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To newspaper readers everywhere

11/7/2008 12:04:08 PM

From PAUL FARHI, Washington Post:

To: You
From: Your newspaper

Dear You:

Every day, I was there for You, rain or shine, good times and bad. I was always available. Like a puppy, all I ever wanted was to please You.

Was it lively conversation You wanted? Cackling opinions? The latest news and gossip? I gave You all that. I even tried to keep up on all the sports and business stuff because I knew you cared about that, too.

Oh, we had so many beautiful years together. Sometimes I made you mad. Often, I moved you. But we always made up.

And then a few years ago you rewarded my loyalty by straying. You went elsewhere. You sought the company of others who, you thought, gave you something that I could not. Fickle and faithless, you went looking for something faster, newer and younger.

Oh, You.

I wondered, incessantly, had I failed you? Was it me?

And then one day this week, You wanted me again. Hungrily. Desperately. You searched everywhere for me. You lined up outside my door, stood in the rain and cold, on the chance that I would be available to You again.

And I wasn't there. How ironic!

Finally, You recognized something in me again. Something that had been dormant all these years. That You needed me.

That You needed to hold me again. If only for one special day.

I feel so.... used.

I should be aghast at your behavior. I should cast you aside forever and move on, somehow. But I know in my heart what I have always known:

That I need you, too. Every day. And I want you back. Desperately. Hungrily.

So won't you use me again?

Please?
--30--

[Permalink]

USA Today sells out, too

11/5/2008 5:17:30 PM

From ALEXANDRA NICHOLSON: manager-communications, USA Today: USA Today printed 380,000 additional copies of the newspaper for Nov 5, totaling 2.8 million copies nationally. We've received word that USA Today is sold out across the country and in response we are printing an overrun to be available for purchase at electionedition.usatoday.com. An image version of the front page will also be available for download at electionfront.usatoday.com. [Permalink]

Buying the Sun-Times in bulk

11/5/2008 4:18:30 PM

From DON HAYNER: managing editor, Chicago Sun-Times: The Sun-Times sold out its Wednesday's edition and has printed an additional 150,000 copies. We are selling the extras so fast, people are lining up at the gate of the printing plant to buy the paper. One man came up to a delivery truck and bought 300 copies. [Permalink]

Subject: Newspapers and history

11/5/2008 1:47:09 PM

From GARY CRAIG, reporter, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Already today, I've purchased three newspapers that capture the history of this election and I'm likely to buy several others, including international publications. Should print disappear, what in the future will be the immediate keepsakes recognizing history when it is made? A screen grab of a Web site? A saved text message? Any thoughts? [Permalink]

Cold pizza

11/5/2008 10:35:50 AM

From STEVE MERELMAN, front page editor, Raleigh News & Observer: I just wanted to let your readers know that end of the night we have nearly a whole pizza left -- Canadian bacon and sausage. We will leave it in the fridge by the copy desk if anyone wants it. [Permalink]

McManus responds to LAT staffer's memo

11/1/2008 5:07:45 PM

From DOYLE McMANUS, Washington bureau chief, Los Angeles Times: The October 31 memo gives a distorted and incomplete account of what I told our staff. In some cases, it attributes words to me that were actually uttered by others in the heat of a vigorous discussion. I did tell our staff that the new Tribune bureau in Washington will be a jointly-managed operation to serve all of Tribune’s newspaper, interactive and broadcast outlets -- not only the Los Angeles Times. That has been clear for months, but I was worried that some of my colleagues weren’t getting the message. I said I believe the new Tribune Bureau will be fully capable of producing the kind of first-rate coverage that the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and other Tribune bureaus now produce, and I urged skeptics among my colleagues to give the new organization the benefit of the doubt. And I said the leadership structure of the bureau (and, for that matter, its name) have not yet been determined. I regret that this internal discussion has been made public, especially in this distorted form. [Permalink]

Newspaper people love bad news

10/30/2008 10:24:29 AM

From DAVID SULLIVAN: Matt Baldwin's post on why newspapers beat themselves up on falling circulation numbers, when other media don't, brings to mind:

1. Newspaper people always love systemic, catastrophic, bad news. But don't journalists in other fields?

2. Newspaper people take a certain relish in being unloved; if they liked our paper, we'd be doing things wrong. But again ...

Personally I trace this to newspaper journalism's well-meant and generally useful attempts to be seen as professionals instead of easily bought-off hacks, from Harry Karafin's shakedowns at The Inquirer in the 1960s to the more typical "Merry Christmas, boys! The drinks are on me!" "Thanks, Mr. Mayor" scratch-my-back genial tolerance of minor corruption. The argument at the time was: If newspapers do not report on themselves, as institutions of society, with the same Caesar's wife attitude they should report on everything else with, then how can they be believed? If we can suppress bad news about ourselves, why shouldn't we suppress it about City General Hospital? Marat sitting in his bathtub, and all that.

Thus came the great era of in-house press critics, when one could be David Shaw and analyze the newspaper business from within, instead of being A.J. Liebling and looking at it from the safety of the New Yorker. And thus came the era of assigning a reporter to cover his or her own employer, instead of simply running a press release from the top floor.

In a grand sense it is a wise policy; in the old days Newsday might have simply declared to its newsroom that its circulation falsification was really not a story, the same way that a publisher or department store owner's DUI arrest was not a story. But it was envisioned when times were good and would be good forever. One doesn't change the rules just because one's side is losing, but I doubt it would have been seen as a good new thing to do in 2006.

Still: When Gene Roberts was editor of The Inquirer, he would not have an on-staff press critic, despite the hopes of many of us who wanted to have our own David Shaw, so we could read fascinating stories about how important journalists were in our own paper. As it was explained to me, Gene felt that anything that would undercut the legitimacy of newspapers as unique agents of change in American society was not ultimately in newspapers' best interest, and thus not in America's either; and that a newspaper could not fairly cover itself without making its warts seem disproportionately large, simply out of its own fascination with itself. If I have that wrong, Gene, I apologize.

So yeah, a little rooting for the home team in these days might be called for. People might think newspapers had a future if newspaper people acted as if they did. The readers still do believe us, you know. This would require stating as a dictum that a newspaper cannot fairly cover itself, and so should not even try; that it is in the interest of the newspaper to publish what the newspaper wishes to be known about itself as a business, but that does not mean it cannot fairly cover everything else. (And the publisher's DUIs are still fair game.) It would once have seemed like heresy to me, but for those who object, well, the newspaper no longer holds a monopoly on local information. [Permalink]

What's with the self-flagellation?

10/29/2008 5:06:28 PM

From MATT BALDWIN, vice president of research, MediaNews Group: Response to article on 10/28/08, "Post, News Report Drops in Circulation." In over three decades as a media research professional, I'm continually baffled by the newspaper industry's insistence on self-flagellation when it comes to reporting circulation declines and the maddening failure to properly position the reality of media transformation. I cannot recall a single instance of Broadcast Television reporting on plummeting prime-time audiences, channel proliferation or record satellite and dish penetration. I cannot recall a single instance of Radio announcing the number of listeners lost to fragmentation, new formats, HD or satellite radio services.

It's true -- the number of printed newspapers in any given market is changing with the way people choose to get their news and information. In addition, a significant portion of recent circulation declines are due to Audit Bureau of Circulations Board guidelines and advertiser preferences that have markedly reduced the number of “sponsored copies” being distributed, changing the basis for trends and comparisons-it’s not apples to apples comparison. "We'd asked newspapers to really focus on paid, quality circulation," the Journal quoted Dave Walker, whose firm, NSA Media Inc., buys ads for big-box store including Wal-Mart and Home Depot. "They're actually doing what we asked them to do."

Judging a newspaper by the number of copies in the market makes no more sense than counting the number of television sets to evaluate a TV station. To paraphrase a recent United States President, "It's the audience, stupid!"

TV "gets it." Ask about "ratings" for the latest episode of Desperate Housewives, and youll likely be supplied with an aggregated number that includes live viewership, recorded viewership, online viewership and maybe even download statistics. Why? Because it's all about the audience.

So what’s really up with print? Metro Denver is a perfect example. According to the Denver Scarborough Report (a national media research firm), 1.3 million adults read a printed newspaper at least once a week. That number hasn’t fluctuated significantly in over three years, even with the circulation changes documented in the article. Here's what HAS changed: In that same three years, the weekly unique visitor average for the Denver newspaper’s family of websites has grown from 827,582 to 1,286,070. Even with some duplication between print and online, there’s no question that the Denver newspaper total audience (print plus online) is at an all-time high.

This media transformation is not unique to Denver. A new analysis from Nielsen Online reports that usage of newspaper websites nationally grew by nearly 16% in the third quarter, averaging 68 million monthly unique visitors who generated more than 3.5 billion page views. Now that’s an audience.

No one will deny that media today is changing. No one will deny that media today is challenged like never before. Telling the whole story is our ultimate responsibility - to readers, consumers and advertisers alike. [Permalink]

Most expensive race?

10/24/2008 3:32:53 PM

From JAMES GELUSO, Bakersfield Californian: Contributions in the race I'm covering for California Assembly have now reached $3.8 million to the two candidates combined. I have a suspicion that this is the most expensive race for the lower house of a state legislature anywhere in the country, but confirming that is difficult. Googling has turned up numbers for expensive races in New York, Illinois and Florida, all of which are well short of this race. Does anyone know of any $4 million lower-house races I may be missing? [Permalink]

Election concerns are contrived

10/24/2008 1:12:25 PM

From DAVID MACARAY: While concerns over whether the media are treating the outcome as a forgone conclusion make sense, they also seem a bit contrived. People seem to be reading into it more than there is. Either you report the results of the polls (which all point to an Obama victory) and the predictions of Republican politicos, like Ed Rollins, Karl Rove and Dick Morris, who've publicly predicted an Obama victory . . . or you don't. Reporting that all available evidence seems to point to a specific result doesn't mean you're "abandoning" fair coverage of the election. Indeed, if the media were interested in promoting continued readership and viewership, they'd be portraying this thing as "too close to call." [Permalink]

More on Mark Cuban's new website

10/24/2008 12:22:26 PM

From JOHN MAGGS: Here is an e-mail exchange I had with Christopher Carey, the editor of Balioutsleuth and Sharesleuth about owner Mark Cuban's short-selling, the most detailed justification I've heard. Perhaps you'd want to post or add to my earlier letter.

According to Mark, there is no profit motive behind BailoutSleuth. He just sees it as the right thing to do.

If you're writing something about this and mention our other venture, Sharesleuth, I would ask that you please take the time to explain the mechanics of its revenue model correctly. This has been reported haphazardly in the past.

While it's true that Mark seeks to fund Sharesleuth with profits made by shorting stocks of the companies we expose, there is little direct linkage between his stock trades and our stories.

Here's how it works: When we identify a company that appears to be engaged in fraud or deception, we tell Mark about it, citing our evidence or suspicions. He then independently decides whether to short the stock (if shares are even available to short). We pursue our investigation, and if that results in a story, we ask Mark just before publication whether he has a position in the stock. If he has a position, we disclose it as part of the story.

In other words, Mark makes his investment decisions on the fundamentals of the company. We make our story decisions on the journalistic merits. He doesn't know when we are going to complete our investigations or post our stories, so there's no way he can time his trading to the publication of those pieces. In the three instances in which Mark shorted shares of companies we wrote about on Sharesleuth, he took his positions months before our stories appeared.

Also, Mark has said he will not take profits from any short-term declines in the stock prices of the companies we write about, but rather will hold his position until the companies' stock goes to zero or they correct the problems that we have identified. [Permalink]

Mark Cuban starts a new journalism venture

10/23/2008 12:59:02 PM

From JOHN MAGGS: Comes now the word that Mark Cuban has started Bailoutsleuth.com, to post investigative stories on the financial crisis. At least one of his other ventures involved mounting investigations of skullduggery at publicly-traded companies and then shorting their stock to profit from the disclosure of bad news. Will Cuban similarly try to profit from reporting bad news about our teetering financial system? If what Cuban was doing before isn't illegal, can Congress please pass a law against it in the current context? Has the SEC's fiddling with the short-selling rules interfered with Cuban's journalism scam? [Permalink]

Is there life after newspapers?

10/21/2008 2:42:48 PM

From ROBERT HODIERNE: I am a journalism professor at the University of Richmond, in Richmond, Va. I have been commissioned by American Journalism Review to do a survey of folks who've left newspapers in the past few years under circumstances that were less than voluntary (e.g. buyouts and layoffs). As you might imagine, finding a comprehensive list from which to draw a random sample is impossible. Instead what we're doing is an exploratory survey of as large a selection of folks who fit that description as possible. The survey asks about the circumstances of their departure from a paper, the size of the severance and so forth. It also asks what they're doing these days. It also hopes to explore a bit about their morale before and after their departure.

I could use some help publicizing the survey. The more who take part, the more informative the results will be. A link to the survey is at AJR.org. [Permalink]

Secret Service *admits* corraling reporters

10/18/2008 1:57:37 PM

From CHARLES FISHMAN: Okay, let's review. Dana Milbank of The Washington Post writes that the Secret Service has been preventing reporters travelling with Sarah Palin from entering the crowd at her rallies to interview attendees.

Then comes Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan to protest that it's really not so. But now, it seems, even the Secret Service, of all respected organizations, is infested with Orwellian spin. Because right there in the interview he gave to ProPublica, Donovan admits that the Secret Service does *exactly what Dana Milbank accused them of*: It refuses to let reporters out of their Secret Service pen, into the audience, at Palin rallies.

ProPublica writes, paraphrasing Donovan, "Donovan said that at rallies for all the candidates, the Secret Service sometimes separates the press corps that is credentialed to cover the event—known as the pool—from the general public. That is for logistical and security reasons, he said.

" ' Being in a press pool gives them special access,' said Donovan.
'But the other side is that they have to stay together. You keep national press away from the local press for the same reason.'

"Any journalist can get around these restrictions simply by attending the rally as a member of the public rather than a part of the press pool, he said."

Let's review:

• The Secret Service has never been asked to restrict reporters covering presidential campaign events.

• The Secret Service does this all the time, at every event, without being asked, because you can't have credentialled national political reporters mixing with either the crowd at events, or other local reporters, for security reasons.

• In this way, the Secret Service provides those reporters with special access, which they must enjoy together.

It's perfect, head-spinning, double talk. Why can't the Secret Service --
which has credentialed and vetted the national reporters -- let them into the crowd? Who's security is at risk? The candidate? The crowd? The reporters? Does the Secret Service let the reporters go sleep alone in their hotel rooms every night, then rejoin the candidates in the morning -- without knowing where they've been all night long?

Here's an idea: Restrict access to the reporting platform to the reporters,
but let the reporters with credentials roam where they may. All they have to do is make the bus at the time the Secret Service tells them.

This is ridiculous. And frankly, shame on ProPublica for not seeing the double talk as it was being issued, for not challenging it, for producing a headline that says the Secret Service denies bad behavior that it clearly admits right in the story. And why no followup phone call to Dana Milbank and other campaign reporters? ProPublica of all places should not be issuing Secret Service press releases. [Permalink]

Happy to lose her as a fan

10/18/2008 12:29:18 PM

From ROGER EBERT: I find it charming that Margaret Nowak was able to arrive at her scorched-earth opinion of me without reading either the review in question OR my linked blog entry that was posted simultaneously with the review on the same page. It analyzed my decision and its ramifications, and has provoked a fascinating discussion, attracting more than 300 illuminating comments in 24 hours.

A reader like this I can cheerfully lose. It was a cheap shot for her to go all medieval on my blameless editor. She doesn't sound very nice. [Permalink]

Ebert gets zero stars from this critic

10/17/2008 4:55:31 PM

From MARGARET NOWAK: After learning that Roger Ebert defends writing a full-column review based on an 8-minute scrap of film, I don't feel so bad about not reading movie reviews. I give a cursory glance to the score rating the movie received, and move on.

That's my choice, as a reader. Ebert should not have that choice as a critic. These people are paid -- some quite handsomely -- to judge bodies of work, not 8-minute sound bites.

The newspaper industry has been battered by storms of reporters who fabricated, columnists who plagiarized, and advertising/circulation managers who cooked books. We've had a few concert reviewers write about shows they never attended, but none at Ebert's level of syndication that I can recall. He and his "wise and expert" editor (his words) have given readers another reason not to trust the "morally dishonest" (her words) review.

Let us hold our collective breath to see if papers across the country will drop his reviews from their slate of columnists. [Permalink]

Subject -- Lee Abrams' thinking

10/16/2008 12:16:24 PM

From LARRY KART: As a former journalist in the cultural ghetto of the very same paper, there's something I've never understood about quotes likes this recent one from Lee Abrams of the Chicago Tribune:

I mention the balance thing. The Chicago Tribune and many papers historically seem to skew away from popular choices in the Arts and Entertainment world. Musically, the top grossing artists so far in 2008 are:

1. The Police ($115 million)
2. Beyonce Knowles ($80 million)
3. Toby Keith ($48 million)
4. Justin Timberlake ($44 million)
5. Madonna ($40 million)
6. Celine Dion ($40 million)
7. Rascal Flatts ($40 million)
8. Van Halen ($35 million)

The Classics, Jazz and other entertainment institutions are part of the mix, but not at the expense of the mainstream if we are to be a mainstream product.

What Abrams and others like him don't see are the differences between (to borrow and redefine a phrase) what I'll call "self-consuming artifacts" and stuff that some people like to talk about and be talked to about. Yes, the musical acts Abrams lists above are "top grossing artists," but when was the last time that anyone (and I certainly include their fans here) really wanted to talk about or be talked to about any of them (except, perhaps, when something gossip column-worthy happens, as is now and so often is the case with Madonna). An analogy might be drawn to Big Macs, which must be close to the top-grossing over-the-counter food item in America. Obviously, large numbers of people want to consume Big Macs, but do they want to talk about or be talked to about the nature and virtues of the Big Mac as opposed to those of, say, The Whopper? I would argue that a large part of the appeal of such food items has to do with the likelihood that consuming them is an end in itself, thanks in part to their well-established familiarity; that there's no "news" there is among the reasons one likes them. Likewise with most if not all of the top-grossing musical acts on Abrams' list. A story about what's new with any of those acts (The Police?) is almost absurd and will likely be boring even to those who go to their concerts (again, barring gossip column-worthy material, which does have to meet a certain standard of "genuineness" before it too becomes boring/absurd).

By contrast, there are segments of the arts (and the acts and artists within them) -- and segments of the world of food and drink, and politics, etc., etc. -- that by their very nature inspire talk because in part the nature and appeal of what's going on there is not yet that familiar to us or fully understood, and because becoming more familiar with these things, understanding them better, feels like it would be fun or useful to do.

Why is it so difficult for the likes of Lee Abrams to fill in the pieces of this not terribly baffling puzzle? Because, I think, they come from mediums (music radio in Abrams' case) where consumption is all or close to all and talk about what is consumed there is nil. Thus Abrams doesn't understand the difference (and/or simply shuns it out of fear) between what we consume and don't talk about (even don't like to talk about) and what we consume and do like to talk about because talking about these things is or more or less built into the act of seeking out and consuming them. Abrams is in a talk-about medium now, and he wants it to behave as though that weren't the case. It won't work. That's not to say that the other way will work, given all the non-content-related problems of American journalism, but isn't it the only way that could work? [Permalink]

How to deal with a candidate's false statement

10/15/2008 1:03:10 PM

From DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Regarding the editing by WFMZ-TV that protected a Democratic politician from her own words:

The solution is to tell the audience ahead of the video that what follows includes a false statement, explain the falsehood briefly ("the two banks you will hear mentioned are still in business") and, maybe, to reiterate that afterwards.

Tonight WFMZ should re-air the clip without the muted sound or altered visuals as part of a brief report that explains the facts, including that the candidate's campaign manager took no steps to correct the record until asked by The Morning Call, and that he then said that this was a slip in which the word "nearly" was left out. Viewers can draw their own conclusions from these facts.

An on-air apology to viewers for acting more like a partisan publicity organization would also be appropriate. A forthright correction will tell the audience that the station owners, and its news director, care about their credibility. We all make mistakes of fact and judgment. How we deal with them goes to our integrity. [Permalink]

Beat reporting and Pulitzers

10/14/2008 4:17:39 PM

From JOHN MAGGS: Subject -- Does the Pulitzer board reward beat reporting? I wish Len Downie's assertion was true, but a fair reading of the lists of Pultizer winners and finalists of recent years indicates that the opposite is the case -- that large, relatively wealthy newspapers win more often, in part, because they alone can afford the time to pursue large-scale reporting projects that seem irresistible to Pulitzer jurors. [Permalink]

An answer for Dennis Persica

10/13/2008 4:52:17 PM

From EDWARD HIGGINS: Subject: Newark incident. I remember the incident well. I was on the staff of the Newark Evening News covering the mayoral race. The event was held in a large catering hall in the North Ward of Newark, then still mostly white. The mayor and through him the Italian American community had finally gotten a foothold in local politics but Addonnizio could only win in Newark by making a coalition ticket with the African-American community. At the time of the incident there had been a number of news stories about corruption in Newark and it looked as if Addonnizio would lose the race and an African American, Ken Gibson, would take the reins of power. The Italian American community felt robbed. Their hero at the time was a self-styled vigilante by the name of Anthony Imperial who claimed to have “protected” the North Ward during the ’67 riots by patrolling in an armored car. Since he could never produce the vehicle a young ABC reporter by the name of Peter Jennings, told me this was a "print" story.

I remember that CBS was covering the event also and as they were on a riser, they could be seen easily. Many reporters in the hall stood along the side walls. A New York Post guy when things started going badly slipped a Hughie button out of his pocket and stuck it on his lapel.

At some sort of bad news from the podium the crowd started shouting, "CBS sucks" over and over and then there was pushing and shoving and the crowd forced the camera crew off the riser. Then people started throwing glasses, chairs and anything else they could put their hands on. I was with another Newark News reporter at the time, an African American and we scrambled to get him out and into his car. I hung around for another 30 or 40 minutes but this calmed down and most of the crowd left quickly.

For the rest of the campaign most reporters carried Hughie buttons in their pockets. [Permalink]

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