web-first at the christian science monitor: one year later

Check out this Mediabistro Q-and A with John Yemma, the editor of the Christian Science Monitor. He talks about what it means to go web-first, and how digital journalism can make print editions viable:

The Monitor's decision to go online-only last year was seen by many as a major step in the evolution of newspapers. What was the genesis of that decision?
For about two years before they hired me, [the paper] had been involved in a fairly deep-dive [analysis] into the future of print. They looked at their financials, they looked at the future of print, they did prototyping of a weekly in two different forms -- a slick weekly and a tabloid weekly -- and they'd already made a lot of progress along the lines of moving from daily print to weekly print. It seemed like where they weren't making much progress, and where they were still caught in the old paradigm was "What do we do with print? How do we make it most effective?" -- when what we really needed to do was go Web-first. Print should be there, but it shouldn't be the lead dog on the dogsled.

Even though print still makes the bulk of the money?
In fact, that's true of the moment. And it's certainly true with most newspapers. But it's clear that the future is digital. That doesn't mean that you won't have print. It just means that you either lower the frequency of print -- which is what we did -- or you do what the Globe and the Houston Chronicle and others have done, which is to decrease your print footprint... down into your core readership areas, so that your supply chain and distribution chain is much cheaper. And then you raise your subscription rates -- which all of the big companies have done. So that's an attempt to keep print viable.

And:

How has your revenue model worked since the move away from daily print, and how has that affected your workflow generally?
Our revenue streams now are print circulation, print advertising, syndication sales and Web ad revenue. We have a daily subscription email with about 2,000 subscribers at $84 a year, that has an abridged version of the daily news stories. I think we've got the mix right for us.

It works because we've been able to unharness the manpower that used to be devoted to daily print, and free them to work on Web-first content. That's been the big revelation. When you have print on a daily basis, then everything funnels into those print deadlines. Everything backs up from that, and everything that you're doing is oriented toward that one deadline, so you're not really optimizing your posts for the Web, you're not thinking about trending stories, you're not thinking about when the best time to post something is, and you're not living Web-first. And that's what we've done in the past year. We've taken a culture that had been a traditional news culture, and we've transitioned them to a Web-first one where they understand the rhythms of the Web better. That's probably been a big factor in contributing to our increase in Web traffic.

critical thinking

for the first class of the quarter: what journalism is all about. bk

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.

tell me again why ...

.. philanthropy -- and short staffs -- will succeed where others have failed?

The latest from the LA Times on the Warren Hellman-sponsored news project in the San Francisco Bay Area:

When the Bay Area News Project launches its website in late spring or early summer, it will be just the latest -- and perhaps the most ambitious -- nonprofit venture among a string of similar start-ups. Now all it must do is figure out how to provide coverage for a nine-county region, starting with only 15 employees.

Still confused as to why a wealthy businessman, who clearly has ties to corporate interests, would be less likely to interfere with the news than, well, corporate interests. Seems to me, if you believe that journalists are influenced by the need to stay on the good side of their funders -- and I do NOT believe that good ones are -- what difference does it make who does the funding?

Also wonder why it's assumed that a short staff -- or worse yet, amateurs equipped with cell phones and twitter accounts -- will do a better job than professionals. But that's another issue. Entirely. bk

off with their heads...

... or some such.

Yeah, yeah, the print newspaper industry is hurting for cash. But this? The front page of today's LA Times was an ad for the new Johnny Depp film, Alice in Wonderland.

You have to wonder if the Mad Hatter is now making editorial decisions. From the HuffPo:

The Los Angeles Times has already cut its editorial staff in more than half, but it's crossed another line here by making the real news little more than an aside to advertising dollars, and selling its masthead off to the highest bidder. Advertising used to sustain the news, now it's obscured it.

the death of the fact

Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. weighs in on the death of fact-based knowledge, thanks in no small part to what has come to pass as "news" -- cable news, shout-out shows, blogs -- when everything has become "a partisan shouting match, back before it was permissible to ignore or deride as 'biased' anything that didn't support your worldview."

The story regards a column Pitt wrote about an African-American war hero that was disputed point by point by an online commenter named Ken Thompson, despite the fact --if you'll pardon the pun -- that said commenter's points were all factually wrong. From the story:

... the whole point here is that facts no longer mean what they once did. I suppose I could also ignore him. But you see, Ken Thompson is not just some isolated eccentric. No, he is the Zeitgeist personified.

To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper's online message board, is to realize that increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth. We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not echo us, sift out all information that does not validate what we wish to believe.

I submit that any people thus handicapped sow the seeds of their own decline; they respond to the world as they wish it were rather to the world as it is. That's the story of the Iraq war.

update: beware the conservative collegiate press...

What journalism is not.

First we posted this, re James O'Keefe, who was credited for breaking the ACORN story back when, then got caught breaking into a U.S. senator's office last month:

I got two emails from Jack yesterday. The first was a link to this NYT story about the wiretap attempt at Sen. Mary Landrieu's office (D -La) in New Orleans. Jack took issue with the following quote, from the father of the kid who had been arrested for the alleged tampering:

“He is an outstanding young man doing investigative journalism,” Mr. O’Keefe said of his son. “He studies a different form of journalism, and he pushes the limits a bit. What they were up to, I have no idea.”

To which Jack responded:

The father's quote infuriates me. Apparently his "reporter" son has never heard of Food Lion v. ABC. Wiretapping a senator is no "investigative journalism" I'd ever practice.

Now, more on the story from Eric Alter, via the Center for American Progress:

While we may never find out just who plotted the break-in by James O’Keefe and his comrades of Senator Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) district office or why, we may be certain it was no accident or “misunderstanding.” It was the culmination of a long-term investment strategy by conservatives to rewrite the rules of professional journalism. Organizations like The Leadership Institute, the Collegiate Network, and the National Journalism Center—an arm of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative youth organization—have been funneling millions of dollars into college newspapers and training programs designed to overturn what they believe to be a liberal bias on the part of the mainstream media. In doing so, they are also working to subvert the media’s professional standards.

As TPM Muckracker notes, The Leadership Institute, where James O’Keefe was employed to train young activist/journalists—and where he met Ben Wetmore, who put up the alleged criminals in Louisiana—claims on its website to “prepare conservatives for success in politics, government, and the news media.” So far, the organization boasts, it has trained more than 79,000 students since its inception in 1979. It claims assets of $11.8 million and a staff of 58.

Read more, much more here.

on journalism education

If Dan Gillmor ran a J-School, this is what he would do. So many good ideas in terms of preparing the architects of the change -- and the changing newscene itself. His foundation:

If I ran a journalism school, I would start with the same basic principles of honorable, high-quality journalism and mediactivism, and embed them at the core of everything else. If our students didn’t understand and appreciate them, nothing else we did would matter very much.

Among his solid suggestions, here are the first three:

Emphasize undergraduate journalism degrees as great liberal arts programs, even more valuable that way than as training for journalism careers. At the same time, focus graduate journalism studies on helping people with expertise in specific areas to be the best possible journalists in their fields.

Do away with the still-common “track” system for would-be journalists where students focus on print, broadcast, online, etc. These are merging. There would be one track. We wouldn’t just recognize our students’ digital future; we’d immerse them in it.

Encourage, and require in some cases, cross-disciplinary learning and doing. We’d create partnerships around the university, working with business, engineering/computer science, film, political science, law, design and many other programs. The goals would be both to develop our own projects and to be an essential community-wide resource for the future of local media.

more from Jack:

Flunking Advanced Placement tests: When more high school kids sign on to AP classes -- does that up the failure rate? Jack has the data, today in USA Today. Read all about it here.

Amazing what numbers can tell you. bk

today's WTF moment:

Thanks to Ted Pease, professor of journalism at Utah State:

"A new poll finds Fox News as the only network that more people say they trust than distrust.

“Here are the trust/don't trust spreads: Fox 49 to 37, CNN 39 to 41, NBC 35 to 44, CBS 32 to 46, and ABC 31 to 46.

“Analysis: 'These numbers suggest quite a shift in what Americans want from their news. A generation ago, Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in the country because of his neutrality. Now people trust Fox the most precisely because of its lack of neutrality. It says a lot about where journalism is headed.'"

--Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire, http://politicalwire.com/archives/2010/01/26/fox_news_most_trusted.html (blogging on a survey by consulting firm Public Policy Poll: http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2010/01/fox-leads-for-trust.html)

In other words, ugh. bk

a good week for scu journalists

First this: I got two emails from Jack yesterday. The first was a link to this NYT story about the wiretap attempt at Sen. Mary Landrieu's office (D -La) in New Orleans. Jack took issue with the following quote, from the father of the kid who had been arrested for the alleged tampering:

“He is an outstanding young man doing investigative journalism,” Mr. O’Keefe said of his son. “He studies a different form of journalism, and he pushes the limits a bit. What they were up to, I have no idea.”

To which Jack responded:

The father's quote infuriates me. Apparently his "reporter" son has never heard of Food Lion v. ABC. Wiretapping a senator is no "investigative journalism" I'd ever practice.

And hooray for that. Jack also linked to the photo credit on a USA Today story on the same issue: Photo by Pat Semansky. (He also got a photo credit in the NYT piece.)

Which prompted Jack's second email:

Last night, Jeremy (Herb) and I were talking after dinner about TSC alums. And I got to thinking about three of us: Jeremy, roaming around the halls of the Capitol and chasing down Barney Frank about the financial crisis for the Boston Globe; Pat Semansky, racing to an impromptu press gathering with the ACORN pranksters for the AP; and me, frantically writing a page one story on deadline for USA Today. And it's only Wednesday!

Who says SCU doesn't teach you anything about journalism?

Finally, Jack's page one story. Apparently, he met his deadline. Here's the link. 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

Liz was here first!

Sunday's Merc featured a page one story on military women with PTSD. You'll find a link to the story itself, and my post about it here.

Just so you know: former capstoner Liz Weeker pursued this story three years ago -- back when no one else was paying attention. bk

going behind the wall

New York Magazine recently reported that The New York Times is ready to pull the trigger on a pay-to-play model. (Lauren brought up a similar discussion in class on Wednesday. Prescient?) The final decision may be announced within days, once the powers-that-be decide on the appropriate model:

The Times has considered three types of pay strategies. One option was a more traditional pay wall along the lines of The Wall Street Journal, in which some parts of the site are free and some subscription-only. For example, editors and business-side executives discussed a premium version of Andrew Ross Sorkin's DealBook section. Another option was the metered system. The third choice, an NPR-style membership model, was abandoned last fall, two sources explained. The thinking was that it would be too expensive and cumbersome to maintain because subscribers would have to receive privileges (think WNYC tote bags and travel mugs, access to Times events and seminars).

While the pay model will bring in badly needed revenue, one issue is whether the pay model will result in a drop-off in readership in what has become a global journalism soure. Some years back, the paper experimented with a partial-pay system, where some content was free, while premium content was only available to subscribers. As happened when salon.com tried a similar strat, it didn't work:

What makes the decision so agonizing for Sulzberger is that it involves not just business considerations, but ultimately a self-assessment of just what Times journalism is worth to the world. This fall, Keller told the Observer that at some point, the decision is a “gut call about what we think the audience will accept.” Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times’ last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially supportive of TimesSelect, he’d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East. “As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,” Friedman recently told me by phone. “What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ‘I used to read you before you went behind the wall.’”

Of course, as Lauren and others brought up on Wednesday, the most important issue is this: somebody has to figure out a way to pay the reporters to do the work. bk

jack's back ...

... with a hard-hitting investigation of collegiate spending on sports in USA Today. The story (plus sidebars) was based on a detailed analysis of four years of financial information from university athletic departments.

Here's a taste:

More than $800 million in student fees and university subsidies are propping up athletic programs at the nation's top sports colleges, including hundreds of millions in the richest conferences, a USA TODAY analysis found.

The subsidies have reached that level amid a continuing crisis in higher education funding. At some of the schools where athletics is most heavily subsidized, faculty salaries have dipped, state-funded financial aid is drying up and students are bracing for tuition and fee increases.

Taken together, the subsidies for athletics at 99 public schools in the NCAA's 120-member Football Bowl Subdivision grew about 20% in four years, from $685 million in 2005 to $826 million in 2008, after adjusting for inflation. At more than a third of those schools, the percentage of athletic department revenue coming from subsidies grew during the four-year period studied.

Congrats to Jack: Disturbing story. Great work. Often the two go hand in hand. bk

how to save newspapers vs why to save newspapers

Two views on the future of newsapers: First, from the Nation, John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney reprise their argument for public support of journalism:

In moments of crisis, our wisest leaders have always recognized the indispensible role of journalism in democracy. We are in such a crisis now. It is the character of the crisis, and the urgency of the moment, that should make Americans impatient with blanket condemnations of subsidies. State support is vital to higher education; on rare occasions professors have been harassed by governors or legislators over the content of their research or lectures. But only an extreme libertarian or a nihilist would argue to end all public support of higher education to eliminate the threat of this kind of government abuse. Likewise, the government does not tax church property or income, which is in effect a massive subsidy of organized religion. Yet the government has not favored particular religions or required people to hold religious views.

And now, for the other side, an oldie but goodie by Slate's Jack Shafer, who took on the McChesney-Nichols argument almost a year ago. (As an aside, look what happened to government-subsidize entities such as NEA and PBS):

Big love for newspapers has also been flowing in from academy/activist circles, a very unlikely source. Many in this orbit blame the press for not spotting our current financial predicament early enough and also believe that every reporter outside of the old Knight Ridder Washington bureau was complicit in the criminal conspiracy that made George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq possible. Bill Moyers encapsulated their view two years ago when he argued against the notion "that the dominant institutions of the press are guardians of democracy. They actually work to keep reality from us, whether it's the truth of money in politics, the social costs of 'free trade,' growing inequality, the resegregation of our public schools, or the devastating onward march of environmental deregulation."

Yet now, as newspapers attrite and collapse, some scholars are telling us that newspapers are a necessary component of democracy. Princeton University scholars Samuel Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido recently linked the Dec. 31, 2007, closure of the Cincinnati Post (circulation 27,000) to a local decline in vote turnout and office seekers, even though the Cincinnati Enquirer (circulation 200,000) survives. Media consolidation critics Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, who asked "Who'll Unplug the Big Media?" in The Nation a year ago, are back this week lamenting the demise of big newspaper journalism. They're calling for "tax policies, credit policies and explicit subsidies to convert the remains of old media into independent, stable institutions." I can't wait to hear the duo's pitch for a government subsidy to keep Rupert Murdoch's New York Post alive.

Shafer ends his piece with this: "All this lovey-dovey about how essential newspapers are to civic life and the political process makes me nostalgic for the days, not all that long ago, when everybody hated them." For the record, McChesney was one of them. bk

write thin to win?

Want to improve journalism? Get out the scissors. Metaphorically, that is. Michael Kinsley rants about the excesses in daily journalism in this post from the Atlantic.

Pet peeve No. 1: long and cumbersome leads full of background that can only serve the reader who just woke up from a coma:

Take, for example, the lead story in The New York Times on Sunday, November 8, 2009, headlined “Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House.” There is nothing special about this article. November 8 is just the day I happened to need an example for this column. And there it was. The 1,456-word report begins:

Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.

Fewer than half the words in this opening sentence are devoted to saying what happened. If someone saw you reading the paper and asked, “So what’s going on?,” you would not likely begin by saying that President Obama had won a hard-fought victory. You would say, “The House passed health-care reform last night.” And maybe, “It was a close vote.” And just possibly, “There was a kerfuffle about abortion.” You would not likely refer to “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system,” as if your friend was unaware that health-care reform was going on. Nor would you feel the need to inform your friend first thing that unnamed Democrats were bragging about what a big deal this is—an unsurprising development if ever there was one.

And another: "well, duh" quotes that are not only self-evident, but are shorter than the identifiers. As in:

“Now is the chance to fix our health care system and improve the lives of millions of Americans,” Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the Rules Committee, said as she opened the daylong proceedings.

(Quote: 18 words; identification: 21 words.)

Meanwhile, Republicans oppose the bill. Yes, they do. And if you haven’t surmised this from the duly reported fact that all but one of them voted against it, perhaps you will find another quote informative.

“More taxes, more spending and more government is not the plan for reform the people support,” said Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and one of the conservatives who relentlessly criticized the Democrats’ plan.

(Quote: 16 words; identification, 19 words.)

Finally, he rails at the wink-wink practice of reporters quoting random Joes to get across the reporter's own opinion -- and voila. Objective journalism it becomes. why not just cut out the middleman, Kinsey wonders, rather than dredging up quotes from the likes of Jesse M. Brill, who was quoted in an NYT story on the current financial crisis:

Those are 56 words spent allowing Jesse M. Brill to restate the author’s point. Yet I, for one, have never heard of Jesse M. Brill before. He may be a fine fellow. But I have no particular reason to trust him, and he has no particular reason to need my trust. The New York Times, on the other hand, does need my trust, or it is out of business. So it has a strong incentive to earn my trust every day (which it does, with rare and historic exceptions). But instead of asking me to trust it and its reporter about the thesis of this piece, The New York Times asks me to trust this person I have never heard of, Jesse M. Brill.

Of course this attempt to pass the hot potato to a total stranger doesn’t work, because before I can trust Jesse M. Brill about the thesis of the piece, I have to trust The New York Times that this Jesse M. Brill person is trustworthy, and the article under examination devotes many words to telling me who he is so that I will trust him. (By contrast, it tells me nothing about the reporter.) Why not cut out the middleman? The reason to trust this story, if you choose to do so, is that it is in The New York Times. What Jesse M. Brill may think adds nothing. Yet he is only one of several experts quoted throughout, basically telling the story all over again.

a cheat sheet for good writing

William Zinsser, author of the million-seller "On Writing Well", lays out the fundamentals of writing good English in this piece in The American Scholar. The article was based on a speech he gave in August at the Columbia J-school to the incoming international students.

He starts off his rules for good writing by making a distinction between "good nouns" and "bad nouns", the latter being derivatives of the odious Latin:

The words derived from Latin are the enemy—they will strangle and suffocate everything you write. The Anglo-Saxon words will set you free.

How do those Latin words do their strangling and suffocating? In general they are long, pompous nouns that end in -ion—like implementation and maximization and communication (five syllables long!)—or that end in -ent—like development and fulfillment. Those nouns express a vague concept or an abstract idea, not a specific action that we can picture—somebody doing something. Here’s a typical sentence: “Prior to the implementation of the financial enhancement.” That means “Before we fixed our money problems.”

The good nouns, he writes, are those good old Anglo-Saxon words that are strong and concrete and that refer to the stuff of everyday life. Later, he references Thoreau, Abraham Lincoln, Didion and Obama, among others, to show that the best and most evocative writing is clear, concrete and active. Here's an eg:

One of my favorite writers is Henry David Thoreau, who wrote one of the great American books, Walden, in 1854, about the two years he spent living—and thinking—in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau’s writing moves with simple strength because he uses one active verb after another to push his meaning along. At every point in his sentences you know what you need to know. Here’s a famous sentence from Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of nature, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Look at all those wonderful short, active verbs: went, wished, front, see, learn, die, discover. We understand exactly what Thoreau is saying. We also know a lot about him—about his curiosity and his vitality. How alive Thoreau is in that sentence! It’s an autobiography in 44 words—39 of which are words of one syllable. Think about that: only five words in that long, elegant sentence have more than one syllable. Short is always better than long.

Exactly. bk

the future of magazines?

Here's what some folks are predicting the new tablet computers can do for the magazine industry. Lots of glitz, lots of pix -- and actual reporting and writing, too. Can't say I'd use one, but if it will keep magazine writers in business, I'd buy one.

Here's the link to Sports Illustrated's prototype. (My apologies for the swimsuit segment.) Below is the video. Let us know what you think. bk

incivility in the internet age

An obituary for journalist Deborah Howell, who was killed in an accident in new Zealand, generated a slew of ugly comments from readers who didn't even know her. In this NPR interview, journalist Melinda Henneberger questions the incivility that results from the anonymity of the internet.

When do we say basta? Or should we? Should these kinds of comments be censored? Is doing so a violation of free speech? The internet has long been heralded as an instrument of democratization. But how do we -- or should we -- corral it?

You can read Henneberger's column on the subject on Politics Daily here. Here's a taste:

But there was also a shocking number of comments to the effect that since Howell was in the news business, she must have been a lefty, so how fabulous she'd been killed. There was joshing speculation about whether she'd been driving a hybrid, a joke about how liberals walking in lockstep really ought to be more careful, and a couple of cracks about how Republicans were sure to be blamed. "One less of those anti-US types to deal with," said one of several celebratory rejoinders from readers who by their own account had five minutes earlier never even heard of Deborah Howell.
We can't pretend this sort of thing is limited to one or other corner, either; Matt Lewis wrote here about how news of Rush Limbaugh's chest pains had similarly gladdened some tiny liberal hearts, and our obit of Irving Kristol provoked disquieting comments, too.

So, what to make of this? Assuming we are not becoming a nation of psychopaths, are we trading our humanity for a little negative attention? Do people just not think before they type? Or, even if they don't really mean such meanness, do they not worry that someone who reads it might?

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.

what we lose? FACTS

If you've ever wondered if the blogosphere, Citizen J, and all else that masquerades as news can fill the void created by the ever-shrinking news industry, today's Boston Globe column by Ellen Goodman is a must must-read. Interested in how journalism is changing? Wonder what the almost-news is doing to the real news? Read it here: short, smart, and to the ever-loving point.

As more and more folks look to blogs, right wing talk shows, shout-out TV shows, and ridiculous email forwards for "news", we replace facts, the cornerstone of actual journalism, with opinion, and often moronic and unsubstantiated opinion at that. I don't know about you, but I'd really don't much care what someone's cantankerous, rightwing uncle has to say about the Obama administration, no matter how quickly his blah-blah goes viral.

The scary thing is that when all the noise becomes confused with boring-old fact based reporting -- the belief in truth, or any semblance thereof flies right out the window. From Goodman's column:

... Facts - along with their enforcers, editors - have long been the guides and saviors of my career, which is 46 years long.

Now I’m planning the next phase of my life. This may be why I’m struck by how much hard facts have softened in this time, how much less they seem to matter.

“Truthiness’’ has exploded alongside a new media that is decidedly not mainstream, that flows into as many rivulets as there are cable channels, points on the radio dial, and unvetted bloggers.

It’s now possible to find a group somewhere in Googleland that will agree with anything. Any outlier can find a tribe and a “fact’’ - Global warming is a hoax! Evolution is a fraud! - that reinforces his own belief.

There is a sense that we don’t need science or editing or fact-checking as long as we have crowd-sourcing. We don’t have to build opinions on facts; we can build facts on opinions.

Well, you can't, as Goodman points out. She ends the column thus:

Those of us who have spent our lives in journalism wake up to daily reports of troubles: newsrooms cut, papers bankrupt. My first employer, Newsweek, no longer covers news. My second, the Detroit Free Press, has cut back home delivery. I have watched my third employer, The Boston Globe, grow and shrink.

Hardest of all is to witness the evaporation of a profession that’s been the vetting agent for the “reality-based community.’’ A craft that has struggled to be right as often and rigorously as possible.

In a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll last month, readers were asked what professions are likely to disappear. Of the likely candidates, 28 percent chose tobacco farmers, but 26 percent picked newspaper reporters. Only 3 percent thought fact-checkers would become extinct.

Well, I have “news’’ for you. When the reporters go, so do the facts. And their checkers.

social media tips for journalists

Here are some practical tips for using social media to enhance your reporting and make more efficient use of your time, courtesy of Mashable. The story features five journalists and how they use Facebook, twitter, etc., in their daily routines to expand their reporting power -- finding story ideas, for example, and sources.

No black holes. Pure efficiency. Read it here. bk

first v. right: when news goes viral

Andrea Ragni, a former capstoner, forwarded this link to a ZDNet post by Ed Bott that illustrates everything that can go wrong when the first value of (internet) news becomes being first with the news. Clearly, being there first has always been important to news organizations, but add the blogosphere, and you've got yourself a real pickle.

Case in point, the so-called "Blak Screen of Death" Story that made its rounds all over cyberspace earlier this week:

On Friday, November 27, an obscure computer security company, Prevx, publishes a blog post accusing Microsoft of releasing security patches that cause catastrophic crashes in Windows PCs. The inflammatory headline reads: Black Screen woes could affect millions on Windows 7, Vista and XP. The post lacks even the most rudimentary technical details and is maddeningly vague. It goes unnoticed over the U.S. Thanksgiving weekend.

Early Monday morning, November 30, Jeremy Kirk of the IDG News service sends a story out on the wire that is picked up by IDG flagship publications PC World and ComputerWorld. Conveniently, the story is posted at 7:05AM Eastern Time, ensuring that it will be at the top of news sites as Americans drag back into work after the long holiday weekend.

Here’s the first headline as it appeared at PC World and ComputerWorld early Monday morning: Latest Microsoft patches cause black screen of death According to the accompanying story, the patches “cause some PCs to seize up and display a black screen, rendering the computer useless” for millions of Windows users. The security company “hasn’t contacted Microsoft yet” and “Microsoft officials could not be immediately reached for comment.”

The story is echoed by dozens of other publications within an hour, some pointing specifically to PC World as the source. The rush of coverage catapults the accusations into the mainstream. At some point that morning, Microsoft’s security team goes into “fire drill” mode.

And on and on. You can guess the punch line: the black screen of death? Not a problem. Never was:

After two full business days of relentlessly negative coverage for Microsoft, the noise from the echo chamber is deafening. More than 500 separate posts on mainstream tech sites and in blogs have amplified the original story, most of them simply repeating the accusations from the Prevx blog post with no original reporting or fact-checking. The story has now taken on a life of its own.

Finally, on Tuesday evening, Prevx backs down completely from the story, publishing a formal retraction and apologizing to Microsoft. Another follow-up post the next day from Prevx CEO and CTO Mel Morris tries to deny any responsibility for the damage. He includes this hilarious bit of understatement: “Regrettably, it is clear that our original blog post has been taken out of context and may have caused an inconvenience for Microsoft.”

From Andrea: "Ed Bott makes a good case for the reality that some journalists, especially in tech, are jeopardizing accuracy for the sake of real time reporting – in some cases not talking to any sources…craziness!"

Clearly. bk

the beginning of the end: outrage redux

Just when you thought journalism was back earning the respect it deserves, there's this from the Dallas Morning News: Section editors of several sections will now be reporting to the advertising SALES MANAGERS of those sections. They call it business/news integration.

Words fail. I mean it: words fail. So here's a link to the story in Dallas' alt-weekly (along with a transcript of an interview w/an editor at the DMN. Here's an excerpt from the story:

As of yesterday, some section editors at all of the company's papers, including The News, will now report directly to Carr's team of sales managers, now referred to as general managers. In short, those who sell ads for A.H. Belo's products will now dictate content within A.H. Belo's products, which is a radical departure from the way newspapers have been run since, oh, forever.

Those sections mentioned in the memo include sports, entertainment, real estate, automotive and travel, among others.The memo doesn't mention Business or Metro by name, but there are references to "health/education" and "retail/finance"; these are not defined in the missive. Says the memo, Carr's sales force will "be working closely with news leadership in product and content development."