady Bunch, The Monkees, and I Love Lucy. When your cultural outlets are that distilled, everyone tends to be exposed to the same stuff.

Today, kids have 600 channels. None of them are on the same page (not even the same Web page). It’s hard to blame them if they don’t know what to consider relevant. They have only word of mouth to prompt them.

But it’s easy to blame them for wearing their ignorance like a badge. I forgive them for not knowing, but I can’t understand why not knowing doesn’t upset them, or at least pique their curiosity. This generation has Google and Wikipedia, yet it’s the least inclined of all to actually use them. We have created for ourselves tools beyond our ancestors’ abilities to imagine, tools with the potential of transforming and enlightening mankind forevermore, and yet we utterly lack the agency to activate them.

If you don’t know something, Google it. A decade ago, even that advice seemed like a short cut. Today, people aren’t even bothering to do it at all.

It’s as if knowing the information could be at our fingertips is enough, and actually accessing that information is a formality we need not engage.

There are kids who use these to sponge up understanding of the world into which they were born. But too many of them merely crowdsource remedies to their ignorance, ensuring that the most enduring aspects of our culture are those few topline facts we all agree on. American culture is becoming no richer than the 200-odd standard songs on a Clear Channel rotational playlist.  I suppose this is the same shallowness that Hollywood depends on to pump out remake after sequel, with nothing original to inspire future generations of recyclers.

There’s a dissertation to be written about this phenomenon, no doubt: the fantasy that owning an encyclopedia automatically makes you smart. The queasy realization that the upcoming generation measures the worth of something based on whether they overheard someone talking about it or saw it reposted somewhere.

I want to say: Paul McCartney was a Beatle. Spelled that way. They broke up before you were born. They broke up before I was born, too, but I still know all about them.

They were important, but it’s also true they were not nearly as important as many other things you will never know about because you will not be accidentally exposed them on the Grammys.

And because you do not care about reaching for anything that is not placed in front of your face, you are doomed to live small. You are the perfect consumer.


 


How to see London for $15 a day [WATCH]

Jason Cochran: The Ward of Cheap in London

My recent post on San Francisco touring pitfalls was such a success that it’s not too early for another winning budget travel video. This one is about London, and how to see it without spending more than $15 a day. I have passed more time in London than in any city other than my home, and I have written about it quite a lot, too.

Between you and me (don’t tell anyone), my guidebook to London, is probably the best one I’ve written. I was in the zone. That’s the same book that was award best guide of the year by the Society of American Travel Writers’ Lowell Thomas Awards. I took some of the ripest fruit from that guide and turned it into a video.

You should have seen me racing around London in a single day to shoot all this footage with my little camera (for a site that’s now defunct). It’s easier said than done since there I was on my own and there was a lot of running around to be done. And I shot this on the same day as a video about what the U.K. Post Office can teach America’s and one about the successful Barclays free bike loaner system, also known as Boris’s Bikes. I was mildly moist, enjoyed nothing of the sights, and I might have chosen my wardrobe better. Then I hustled off to Southampton to do another video about the naming of the new Cunard Queen Elizabeth ship.

Let no one say travel writing is like a vacation. You have to get the goods, and the goods have got to be good.

Yeah. I know. Uptown complaints.

But this is good. There are actually some incredibly useful tips in here for saving cash there once you arrive — without missing out on what makes London London. I’m proud of this, as I am my book:

Once you’ve laid out a million dollars for airfare and hotel (although my book has some terrific secret hotels), these tips will save you save you dosh.

Fun fact: The opening and closing shots were lip-synched because the original audio was too messy. You probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t told you, but I now know what Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds go through in their ADR sessions.


San Francisco’s tourist pitfalls

Today, I present a segment (with some really handsome shots by Matt Crum) about all the ways to make San Francisco, which is already a good-value city for vacations, into an even better value.

One of my books is a guide to San Francisco, which is barely still for sale. I don’t think you should necessarily rush to buy it, because it may be the most plainspoken guide to San Francisco ever written. I sort of tell people things are not as exciting as they’re cracked up to be. On The Haight: “You’re more likely to meet slumming rich kids from the suburbs who have discreetly parked their Beemers a few blocks away than you are to meet any actual hippies.” And I proclaim the vagrant-plagued Tenderloin “a national shame.”

Oops.

I do think it’s true. But as it turns out, people don’t always want the unvarnished truth in their guide books. They want a li’l bit of cheerleading.  Framed this way, though, in a helpful how-to video, navigating the mistakes of San Francisco becomes much more appealing.

This originally ran (in a much shorter version) for a website that is now in website heaven.


A ride on L.A.’s Angels Flight [WATCH]

Just a happy, pleasing video designed to bring you the feeling of being somewhere, without quick cuts or commentary: Like I did for my drive through South Dakota’s Badlands, I shot a ride on the Angels Flight railway in downtown Los Angeles.

Most people don’t know that downtown Los Angeles is steep in places, and this funicular was constructed in 1901 to haul locals up Bunker Hill, which is now the heart of the city but then had some pretty mansions. It’s only 298 feet long (although its historic plaque, installed before the railway was moved slightly south, gives the old length of 315 feet—and adds an apostrophe for “Angel’s”). That it managed to survive at all is a miracle, but the ride has been bumpy. It started as transportation in a residential district, as did Pittsburgh’s Monongahela and Duquesne inclines, which are also still in operation.

It was later engulfed in stone skyscrapers, followed by dismantling, storage, a move slightly south, and a period of benign neglect that climaxed when one of the trolley cars disregarded its brakes, hurtled downhill, and crushed someone. This video was shot 15 days after it re-opened following a nine-year closure and refit. The locals were curious and not a little bit nervous.

Downtown L.A. is actually one of my favorite places. It’s bizarre to me that an entire city, one that is about the size of Chicago’s Loop, would be pretty much abandoned, as L.A. was in the 1940s. The whites went west and left it to the incoming Mexicans. What remains is a fascinating mix of the untouched and the decimated. Part of the city is a stately example of incredible American wealth in the years between the San Francisco Quake and World War II. And part of the city is parking lots. Downtown Los Angeles lost the thread of what its personality was. Angelenos are figuring it out.

Citizens of Beverly Hills, perhaps regretting the white flight that abandoned the Angels Flight, installed this plaque in its old location. They wrongly made its name possessive, too.


Signs that your favorite website is a post mill

See the recent graduates huff and puff at the grindstone so that Google is swarmed with the domain they serve

The Twitterverse loves congratulating itself over the speed and reach of its favorite toy, but it leaves out one important fact: There’s a lot more bad journalism now than there was before the social media revolution.

While social media has the power to spread snippets of potentially useful information far and wide, many of the updates link to some truly awful reportage. That is, if people click on the link at all. Analyst Dan Zarrella found that tweeted links have a less-than-10% click-through rate, meaning fewer than one in ten people bothers to absorb more than a headline. The number of people who bother to read more than a sentence or two on Facebook is similar.

With numbers like this, it’s hard not to begin to see poorly executed social media as gossip, refined.

Because much of the time we only see information 140 characters at a time, we don’t realize how wobbly are the underpinnings of the headlines. Even on the relatively rare instances when we click through on a link we read, we’ve become so habituated to scanty details that we some of us have never grown up with the ability to discern a professionally researched, ethically sourced story and something slapped together to harvest a click.

The bulk of our news is now bulk news. These are the post mills.

Corporations have laid off their full-time reporters by the thousands. They devote no resources to deep investigation, or if they do, it’s only to a few figurehead hires. Rarely did someone who works at the site you’re reading actually pick up a phone to validate the story it is recycling. Instead, you will notice, it passes the buck and links to where it found it. And thus, Web rumors circulate daily. A significant chunk of the New Media machine disseminates squibs and filler in a mandate to crank out topical information, harvest clicks while the getting is good, and move on.

These sites require writers to pump out five or more posts a day — not enough time to properly research, and not enough time to even leave their desks to sift through government files, attend press conferences, or cultivate contacts.

I won’t name names. I don’t need to. Here are 10 warning signs that your site may be a post mill that trades in glorified gossip.

A post mill:

— Links to original reporting another site did. Usually the writer places not so much as a single phone call to get a response or to fact-check. They might quickly consult a website. With post mills, you’ll often find yourself clicking backward from site to site, Escher-like, before you can finally locate the one that reported the story to begin with. Let’s hope it did it properly, because it can be hard to find the beginning of the research trail.

— Doesn’t pay its writers, or it only pays a few of them. If it does pay them a living wage, it may make a show of it to ward of a reputation as a post mill. Some of the aspects of the post mill, such as relentless working conditions for the young people hired to staff them, are not evident on the home page.

— Has high writer turnover. This is sometimes a sign that websites pay (if they do) according to how many views their posts attract. Given the post mill’s onerous daily quota, writers burn out faster. Commission systems also create an incentive to dangle scandalous or scary posts that are designed to stir reader fears or outrage, which in turn has them reposting them in alarm, delivering the post mill the clicks it craves.

— Often covers press releases. These can be collected and processed with a minimum of effort. Readers won’t often recognize the story as a press release rehash, but if a bunch of sites post the same story on the same day with the same details, it’s usually because a miller turned PR puff into news. Or they “aggregated” it from another site. Either way, the emperor has no clothes.

— Front-loads hot, SEO-friendly words in the headline and early grafs. During the writing process, the editors probably consulted Google Keywords to tip potential clicks in their favor, or its editors know what works. This isn’t necessarily a bad practice. Newspapermen do something similar all the time with their headlines, of course, but sexy headlines that attract clicks are a primary M.O. of a post mill.

— Gravitates toward crime and weirdness. Controversy and weird videos are a sure sign a post mill is click-baiting. I see several of the major “travel” sites trafficking mostly in airplane mishaps and airport infractions, posting very little industry and destination expertise at all. Highlighting controversy because people click on it does nothing good for public discourse, and in fact, it often gives power to idiotic arguments that don’t merit endless debate in a society with plenty of real problems to confront.

— Frequently wanders off topic. A post mill often has a lax editorial directive that enables what I call search trapping, which is posting anything, often with not even tangential connection to the theme of the site, to cash in on the hot subject of the moment.

— Often keeps posts really short. The less reporting, the shorter the writing time, the quicker a mill can search trap. If you finish reading a post and you have some basic questions unanswered, if there were no quotes that aren’t attributed to some other publication, or if you have to click from that brief story to someone else’s website to get the full details, you might be reading a post mill.

— Publishes top 10 lists with no methodology. If you’re not finding new stories, you have to rehash old ones, and if you list 10 subjective things, you have 10 chances to pop up in Google searches. They’re also highly shareable because readers are now used to the unchallenging buzz of the meme. They’re not all bad, and I have written quite a few of these myself for reputable publishers such as the BBC and Travel + Leisure; you can recognize the milly ones for their utter lack of factual meat.

— Has lots of sister sites. This is a sign that a publisher is trying to corner a bunch of topics at once, and a business with a split focus like that is more likely to be financially, and not journalistically, obsessed. Not a sure sign, but like everything on my list, it could be a flag.

Don’t get me wrong. Not all post mills are bad. Some do a very good job of aggregating news that would otherwise escape wider notice. There’s also nothing wrong with using tools to get more clicks. There is something wrong, though, when there is precious little expertise, reporter access, or eyewitness validation supporting the content.

Post mills can undermine the Fourth Estate, allow marketing and PR departments to manipulate our media as their mouthpiece, and leave the watchdogs sleeping. An entire generation of people is growing up without an understanding that the people who bring them their news have hastily recycled it, without checking how it got to them. Even the esteemed news outlets devote minutes and column inches to recycling what Joe Blow said about a topic on Facebook or Twitter. Gossip and news are becoming indistinguishable.

We have developed a news system in which everyone assumes that someone else is doing the heavy lifting. Somewhere, we think, there’s a group of people who vetted and researched what we read. In actuality, a lot of it just came off the grindstone.