“Your reputation is everything here at the Times, and if you want get known, you’ve got to deliver what readers want: differences between men and women, and photos of cats,” national political reporter Adam Nagourney said. “I suppose I could be most e-mailed, too, if I sat in front of my computer all day making up cutesy names for government officials, like some redheaded Wednesday and Saturday columnists I know.”
The Eastern Daily Press has apologised after confusing the Bishop of Norwich with serial killer Steve Wright, known as the “Suffolk strangler”.
Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television, magazines and newspapers might exist independently of their rapidly changing modes of distribution? The thought has become unsustainable.
Through blogs, file-sharing and social networking functions on the Internet, dozens of eyewitness reports, some coming from within the two besieged hotels, delivered information faster than conventional media and challenged some of its reporting. Twitter, a user-generated service that delivers text message-sized “tweets,” for instance, reported that there was still gunfire inside the Taj Mahal long after Indian media had said it was finished. Others transcribed lists of casualties from the hospitals faster than mainstream media could access it.
While some hailed the online reporting as “a social media experiment in action,” much of the information on Twitter was woefully inaccurate. Reports of casualties in the thousands were wrong. So too, apparently, was a report that the government had asked Twitter users to stop reporting for fear that they too might help the attackers.
Armando Rodríguez, at El Diario newspaper, was the top crime reporter in the deadliest city in Mexico. He had seen it all. But this was different. This was personal. Earlier this month, someone had hung the decapitated body of a local drug thug from a bridge on the airport road. Later the head appeared downtown at the Plaza of Journalists, wrapped in a plastic bag, carefully placed at the foot of a statue of a newsboy hawking papers.
Tribune Company has given a two-year notice to the Associated Press that its daily newspapers plan to drop the news service, becoming the first major newspaper chain to do so since the recent controversy over new rates began.
It was probably my 50th call. The line had always been busy. Or the phone had been shut off.
But on Tuesday morning, someone actually picked up.
“Can I speak to the pirate spokesman, please?”
The pace of doom and gloom stories for printed media continues unabated but I’ve noticed more and more that are offering brilliant insight into the problem and even a few solutions.
Check it out here.
Forget April. For bean counters at financially troubled newspapers, August is the cruelest month.
Their budget-stretching began with coverage of the Beijing Olympics, which ends Aug. 24. A day later, the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Denver, and the Republican National Convention begins Sept. 1 in St. Paul, Minn. The result is predictable.
“Almost every large news bureau, with maybe a few exceptions, is cutting back,” says Jerry Gallegos, superintendent of the House of Representatives’ daily press gallery, which is handling newspapers’ convention credentials. In some cases, though he won’t say which ones, papers have reduced their staffing “by as much as 20%.”
Check it out here.
Every morning during the Olympics, the local organizing committee and the International Olympic Committee address the world’s media at a state-of-the-Games news conference.
These things are rarely entirely smooth sailing for the officials, but Wednesday’s conference was unusually testy.
Check it out here.
As the disruption to the mass media business models of traditional media becomes more acute, more and more veteran journalists are beginning to ask how the business of news will be funded. Of course, this question comes from a belief that professional news — that which is funded by advertising — is a permanent institutional structure, and this is problematic at best. Now that advertisers are voting with their money, journalists are crying “foul” and desperately seeking another model to sustain what increasingly comes off as a sense of entitlement.
Check it out here.
When former presidential candidate John Edwards finally admitted to having an extramarital affair this weekend he faced an outpouring of recrimination. But a lot of ire has now been aimed at the mainstream media in America, which did not report on the story even as it became a national talking point on the internet and late-night television.
Check it out here.
A blog post written by William Lobdell, an 18 year veteran of the Los Angeles Times entitled “42 Things I Know” should serve as a clue train manifesto for newspaper
Check it out here.
KHARTOUM, Sudan — Sometimes, the things reporters do here in Africa can seem harrowing from afar. But up close, the experiences tend to be more Seinfeld than 24, more surreally mundane than high adventure. My recent eight-hour non-detention detention by Sudanese intelligence agents in Khartoum was a long, sleepy day of waiting and more waiting with no definitive beginning or end.
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Comments are thought to be an added value to a newspaper’s site—providing another reason to read. You come for the article, and stay for the interesting discussion. The only problem is, there is no interesting discussion. Almost never. Not even from the mythical supersmart New York Times readers.
Check it out here.
An obnoxious TV reporter went to Burbank to ask stupid questions to people waiting in line for the new iPhone. I was delighted to see that my pal Jeff, or his identical twin brother (he really has one) told the reporter he was a jackass.
Check it out here.
This evening at the Tampa Tribune, editor in chief Janet Coats sat in a rolling chair in the center of the newsroom while everyone gathered around for the latest news on layoffs.
She went over the list of who was layed off and why. Then she reexplained that 10 more layoffs were to come in the following weeks and how the newsroom would start reorganizing around its new business model.
Check it out here.
In the name of “defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt” the Associated Press is now selling “quotation licenses” that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that “fair use” — the right to copy without permission — means “Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.”).
It gets better! If you pay to quote the AP, but you offend the AP in so doing, the AP “reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher’s reputation.”
Check it out here.
A note threatening a Mexican journalist was found outside the office of a newspaper in southern Mexico on Monday, two days after someone left a severed head there.
Tabasco state Attorney General Gustavo Rosario said the letter was directed at Juan Padilla, editor of El Correo de Tabasco, which recently carried reports about migrant smuggling and kidnapping in the area.
“You are next,” the note read.
Check it out here.
