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 other hand: consider the non-profit

By now you have clearly heard of the plan to save journalism hatched by wealthy investor F. Warren Hellman, KQED-FM, San Francsico's NPR station, and UC Berkeley's journalism school. (If not, read about it in this piece by Richard Perez-Pena in The New York Times last month.)

Funded by a $5 million grant from Hellman, the project will combine the labors of the j. school interns and KQED-FM's staff to produce the kind of Bay Area news that has begun to disappear with the shrinking of the local daily newspapers.

Innovative, yes. Especially at a time when the news industry is desperate for solutions to keep it on life support. But still: Do we really want to turn investigative news-gathering over to interns? Or will their contributions be more like the stuff we read in the free weeklies that used to sit in our driveway for days? Does KQED-FM have the staff to adequately vet their stories and supervise their work? And what kind of credibility problems could arise when the whole project is funded by one donor. Will he keep his hands off?

In the words of one of my esteemed colleagues:

It's great to see people thinking of new ways to fund news
organizations, but I'm not sure this combination offers long-term
financial stability...a wealthy investor whose wealth fluctuates with
a troubled stock market, a cash-strapped public university, and an NPR
station that has had numerous funding problems over the years despite
being in one of the country's wealthiest areas. (See the stories on
KQED's financial problems related to its headquarters.) And while
corporate owners present all kinds of accountability issues, this
combination presents a whole different set of potential accountability
problems.

In a less serious vein, but kind of not, the SF Weekly posts this somewhat snarky list of how Hellman's approach is likely to save journalism. No.5 reads as follows:

• Bank on the fact that college interns and former journalists will do anything to look important

whither the watchdogs...

While i was in the midst of the holiday blitz, Jack sent me this link to a piece in the New York Times about the ever-shrinking number of news bureaus in Washington, D.C.

Finally got around to posting it. It's an old story, but one that grows worse by the week. One of the sources in the piece is Representative Kevin Brady, a Republican from the Houston area, who has seen his hometown paper's staff in Washington drop from nine to three in two years.to three people, from nine, in two years. “From an informed public standpoint, it’s alarming,” he said. “They’re letting go those with the most institutional knowledge, which helps reporters hold elected officials accountable.”

As Jack says, "you know when a republican from texas laments the press leaving,
you're in trouble."

From the story, by Richard Perez-Pena:

"The times may be news-rich, but newspapers are cash-poor, facing their direst financial straits since the Depression. Racing to cut costs as they lose revenue, most have decided that their future lies in local news, not national or international events. That has put a bull’s-eye on expensive Washington bureaus.

"Albert R. Hunt, Washington executive editor at Bloomberg News, said he was taken aback by the mood Saturday night at a dinner of the Washington press corps’ Gridiron Club. 'It was like being at a wake,' he said. 'Every time you turned around, someone was talking about their bureau being closed or downsized.'

"A few years ago, after much debate, the club began to admit magazine and television reporters. Now, without them, 'there couldn’t be a Gridiron Club,' Mr. Hunt said. 'You couldn’t get enough newspaper people.'”

slash and burn optimism

Jack forwarded this piece from the NYT on Dean Singleton, owner of MediaNews, which bought our hometown Mercury News from Knight Ridder a few years back. The results have been disastrous for local news junkies -- but a boon for local PR firms, local university journalism programs and Stanford University, all of which have been flooded with solid-gold resumes from veteran staffers who were either bought out or laid off.

But I digress. You've read about Singleton on jlinx before.

In the story, Richard Perez-Pena writes that while MediaNews' timing in buying the Merc and several other dailies couldn't have been worse, Singleton remains optimistic, predicting that "the Mercury News’s revenue base will perform better when things turn around than almost any newspaper in the country.”

Really?! Let's hope that when "things turn around" there will more than a few pages of newsprint left. Counter point from the story:

"Others are not so sure. 'The Bay Area has been the canary in the newspaper coal mine, and that was recognized a long time ago by a lot of people,' said Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst at the firm Outsell. “The impact of the Internet has been heavier here and earlier here than anywhere else in the country.”

"Sites like Craigslist and eBay, which have long fueled the migration of advertising to the Internet, began in the Bay Area, and are more entrenched there than in any other part of the country.

"Already known for squeezing costs as hard as anyone in the industry, Mr. Singleton and his team have cut spending at a furious pace, trying to keep pace with tumbling revenue. His detractors among analysts and journalists concede that in this market, any owner would have to make deep cuts. But they say that he was already inclined to a slash-and-burn approach that is little more than a prescription for having the papers do steadily less, and do it less well.

“'There’s no newspaper in the country that I know of that’s not suffering,'” said John McManus, a journalism professor at San Jose State University. “'But Dean Singleton has hollowed out The Mercury News.'”

"The Mercury News, the Silicon Valley paper that was long considered one of the nation’s best, began shrinking years before MediaNews took over, under the now-dissolved Knight Ridder chain. The news staff, from a high of more than 400 people early in this decade, has fallen below 150, producing a much slimmer, more locally focused paper.

"It no longer has a movie reviewer. The science and book sections are gone. Most national and international news comes from wire services.

"A business section that was one of the nation’s biggest has shrunk by about two-thirds in the face of competition in its bread-and-butter field — technology — from Web sites like CNet and TechCrunch. Matt Marshall, a reporter covering Silicon Valley’s venture capital scene, left The Mercury News and has his own Web site, VentureBeat, covering much the same ground.

“'My philosophy on pretty much everything these days is born of pure necessity,'” said Bud Geracie, the acting sports editor. “'There’s no grand plan; it’s how we get through today.'”

"Dave Butler, the executive editor, acknowledged that the paper no longer had the ambitions it once did. Now, he said, “'we’re protecting the core mission, which is good, hard local news and information.'”

"Ownership changes and disputes over the direction of the paper have contributed to rapid turnover in the top ranks. The Mercury News has had six publishers and four executive editors in this decade."

There's more. Read it and weep. We do every morning. bk

not just a clever name

You have to wonder if the late Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle's Pullitzer-winning "three-dot" journalist, may have been the original blogger: a bunch of short items, bold-faced names that, had he been on the internet, would certainly have been links, and lots of random connections.

In that spirit, a bunch of short J.linx. Something for everyone.

Possibly an attempt to compete with all the political blogs out there that, ahem, offer a bunch of quick links, the Washington Post has just launched Political Browser, a site that will provide links to what it considers the best political coverage, even by rival news orgs, of the day. According to Editor and Publisher, "the idea behind the Political Browser, expected to start Monday, is to brief political junkies on the top "must reads" of the day, from an article on a scandal to a humorous video making the rounds on Google Inc.'s YouTube." Interesting.

Lots of interesting data in the latest "State of the First Amendment Survey": Among the more, uh, interesting findings, the majority of Americans surveyed strongly disagrees that the news media "tries to report the news without bias." Regarding the presidential campaign, 48 percent of those surveyed found coverage of Obama to be "very fair" while only 30 percent felt the same about McCain's coverage. And just over half (51 percent) of those surveyed strongly agree that it is important for our democracy that the news media act as a watchdog over government. Just over half? Baffling.

Richard Perez-Pena, writing in the New York Times, notes that many reporters covering Wall Street's meltdown used very careful language so as not to add to the panic. He writes: "...in most of the news, stocks have “slid” and markets “gyrated” but not “crashed.” Companies have “tottered” and “struggled” rather than moved toward failure and bankruptcy." Were those writers minimizing the danger? Acting responsibly? Misplacing their loyalties?

For those of you who can't get enough of the campaign -- and are numbers nerd to boot: check out this detailed, continually-updated website on electoral projections and polls.

The American Prospect discusses the demise of yet one more newspaper's Washington bureau, and what that means not only for political coverage but for the newspaper industry itself. I talked about this last year when i played "bad cop" on a panel with a couple of folks from the San Jose Mercury about their attempts to recreate their newspaper: As newspapers constrict and close bureaus to concentrate on "hyperlocal coverage", you are left with a diminishing marketplace of ideas where one or two news orgs controls the agenda -- and the filter -- as well as, in your local paper, a front page full of silly stuff. Like, for example, the day last summer that the front page story in the Merc -- above the fold, complete with graphic, was about the local kid who was poised to win Nathan's hot dog eating contest. Hello?!

And finally, after some office chitchat today about "he said/she said" journalism, my officemate Gordon Young writes the following about a couple of pieces in the NYT.:

Here are links to the NY Times items I mentioned in the discussion of balanced coverage.
Here's the Krugman column:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/opinion/12krugman.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin

And here's the key section:
"Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well,
they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of
being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician
says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong,
it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie
from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other,
conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race
reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it
becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”

And here's the news article "McCain Barbs Stirring Outcry as
Distortions"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/politics/13mccain.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

And here is the painful attempt to be balanced by including some of
Obama's "distortions":

Mr. Obama’s hands have not always been clean in this regard. He was
called out earlier for saying, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain supported a
“hundred-year war” in Iraq after Mr. McCain said in January that he
would be fine with a hypothetical 100-year American presence in Iraq, as
long as Americans were not being injured or killed there.

More recently, Mr. Obama has been criticized for advertisements that
have distorted Mr. McCain’s record on schools financing and incorrectly
accused him of not supporting loan guarantees for the auto industry — a
hot topic in Michigan. He has also taken Mr. McCain’s repeated comments
that American economy is “fundamentally sound” out of context, leaving
out the fact that Mr. McCain almost always adds at the same time that he
understands that times are tough and “people are hurting.”