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THE LATEST BLOG
Phelps' Media Tidbits ...
Local News As We Know It!!
A Musical Definition of News
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Wednesday, March 21, 2007
NYTimesman John Burns on Being a Foreign Correspondent ...
PBS "NewsHour" correspondent Jeffrey Brown
asks John Burns if covering war has taken a personal toll on him. "Look, it would
be foolish and vainglorious of me to say, you know, 'We don't feel it.' Of course we feel it, and we should feel
it," he says. "I tell newly arrived New York Times correspondents that they should have no illusions about where
they are and no illusions about the potential price that they may pay for being there. But it needs to be said that covering
a war and covering a war of the significance that this war has assumed for the United States is an exhilarating affair. It's
a tragic affair. But if you're a reporter, if you're a foreign reporter, you want to be where the big story is."
But then there's this from the LA Times:
"I
find the war in Iraq much more frightening to watch on television when I'm on leave outside Iraq than I find it when I'm
there," New York Times Baghdad bureau chief John Burns said on C-Span last month.
http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/cl-et-ontv20mar20,0,2630889.story?coll=cl-calendar
11:23 pm eet
Monday, March 19, 2007
From TomPaine.com ...
Alberto Gonzales is (just) the
latest imperious conservative tripped up by his own ideological arrogance.
6:15 pm eet
Friday, March 16, 2007
From the PEJ State of the Media 2007
In 2007, we see seven new major trends worth highlighting:
News organizations need to do more to think through
the implications of this new era of shrinking ambitions.
The
move toward building audience around “franchise” areas of coverage or other traits is a logical response to fragmentation
and can, managed creatively, have journalistic value. To a degree, journalism’s problems are oversupply, too many news
organizations doing the same thing. But something gained means something lost, especially as newsrooms get smaller. There
is already evidence that basic monitoring of local government has suffered. Regional concerns, as opposed to local, are likely
to get less coverage. Matters with widespread impact but little audience appeal, always a challenge, seem more at risk of
being unmonitored. What do concepts like localism and branding really mean? Should only national newspapers maintain foreign
bureaus? Does localism mean provincialism? Should news organizations, so as not to abandon more high-level coverage, enlist
citizen sentinels to monitor community news? To what extent do journalists still have a role in creating a broad agenda of
common knowledge? Those issues, debated in theory before, are becoming real. And the wrong answers could hasten, not stave
off, the decline of news organizations.
The evidence is mounting that the news industry must become more aggressive
about developing a new economic model.
The signs are clearer that advertising works differently online than in older media. Finding out about goods and
services on the Web is an activity unto itself, like using the yellow pages, and less a byproduct of getting news, such as
seeing a car ad during a newscast. The consequence is that advertisers may not need journalism as they once did, particularly
online. Already the predictions of advertising growth on the Web are being scaled back. That has major implications, (which
some initiatives such as “Newspaper Next” are beginning to grapple with). Among them, news organizations can broaden
what they consider journalistic function to include activities such as online search and citizen media, and perhaps even liken
their journalism to anchor stores at a mall, a major reason for coming but not the only one. Perhaps most important, the math
suggests they almost certainly must find a way to get consumers to pay for digital content. The increasingly logical scenario
is not to charge the consumer directly. Instead, news providers would charge Internet providers and aggregators licensing
fees for content. News organizations may have to create consortiums to make this happen. And those fees would likely add to
the bills consumers pay for Internet access. But the notion that the Internet is free is already false. Those who report the
news just aren’t sharing in the fees.
The
key question is whether the investment community sees the news business as a declining
industry or an emerging one in transition.
If one believes
that news will continue to be the primary public square where people gather — with the central newsrooms in a community
delivering that audience across different platforms — then it seems reasonable that the economics in time will sort
themselves out. In that scenario, people with things to sell still need to reach consumers, and the news will be a primary
means of finding them. If one believes, however, that the economics of news are now broken, with further declines ahead, then
it seems inevitable that the investment in newsrooms will continue to shrink and the quality of journalism in America will
decline. One thing seems clear, however: If news companies do not assert their own vision here, including making a case and
taking risks, their future will be defined by those less invested in and passionate about news.
There are growing questions about whether the dominant ownership model of the last
generation, the public corporation, is suited to the transition newsrooms must
now make.
Private markets now appear to value
media properties more highly than Wall Street does. More executives are openly
expressing doubt, too, whether public ownership’s required focus on stock price and quarterly returns will allow media
companies the time and freedom and risk taking they feel they need to make the transition to the new age. The radio giant
Clear Channel made that point when it went private. So have a host of private suitors emerging in the newspaper field. What
is unknown is whether these potential new private owners are motivated by public interest, a vision of growth online, having
a high-profile hobby (like a sports team), or as an investment to be flipped for profit after aggressive cost-cutting. Public
ownership tends to make companies play by the same rules. Private ownership has few leveling influences. And the new crop
of potential private owners is unlike the press barons of the past, people trying to create their legacy in news. Most of
them are people who made their fortunes in other enterprises.
The Argument Culture is giving way to something new, the Answer Culture.
Critics used to bemoan what author Michael Crichton once called the “Crossfire Syndrome,” the tendency
of journalists to stage mock debates about issues on TV and in print. Such debates, critics lamented, tended to polarize,
oversimplify and flatten issues to the point that Americans in the middle of the spectrum felt left out. That era of argument
—R.W. Apple Jr. the gifted New York Times Reporter who died in 2006, called it “pie throwing” — appears
to be evolving. The program “Crossfire” has been canceled. A growing pattern has news outlets, programs and journalists
offering up solutions, crusades, certainty and the impression of putting all the blur of information in clear order for people.
The tone may be just as extreme as before, but now the other side is not given equal play. In a sense, the debate in many
venues is settled — at least for the host. This is something that was once more confined to talk radio, but it is spreading
as it draws an audience elsewhere and in more nuanced ways. The most popular show in cable has shifted from the questions
of Larry King to the answers of Bill O’Reilly. On CNN his rival Anderson Cooper becomes personally involved in stories.
Lou Dobbs, also on CNN, rails against job exportation. Dateline goes after child predators. Even less controversial figures
have causes: ABC weatherman Sam Campion champions green consumerism. The Answer Culture in journalism, which is part of the
new branding, represents an appeal more idiosyncratic and less ideological than pure partisan journalism.
Blogging is on the brink of a new phase that will probably include
scandal, profitability for some, and a splintering into elites and non-elites over standards and ethics.
The use of blogs by political campaigns in the mid-term elections of 2006 is already intensifying
in the approach to the presidential election of 2008. Corporate public-relations efforts are beginning to use blogs as well,
often covertly. What gives blogging its authenticity and momentum — its open access — also makes it vulnerable
to being used and manipulated. At the same time, some of the most popular bloggers are already becoming businesses or being
assimilated by establishment media. All this is likely to cause blogging to lose some of its patina as citizen media. To protect
themselves, some of the best-known bloggers are already forming associations, with ethics codes, standards of conduct and
more. The paradox of professionalizing the medium to preserve its integrity as an independent citizen platform is the start
of a complicated new era in the evolution of the blogosphere.
While journalists are becoming more serious about the Web, no clear models of how to do journalism online really
exist yet, and some qualities are still only marginally explored.
Our content study this year was a close examination of some three dozen Web sites from a range of media. Our goal
was to assess the state of journalism online at the beginning of 2007. What we found was that the root media no longer strictly
define a site’s character. The Web sites of the Washington Post and the New York Times, for instance, are more dissimilar
than the papers are in print. The Post, by our count, was beginning to have more in common with some sites from other media.
The field is still highly experimental, with an array of options, but it can be hard to discern what one site offers, in contrast
to another. And some of the Web’s potential abilities seem less developed than others. Sites have done more, for instance,
to exploit immediacy, but they have done less to exploit the potential for depth.
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2007/
Thursday, March 8, 2007
HIASSEN on ANNA NICOLE
We have seen the future, and it's not prettyBy
CARL HIAASEN (Miami Herald, 3/4/07)Now that Anna Nicole Smith is at long last departed from Florida,
it's time to confront a simmering disgust over the media's salivating treatment of this dreary event. Was the press coverage excessive? You bet. Mindless? Inevitably. Tasteless?
Rapturously so. But this is the new New Journalism, which is steered by a core belief
that people would rather be smothered by seedy gossip about dead ex-Playmate junkies than be bothered with the details of
North Korea's nuclear program. Like the Don Henley song says, crap is king. We are merely
here to serve. If you Googled Anna Nicole's name last week, you got 28.8 million
hits -- 10 times more than that of Condoleezza Rice, who is only the U.S. secretary of state. Debate
all you wish about whether the public's interest is fueling the Anna Nicole overkill, or the overkill is inflating the
public's interest. The fact is, lots of people are hungry for the story -- and not because they care one bit about this
poor woman, or her child. It's necro-tainment, that's all. The five-car pileup on the
interstate. The stunt plane crashing at the air show. The train derailment, caught on tape. As
soon as Smith's death became known, a small army of print and broadcast reporters swarmed to Fort Lauderdale, grabbed
spots in the shade outside the courthouse and began tracking the day's legal proceedings, which they dutifully regurgitated
to their readers and audiences. Not since the O.J. Simpson murder trial have so much manpower
and so many resources been thrown at a story of so little ultimate consequence to society. Scoff,
if you will, at the hyperventilating TV coverage of the Smith case. You think it's easy trying to make Anna Nicole sound
important enough to justify three minutes and twenty seconds of air time? That's a tough job, folks. Here you've got this deceased person who had no discernible talent whatsoever, a pitiable and often incoherent
soul who perished in a shabby and unoriginal way. Yet, day after day, you must with all seriousness
face the cameras and present Smith's demise (and its messy, freak-filled aftermath) as a matter of pressing significance. How does such a forlorn cliché become elevated to major breaking news? Many journalism students are probably
pondering the same riddle. The answer isn't pretty. In a nutshell: Former Playboy centerfold
turned rich widow turned reality-TV star suddenly dies, leaving an infant of uncertain paternity and a potential fortune up
for grabs. Story-wise, the angles are beauty, sex, money and greed -- classic tabloid ingredients
and, now, a premium formula for mainstream media. For a competitive industry that's fighting
to maintain profit levels and market shares, covering Anna Nicole is relatively cheap and easy, a quick hit; modest investment,
maximum return. Another factor heightened the frenzy: She expired in South Florida, which in February
is a dream destination for any journeyman reporter. Had Smith passed away at a Holiday Inn in Buffalo, the throng of invading
media would have been much smaller -- and far more eager to leave. Now the circus shifts to Nassau,
where visiting journalists face a dicey new challenge: How to conceal their windsurfing lessons and casino losses on their
expense accounts. It's money that could be spent in pursuit of serious news in Darfur or Pakistan,
or even back home where there is likely some crime and corruption waiting to be exposed. But this
is a new dawn for modern journalism. The smelly stuff that was once left to the capable vultures at the Star and The Enquirer
is now front-page fodder in your hometown paper, and the lead story on the six o'clock news. Dead
or alive, celebrities rule. And it's never been easier to become a celebrity. Although the
Anna Nicole blitz hasn't much illuminated or informed, neither has it been a total waste of time. For example, attentive
readers and viewers picked up some helpful information about how quickly the human body decomposes, both before and after
embalming. CSI Miami, eat your heart out. Don't make
the mistake of dismissing the Smith story as an anomaly; it's a media watershed. If the death of a hapless, doped-up ex-model
can knock two wars out of the headlines, there's no end to the squalid possibilities. We have
seen the future, and it's in the gutter.
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