Category: Journalism

A 61-year-old woman elbows her 5-foot-2-inch frame to the front of the crowd mobbing Bill Clinton after a campaign event in South Dakota. As Mr. Clinton shakes her hand and holds it tight, she deftly draws him into a response to an article on the Vanity Fair Web site that examines his post-presidential life. “Sleazy” and “slimy” are among the words that issue from the former president’s mouth. Within hours, audio of the three-minute exchange — including the woman’s description of the article as a “hatchet job,” and Mr. Clinton’s description of Todd Purdum, the author and a former reporter for The New York Times, as “dishonest” — is available for the world to hear on the Huffington Post Web site.

The woman, Mayhill Fowler, who calls herself a citizen journalist, wore no credential around her neck and did not identify herself, her intentions or her affiliation as an unpaid contributor to Off the Bus, a section of The Huffington Post. While her digital audio recorder was visible in her left hand during that encounter last Monday, she says, she did not believe Mr. Clinton saw it. “I think we can safely say he thought I was a member of the audience,” she said in a telephone interview on Friday.

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A recent glut of feature stories on the death of the American newspaper has temporarily made the outmoded form of media appealing enough to stave off its inevitable demise for an additional 21 days, sources reported Monday. “People really seem to identify with these moving, ‘end-of-an-era’-type pieces,” Washington Post editor-in-chief Leonard Downie, Jr. said. “It’s nice to see that the printed word is still, at least for now, the most powerful medium for reporting on the death of the printed word.” Downie added that the poignant farewell Op-Ed he recently penned was so well received that he will be able to hold onto his job for up to six more days

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A major article by David Barstow in the Sunday edition of The New York Times rips the veil off a Pentagon effort to promote its views, and those of the White House, via the press by the use of so-called “military experts,” usually retired officers.

“To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as ‘military analysts’ whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world,” Barstow writes.

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Newspaper staffers facing layoffs and cutbacks all around them respond in different ways. For San Jose Mercury News Designer Martin Gee, his reaction was to post online a gallery of photos depicting life in the newsroom with empty desks, discarded phones and computers, and other remnants of his paper’s recent cutbacks. One image shows a bottle of Prozac.

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One rule of journalism: Don’t become part of the story. That was the reminder that nearly every clever co-worker gave me when I returned to work Wednesday morning.

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Now, three decades later, I certainly couldn’t see what remained of our house. From the air, it was all bush and sea, like a set for some movie of Africa 100 years ago. My hands clenched into fists. For 23 years I hid in America, remaking myself into a nondescript black American woman. I polished up my American accent so that I sounded as if I were from New York. I dumped my Liberian passport, got a job as a journalist, covered the Florida presidential recount and the Sept. 11 attacks and even embedded with the Third Infantry Division to cover my country’s invasion of Iraq. And with each new accouterment of my ever-evolving image, I further shed Liberia.

Until now.

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I see tremendous energy going in to breaking new ground in gathering news, telling stories, and creating community. What I don’t see is an equivalent amount of innovation occurring around the business models that will support journalism going forward. What I tend to see, over and over, is people experimenting wildly on the content side, and then falling back on the same old business model: Selling ads.

This model is dying.

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if I were marketing for them, I would be doing everything I could to send the message that “The NY Times does not have blogs, we have Real Time Reports from the most qualified reporters in the world. Like blogs we post continuously , 24x7x365 to keep you up to speed, unlike blogs, we have the highest level of journalistic standards that we adhere to. A copy of which is available at…..” You get the picture.

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Citizen journalism has become the faddish name for the effort to encourage regular folk to use the Internet to report the news directly, but Mr. Wolfson had a point: many of the people whom his organization and an immigrant rights group, Juntos, are teaching to make video reports for streaming on the Internet are not citizens. Many are not even legal residents.

The hope, however, is that they can be journalists.

The classes are supported by a $150,000 news challenge grant from the Knight Foundation in Miami, which is donating a total of $25 million over five years “for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.”

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Once upon a quite recent time, say a decade and a bit ago, only 3,000 or so students took university journalism and related media courses. Today you can count around 10 times that number of young people studying to inherit a green eyeshade, and there are 30 courses accredited by the National Council for the Training of Journalists (plus a rather substantial number which aren’t). Almost exponential expansion – except, where are the jobs?

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“Re-inventing anything is tough,” notes Andrew Analore, editor of the Freeport (Ill.) Journal-Standard. But the GateHouse paper’s staff has tried. Page one includes a picture of a local person who is asked why he or she is smiling. “One idea we borrowed, a Sunday ‘Brag Book’ of reader-submitted baby photos, has proved to be a huge hit with readers,” writes Analore.
Posted at 4:25:31 PM

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The shadow of the Sept. 11 terror attacks is eclipsing press freedom and other constitutional safeguards in the United States, Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley said Thursday.

“What has become clear in the aftermath of 9/11 is how much expediency trumps safeguards,” Curley said in remarks prepared for the annual dinner of the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation.

“Congress steps back from its constitutional role of executive oversight. Civilian oversight of the military wanes. A Justice Department interprets laws in ways that extend police powers. More drastically, prisons are established in places where government or military operatives circumvent due process or control trials,” Curley said in accepting the foundation’s First Amendment Leadership Award.

“It’s at moments like these when a free press matters most,” he said.

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After Heath Ledger was found dead in his SoHo apartment on Jan. 22, David Granger, the editor in chief of Esquire magazine, dispatched a writer named Lisa Taddeo to report on the actor’s final days.
Her article, published in the April issue, which will be on newstands next week, finds Mr. Ledger eating Moroccan food with Jack Nicholson in London, returning to New York and partying at the downtown nightspot Beatrice Inn, eating steak and eggs at a cafe in Little Italy and wolfing down a banana-nut muffin as his last morsel of food.

None of this is exactly true. “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” written in the first person as if it were Mr. Ledger’s own diary, is a fictionalized account of his last days in London and New York and ponders the indignities of celebrity.

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As newspapers struggle with changing times, one young Davis entrepreneur has cast his lot with the printed word.

Finnegan O’Toole Boire founded his own paper in September. He writes, takes photos, sells ads and handles printing and circulation.

“I’m the editor-in-chief,” he said. “I’m also the delivery boy. I do pretty much everything all by myself.”

Finn is 7 years old. His paper is called The Weekly Block and covers his own small part of the world in central Davis.

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Alisa Miller of Public Radio International just gave an amazing short presentation on why, every year, we get less and less information about the world around us through the media — even though we want and need it more than ever.

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The Albuquerque Tribune announced today that it will cease operations, publishing its final edition this Saturday. In 2005, PDN named the Tribune one of the best newspapers to shoot for.

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