Category: Journalism

A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades

Every six months, the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases data about newspapers and how many people subscribe to them. And then everyone writes a story about how some newspapers declined some amount over the year previous. Well, that’s no way to look at data! It’s confusing—and it obscures larger trends. So we’ve taken chunks of data for the major newspapers, going back to 1990, and graphed it, so you can see what’s actually happened to newspaper circulation.

Link: A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades | The Awl

October 26, 2009
Saudi female journalist sentenced to 60 lashes – washingtonpost.com

Saudi female journalist sentenced to 60 lashes

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/24/AR2009102402141.html?wprss=rss_world

A Saudi court on Saturday sentenced a female journalist to 60 lashes after she had been charged with involvement in a TV show in which a Saudi man publicly talked about sex.

October 25, 2009
Maziar Bahari's Ordeal in Tehran Prison | Newsweek

Maziar Bahari’s Ordeal in Tehran Prison

Maziar Bahari’s ordeal inside Tehran’s Evin Prison.

via Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/id/219034

For day after day, month after month, following his imprisonment in Iran on June 21, documentary filmmaker and NEWSWEEK correspondent Maziar Bahari did not see the face of his interrogator. Bahari, 42, was blindfolded or faced a wall as the accusations and questions—often it was hard to tell the difference—kept coming at him. And always the interrogator told him the same thing: “No one on the outside cares about you. Everyone has forgotten you.” Nothing could have been further from the truth.

October 23, 2009
Held by the Taliban. Part Three – The World of Young Militants

‘You Have Atomic Bombs, but We Have Suicide Bombers.’

The Taliban fighters who kidnapped David Rohde, a Times reporter, and two Afghans were guided by a strident belief that the United States was waging a war against Islam. The third installment in Mr. Rohde’s account of his captivity.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/world/asia/20hostage.html?_r=2&ref=world&pagewanted=all

Obeying the guard, I covered my face. The soldier was in the lead vehicle of a Pakistani Army supply convoy in North Waziristan. After surveying the road, the soldier got back in his truck, and the convoy rumbled forward.

I hoped that the Pakistanis might somehow rescue us. Instead, I watched in dismay as Badruddin got out of the truck and calmly stood on the side of the road. As trucks full of heavily armed government soldiers rolled by, he smiled and waved at them

October 20, 2009
Held by the Taliban – Part 2 in a Series by David Rohde

Inside the Islamic Emirate

After being kidnapped in Afghanistan, David Rohde, a Times reporter, and two Afghan colleagues were moved into the tribal areas of Pakistan. The second installment in a series offering Mr. Rohde’s account of his captivity.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/world/asia/19hostage.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

On the first day there, I went to the bathroom and returned to find Tahir with a fresh cut on his calf. It looked as if someone had drawn a line across his leg in red ink. A local Waziri militant had taken out his knife and tried to cut off a chunk of Tahir’s calf, saying he wanted to eat the flesh of an Afghan who worked with Westerners. One of Atiqullah’s guards had stopped him.

October 19, 2009
The Media Equation – What Would It Take to Support a Newsroom?

A Newsroom Subsidized? Minds Reel

A report by Leonard Downie Jr., formerly of The Washington Post, sets forth a number of ways to pay for journalism. One of them is government money.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/business/media/19carr.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

“Fewer journalists are reporting less news in fewer pages, and the hegemony that near-monopoly metropolitan newspapers enjoyed during the last third of the 20th century, even as their primary audience eroded, is ending.”

In other words, the current advertising model won’t continue to support so-called accountability journalism.

October 19, 2009
dispatches / Beyond Towering Babble: Good Schools, Real News

Link: dispatches / Beyond Towering Babble: Good Schools, Real News:

“I doubt young Americans would pay for newspapers, no matter the quality,” she replied. “My generation is accustomed to free leisure activities. Many of us download music illegally, watch bootleg movies and read newspapers online because we like cheap entertainment. And why shouldn’t we, since real wages keep falling every decade?”

October 11, 2009
Don't Bail Out Newspapers–Let Them Die and Get Out of the Way

Link: Techtonic Shifts : Don’t Bail Out Newspapers–Let Them Die and Get Out of the Way:

Frankly, a lot of newspapers just stink. People worry about the fate of the San Francisco Chronicle, but that paper has been an embarrassment for decades. The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press are in trouble, but they deserve it: for one thing, they spawned Mitch Albom; for another, they’re both pretty awful. The Boston Globe, my current hometown paper, is smug and provincial, and the writing is embarrassingly bad. Much of the Globe reads like a college newspaper. Would any of us really be worse off if these crusty, crappy old relics suddenly disappeared?

September 29, 2009
Job Became Completely Humiliating So Gradually Area Man Barely Noticed

Link: Job Became Completely Humiliating So Gradually Area Man Barely Noticed | America’s Finest News Source:

“Now that I think about it, a lot of little things have sort of slowly added up, like when they reduced my lunch hour to 30 minutes last October,” Durkee said while walking CFO Janice Dugan’s poorly behaved English bulldog, Twombly, a task that cannot be found in Durkee’s extensive job description. “In and of itself, I suppose that isn’t really that terrible. Until you consider the five different job-title changes I’ve endured over the past two years and the fact that I had to buy my own computer for work.”

September 19, 2009
Controversy Over How, Why Post Piece Was Killed, If Publisher Weymouth Involved

Link: Controversy Over How, Why Post Piece Was Killed, If Publisher Weymouth Involved – washingtonpost.com:

A Post Magazine editor encouraged Matt Mendelsohn to pursue the story after reviewing his photos of Ess. But the atmosphere apparently soured after Weymouth told Mendelsohn at a birthday brunch in her honor that this was not the sort of piece that she favored for the magazine. Weymouth has been telling editors that there have been too many stories similar to the one last November about a 13-year-old dwarf undergoing surgery to lengthen her legs.

September 16, 2009
Military's Killing of 2 Journalists in Iraq Detailed in New Book

Link: Military’s Killing of 2 Journalists in Iraq Detailed in New Book – washingtonpost.com:

The Reuters photographer and driver were carrying cameras and walking with a group of Iraqi men, some of whom appeared to be armed, when a U.S. helicopter crew mistook them for insurgents, according to an account by David Finkel in the book “The Good Soldiers,” published Tuesday.

September 14, 2009
War Crimes Court Convicts Journalist of Contempt

Link: War Crimes Court Convicts Journalist of Contempt – washingtonpost.com:

The case against Florence Hartmann — who covered the Bosnian war as a reporter in the 1990s, became spokeswoman for the tribunal prosecutor from 2000 to 2006, then returned to writing — has been denounced as a waste of the court’s time and money and a deviation from its mission of prosecuting those accused of atrocities during the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia.

September 14, 2009
Too Close for Comfort? : CJR

Link: Too Close for Comfort? : CJR:

The dramatic change in Ricks’s writing about the military in Iraq reflects a broader shift that has taken place in the coverage of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The doctrine of counterinsurgency has received almost uniformly positive press coverage, at times making it appear to be the only possible avenue for the U.S. military, and in the process that coverage has cast it in the most positive light.

September 13, 2009
The Reporter’s Account: 4 Days With the Taliban – At War Blog

Link: The Reporter’s Account: 4 Days With the Taliban – At War Blog – NYTimes.com:

Stephen Farrell, a reporter for The New York Times, and Sultan M. Munadi, an Afghan journalist working with him, were kidnapped by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan on Saturday. In a British raid to free them early Wednesday, Mr. Munadi was killed. This is Mr. Farrell’s account of their four-day ordeal.

September 10, 2009
John Burns Discusses Sultan Munadi – At War Blog

Link: John Burns Discusses Sultan Munadi – At War Blog – NYTimes.com:

Sultan Munadi is dead, and a British paratrooper whose name we may never know. There may also have been Afghan casualties, perhaps Taliban, perhaps not; that we also don’t know yet, for sure. But from where I am writing this, on a sunny autumn afternoon in rural England, the deaths of Sultan and the British commando seem like a grim black cloud darkening the landscape – a harbinger, perhaps, for the increasingly grim news that seems to await us all from a war that seems to be worsening by the day, and heading for worse yet unless our political and military leaders can find a way to turn the situation around.

September 9, 2009
Seized Times Reporter Is Freed in Afghan Raid That Kills Aide

Seized Times Reporter Is Freed in Afghan Raid That Kills Aide – NYTimes.com:

Armed gunmen seized Stephen Farrell and his interpreter, Sultan Munadi, four days ago while they were working in a village south of Kunduz.

September 9, 2009
Cuban's Plan to Kill Aggregators: End Free Links

Cuban’s Plan to Kill Aggregators: End Free Links | Newsweek Daniel Lyons:

Since the dawn of the Internet, news organizations have accepted the notion that the only way to survive the onslaught of the Web is to publish everything online, at no cost to readers, and let anyone in the world synopsize it, refer to it, and copy and link to it. You can’t charge for your work—that’s rule No. 1 on the Internet. And you can’t block others from copying or linking to it—that’s rule No. 2.

But those rules are starting to look stupid.

September 4, 2009
Getting Lost – Jenna Isaacson Pfueller

Getting Lost – sportsshooter:

In my thirty-one years I’ve lost a lot of things. Car keys, fights with roommates, favorite pairs of socks, photo contests, both of my parents and occasionally my mind. But nothing prepared me for losing a job, especially over the phone. Especially when they knew I’d be alone to hear the news.

September 4, 2009
With Fwix iPhone App, All a Cub Reporter Needs Is a Scoop

With Fwix iPhone App, All a Cub Reporter Needs Is a Scoop – NYTimes.com:

The site, Fwix, will release an iPhone application this week that enables its users to file news updates, photos and videos, live from the field. The items will appear on Fwix’s year-old Web site, which also collects links to local news articles from newspapers and blogs in 85 cities.

August 30, 2009
At The Journal News, Everyonersquo;s Laid Off and Welcome to Reapply

The Media Equation – At The Journal News, Everyone’s Laid Off and Welcome to Reapply – NYTimes.com:

Specifically, the 288 news and advertising employees at The Journal News were told that jobs were being redefined and that they all would need to reapply for the new positions and that by the time the re-org music stopped, 70 of them would be without jobs.

What fresh hell is this?

August 30, 2009