Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Politico’s Roger Simon, in a nice article about Journolist, pulls out a priceless nugget from Stanley Walker, a famous editor from the ’20s and ’30s:

“What makes a good newspaperman? The answer is easy. He knows everything. He is aware not only of what goes on in the world today, but his brain is a repository of the accumulated wisdom of the ages.

“He hates lies and meanness and sham, but keeps his temper. He is loyal to his paper and to what he looks upon as his profession; whether it is a profession or merely a craft, he resents attempts to debase it.

“When he dies, a lot of people are sorry, and some of them remember him for several days.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40308_Page2.html#ixzz0vAQWuO75

If you haven’t read Michael Wolff’s Vanity Fair article about Politico, you’re cheating yourself.  Politico.com is a virtual case study on why good journalism is destined to survive even if the newspapers were to disappear. During the presidential campaign, the organization emerged as the “go to” source for solid, authoritative coverage that matched or trumped anything the Washington Post or New York Times could produce.

And here’s the real kicker: While we think of Politico primarily as a web site, it’s actually making money off its print product, even though it gives away its content free on the web site, which can’t support the organization by itself because Internet ad rates are too low.

How does this differ from what the “newspapers” are doing? It starts with the understanding that the product itself is the reporting. The story. It’s pure information, and the way we read it is secondary. Newspapers have the tail (the print medium) wagging the dog (the story). They still think the product is the thing that gets ink on our fingers.

Fortunately, there are others at places like Politico, Salon, Slate and a few hundred local web-based news startups who can tell difference.

After analyzing 90 million articles and blog posts, researchers have found that blogs typically lag traditional news outlets by about two and a half hours.

The study by researchers at Cornell is one of several recent attempts to quantify the news cycle. In this case, the researchers looked for repeated phrases (e.g., “lipstick on a pig”) and tracked their appearance on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs.

The study found that about 3.5% of the phrases tracked began with the blogs and percolated to mainstream media. Read the study.

I’m still trying to make sense of the Washington Post’s idea for holding corporate-sponsored private “salon” meetings with D.C. insiders as well as Washington Post editors and writers. It’s one of those “say what? ” moments when normally intelligent people do something stupid that we just can’t comprehend it.

This fiasco breaks so many of the rules it’s hard to know where to begin. The flap started when Politico reported on a Washington Post brochure offering to let corporations pay $25,000 for a single session to $250,000 for a series to sponsor sessions where their executives could mingle with high-ranking officials and public officials. To make matters worse, they apparently implied that the sessions would be “off the record,” with the journalists present promising not to quote anybody.

Right off the bat, here are two big problems:

• It smacks of checkbook journalism. Assuming the power brokers were compensated to appear, it would put the Washington Post in the position of paying money to public officials. (What ever happened to the arm’s length watchdog role of the media?)
• It violates the basic rule that everything is ALWAYS on the record. If you say something in the presence of a reporter, you’d better make sure you’re willing to read it in tomorrow’s paper. That’s true even if the reporter says it’s “off the record.”

I know times are tough in the news business, but do they need the money that badly?

If you don’t believe that e-readers (the name that’s catching on for hand-held gadgets like Amazon’s Kindle) are the future of journalism, you’ll want to read accounts from the symposium of the Digital Publishing Alliance. The Digital Publishing Alliance at the Reynolds Journalism Institute brought together some of the industry’s heaviest and smartest hitters last month, and they connected a lot of the dots in the current marketplace. Digital Publishing Alliance site.

Ray Pearce, VP-Circulation at The New York Times, said e-readers will create a fourth major delivery system for newspapers (the first three being print, web and hand-held devices such as Blackberry and iPhone). He doesn’t see advertising on the e-reader as a major short-term revenue source, but he does see a great deal of potential for low-cost subscriptions. The Times is currently offering a variety of low-cost blogs, breaking news packages, and content-specific subscriptions via the Kindle at low rates.

While the Kindle has the traction now, it won’t be alone for long. We can expect a bunch of product announcements in the coming months.

A Pew survey conducted in April found that only 43% of Americans would personally miss their newspaper if it disappeared. Only 43% felt that it would hurt civic life in their community “a lot” if the paper went away. Read the Pew story.

Meanwhile, Slate, the enormously successful web-only news site, has a nice story on Time’s experiment with an online magazine custom-built especially for the reader. Of course, it doesn’t do anything an aggregator page can’t do, but it’s a little slicker. Slate story.

Here’s the roundup of newspaper layoff news from the past week. Erica Smith’s Paper Cuts, which tracks these better than anybody, now puts the year-to-date total at 9,906 newspaper jobs lost. Here are the ones I spotted this week:

• South Florida Sun-Sentinel, an estimated 30 in newsroom – about 20% of the news staff. The Sun-Sentinel laid off about 50 last summer.
• Huntington (W. Va.) Herald-Dispatch, 24 in newsroom and administrative positions.
• Baton Rouge Advocate, 49 workers.
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 39 workers, mostly in circulation.
• The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, none for now. They dodged a layoff bullet as the union agreed to concessions, including a 10 percent pay cut, a suspension of all retirement and 401k contributions by the company, and a two-year wage freeze.

This cut reduces the the San Diego Union Tribune’s staff by 18% to to 850. Upstate, the San Francisco Chronicle is laying off another dozen or so, and the Boston Newspaper Guild agreed to hefty concessions to keep the New York Times from closing down the Boston Globe. They Guild reportedly agreed to a 23% pay cut, unpaid furloughs and other concessions, and they’re still going to face serious job cuts. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the biggest paper in Arkansas, cut its newsroom by 16.

Even San Francisco’s irreverent The Onion is closing, with its final edition this week.

In Reading, Pa., The Eagle sent 50 employees packing and didn’t even give them a severance package.

Newspapers have always conducted focus group research to refine their product. When I was a reporter and editor, we’d get called in once or twice a year for a read-out on the results. But it was always about such things as the news mix (how much national, local, business, sports etc.). And of course it was always dominated by people saying they wanted “good news,” though of course they never read it.

What the Chicago Tribune blundered into recently was different. (Background.) They were surveying readers on actual specific story ideas, apparently with the idea of using reader input to determine which stories would be pursued. This speaks somewhat to the desperation of some newspapers, who are searching for ways to keep readers and stay profitable (the Tribune is in bankruptcy). Happily, the newsroom protested, and the idea was dropped. We don’t need journalists who are testing the winds of opinion to decide what to cover. They need to listen to readers, of course, or they’ll lose touch with their audience. But decisions need to be independent.

Nobody has brought it up yet, but I suspect the current practice of inviting comments on individual stories on web sites crosses that line. Often, anonymous comments are allowed from unregistered users, and many come from people with an ax to grind. It’s impossible for reporters not to read and react to such comments, and they can find themselves tossed about by public opinion rather than simply doing the job they are paid (for the time being, at least) to do. Letters to the editor are a better way to handle such feedback, because they are filtered, and the identities of the writers are known.

One of the most useful Twitter functions is sending out headlines that lead people to media web sites. I’ve found myself dropping some feeds because they just crowd out everything else. If Google tweets everything it picks up, that may just be way too much of a good thing. But it will be interesting to watch. Information Week story.