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Archive for the 'Journalism' Category

TechCrunch and the New New Journalism

Published by William Beutler on August 10, 2009 in Beltway media, Blogs vs. MSM, Journalism, Journalist Bloggers, Tech Blogosphere and William Beutler. Closed

arrington-cigarTo say that many people do not like TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is some understatement. Anyone who can get the normally laid-back Leo Laporte to start cursing and shut down a broadcast has some kind of unique skills of irritation. (See also: DouchebagName.com) And it’s clear he relishes this distinction, having willingly posed for the photo at right for the late Business 2.0 magazine.

No matter what one thinks of him, it’s becoming ever more clear that Arrington is driving a significant part of what journalism is becoming. And while I’ll decline for the moment to unpack what all of that means (I will happily do so for a modest book advance) let me point to two announcements from TechCrunch in recent months.

First, in December 2008, Arrington declared — in a post titled “Death to the Embargo” — that he would no longer honor non-exclusive news embargoes:

We’ve never broken an embargo at TechCrunch. Not once. Today that ends. From now our new policy is to break every embargo. We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo by one minute or three days. We’ll choose at random.

Some firms will stop talking to us (yeah! less email), but we’ll find other ways to get the news. Others, who haven’t read this post because they don’t read TechCrunch, will be unpleasantly surprised. Maybe if we cause enough pain then PR firms will start to take action against those publications who break the rules.

It’s a radical idea in the world of old media, but that world is quickly ending. This is the business side of political bloggers’ dissatisfaction with the inside-the-Beltway “cocktail circuit” journalism. Those rules are under attack and those can undermine them will.

And, indeed, just this past week the Wall Street Journal announced it would no longer honor such embargoes either. If you want them to hold off on covering a story, it had better be an exclusive. This makes great sense in an age where just about anyone can (more or less plausibly) call themselves a news outlet. “Publish or perish” is a phrase long-established in academia, but it applies in journalism now more than ever.

The lastest example of TechCrunch pushing on the boundaries of journalistic piety comes this weekend from Paul Carr, sort of a Toby Young for the Web 2.0 set, declaring his intention to break from convention and reveal the names of sources whom he comes to believe have lied to him:

I’ll never trust either of my two liars again, but they’re still free to scamper off to another reporter and peddle the same bullshit with a decent chance it’ll be published, at least as a rumour.

Every technology and business reporter I’ve spoken to this week about the off the record problem has their own story to tell about bullshitting sources, and every single one says they don’t know what to do about it. They just consider it one of the risks of the game.

Well enough’s enough. The one-sided contract ends here.

From now on, if you tell me something off the record and I later discover that you’ve knowingly mislead me, our contract of anonymity is immediately void, for breach. That means that everything you’ve told me about the story becomes on the record, and fully attributable.

Here too one can see lessons for print journalism. It may not have saved Judith Miller 85 days in jail, but the notion that journalists are sworn to uphold sources even after being burned by them is a thankless task. For obvious reasons, it mostly goes unreported or is left a matter of allegation. For yet more obvious reasons, this is also much more dangerous than merely breaking an embargo. After all, the consequences for being wrong are much higher than merely breaking an embargo — where one can be, at most, “wrong.”

But the same pressures are in effect: the dissatisfaction with the old way of doing things is finally starting to change, for two reasons that are immediately apparent:

  1. The recent proliferation of news outlets gives writers options to find stories elsewhere, and likewise flacks options to get coverage elsewhere; and
  2. These new journalistic outlets identify with each other much less closely than the television networks or big city dailies of old.

This looser confederation of participants is already producing a more anarchic news environment — one in which someone like Arrington thrives. That means trouble for anyone who isn’t prepared, or willing, to play by the new rules. But it’s a great thing for information consumers — especially those who like some entertainment with their news.

Cross-posted from New Media Strategies.

Dispatches from the Culture11 Wars

Published by William Beutler on January 29, 2009 in Beltway media, Bloggingheads.tv, Conservative movement, Journalism, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Startups and William Beutler. 8 Comments


Some events come as a shock to the system, even as they don’t especially surprise. (Wait, that’s how I began yesterday’s post. Well, this one also mentions Josh Treviño, and here at Blog P.I. we are all about serendipity.) The shuttering of Culture11, billed as kind of a center-right Slate, is one of them.

The website debuted in late summer 2008 and mostly featured writers about my age and no more than one or two degrees of Kevin Bacon away, writing mostly about whatever they wanted. I thought the project had merit: as someone of a center-right disposition who listens to college music, watches art films and reads literary fiction, I wanted it to succeed. The best explanation for why Culture11 was important, I thought, was delivered last November by features editor Conor Friedersdorf on Bloggingheads.tv. However, just because I wanted it to succeed did not mean that I thought that it did, or even that I read it very much.

Likewise, the name was a definite stumbling block.* I’m not sure what Culture11 was supposed to mean, but it had the unfortunate connotation for me of 9/11, which in turn made me think the site was supposed to be or comment upon something like “a cultural 9/11″ and I just didn’t understand. At least something like “Slate” or “Salon” conjures something: a place for writing and a place for talking, respectively. And while “culture” is interesting, it always seems less so when one calls it that. I don’t know why, but let me know if you do.

While it’s hardly the only journalism concern cutting back or going under this week, it is probably attracting the most discussion of any right now. Which means it’s high time for a roundup:

First off, Culture11 founder David Kuo, in his farewell post:

We raised a certain amount of money last year predicated on the assumption we would raise more money last year. Then the Fall’s fall occurred and we stretched money as long and far as we could without incurring any debts. With no new money in the door the board decided the most prudent thing to do was suspend business operations.

From NYC-based Patrol Magazine:

There were “signs,” says one source who spoke to a Culture11 editor yesterday, but the announcement was a shock. The financial backers lost money in the downturn, and suddenly decided the expensive Culture11 needed to be profitable. (The site has, in its five months of operation, only occasionally displayed small ads.) How things proceeded to an overnight shutdown, we don’t know. If you worked at C11 or know more, feel free to share.

One-off contributor and Culture11 fan Will Collins:

Culture11 was a pretty special publication. The editors gave new writers a shot, published authors from across the ideological spectrum, and provided something of a one-stop shop for great blogging. But beyond all that, I felt close to the writers, who always did their level best to respond to interesting comments, reply to our emails, and even solicit reader submissions. So much of this new media bullshit is hype and snake oil salesmanship, but at Culture11, technology actually enhanced the relationship between publication and audience.

Another dedicated reader, blogging under the name Freddie:

If you Google “Culture11″ you’ll find a ton of entries that say “My article at Culture11″. That’s because, in addition to tons of content from established (and David Brooks approved!) writers, the editors went out of their way to find young or undiscovered talent and give them a forum to write in. It made for a much livelier and more complete discussion, and was a real credit to the imagination of the architects of the site and to the willingness of the editors to let quality rule and give whoever was honest and well-spoken a shot.

The man who defies political categorization, Andrew Sullivan:

I have a feeling that Culture 11 will one be remembered in the same way that Seven Days, the briefly brilliant New York City magazine that Adam Moss edited in the late 80s, is now remembered. One day, a conservative journal will emerge that is able to break from the stifling, clammy orthodoxy of today’s post-Buckley National Review and the often unhinged neocon catechism of the Weekly Standard. When it does, its editors will be able to look back and say that Culture 11 opened up the frontier.

And the aforementioned Josh Treviño:

Culture11’s subject matter was perfect for, say, summer 2000: heavy on pop and principles, light on policy and prescriptions. But it launched in summer 2008, when the national conversation was focused on war and economics. In that sense, it was marginalized from the start, and stayed that way: today, for example, the single largest item on its front page concerns the Culture11 “American Idol Watch Party.” This may be good fun, but it’s not particularly in touch with the national zeigeist — nor even the zeitgeist of those who read online publications like Culture11. All this said, it’s reasonable to assume that in the fullness of time, those zeigeists would come around: perhaps in spring 2010, the national mood will be ready to reflect upon the conservatism of reality television.

This probably explains a lot why I didn’t read the site much. And there are bigger problems with the project as undertaken, which Mike Riggs at the City Paper explains at some length.

It’s always seemed to me that a center-right pop culture website would have to be incidentally so, just as Slate doesn’t usually make a point of being center-left. Which brings me back to my old lament about the state of conservative journalism.

A change of culture, ironically, will have to take place for that to happen, and I don’t see that just yet.

P.S. In a post at the still slightly active Culture11 blog, Joe Carter graciously notes my comment on the name of the site and explains to my satisfaction just what the name was all about.


___
*Prior to launch, I had suggested an alternate name to an editor I didn’t know too well. The original name was originally titled “Liberty Wire”, which sounds like an Associated Press for Ron Paul voters; my idea was “Redhead”, a nod to its espoused conservative, intellectual and cultural inclinations. Someone later pointed out the dot com for that name went to a porn site (a claim I cannot verify this morning, although I promise I have tried).

For Want of a Google Search, Paul Mulshine Was Lost

Published by William Beutler on December 28, 2008 in Instapundit, Journalism, Journalism History, Journalist Bloggers, MSM vs. Blogs, Newspaper Columnists, Newspapers and William Beutler. 39 Comments

Note: Updated below.

If you haven’t read this morning’s Wall Street Journal op-ed by Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star-Ledger, “All I Wanted for Christmas Was a Newspaper”, it’s just the kind of arrogant-clueless screed by a newspaperman against the blogosphere that elicits first anger, then pity.

These opinion columns are nothing new. See David Simon’s disproportionate contempt for bloggers for an example of someone who managed to succeed after taking a buyout yet is still consumed by the subject. Such columns have long been a symptom of the industry’s steady decline, but as it slips into precipitous free fall, schadenfreude has given way to Willy Loman-esque pathos. I’ve never found Ol’ Gil from The Simpsons all that funny, in part because he was a poor replacement for Lionel Hutz, but also because it’s no fun to watch the helpless fail and flail.

Still, that does not mean the poverty of their arguments should be excused, especially because they are the squeakiest wheels in this dilapidated machine, and their erroneous conclusions may well be adopted by those watching from a short distance. So far Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit and Robert Ivan at Metaprinter have ably pointed out the many flaws in his piece, but I’d like to tackle another. Here is Mulshine making an elitist argument that is not prima facie incorrect, but is nevertheless undone by its own careless construction:

In his book, “An Army of Davids,” Mr. Reynolds heralds an era in which “[m]illions of Americans who were in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff.”

No, they can’t. Millions of American can’t even pronounce “pundit,” or spell it for that matter. On the Internet and on the other form of “alternative media,” talk radio, a disliked pundit has roughly a 50-50 chance of being derided as a “pundint,” if my eyes and ears are any indication.

The type of person who can’t even keep track of the number of times the letter “N” appears in a two-syllable word is not the type of person who is going to offer great insight into complex issues.

All right, well this question about usage of “pundit” vs. “pundint” is easily testable. Let’s go to Google BlogSearch:

Already we can see that Mulshine should have chosen a different word to illustrate the alleged ignorance of Internet political commentators. Thanks to those like Instapundit, the word has enjoyed a strong currency in recent years, perhaps more so than any word besides “meme”.

Remember, these are not necessarily the savviest bloggers (let alone, strictly, bloggers), just those which (the increasingly unreliable) BlogSearch coughed up first.

As someone who tries to anticipate likely objections while writing, I can’t imagine doing as Mulshine does and simply assuming that others would willingly accept one’s personal impressions as empirical evidence. A quick Internet search reveals his example as, charitably, an exaggeration.

Not only is he wrong, even if he was right it wouldn’t be the damning evidence he thinks it is. In fact, I read a newspaper column two weeks ago that replaced the common phrase “to the … manor born” with the malaprop “to the … manner born.” A mental slip-up of this sort is indeed careless. It may mean the columnist (it was Kathleen Parker) should be scrutinized more closely, but it does not mean that newspaper columnists should be dismissed out of hand.

Smart people make common errors all the time. And Mulshine certainly seems to be among them them.

Instapundit readers 7, Blog P.I. 3: Everyone in the comments (and now Glenn, too) is right about the Shakespeare quote. I didn’t realize the phrase I knew came from the title of a British sitcom, To The Manor Born, a pun on the Shakespeare line. Would it hurt or help my cause to mention I’m an English major?

This is pretty ironic given the subject of this post, and while it certainly means one should always read me with a critical eye, it actually underscores the point about focusing on these things too much. To wit, a Google search of to the manor born returns 500,000 results, while one for to the manner born returns 52,400 results. To make another gratuitous Simpsons reference: “Show’s over, Shakespeare.”

To the list of smart people who make mental slips, one might add yours truly.

P.S. I’ve actually seen Hamlet on screen or stage at least four times, and I’m a fan, but I’ll be sure to read up on this bit now.

Huffington Post Appropriating Others’ Content is Nothing New

Published by William Beutler on December 20, 2008 in Asymmetrical Media, Attribution, Hotline, Huffington Post, Journalism, SEO, Site Traffic and William Beutler. Closed

There’s been plenty of discussion over the past couple days about Huffington Post’s habit of posting articles that consist of the first few paragraphs of someone else’s story sans commentary and then linking to the full piece. This was first raised by Whet Moser at the Chicago Reader, who noticed that HuffPost Chicago (a first attempt at thinking locally, hence its “beta” designation) was doing this to previews of local concerts. In some cases, by copying just the first few paragraphs, HuffPo had reposted the entire article. This is because, as Moser put it, “that is the whole article, dumbass” [italics in original]. For example, click through the thumbnails below to screen shots as provided by Moser:

   

This has resulted in some serious discussion at Techmeme, as it should be, but my question is: What took so long? I covered the launch of Huffington Post when I was writing the Blogometer at National Journal’s Hotline two and a half years ago, and kept a close eye on the development of the site. If you recall, the site was the subject of some some scrutiny and fun-making ahead of its launch. Huffington’s venture survived the early gibes, long enough at least to attract new ones.

Maybe six months in, I noticed that headlines on the front page linked to just the kind of pages now being critcized. I never wrote about it, but I did bring it up to my boss, who also thought it strange. While Moser has stumbled across a particularly egregulous example of the practice — and in fairness, HuffPo’s Jonah Peretti claims it was an editing mistake — they’re already pushing the envelope of what’s acceptable. And in this case, I think even Sam Zell would have a point.

Bloggers are frequently given to quoting long stretches of others’ writing, but as fair use guidelines usually require, they do so for purposes of adding commentary. HuffPo does not, which raises the question of how much Huffington Post is an authentic blog and how much it is a media company appropriating others’ credibility.

Also raising this question is the new book, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging. Here’s the cover, available from Simon & Schuster:

Notice anything? Like, say, a complete lack of original blogging voices? Craig Newmark is the lone individual whose reputation was first made online, and even then his rep is not as a blogger but as the founder of Craigslist. Huffington Post built some credibility over the past few years, with myself and other informed consumers of news, by giving a bigger soapbox to lesser known talents such as Jason Linkins and Lee Stranahan. I’d say HuffPo has done them a lot of good, and they would say the same.

But then there are those like Walt Moser and Monica Kendrick, the author of the review noted above. In both circumstances, HuffPo falls short of being a democratizing force in the media. In the dichotomy between its famous and non-famous contributors, HuffPo is trying to have it both ways: they will elevate new writers, but only so far. And the same is true of its bid to provide a new way of experiencing the news: sometimes, all that means is appropriating yours.

The Phillips Foundation: Righting Journalism, One Grant at a Time

Published by William Beutler on October 26, 2008 in Conservative movement, Journalism, Metapost, National Politics, Newspapers and William Beutler. 1 Comment

In March, I published a long, essayish post titled “What’s the Matter with Conservative Journalism?” Among numerous lamentations about the right’s inability to produce serious journalism and serious journalists, I wrote:

The liberal tilt of mainstream newspapers and magazines certainly has something to do with the professional networks within which editors find writers for their stories. But it also has something to do with conservative journalists rarely operating outside their zone of comfort. And especially in magazine articles, they tend to add commentary to existing stories rather than going out and finding new ones.

This is how it works: Liberals get reporting jobs. Conservatives get opinion columns.

Obviously, I’d like to see that change. Just as obvious is that this is a long-term project, and though other factors are involved, substantial and sustained investment is a must. So let me point out one place where this is happening: The Phillips Foundation is one such organization, and just this week they put out a call for applications to its 2009 Journalism Fellowship Program. From the release:

Print and online journalists with less than 10 years of professional experience are eligible. The Foundation created this program to provide fellowships for projects by journalists who share the Foundation’s mission to advance constitutional principles, a democratic society and a vibrant free enterprise system.

The Phillips Foundation awards $75,000 and $50,000 full-time fellowships and $25,000 part-time fellowships to undertake and complete a one-year project of the applicant’s choosing focusing on journalism supportive of American culture and a free society. In addition, there are separate fellowships on the environment, on the benefits of free-market competition, and on law enforcement.

I think anyone would call that substantial, and considering that the program is going into its 15th year, sustained it is, too. Applications are due by March 2, so if this is your kind of thing, you better get cracking.

When Not to Blog About the White House

Published by William Beutler on August 10, 2008 in Barack Obama, Beltway media, Blogs vs. MSM, George W. Bush, Journalism, Journalist Bloggers, MSM, MSM vs. Blogs, Metapost, National Politics, Newspaper Columnists, Newspapers, Startups, Tough Crowd, Twitter, Website Design, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Politico sign in DC Metro from David Boyle in DC via Flickr.

Last week I traded a series of Twitter “@ messages” with Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor, blogger and media critic. The first one asked:

Maybe you know. Q: why doesn’t Politico have a Ben Smith for the White House? Bets on whether they’ll get one if Obama wins?

He’s got a point. The Politico lists the organization’s designated blogs on its front-page in this order:

Ben Smith on Dems, Jonathan Martin on GOP, Shenanigans on Gossip, The Scorecard on Campaigns, The Crypt on Congress, Michael Calderone on Media, James Kotecki on whatever.

The Politico is literally blogging about “whatever” but not about “the White House.” So I guessed, in fewer than 140 characters:

Smith-Martin are a package deal, covering both primaries. Politico: more campaign, less governing? But that’s a great idea.

Prof. Rosen suggested in turn:

How about a PI post? Politico columnists for the Dems, Reps, Congress, Media, Gossip, Campaign trail, but no White House?

To which I replied:

Mike Allen certainly covers the WH. But not in blog form, true. Have friends down there, so I can ask. Possible PI post indeed.

And so I did, getting in touch with a half-dozen or so current and former Politico writers, asking for their thoughts on background. I also made an effort to get VandeHarris on the record, but they did not return e-mails by my less-than-rigorously self-enforced deadline.

So here’s what I could piece together:

  • When the Politico launched a little under two years ago, the presidential campaign offered the biggest opportunity first. Politico was first conceived as a newspaper to be called Capitol Leader — “Yet Another Newspaper Aimed at Capitol Hill” as the Washington Post had it. The Executive branch wasn’t even in the picture until John Harris and Jim VandeHei were.

  • As noted above, the newspaper that did emerge hired the much-acclaimed, much-accosted former White House reporter for Time and WaPo, Mike Allen. He writes big stories, is in good with Drudge, and produces content on a daily basis like everyone else. The format of his output is a secondary matter.

  • Most everyone I talked to seemed to assume that no matter who won the presidential election, Politico would increase their White House coverage after the election. After all, it’s the logical continuation of the campaign stories they are covering now. Some said they thought a blog would be involved, and no one volunteered the opposite.

One thing that occurs to me is that other major newspapers have blogs covering the White House as a beat, as do regional newspapers with Washington correspondents, but none of them command major audiences (even when they resort to Olympics T&A).

People care about the big stories that emanate from the White House, and they’ll get that from every newspaper and every political blog inside the Beltway, but few are looking for the day-to-day minutiae. Bush is a lame duck, interest has waned even in some of the bigger stories, and other national newspapers have moved their White House correspondents to the campaign trail.

The answer given reminds me a bit of the response I got in the summer of 2006 when I first wrote about the opening for a “Republican ActBlue”, viz., just wait. It may be worth noting, the person who did finally create one was not yet working on it at that time.

So, yes, the Politico will probably have a White House blog next year. Whether Politico writes the one that Jay Rosen is hoping for remains to be seen.

Photograph by David Boyle in DC via Flickr.

The Gestalt of The Politico

Published by William Beutler on August 4, 2008 in Blogs vs. MSM, Hotline, Journalism and William Beutler. Closed

The Gestalt of the Politico

The Politico is produced just a couple floors below the office whence I type these words, and its staff has counted more than a few of my fellow former Hotline colleagues. Heck, I’ve got two of their promotional coffee mugs in my kitchen cupboard at home. So I take great interest in this American Journalism Review article on its first two years in existence. Here’s how it begins:

When veteran Washington Post political reporters John Harris and Jim VandeHei urged their bosses to create a Web site strictly dedicated to politics, management didn’t jump at the idea.

Less than two years later, Politico, the venture they envisioned – and left the Post to take on – is a success, and a politics-only site is “under study” at the Post, according to Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr.

“The proof is in the figures,” says Harris, Politico’s editor in chief. In May, it had 3.5 million unique visitors and 25.1 million page views, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. Editor & Publisher ranked Politico the 10th-most-visited newspaper site that month.

Although Harris would not reveal revenue or advertising numbers, he says Politico’s operations are already self-sustaining and the Allbritton Communications-owned publication should be profitable next year. Print advertising provides about 60 percent of its revenue, VandeHei says.

Under normal circumstances, nobody expects print ventures to be profitable in a short period of time. The last few years have been anything but normal, with newspapers in particular hemorrhaging readers and surgically removing staff writers.

Yet the Politico seems more relevant than ever. Though it is not without its flaws, perhaps this is what makes it so timely. And if it really is just a year from profitability, that’s a good sign for the news industry, right?

Not so fast, says Ezra Klein, in a post at The American Prospect:

Here you have this forward-thinking, primarily virtual venture to create a political news organization that marries old-school reporting values to the speed and the immediacy of the web and it actually works. A year-and-a-half after launch, it’s getting 3.5 million unique visitors per month and 25 million page views. And yet not only is it unprofitable, but 60 percent of its revenues come from advertising in the 27,000 circulation print version. In other words: Politico got the online readership it dreamed of, but it hasn’t come even close to figuring out how to monetize it.

This makes sense. After all, massively popular websites like Facebook, Digg and MySpace can’t figure out how to make money off their audiences — why should a news site? Especially why a news site that’s entirely about politics? Everyone knows that politics isn’t where the money is. Consider, for example, how James Joyner subsidizes his high-minded Outside the Beltway blog with the lower-brow Gone Hollywood.

But not so fast again, says Kevin Drum, at The Washington Monthly:

But there’s another way of looking at it: without a website, The Politico would be dead in the water. If, instead of being almost profitable, it were still hemorrhaging a few million bucks a year with break-even years away, there’s a pretty good chance Allbritton would just shut it down. …

Bottom line: Print gets you respect and big dollar advertisers. The web gets you buzz and a nice chunk of additional revenue. The future — part of it, anyway — belongs to those who can successfully combine multiple media platforms into a single profitable whole. So far, it looks like The Politico has done that.

The premise is more complicated, but fair: the whole point of The Politico was to create an online-offline (and even televised) news hybrid. The Albrittons wouldn’t have bankrolled it in the first place without a website. And I do like the takeaway: the print and web editions can be mutually reinforcing.

This works in a glorified company town like Washington, where lobbying firms and trade associations are always there to buy an ad in the hope of influencing lawmakers and their staff. If this model is replicable in Chicago or Cincinnati or Corvallis, I’m not sure how.

Plus, it’s more than a little discouraging for anyone thinking about trying to create an online-only news organization. Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo do more newsgathering than any twenty of the top political blogs on the right, but they’re still a far cry from being a true professional news organization like The Politico.

All that said, we need more Politicos. I wonder what David Simon would have to say about it.

Blogger Rises to Top Job at Los Angeles Times!

Published by William Beutler on July 27, 2008 in John Edwards, Journalism, Journalist Bloggers, MSM vs. Blogs, Newspapers, Scandal and William Beutler. 3 Comments

Today, the Times of London reports on the John Edwards sex scandal and the awkward non-coverage here in the states, and it includes at least one sentence that will be very amusing to the L.A. blogosphere:

Tony Pierce, editor of the Los Angeles Times, issued an edict to the paper’s own bloggers to stay off the subject. “Because the only source has been the National Enquirer, we have decided not to cover the rumours or salacious speculations,” he wrote.

Wow! Tony Pierce, longtime writer of Tony Pierce dot com + busblog and former editor of LAist, has risen all the way to become chief editor of the fourth-largest newspaper in the United States by reported circulation? That’s incredible!

It may sound credible, but it certainly is not creditable. Pierce is a web editor at the L.A. Times, overseeing about two dozen blogs on the latimes.com website. And except for the part about working for the Times, that sounds like a pretty good job by itself.

The Times of London simply omitted the conditional “an” before “editor,” giving an inflated impression of Pierce’s role. I thought maybe there was a difference between U.S. and U.K. English usage, but after clicking around google.co.uk, I’m pretty sure it’s just a mistake.

So who is editor of the Los Angeles Times? After all the turmoil at the newspaper these past few years, I had to look it up: Russ Stanton, a 10-year veteran of the paper, who was in fact a web editor himself.

So don’t count Pierce out yet. In the meantime, at least there are now thousands of people around the world who think that he is, in fact, editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times.

P.S. Another reason why Pierce has a shot? He may have been punk at one time, but from what I’ve heard of the fallout, he’s been fairly humorless about it. I suggest Tony “Keep Rockin’” Pierce as an appropriate nickname.

P.P.S. This leaked follow-up memo from L.A. Times executive editor Meredith Artley gets it right the second time. That’s one memo too late, but it still should have been leaked more widely.

Brief Interviews with Mike Murphy

Published by William Beutler on July 11, 2008 in John McCain, Journalism, Literature, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

For no reasons other than my own demonstrated affinity for the works of David Foster Wallace and recent fixation with the alleged pseudonymous works of Mike Murphy, I would like to present an excerpt of a limited panel strip drawn in 2005 by webcomic artist Mike Russell1.

The following is based on one brief passage from “Up, Simba!”, Wallace’s not-so-brief 2000 Rolling Stone article about his time aboard the Straight Talk Express with the “anti-candidate” and the traveling press corps, recently republished as a short book with the dreadful title “McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope”2:

Mike Murphy and John McCain star in an unauthorized comic strip based on David Foster Wallace’s “Up, Simba!”

  1. Oh, all right. As long as I’m talking about Wallace, you’ll have to excuse the use of footnotes. Anyway, I asked Russell if I could use this, and he pointed out that because he drew it on spec using copyrighted material, he couldn’t actually make any money off it, so I was free to “go nuts” with it. However, he did want the point made clear that he is “totally unaffiliated” with Wallace or any publishers of the text wherefrom he derived the above-printed comic excerpt. And I’m happy to do so.
  2. Thing is, most of Wallace’s titles are far better than his editors’. For a (very long (and very funny)) comic essay about a week on board a luxury cruise, which of the following sounds like a better title: “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” or “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise”? Yet the latter is what Harper’s called it, and the former is what Wallace was able to call it once he published the full-length version (approx. 100 pages) in his eponymous (the essay, not his name) first collection of nonfiction.
  3. I don’t actually have a third item, and there’s no corresponding third footnote above, I just thought w/r/t footnotes, three would be a nice round number.

Have You Read Helen Thomas Lately?

Published by William Beutler on May 29, 2008 in Journalism, Journalism History, Newspaper Columnists, Newspapers and William Beutler. 4 Comments

Helen Thomas via Baratunde on Flickr.Of course not. I certainly haven’t. I’m willing to put a good sum on the wager that no one I know has ever read one of her opinion columns. And I’d even bet that no more than two commenters will appear on this blog to claim they have read more than one column since she ceased being a UPI reporter in 2000 and started writing this Hearst column that you’ve never seen. (Yes, I’m hedging my bets. Anonymous commenters are liable to claim anything.)

Maybe this isn’t surprising: she’s famous for her longevity and cantankerousness more than any story she covered during her very, very long career in Washington. But in another way, it is surprising: after all, she is perhaps the most famous and most permanent White House correspondent. I don’t mean to pick on an old lady, but I think that her admirers and detractors can both agree that she makes news for what she says, not what she writes.

So, where would you even go to find her column? Good question!

The Hearst Corporation may have fallen in stature somewhat since Xanadu… er, I mean Hearst Castle played host to debaucherous parties involving nubile young starlets in the early days of Hollywood, but the company remains one of the biggest newspaper (and other media) holding companies in the United States (for whatever that’s worth).

In order to find Thomas’ column, I thought I’d visit some Hearst-owned newspaper websites. What I found wasn’t encouraging. On some of the smaller newspapers’ sites, the opinion/commentary sections may as well be abandoned. But at its three largest papers — the San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News — there was no Thomas to be found. At smaller, still important newspapers such as the Albany Times-Union, there are numerous local columnists as well as nationally syndicated columnists such as Ellen Goodman and Kathleen Parker. But no Thomas.

To find Helen Thomas’ allegedly-syndicated column — which may well run in the print edition of some of these papers — you have to consult the Oracle of Mountain View. The top result is for TheBostonChannel.com, the website of WCBV-TV — a television station owned by subsidiary Hearst-Argyle. And if you go digging further, you can find her column at websites such as WBAL-TV in Baltimore and KCRA-TV in Sacramento.

So, if you care to read them, there they are. But as I said, I don’t mean to pick on an old lady. I think I’ll leave that to Jon Chait*.

P.S. With apologies to the Ford Motor Company.

* Or I would, except it seems the article has been removed from the web, and is not available on any public website that I can find. Hmm. If Blog P.I. disappears from the web, now you’ll know why.

Helen Thomas photograph via Baratunde on Flickr.