R.I.P.: The English Language

Great piece by the WaPo's Gene Weingarter about the demise of English as we know it. Here's just a taste:

The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the "Obama's." This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame.

The language's demise took few by surprise. Signs of its failing health had been evident for some time on the pages of America's daily newspapers, the flexible yet linguistically authoritative forums through which the day-to-day state of the language has traditionally been measured. Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes eliminating it entirely.

To read more, go here. bk

immersion in iraq

Check this interview with journalist David Finkel on KQED-FM, San Francisco's NPR station. Finkel, a Pullitzer-winner from the Washington Post, and one of my favorite magazine writers, talks about his 13 month immersion with a battalian of soldiers in Iraq. The result? His book, "The Good soldiers", gives a searing account of the price of war from the soldier's perspective.

All of which points to the value of both immersion journalism -- and going into a story with an open mind.

Magazine students might remember him as the author of "TV Without Guilt" and "The Last Housewife in America," both immersion projects that took the reader inside what could have been touchy subjects -- without agenda or judgement.

When he was awarded the Pullitzer for feature writing some years back, he said something like this in his acceptance speech: Start with an idea, but wait for the story. Love it. bk

inquiring minds want to know... if a tab can win a Pulitzer

Gotta love it. WaPo's Howard Kurtz reports that the National Enquirer is going to enter its scoops on the John Edwards scandal for a Pulitzer. To which Kurtz poses the question: Should a tab be eligible for journalism's top prize?

From his column:

When the Enquirer first reported in 2007 that Edwards had had an affair with Hunter, the former North Carolina senator dismissed the account as tabloid trash. The rest of the media, having no independent proof, even as Edwards, aided by his cancer-stricken wife Elizabeth, was mounting an aggressive campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. In August 2008, after being knocked out of the campaign, Edwards admitted to ABC's "Nightline" that he had been lying about the affair. But he didn't come entirely clean. Asked about the Enquirer cover that showed him with the baby during a late-night visit to a Beverly Hills hotel, Edwards denied paternity, saying: "Published in a supermarket tabloid. That is absolutely not true. . . . I know that it's not possible that this child could be mine because of the timing of events." He claimed he wasn't sure if the man in the blurry photo was him.

Clearly, the tab was there first. But the big question is -- where were the other guys, and why didn't they check it out? Sure, it's all scandal, but just think what might have happened had he won the nomination before it all came out. bk

sometimes it's funny ...

... when people who clearly have never worked in a newsroom pontificate about journalism. In this case, specifically, a TechCrunch piece by MG Siegler, on new WaPo rules relegating tweets to the social media no-no list.

Seigler finds this laughable:

Obviously, WaPo is doing this to try and maintain what it perceives to be its journalistic integrity. That’s great. But as we’ve discussed recently, the idea that any kind of reporting lacks any kind of bias on some level is laughable. It’s fine if you want your organization to only present the facts with no opinions, but the notion that those reporters do not have their own opinions is absurd. WaPo can try to hide those opinions all they want, but they exist, regardless.

I find Siegler, well, naive. (Maybe he is confusing columnists with reporters and editors?) Sure journalists have opinions, but good ones who want to keep their jobs, not to mention their reputations, don't interject same into their reporting methods -- or final stories, unless they are validated by things called facts. That's objective journalism. Let's review: objectivity does not mean some silly kind of artificial balance. Nor does it mean neutral. And yes, point-of view journalism can be, and often is, objective journalism, so long as the news-gathering has been fair, thorough and multi-sided. In other words, the reporter (even one with opinions) went into the story willing to be proven wrong. (I could go on. Better, just plug objectivity into the search box, above.)

The twittersphere problem is that tweets can lead to the perception of bias on the part of the reader. At a time when the whole industry is on shaky ground -- and the public itself is starting to question what we do -- do we really need another reason for news-consumers to distrust the news? Ugh. bk

pay to play

Words fail.

Politico reports that the Washington Post has circulated a flier that offers health care lobbyists and the other usual suspects "access" to the power players -- administration officials, top health care reporters, etc. -- in the health care debate.

Access is defined thusly: you pay us anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 and your place at the table is reserved. Price includes dinner and cocktails.

The shenanigan came to light when an outraged lobbyist leaked the flier.

From Politico's story:

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — was a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

And it's a turn of the times that a lobbyist is scolding The Washington Post for its ethical practices.

"Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate," says the one-page flier. "Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. ... Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders."

From the flier itself:

“Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it. What is guaranteed is a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds typically on the guest list of 20 or less. …

“Offered at $25,000 per sponsor, per Salon. Maximum of two sponsors per Salon. Underwriters’ CEO or Executive Director participates in the discussion. Underwriters appreciatively acknowledged in printed invitations and at the dinner. Annual series sponsorship of 11 Salons offered at $250,000 … Hosts and Discussion Leaders ... Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post ... An exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done. ... A Washington Post Salon ... July 21, 2009 6:30 p.m. ...

Embarassed by the Politico story, the Post has issued a statement that disavows the participation of the newsroom in any access-for-money event, but stopped short of cancelling the event. And, oh yes. Shouldn't it be "... the guest list of 20 or fewer"?

Thanks, D. Fact. bk

why narrative matters

Jack forwards this piece by Eli Saslow from Sunday's Washington Post on the horrific train crash in D.C. last week. He cites it as an example of why newspapers still matter. And, I might add, the folks trained to work at them.

What you'll see as you read is the incredible power of narrative journalism, when reporters take the time and effort to reconstruct a scene, to develop characters and to viscerally engage the readers by putting faces to the news. The abstract becomes concrete. We can't step away.

There's news: The minute-by-minute updates you find online. We need that. Have become dependent on it, in fact. But then there's this, which takes incredible amounts of time, talent and space -- and, if we don't watch out, may soon die out.

From the piece:

Train 112: a nondescript Metro train, six cars in all. Car 1079: at least 16 people scattered across 68 seats, lost in their own worlds late on a Monday afternoon. Baker stood up again. If he walked to the rear of the car, he would be closer to his exit at Fort Totten. He would shave nine seconds off his commute home. That seemed important.

Baker tossed his blue backpack over his shoulder and walked the full 75 feet to the back of the car, passing all the other passengers on his way. There was a dentist reading a book about golf; a college student closing his eyes after the fourth day of an internship; a young architect fiddling with his cellphone; a 17-year-old checking her makeup in a small mirror before applying extra lip gloss.

Near the front of the train, a 23-year-old named LaVonda King was on her daily trip to pick up two young sons from day care. She had just finished a cellphone conversation with her mother, who suggested that King print advertising fliers for her new hair salon. A good idea, King agreed. She already had the keys to the shop and a name she had daydreamed about since high school: "LaVonda's House of Beauty."

In the far rear of the car, Dave Bottoms listened to an iPod. A chaplain who had just finished his first day on the pastoral staff at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Bottoms, 39, felt scattered from the stress of a new job. Wasn't today his dog's seventh birthday? Did his new BlackBerry work? Were there any leftovers in the fridge for a quick dinner? Bottoms reached into his backpack and grabbed a photocopy of a homily by St. Irenaeus. Maybe, Bottoms thought, a little reading would quiet his mind.

quick linx for a sultry monday night

Quick hits:

Ana Marie Cox in the WaPo on the Washington Press briefing room as the place "where news goes to die."

Jack Shafer on Slate re Steve Brill's plan to charge for news content -- and why it won't work.

Something interesting in Seattle: Just as the Seattle PI went all-digital (at 12 percent capacity) several of the former staffers came online with the Seattle PostGlobe, with many of the former PI staffers volunteering their time and expertise in collaboration with both a local TV station and an alt-weekly . What I find cool is not only the entrepreneurial spirit, but also the drive to keep news from the riverbanks alive and well.

Here's a note from one of the writers. I'd post the link, but damn. I can' find it anymore.

By Kery Murakami PostGlobe The last you saw of us, we had the stunned look of many people in this economy -- suddenly jobless, our futures and our careers uncertain. Many of us were in tears. We became the subject of news ourselves, on TV, in the papers, in the blogosphere, as the pages of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer died. It's been almost a month. But we haven't left. Today, we -- former P-I journalists -- are embarking on a new stage in our careers, hoping to fulfill our life's mission in a different way. We want to keep letting you know what's really going on in this city. At first, we're doing this as volunteers. But what you'll find on this Web site is a story much larger than ours. As in Denver, where the journalists of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News also are starting their own news site, we're forging on because we believe newspaper-quality journalism needs to continue even as newspapers close. We're relying on you -- the community -- to keep us going. The possibilities are exciting, because we're resurfacing with new friends: KCTS public television and the Seattle Weekly. We'll begin by bringing the work of former P-I journalists to our site. We're planning next to work with public television, and possibly public radio journalists, on stories and special projects, combining the best of our approaches. Ultimately, we're exploring creating a combined news organization based on the idea that distributing information should be not just for profit. Our venture with the Weekly means we'll be able to bring to you the longer-form journalism and daily posts from its site. From a business standpoint, the Weekly's national ad staff will be selling advertising for this site. And of course, we'll offer some of the best journalists of the old P-I you miss. Kathy Mulady will be going back to patrolling the corridors of City Hall. Mike Lewis will return to the city's streets to tell you the stories only he can. Art Thiel will write for this site as well as others. Joe Copeland, who wrote for the P-I editorial board, and Larry Johnson, a veteran P-I foreign correspondent, will bring you commentary on Seattle and the world. And our site will have the professional photojournalism of former P-I photographers Grant Haller, Mike Kane and others. Please bear with us because this is just the beginning. Coming soon will be a way to comment on our stories. Hopefully, as our colleagues pick themselves up, more of them will be back with us doing their jobs. Yes, the P-I we knew is gone. But we're still here with our notebooks and computers. Now it's up to you. We'd especially like to thank KCTS President and CEO Moss Bresnahan for his support, and Rennie Sawade, of WashTech, and former P-I designer Elana Winsberg for putting in countless hours to develop our Web site. Kery Murakami can be reached at kerymurakami@gmail.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . To support his work and allow stories like these to continue, please go to our donation page

more on the future of news

No one knows what lies ahead. Not even WaPo's Michael Kinsley, who ruminates on the newspaper of the future here.

.... As many have pointed out, more people are spending more time reading news and analysis than ever before. They're just doing it online. For centuries people valued the content of newspapers enough to pay what it cost to produce them (either directly or by patronizing advertisers). We're in a transition, destination uncertain. Arianna Huffington may wake up some morning to find The Washington Post gone forever and the nakedness of her ripoff exposed to the world. Or she may be producing all her own news long before then. Who knows? But there is no reason to suppose that when the dust has settled, people will have lost their appetite for serious news when the only fundamental change is that producing and delivering that news has become cheaper.

Maybe the newspaper of the future will be more or less like the one of the past, only not on paper. More likely it will be something more casual in tone, more opinionated, more reader-participatory. Or it will be a list of favorite Web sites rather than any single entity. Who knows? Who knows what mix of advertising and reader fees will support it? And who knows which, if any, of today's newspaper companies will survive the transition?

hesitation cuts

Aggregation or aggrevation:

Re the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Reuters reports that Hearst will make a decision next week whether to "name a buyer for the daily newspaper, close its print edition or shut it down entirely."

Re the SF Chronicle: WaPo and others have reported that the union has agreed to concessions that "will allow the Chronicle to lay off union employees without considering seniority, which means it can more easily cut higher-paid employees." The union ratification is set for today.

Re MediaNews and Gannett: The same site reports that "unions at Gannett and MediaNews may eventually have to decide on whether to accept unpaid furloughs next quarter."

Re McClatchy: HuffPo reports that "about 175 employees at the Miami Herald will lose their jobs, and most of the remaining full-time staff will see their salaries reduced as the newspaper tries to cut costs amid plunging advertising revenue."

Molly Ivins had it so right. bk

finally, redux

The WaPo reports today that, after Obama has said that he is reconsidering the ban on photographs of the coffins of war dead arriving at Dover, the Pentagon is investigating, according to Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, "'a way to better balance an individual family's privacy concerns with the right of the American people to honor these fallen heroes" and 'is disposed, leaning, tilting towards trying to do more, if possible' to allow coverage of the ceremony."

Coincidentally -- or do I mean "ironically" -- this issue was the subject of the post that kicked off my adventures in blogland back in August. It's also been the topic for many an in-class debate.

From the WaPo story:

"Pictures of casualties have long played into the politics of a war -- most notably in Vietnam, dubbed the "living-room war" for its extensive television coverage, including footage of coffins rolling off planes at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii as if off a conveyor belt.

President George H.W. Bush's administration imposed the ban on media coverage of the arrival of fallen troops' remains at Dover Air Force Base during the Gulf War in February 1991. It came about after a controversy arose when Bush held a news conference at the same moment the first U.S. casualties were returning to Dover the day after the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, and three television networks carried the events live on split screen, with Bush appearing at one point to joke while on the opposite screen the solemn ceremony unfolded at the Delaware base.

Indeed, starting in the 1990s, politicians and generals used the term "the Dover test" to describe the public's tolerance for troop casualties."

Ironically, President George W. Bush made an exception to the ban in September 2001, when the Air Force allowed a photograph of the remains of a victim of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.

Again from the story:

"'When it was in the government's interest, they allowed photographers to take pictures,' said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the National Security Archive, which provided legal representation for the Begleiter lawsuit that led the Pentagon to release in 2005 hundreds of photographs taken by government photographers. 'They wanted us to be angry over a terrorist attack,' she said.

"Soon after the war in Afghanistan started in October 2001, however, the Pentagon restated the ban on coverage at Dover, and in March 2003, the same month that the U.S. military invaded Iraq, it expanded the policy prohibiting media coverage of the coffins of fallen troops to other ports of arrival as well."

Photo courtesy U.S. Air Force via Reuters

the kids were all right

Go here for a New Yorker think piece on running a non-profit newspaper on an endowment -- reminiscent of an idea for the news media of the future that a couple of my intro students dreamed up last quarter.

Such a good idea. If only we could make it work.... Uh, why not?!

From the essay:

It has been very painful to watch papers like the [Washington] Post offer buyouts to dozens of talented journalists at the height of their powers while shutting overseas bureaus and even entire sections of the paper. Not to pick on any one institution, but, from a constitutional perspective, how did we end up in a society where Williams College has (or had, before September) an endowment well in excess of one billion dollars, while the Washington Post, a fountainhead of Watergate and so much other skeptical and investigative reporting critical to the republic’s health, is in jeopardyàI’m sure that Williams-generated nostalgia in the emotional lives of wealthy people is hard to overestimate, but still …

And later:

The typical spend rate for endowed nonprofits is in the five-percent range. If the Washington Post had a two billion dollar endowment, it would be able to fund a very healthy newsroom. And this is before revenue from continuing operations—advertising, circulation, etc., which could surely cover at least the cost of distribution and overhead, particularly if the form of delivery is increasingly digital. Two billion dollars, by the way, represents something in the neighborhood of five per cent of Warren Buffett’s net worth, the last I knew that figure. (Buffett is a director of the Washington Post Company and one of the great public-minded businessmen of his age, although my impression is that, as someone who is so talented at making money, he is congenitally unhappy about giving it away—so he has asked his friend Bill Gates to do it for him).

rekindling the news biz?

This, according to Mediabistro's Mobile Blog Network: USA Today will soon be available via Amazon's Kindle for download, at a monthly price of $11.99.

Other newspapers that are Kindle-ready include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

I'm not sure how to think about this. Will this help to keep newspapers in business? Hasten their demise? I guess it all depends on how many readers -- ostensibly commuters? -- would pay to read the news on a Kindle when they can read it online on a considerably larger flat screen for free.

Intriguing. bk

wired presidency

The Washington Post has an intriguing piece today on how the Obama presidency might use its unprecedented online organization to communicate directly with constituents -- and in a targeted way -- in a manner that has never happened before.

What's more: there will be instant interactivity so that, at least in theory, constituents will be able to communicate directly with the White House.

All good.

Except for that tiny nagging feeling, even if the president-elect was clearly your guy: If the news media can be side-stepped, will there still be folks out there willing to mediate the message in a credible way? And will we pay attention if/when they do?

Don't know. Can't say. Something to think about, though. bk

just curious:

According to Beet.TV, the Wall Street Journal is currently training many of its print reporters to use video as well. The site further reports that "as of June, 185 print reporters at The Washington Post had been trained to produce online video."

Is this an indication that reporters will soon be expected to report across multi-platforms? A sign, as Microsoft Chairman Steve Ballmer predicts here, that print will be gone entirely in ten years?

If both Beet.TV and Ballmer are right, I wonder what the impact will be -- on the news media itself and on those who either produce it or rely upon it. Your guess: good as mine. bk

life follows capstone

A lot of the discussion in last spring's capstone class revolved around Facebook, mainly because senior Natasha Lindstrom was reporting on the potential of widgets (or applications) to not only wreak havoc with your computer, but -- worst case scenario -- steal your identity. A few days after Natasha turned in her piece, all 4000 words of it, the LA Times broke a story on that very topic.

But we also talked in class -- well, they talked. I ranted -- about the way Facebook can deliver highly targeted audiences to advertisers based on what appears on users' profiles. And again, life follows capstone. In Thursday's Washington Post, staffer Rachel Beckman writes that every time she logged onto her home page, she was bombarded with diet ads.

"Maybe it's my age, my sex or the fact that it knew I was engaged," Beckman writes, "but the site decided I was a gal who needed to drop a few pounds. And it wasn't shy about its tactics."

The old Facebook fear was that prospective employers (not to mention university officials) would have far too much information about what a particular user did on a Saturday night. Now it appears you not only have to worry about losing your identity -- but admen telling you that identity just doesn't measure up.

Natasha, by the way, is currently doing good work as a reporter at the Victorville Daily Press.