To get it first, to get it right....

... or to get it on camera.  That is the question.

And it all surrounds the bizarre case of Manti Te'o and the reporters who loved him.  Or at least loved his story.

According to the New York Times, ESPN had the story of the inspirational Notre Dame football player who loved, then lost, a girl who didn't exist --  but sat on it.  To get it right?  To get te'o on camera? Or was the decision more complicated?  In any event, while ESPN waited, Deadspin, a sports blog, posted.  Recriminations -- and ethical questions ensued:

For some, the debate within ESPN quickly gave way to regret and reflection. Three ESPN executives interviewed in recent days said they should have published on Jan. 16. The executives, who would not be identified because they did not want to second-guess their organization by name, said that the network’s focus on waiting until getting an interview with Te’o was a mistake. 

“If I had my druthers, we would have run with it,” one executive said. “We’ve had a bunch of discussions internally since then, and I don’t think it will happen this way again. I wonder sometimes if perfection is the enemy of the practical.” 

ESPN has faced considerable skepticism over the years about its ability to aggressively report on potentially embarrassing issues involving the leagues and universities with which it has an array of lucrative broadcast deals. Just days before learning that the Kekua story might be a hoax, ESPN televised Notre Dame’s loss to Alabama in the Bowl Championship Series title game before the second-largest audience in cable television history. 

In this instance, there does not seem to be any obvious competing interest that might have blunted ESPN’s vigor in reporting the story. Except, perhaps, the value it attaches to having its subjects on camera. ESPN, as a journalistic matter, said it needed to talk to Te’o. But ESPN, as a competitive broadcaster, also dearly wanted that to happen on camera. Despite its broad expansion into radio, print and digital outlets, ESPN’s greatest strength is built on the power of video.

And so you have to wonder where the ethics play in: Was ESPN trying to get it right?  Trying to stay on the right side of a moneymaking contract?  Or prioritizing the flash -- in this case, an on-camera interview -- instead of the news?  The irony is that Katie Couric rather than ESPN was the one to get Te'o on camera. bk

To quote or not to quote...

That is always the question.  But there's a new wrinkle, according to this piece in Monday's New York Times by media writer David Carr.  He is disturbed by the increasing practice of news sources insisting on reviewing their quotes before publication.  He calls it "The Puppetry of Quotation Approval".  Read the whole column here.

Here's a taste:

Within the past year, I’ve had a communications executive at a media company ask me to run quotations by him after an interview with the chief executive. I’ve had analysts, who are in the business of giving their opinion, ask me to e-mail the portion of the conversation that I intended to print. And not long ago, a spokesman, someone paid to talk, refused to put his name to a statement. Most of the time I push back, but if it’s something I feel I absolutely need, I start negotiating.

As someone who has covered Hollywood, I can’t begin to catalog the number of distasteful communications customs in that industry. And reporters I spoke to said Wall Street companies have been trying to negotiate quotations for a decade, in part because one poorly chosen word could cost millions or even billions. But now it is leaking into all corners of the kingdom.

Including government and politics.  And there's something else that can kill the truth of a story:  email interviews.  More from Carr:

But something else more modern and insidious is under way. In an effort to get it first, reporters sometimes cut corners, sending questions by e-mail and taking responses the same way. What is lost is the back-and-forth, the follow-up question, the possibility that something unrehearsed will make it into the article. Keep in mind that when public figures get in trouble for something they said, it is usually not because they misspoke, but because they accidentally told the truth.

All of which tends to serve the source, rather than the public interest.  Trouble, yes? Especially in an election season.  Back to Carr for the last word(s):

It may seem obvious, but it is still worth stating: The first draft of history should not be rewritten by the people who make it.

 Indeed.  bk

bk

on objectivity, blanace and fact-checking

Whose job is it to fact-check, especially in an election year? Go here for a nuanced look by Neiman Journalism Lab writer Lucas Graves that goes deep into the murky definition of "journalistic objectivity." It all stemmed from a query by the New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane. Here's a taste:

For anyone who missed it (or the ensuing analysis, rounded up here) the exchange can be summed up in two lines of dialogue:

Times to Internet: Should we fact-check the things politicians say?

Internet to Times: Are you freakin’ kidding?

That was an actual response, and a popular refrain: More than a dozen comments included some variant of, “This is a joke, right?” Several readers compared the column to an Onion piece. By far the most common reaction, which shows up in scores of comments, was to express dismay at the question or to say it captures the abysmal state of journalism today. A typical example, from “Fed Up” in Brooklyn: “The fact that this is even a question shows us how far mainstream journalism has fallen.”

You might also check out some jlinx posts from the last election year. Search terms: speechification and fact-checking

a couple of j links -- strictly for comm 40

Here's a look at what it takes for the New York Times to cover the world -- from a piece in The Atlantic

And here are a couple of links that might (or might not) come in handy when you write your obit:
http://www.obitwriters.org/moreobits.html
http://www.blogofdeath.com/

That's it. bk

the power of words: who controls the agenda?

Fierce media critic Glenn Greenwald excoriates the New York Times and other members of the mainstream media for backing down from using the word "torture" to describe water-boarding at the behest of the Bush administration.

This, according to a study by Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. The Bush administration-dictated euphemism of choice? "harsh interrogation techniques."

What's in a word? Lots. It's a pernicious case of letting the folks with the most vested interest in the outcome control the agenda: the press abdicating its role of watchdog.

There could be any number of reasons why the NYT played the toad in this case. I suspect a lot had to do with access to a very closed an secretive White House. Piss off your limited sources, and what access you had tends to dry up. All of which, it seems to me, seems to me to turn the First Amendment, and all its intent, on its head.

Back to Greenwald:

In response to the Harvard study documenting how newspapers labeled waterboarding as "torture" for almost 100 years until the Bush administration told them not to, The New York Times issued a statement justifying this behavior on the ground that it did not want to take sides in the debate. Andrew Sullivan, Greg Sargent and Adam Serwer all pointed out that "taking a side" is precisely what the NYT did: by dutifully complying with the Bush script and ceasing to use the term (replacing it with cleansing euphemisms), it endorsed the demonstrably false proposition that waterboarding was something other than torture. Yesterday, the NYT's own Brian Stelter examined this controversy and included a justifying quote from the paper's Executive Editor, Bill Keller, that is one of the more demented and reprehensible statements I've seen from a high-level media executive in some time (h/t Jay Rosen):

• Continue reading

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said the newspaper has written so much about the issue of water-boarding that "I think this Kennedy School study -- by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories -- is somewhat misleading and tendentious."

You can find the above links, a pdf of the Harvard story, and more thru Greenwald's piece. bk

news vs public relations

Just one example. Easy comparison.

News:

Two weeks ago, the government put out a round estimate of the size of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico: 5,000 barrels a day. Repeated endlessly in news reports, it has become conventional wisdom.

But scientists and environmental groups are raising sharp questions about that estimate, declaring that the leak must be far larger. They also criticize BP for refusing to use well-known scientific techniques that would give a more precise figure.

The criticism escalated on Thursday, a day after the release of a video that showed a huge black plume of oil gushing from the broken well at a seemingly high rate. BP has repeatedly claimed that measuring the plume would be impossible.

PR:

Subsea efforts continue to focus on, firstly, progressing options to stop the flow of oil from the well through interventions via the blow out preventer (BOP) and, secondly, attempts to contain the flow of oil at source to reduce the amount spreading on the surface. These efforts are being carried out in conjunction with governmental authorities and other industry experts.

Further investigation of the failed BOP, using remotely-operated vehicles and a variety of diagnostic techniques, has increased our understanding of the condition of the BOP and allowed planning to continue for a number of potential interventions, including for a so-called “top kill” of the well.

This would involve first injecting material of varying densities and sizes (also known as “junk shot”) into the internal spaces of the BOP to provide a seal, before pumping specialised heavy fluids into the well to prevent further flow up the well. Plans for this option are being developed in preparation for potential application next week.

Work continues to collect and disperse oil that has reached the surface of the sea. Over 530 vessels are involved in the response effort, including skimmers, tugs, barges and recovery vessels.

Over 120 flights have been made to apply dispersant to the spill since the response effort began.

what's in a name?

To name or not to name, once again. Rather than going over old ground, go here from some previously charted territory on anonymity on the web, specifically as regards the odious juicy campus.

On a more releant note, the New York Times reports that several serious news sites are rethinking previous policies that let readers comment under the complete cloak of anonymity. Originally, reporter Richard Perez-Pena writes, opening up the web to any and all who wanted to join the conversation was looked upon, at least by some, as admirable:

From the start, Internet users have taken for granted that the territory was both a free-for-all and a digital disguise, allowing them to revel in their power to address the world while keeping their identities concealed.

A New Yorker cartoon from 1993, during the Web’s infancy, with one mutt saying to another, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” became an emblem of that freedom. For years, it was the magazine’s most reproduced cartoon.

When news sites, after years of hanging back, embraced the idea of allowing readers to post comments, the near-universal assumption was that anyone could weigh in and remain anonymous. But now, that idea is under attack from several directions, and journalists, more than ever, are questioning whether anonymity should be a given on news sites.

It's a good question, one that many big thinkers are rethinking. Back to Perez-Pena:

Some prominent journalists weighed in on the episode, calling it evidence that news sites should do away with anonymous comments. Leonard Pitts Jr., a Miami Herald columnist, wrote recently that anonymity has made comment streams “havens for a level of crudity, bigotry, meanness and plain nastiness that shocks the tattered remnants of our propriety.”

No one doubts that there is a legitimate value in letting people express opinions that may get them in trouble at work, or may even offend their neighbors, without having to give their names, said William Grueskin, dean of academic affairs at Columbia’s journalism school.

“But a lot of comment boards turn into the equivalent of a barroom brawl, with most of the participants having blood-alcohol levels of 0.10 or higher,” he said. “People who might have something useful to say are less willing to participate in boards where the tomatoes are being thrown.”

All of which is another reminder that one of the issues in all things digital is the fact that the technology often outpaces our ability to think about it. bk

on the job training?

... or slave labor. Is an internship by any other name, well, still an internship? You choose.

Is the experience worth the (lack of) paycheck? Or are eager college kids -- in a down economy -- being taken advantage of by everyone on the j-side from Huffington Post (which once auctioned off an internship to the highest bidder at a charity auction) to Rolling Stone.

Go here to read a New York Times piece questioning the legality of unpaid internships. The piece also points out that many unpaid internships often have little experiential value as well as also pondering whether kids from wealthy families end up getting an unfair leg up the career ladder. From the story:

One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots.

At Little Airplane, a Manhattan children’s film company, an N.Y.U. student who hoped to work in animation during her unpaid internship said she was instead assigned to the facilities department and ordered to wipe the door handles each day to minimize the spread of swine flu.

Tone Thyne, a senior producer at Little Airplane, said its internships were usually highly educational and often led to good jobs.

Concerned about the effect on their future job prospects, some unpaid interns declined to give their names or to name their employers when they described their experiences in interviews.

While many colleges are accepting more moderate- and low-income students to increase economic mobility, many students and administrators complain that the growth in unpaid internships undercuts that effort by favoring well-to-do and well-connected students, speeding their climb up the career ladder.

Sticking with the publishing side, Daily Finance blogger Jeff Bercovici notes that The Atlantic, possibly red-faced after the Times' piece, has announced that it will start paying its interns. But he also includes some horror stories about pubs that don't -- despite the fact that the law says employers must provide either cash or college credit along with meaningful work:

But many other companies employ interns who receive neither cash nor credit -- even though such an arrangement falls into exactly the legal "grey zone" Atlantic Media is exiting. A search of online job listings in magazine publishing turns up plenty of unpaid internships for non-students, although in most cases credit can be had for those who want it. A listing for a fashion internship at Interview magazine specifically states, "College credit is not required," while one at Us Weekly merely says credit is "available." It's not much different in online media: A spokesman for the Huffington Post says the site " has both paid and unpaid interns, who work at the site for the training, experience, and exposure." Adds the spokesman, "We're careful to follow all employment guidelines."

Those guidelines, however, are fairly subjective and, taken literally, rather unfavorable to employers. They require, among other things, that any company employing unpaid interns derive "no immediate advantage" from the work they do to ensure that the emphasis is on job training, not exploitation. That rule seems to be honored mostly in the breach at places like Rolling Stone, which is owned by the same company as Us Weekly, Wenner Media. A former intern there says her job was mostly transcribing interview tapes and fetching coffee for editors.

all the news that's fit to tweet

How to go hyperlocal without much of a payroll? The Business Insider tells us here what the New York Times has up its sleeve:

The New York Times Co. (NYT) is roping in more hyperlocal news content with a new announcement: They just made a deal with Fwix, the real-time newswire that filters and finds local information on blogs, news sites, and social media sites.

Um, okay. If you check Fwix's "about page", what you find is that out of a staff of twelve, there are a lot of engineers but no reporters. There is, however, one "content editor."
Here's what Fwix has to say about itself:

Founded in October 2008 by Darian Shirazi, Fwix was originally designed to filter news & information on the internet by local area. Since then, the team at Fwix has built technology designed to filter and find the best local information on blogs, news sites, and social media sites. Currently, Fwix is active in over 160 cities in the US, Canada, UK & Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

Now, Fwix seems like a smart, techy outfit that probably provides an alternative to traditional news media for lots of folks supremely interested in where they live. Nowthat the NYTimes has hooked up, I suspect Fwix stands to make a lot of money. In fact, I wish I had thought of it. But really, is it the source of news you expect from the gray lady? Yeah, didn't think so. Back to Business Insider:

According to Outsell analyst Ken Doctor, the NYT partnership "would have seemed like a punchline a decade ago." But the "now the FWIX partnership is part of the expanding local experimentation of the Times and tells us lots about the Times’ strategic direction, its multi-front competition with Dow Jones and a more nuanced recognition of what putting content under your brand means these digital days."

"It’s the end of an era, and the Times is clearly moving on a new philosophy: gather as much higher-quality content under its brands, national and regional, on as low a cost basis as possible," he added.

pay to play? nope

And we're back! New year, new decade, new ethics question, via Clark Hoyt's weekly column for the New York Times on journalism practice and ethics.

In Sunday's column, the paper's "public editor" writes of why the paper will no longer be working with three freelancers: Harvard professor Mary Tripsas who failed to disclose the fact that 3M, a company she wrote about in the business section, had paid her way to visit its plant; another freelancer who similarly failed to disclose that he had accepted an expense-paid junket to Jamaica for a story for an online publication; and lastly, a young and prolific writer who misrepresented himself as an NYT reporter when "asking airline magazines for free tickets to cities around the world for an independent project."

You gotta admire his chutzpah. But credible journalism practice it is not.

What was at stake, Hoyt writes, was not just the fact that the three had violated the language set out in the Times' freelance contract -- but they had essentially violated the reporter's covenant with the reader. While there may or may not have been a real conflict of interest in these cases -- the perception of bias is always there when reporters are paid to play. At least one freelancer, however, takes issue with the policy. Former Times columnist Virginia Postrel finds the rules unfair to writers and "borderline unethical" From Hoyt's piece:

The paper wants to treat freelancers like staffers without the same pay or benefits, and without paying for their research, Postrel said. She said The Times operates under “the false assumption” that companies pay fees to professors or authors to influence their writing rather than to learn from them. Postrel said Tripsas’ main job was to understand and improve business practices, so it did not matter who paid her way to 3M.

Times editors reject such arguments because, to them, the most important consideration is that everything in the newspaper, no matter who produces it, must be free of even the smallest hint of undue influence. “I think it is important for us to be clear and strict about our rules so readers have reason to trust our credibility,” [Standards editor Phillip] Corbett said.

Ultimately, that's what it's about. Transparency and credibility. Not only to please the editors or the mighty New York Times, but most importantly, at a time when the entire industry is tottering on a cliff, to live up to the expectations of the readers.

BTW, you can download a pdf of the NYT's ethical rulebook here (for some reason, the link won't work the way it should. Do not ask me why.): http://www.nytco.com/pdf/NYT_ Ethical_Journalism_0904.pdf.

Meanwhile, I like the way True/Slant's Caitlin Kelly weighs in on the young freelancer who misrepresented himself as a Times reporter to cadge some free airline tickets. No equivocation in her post: you don't play fast and loose, not if you want any credibility as a reporter:

Get a grip, kid. Really. There are dozens, likely hundreds of freelance writers who produce copy for the Times who refrain from using the paper as an artificial crutch. Yes, it’s a nice clip and gives us street cred. But not because we lie about our relationship to the paper; we’re a “freelancer for the Times” or “a regular contributor”.

Using the word “reporter”, as anyone knows, implies something else, better and more prestigious. Very few journalists will ever get an interview at the Times, let alone a job offer. Those who do get hired — contrary to many fantasies — tend to keep their noses very, very clean. They like their job, the salary, the prestige and access it affords, their colleagues. Some are also still protective of the larger organization, loyal to larger notions of what a newspaper still is or should be or can be. Or just to the Times itself.

life follows capstone: an update

Almost three years ago, capstoner Liz Weeker wrote two investigative pieces on women Iraq War vets. In the first, for her magazine class, she wrote of the new military face of Post Traumatic Stress disorder: women.

Her capstone piece ran a lot deeper: the inability of the VA to develop programs to specifically treat these women, whose issues were often very much different than their males counterparts. What she found was that the VA had yet to catch up.

An article in today's New York Times suggests the VA still hasn't gotten it right -- not only with programs geared specifically for women, but with even recognizing the diagnosis. From the piece:

For some women with post-traumatic stress, like Angela Peacock in St. Louis, the V.A. has been a godsend. She said that the doctors who helped her detoxify from drug and alcohol addiction saved her from suicide.

Many others, however, insist that the military, the V.A. and other established veterans organizations have not fully adapted to women’s new roles. The military, they say, still treats them like wives, not warriors.

Some therapists, case workers and female patients also say that because military regulations governing women’s roles have not caught up with reality, women must work harder to prove they saw combat and get the benefits they deserve.

V.A. officials, including Ms. Duckworth, say there is no systemic bias. V.A. statistics show that as of July 2009, 5,103 female Iraq or Afghanistan veterans had received disability benefits for the stress disorder, compared with 57,732 males.

But the V.A. did not provide the number of men and women who had applied, making a comparison of rejection rates impossible.

At best, women are caught in the same bureaucratic morass as men; the backlog for disability claims from all veterans climbed to 400,000 in July, up from 253,000 six years ago. At worst, women are sometimes held to a tougher standard.

et tu, new york times?

Jerry Seinfeld once famously quipped: "Isn't it amazing that everything that happens on a given day just fits the pages of the New York Times?"

Does that mean, in Seinfeld-speak, that come December less and less will be going on? At first fear, yeah. But a quick look at some numbers makes you think, well, maybe not.

We'll start with the backstory. According to a piece in the New York Observer last week, the gray lady is cutting 100 jobs by December 7:

It's the first time the Times has had to cut jobs since 2008, when they also cut 100 jobs. Earlier this year, reporters and editors voted to cut their salaries, in the hope that newsroom cuts could be avoided. Mr. Keller said today's decision "is happening sooner than anyone anticipated."

The paper has a newsroom of approximately 1,250 people.

Buyouts are the first option, and if they don't reach 100 volunteers, the paper will resort to layoffs.

You can read a copy of the letter editor Bill Keller sent to his staff via the link above. The Observer gets the goods.

As it did today, getting its hands on a copy of the entire 61-page buy-out package, which supplies names, numbers -- and a revealing look at the number of folks employed to put out the paper of record. Take a look:

Editors at the Book Review: 14

Reporters at Metro: 50

Size of the Opinion/Editorial Department: 49

Size of Sports Desk: 57

Critics in the Culture
Department: 18

Editors at The Times Magazine: 21

Average age of the Obituaries Desk:
58 years old

Size of Thursday Styles: 7

Size of Business Desk: 85

Size of Washington Bureau: 45

Size of the Dallas Sales/Advertising Staff: 4

Size of Week in Review: 5

Total size of Art Department: 113

Size of Dining: 5

Size of Metro: 103

Number of Pressman Journeymen at the College Point plant: 106

Newsroom layoffs and buyouts are always tragic. But 57 on the sports desk? bk

all the news that fits?

Interesting dish from Baynewser on the San Francisco Bay Area's new non-profit news site -- and the New York Times plan to go local in San Francisco. According to the story, though the NYT"promises that readers will get 'local stories as only The Times can report them,'" there is talk that the actual reporting may be, er, outsourced:

.. Times President and General Manager Scott Heekin-Canedy tells PaidContent that, in fact, the Gray Lady would like to find an outside organization to actually supply the content.

"Our preference is to find a local partner to produce this," Heekin-Canedy said. "This doesn't really fit within our staffing model, our staffing resources for the New York Times newsroom."

There is no confirmation that the partner will be the forementioned Bay Area News Project -- though that's the word on the street. If so, does that mean that local stories as only the Times can report them -- is reporting done by interns?

journalist, defined

In a piece in the Atlantic on the ways in which political hitmen armed with keyboards and DSL lines are sometimes shaping the debate, national correspondent Mark Bowden ends with this ode to the character of the journalist:

There’s more here than just an old journalist’s lament over his dying profession, or over the social cost of losing great newspapers and great TV-news operations. And there’s more than an argument for the ethical superiority of honest, disinterested reporting over advocacy. Even an eager and ambitious political blogger like Richmond, because he is drawn to the work primarily out of political conviction, not curiosity, is less likely to experience the pleasure of finding something new, or of arriving at a completely original, unexpected insight, one that surprises even himself. He is missing out on the great fun of speaking wholly for himself, without fear or favor. This is what gives reporters the power to stir up trouble wherever they go. They can shake preconceptions and poke holes in presumption. They can celebrate the unnoticed and puncture the hyped. They can, as the old saying goes, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. A reporter who thinks and speaks for himself, whose preeminent goal is providing deeper understanding, aspires even in political argument to persuade, which requires at the very least being seen as fair-minded and trustworthy by those—and this is the key—who are inclined to disagree with him. The honest, disinterested voice of a true journalist carries an authority that no self-branded liberal or conservative can have. “For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote. Journalism, done right, is enormously powerful precisely because it does not seek power. It seeks truth. Those who forsake it to shill for a product or a candidate or a party or an ideology diminish their own power. They are missing the most joyful part of the job.

This is what H. L. Mencken was getting at when he famously described his early years as a Baltimore Sun reporter. He called it “the life of kings.”

In a more ironic vein, you also gotta love what New York Times media critic David Carr has to say about the character of a journalist in this column about a former newsman who quit the newsroom for corporate comm -- and came running back:

Journalists, for all their self-importance, are often a little naïve about the way the real world works. Sure, being a newsie is a grind, the hours are not great and the public holds us in lower esteem than the women who work the poles at Satin Dolls down the road from the Tick Tock in Lodi, but it beats working by a mile. Every day is a caper, and most reporters are attention-deprived adrenaline junkies who care only for the next story. Journalists are like cops, hugging the job close and savoring the rest of their life as they can.

The skills of finding out what is not known and rendering it in comprehensible ways has practical value in other parts of the economy, but the thrill of this thing of ours is not a moveable feast. The difference between a reporting job and other jobs is the difference between working for The Man and being The Man, a legend, at least, in your own mind.

quick hit: up from the ashes?

Interesting news out of Seattle, proving that once again, the reports of journalism's death in general, and newspapers in particular, may have been greatly exaggerated.

The New York Times reports that, since the demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle's remaining daily newspaper has begun to turn a profit. When the PI went out of business, many of the subscribers just re-upped with the Times.

Meanwhile, several of the online news site that have sprung up since the PI closed up shop, are doing well.

From the story:

... But The Times has improved its prospects by picking up most P-I subscribers and managing to keep them so far. It says its daily circulation rose more than 30 percent, to more than 260,000 in June, from about 200,000.

Oddly enough, what remains of The P-I is also faring better than expected. The Hearst Corporation kept the paper’s Web site alive as a news operation with a small staff, heavily reliant on more than 200 unpaid bloggers who write on things as diverse as their neighborhoods, cooking and marathon running.

Industry analysts called it a long-shot experiment, but SeattlePI.com has kept most of the reader traffic it had as a newspaper site. Hearst will not say whether it makes money, but it says that audience and revenue are ahead of projection.

And:

SeattlePI’s news staff of 20 people, down from The P-I’s 165, covers only a few subjects closely, like crime, the aerospace industry and transportation, while offering links to news on other sites. Michelle Nicolosi, the executive producer, said the site, rather than resembling a traditional news organization, “is trying to be Seattle’s home page.”

Other news sites populated by former P-I staff members have also cropped up, expanding Seattle’s already-vibrant range of alternative news choices, and turning the city into something of an online news laboratory.

The New New York Times according to TechCrunch

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has a vision of the financial future of journalism that involves the top writers and editors of the current NYT... walking. Read his 'what if" here.

He also includes some intriguing info re Politico, which is making money by offering a print edition of its online site, and AOL, which is silently building a newsroom on the cheap:

A couple of weeks ago I met the Politico guys just before they taped their Charlie Rose segment. I watched them live from the green room at the show, and read Michael Wolff’s excellent Vanity Fair article on the young company. Their news room is 100 strong and they have more people in the White House Bureau than any other brand. They have roughly the same traffic as we do - 7 million monthly visitors - but they’ve been around just half the time. How did they do it? The site was founded by well known political journalists who bailed to start their own company. They took their personal brands and credentials with them, and the readers followed. Today they are profitable - largely because they launched a three-day-a-week print version of the site. Amazing. Print isn’t dead (yet). Just the overhead is.

And earlier today I got a glimpse at what AOL is up to - they are hiring all the journalists being fired and laid off by the newspapers and magazines. And they now have a news room 1,500 journalists and editors strong. Amazingly, failing old media is throwing away their most valuable assets. And AOL is eagerly picking those assets up for a song. Before anyone knows it, AOL may be the most powerful news outlet in the world.

Journalists still matter. A lot. Especially the good ones.

i think i can, i think i can...

Who says investigative reporting is dead? Or is solely the province of dinosaurs? Go here to read what 25-year-old Michael Schmidt -- he's been a reporter for two years for the New York Times, where he paid his dues as a news clerk and an intern:

In June, he broke the story that slugger Sammy Sosa was on the infamous list of 100 baseball players to test positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003.

Today, he added two more names -- Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz -- to the list in a bombshell story that already has Boston Red Sox beat writers talking.

Moral of the story, at least for Schmidt: you can. bk

R.I.P. Frank McCourt

The New York Times reported last night that Frank McCourt, the Pullitzer Prize winning author of "Angela's Ashes", died of metastatic melanoma. He was 78.

Angela's Ashes, McCourt's memoir of growing up poor in Ireland, touched critics and readers everywhere:

“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all,” the book’s second paragraph begins in a famous passage. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

“People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years."

A former NYC school teacher, first at Ralph R. McKee Vocational High School in Staten Island and then the selective Stuyvesant High School on East 15th St. in Manhattan, McCourt was a raconteur extraordinaire. While he never claimed to be a journalist, he was master of one of jouranlism's most important tools: the art of storytelling. An accompanying article in the Times recounts his methods for teaching his students to write, which involved a lot of storytelling of his own:

He was able to amuse his students and put them at ease, but he was also imparting a lesson. “Looking back, it was all part of a technique,” said Vernon Silver, Stuyvesant class of 1987 and a reporter for Bloomberg News in Rome whose book “The Lost Chalice” has just been published. “He wanted you to tell a story too. At the end of his stories, he would turn it on the class.”

A common exercise was asking students to describe what they had done when they got home the night before. “He would coax it out of us, showing us how to pay attention to mundane but telling details,” Mr. Silver said. “I remember a dialogue with a shy student. The kid said, ‘I did my homework.’ McCourt said: ‘No, no, no. What did you do when you walked in? You went through a door, didn’t you? Did you have anything in your hands? A book bag? You didn’t carry it with you all night, did you? Did you hang it on a hook? Did you throw it across the room and your mom yelled at you for it?’ ”

And on and on, until enough significant glimpses of the boy’s life emerged to begin to paint a picture....

We met him last summer at the Sun Valley Writers conference, first in a jammed breakout session, where he regaled the jam-packed group with tales of the classroom -- when he was most often addressed by "yo, teach" -- and of his disdain, by contrast, of academics and what he saw as their endless bluster on the philosophy of education. Clearly an inspiration to his students, many of whom who have had their own writing careers, he ended by telling us of walking through the Village one night when he ran into a former student.

"Mr McCourt," the former student said. "Remember me? I just wanted to say, thanks to you, I've become a poet."
"That's great, good for you," McCourt said, expecting a long tedious conversation about how he had inspired the kid way back when.
"No, no," the kid said. "I've been dead broke ever since. What I wanted to say was f*** you!"

Later, we ran into McCourt at the Haley airport. "Yo, teach," Tom called out. "Barbara here is a teacher, too." He walked over. "Yeah," I said. "But not the good kind. I teach college."

He shook his head. "College pro-fess-ors," he said with a smirk. "If I had it to do over again, I'd be a college teacher. Easiest job in the world...."

The conversation continued. What he said after that, you'll have to ask me.

photo credit: Hiroko Masuike for the New York Times

... and that's the way it was

The death of former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite marks the end of an era in journalism. At a time when the main , if not only, news sources were morning papers and evening news on three television stations, Cronkite became one of the most trusted men in America, the gatekeeper of all the public needed to know on each particular day. Each newscast ended with the iconic words: "And that's the way it is."

It was a simpler time in journalism, an era that might be difficult to explain to a wired generation accustomed to a 24 hour news cycle, available from thousands of outlets at any given time, and with no definitive voice of authority.

Shortly after Cronkite's death was announced, The NYTimes Brian Stetler interviewed CBS News President Sean McManus:

“It’s really hard,” [Mcmanus] acknowledged, “to remember just how influential and important he was.” He cited Mr. Cronkite’s famous declaration that the Vietnam war would end in a stalemate.

Viewers and Web readers now, he said, “are so used to being assaulted by so many streams of media that it’s hard for them to imagine that there were only three or four ways to get news and information on TV.”

On an evening when Mr. Cronkite was on the minds of the television industry, Mr. McManus sounded a sad note about the splintered media environment. TV executives are always looking for the next Cronkite, he said, “but I don’t think anybody will be in that position of prominence again.”

Cronkite took his responsibility seriously, breaking from his role as dispassionate anchor only a handful of times: when he announced that President Kennedy had died; when, after a trip to Vietnam, he pronounced the war there unwinnable, which turned the tide of public opinion; and when American astronauts first walked on the moon.

Former Merc television writer Charlie McCollum called the legendary Cronkite "television's wise man":

In a sense, he was a Mr. Rogers for adults, a man who could make sense out of things when things didn't seem to make sense.

"A good journalist doesn't just know the public, he is the public. He feels the same things they do," he once said. But no TV journalist ever empathized with America quite like Cronkite.

Read Cronkite's New York Times obit here.

photo credit: New York Times, Bettman/Corbis

good tweet, bad tweet

Changing the news one tweet at a time? I guess. But whether that's for good or ill remains to be seen.

A piece in the New York Times by Alan Cowell about the ubiquity of twitter chatter notes that most reporting out of Iran during the post-election protests came in the form of 140 characters or fewer. And much of that, in fact, made it into the mainstream press.

But then the piece quotes slate.com's tech-friendly Jack Shafer thus: “My zeal for Twitter knows a limit,” wrote Jack Shafer, editor at large of the online publication Slate, saying the welter of messages from the streets of Tehran was “more noise than signal in understanding the Iranian upheaval.”

On the other hand, but on the same subject, the New York Times' Brian Stetler sees tweets (and youtube videos) as filling the void when foreign correspondents have been called home and the powers that be may be imposing a news blackout. The cascade of citizen news that came out of Iran during those first days was a starting point for news organizations with no feet on the ground. The task then became to watch the news as it developed, sift and analyze it, and -- you hope -- vet it. Stetler writes:

“Check the source” may be the first rule of journalism. But in the coverage of the protests in Iran this month, some news organizations have adopted a different stance: publish first, ask questions later. If you still don’t know the answer, ask your readers.

In yet another story on the subject -- this one also cites twitter as the real-time source of news of Michael Jackson's death -- the AP's Jake Coyle looks at the inaccuracies or flat out lies that sometimes crop up on the twittersphere, such as the grossly exaggerated report of Jeff Goldblum's untimely demise. The problem with DIY journalism is the lack of accountability. Twits can tweet anything. He writes:

While involvement in the protests in Iran might be Twitter's most meaningful achievement thus far, some have noted that many inaccuracies were circulated.

That has raised the concern that some people or governments may use Twitter to spread disinformation even more dangerous than suggesting Jeff Goldblum is dead.

Andrew Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amateur," believes Twitter — and whatever real-time Web services follow in its wake — represents the future of both the Internet and media.

But Keen says the Iran coverage on Twitter "exposes all the weakness of the service, the fact that it's so chaotic and unreliable. Who knows who's tweeting what?"

Back to Cowell, who concedes that new forms of info-sharing does indeed make for new ways to gather news, but still suggests it adds a layer of complexity to the process. He writes:

News gathering takes time, energy, courage, people, humility, creativity and layers of editorial oversight to guarantee the authenticity of the final product. For all the human flaws of those who gather, edit, check and analyze it, news allows people to judge for themselves whether the people they voted into office merit their trust and their tax dollars.

As the Twitter revolution has shown, the ascendancy of new methods of spreading the news — a kind of digital, high-speed word-of-mouth — reinforces the need for assembling it, sifting it and trying to make sense of it.

Honest news is essential to ensuring that people know what their soldiers are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan as much as what their politicians are doing in their boudoirs or how they are composing their expense accounts. At its best, news bypasses spin to let readers know who is really winning on the far-flung killing fields of Pakistan or Gaza, just as it did in Vietnam.

We lose all that at our peril.