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Category: News of News (Page 11 of 11)

News and comments about news and media

Triangle Bloggers Update – Feb 12

The Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005 already has some great folks signed up and is going to be bigger than 50 persons soon with greater than a month to go.

If you will be attending and you want to go online during the conference, you need to register with the UNC Wireless network. I can do this for you. Send me email with your name and your MAC address and I will sign you up for conference period access.

One addition of particular note:
Dan Gillmor, former San Jose Mercury News tech reporter and author of “We, the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People” (O’Reilly, 2004) will be among the participants.

You’ll have a second chance to hear Dan on Monday Feb 13 when he will be giving a public talk on campus (not sure where yet) in the afternoon probably around 3:30. I suspect he will be talking about his ideas concerning distributed journalism and grassroots journalism.

Just the Facts? My eyes glaze over

One of the finalists for the job of Dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC was part of a team that did a study of newspaper readers in the St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia) area.
The question: What writing style do readers prefer and benefit from most?
Hint: Not the famous inverted pyramid style that we’ve taught in J-schools forever. (according to the study)
Dr. Georgia Green, who is not the finalist BTW, did a through write up of the study and the findings in an article for the American Society of Newspaper Editors called “Structure, Goals, and Comprehensibility Revisited.”
Note: This study didn’t settle the ongoing discussion of inverted pyramid vs. storytelling or narrative.

When radio was an interactive medium

NC native novelist, Michael Parker reminds me of the time when Raleigh radio was regional and interactive. In his essay “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way” published in today’s NYTimes Magazine, Michael brings back memories of the Ask Your Neighbor show on WPTF (I think). Ask Your Neighbor was at once local, regional and national. National in the sense that there were versions of AYN all across the country. The one in Detroit continues after 43 years!

Rose on WUNC; community blog in Johnston County

News and Observer has a nice very brief piece on WUNC radio and General Manager Joan Siefert Rose by Danny Hooley in their Lifestyles Section today. Part of the story is Joan’s direction to make the content of WUNC more available to a national audience (ala Minnesota Public Radio or Michigan say). Amongst the changes in that direction is the hiring of a Business and a Health reporter (hope that they give a boost to those two programs in the J-School here). This spring, WUNC will become the southeastern bureau for the national program “Marketplace.”
Two other projects will be a youth voice radio and an indepth look at poverty in North Carolina; both are scheduled to begin this spring.

We all know and love, although with some reservations, OrangePolitics.org here in Orange County. NandO also has a story on a community blog in Johnston County called 4042.com. It’s not really a blog, but it is a discussion board setup that allows — for better or worse — anonymous postings and spirited threaded discussions. Already the regular complaints and compliments are being aired in the report, but amusing to see another view of community blogging.

Ethics for Bloggers at Harvard Conference

Coming on the heels of the Armstrong Williams stories and just after John Hood’s mention of Steve Glass, the Berkman Center at Harvard announces an invitation-only conference to be held on January 21st and 22nd, 2005 entitled “Blogging, Journalism and Credibility: Battleground and Common Ground.”
Why talk about an invitation only conference? Because there are active discussions happening on the conference blog right now. And you can participate by commenting on the blog. Also the sessions will be webcast live, blogged, on IRC and covered by journalists.
Of particular interests there so far:

NYTimes to charge (like Salon or Wall St J)?

Dan Gillmor noticed a Reuters report, picking up on the Business Week cover story mentioned here earlier today, saying that the NYTimes might be, may be, maybe, charging their 18.5 million unique monthly Internet users.
Dan asks: Would you pay?
I already pay for the paper edition. Doing that is much cheaper than owning three computers which is how many we’d need so we could all read our favorite sections each morning — and the online version doesn’t give the crossword or free anyway!
And yes I do pay for Salon, but not for WSJ.

Payola News and Commentary

Just as record companies are attempting once again to kill off the payola/indpendent promoter system, the same persistant virus has been revealed to be hitting the news and commentary side of the media.

Rightwing spokesman, Armstrong Williams, has been shown to have been paid $240,000 by the US Department of Education [conservatives note this is your tax money too] to shill for No Child Left Behind. (see USA Today’s story).

The contract, detailed in documents obtained by USA TODAY through a Freedom of Information Act request, also shows that the Education Department, through the Ketchum public relations firm, arranged with Williams to use contacts with America’s Black Forum, a group of black broadcast journalists, “to encourage the producers to periodically address” NCLB. He persuaded radio and TV personality Steve Harvey to invite Paige onto his show twice. Harvey’s manager, Rushion McDonald, confirmed the appearances.

Williams says he was a strong believer in the NCLB to begin with, but that didn’t stop him for entering into a contract which seriously compromised his integrity. I am now glad to say that a full course in ethics is required at UNC’s Journalism School. I hope that Williams and others will take time to check out the classes and take a similar course themselves.

But Williams is only half the equation. Departments of government do have a duty to educate about their work but this project executed with too much secrecy became propaganda — not openness.

As USA Today reports:

Williams’ contract was part of a $1 million deal with Ketchum that produced “video news releases” designed to look like news reports. The Bush administration used similar releases last year to promote its Medicare prescription drug plan, prompting a scolding from the Government Accountability Office, which called them an illegal use of taxpayers’ dollars.

This is the kind of thing that was corrupting the music industry and should not be coming from government. The Clinton Administration was not immune from this kind of behavior as local reporter Fiona Morgan told us in Salon in January 2000.


Editor and Publisher reports that the Tribune Media Services is also questioning the columns that Williams wrote for their syndicate.
Four of his Right Side columns were in favor of NCLB.

Times of Trouble

Collegue and ever alert observer, Phil Meyer, writes to say that the New York Times and its future arethe cover story on the current Business Week. Further, the future is red but not rosy. Not all of the Times’ troubles are tied to their mismanagement and missing oversight of reporters like the infamous Jason Blair. Many are the problems of a paper-based information source trying to make the move to the Internet. More people read the NYTimes than ever and more of us read it on the Net (disclosure: I get the paper edition too, but end up reading a good bit of the paper on the Net anyhow). The question is as always: Where is the Money? This is no small question since good journalism requires good money — unless you are me blogging in the public interest :->

The B-Week article ends:

The New York Times, like all print publications, faces a quandary. A majority of the paper’s readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering. “The business model that seems to justify the expense of producing quality journalism is the one that isn’t growing, and the one that is growing — the Internet — isn’t producing enough revenue to produce journalism of the same quality,” says John Battelle, a co-founder of Wired and other magazines and Web sites.

Today, Sulzberger faces an even bigger challenge than when he took charge of the Times in the mid-1990s. Can he find a way to rekindle growth while preserving the primacy of the Times’s journalism? The answer will go a long way toward determining not only the fate of America’s most important newspaper but also whether traditional, reporting-intensive journalism has a central place in the Digital Age.

Now those are real challenges. Does Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma point to any answers?

In related news news, Phil points out that a lack of standards and a lack of copyeditors makes the Times less readable. For example, he says: “I wrote to the Times ombudsman to complain about Maureen Dowd’s affection of the British spelling of “whine.” She uses “whinge,” which will stop an American reader in his or her tracks. I was told that every op ed writer is entitled to use the spelling and grammar of his or her choice.”

As anyone who has read this blog knows too well, copyeditors can make a real positive difference. I miss them. They help make me sound smarter.

CrossFIRED!

Bye to bow-tied twits and to Crossfire as we knew and hated it. Thanks to Jon Stewart.

Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at “Crossfire” when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were “hurting America.”

Mr. Klein said last night, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.” He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

The official CNN story on the CNN story here.

Transcript of the Jon Stewart appearance on Crossfire here.

Not that I ever express opinions here ;->

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