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Archive for the 'Journalism' Category

Newsweek Buries Isikoff Scoop to Benefit Obama?

Published by William Beutler on May 26, 2008 in Barack Obama, Conspiracy Theories, E-mail, Journalism, Lobbying, Memeorandum, White House '08 and William Beutler. 19 Comments

I’m no fan of oversimplifying the decision-making process that guides news coverage or promotion thereof, let alone promulgating conspiracy theories, but I have to ask about this:

Michael Isikoff’s story, not promoted by Newsweek

Why wasn’t Michael Isikoff’s investigative piece outlining the lobbying connections of Barack Obama’s lead strategist, David Axelrod, promoted in Newsweek’s Sunday e-mail to subscribers?

Below right, I’ve cropped the article descriptions from this list for purposes of formatting this post, but I have not removed any of the articles. Although Isikoff’s report appears in the same June 2 issue of Newsweek as the stories, it is nowhere to be found here. Isikoff’s stories not among Newsweek’s promoted articlesAnd it should be, especially considering that the first four articles listed are all generally pro-Obama in their tilt and three are explicitly framed as advice for candidate Obama. The other four articles cover minor issues such as Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and John McCain.

What happened? One slim possibility is that the article is online-only and thus not eligible for inclusion in a round-up of magazine stories. But this seems not to be the case, as the screen capture indicates, both types of stories are included.

Another may be that Isikoff’s story was put to bed late, and not yet finalized when the feature-heavy e-mail was compiled. Possible, but if so not an adequate defense. Like last November, when WashingtonPost.com erroneously reported positive developments in the condition of Redskins safety Sean Taylor after he was already deceased, there is no excuse for not making e-mail alerts as timely as possible.

One more reason could be that Isikoff’s article is short, perhaps taken from the front of book section that is also home to Perspectives and the up-down-sideways Periscope arrows (if you can’t guess, this week Obama is up, Hillary is down and McCain is sideways). But that doesn’t make any sense, either. As the e-mail alert says,

Dear NEWSWEEK Subscriber,

Welcome to another edition of Political Perspectives, the subscriber-only e-mail newsletter previewing and highlighting NEWSWEEK’s coverage of the political world, in print and online. This week, Evan Thomas writes what an Obama adviser might say to the candidate about how to address the issue of race on the campaign trail. Elsewhere, Holly Bailey pores through John McCain’s just-released health records and Jonathan Alter looks at the lessons we can learn from Hamilton Jordan and Ted Kennedy.

It goes on like that, but there’s no mention of Isikoff or Axelrod. As the e-mail announces, it is not merely a list of their top features but the magazine’s “coverage of the political world, in print and online.” How does Isikoff’s reporting not fall into that category?

Surely there’s an explanation I haven’t ridiculed, and surely that will be their justification. I’m not the first to suggest that Newsweek specifically is in the tank for Obama, but I think I am the first to suggest that Newsweek is burying scoops that are problematic for him.

No matter, the Isikoff story still made it into the blogosphere. But as far as I can tell, only conservative blogs mentioned it. Even TalkLeft, which remains Clinton supporter central, hasn’t picked it up. One wonders how much further it might have traveled if the magazine had deployed its considerable PR assets on the story’s behalf.

The Battle of the Bills: Blog P.I. Does Bloggingheads.tv

Published by William Beutler on May 24, 2008 in Barack Obama, Bloggingheads.tv, Blogs vs. MSM, Debates, Hotline, John McCain, Journalism, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Lobbying, Metapost, Mickey Kaus, Netroots, New Media Strategies, Oregon, Web video, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

This past week I spent about an hour talking through a tiny iPhone bluetooth headset on Skype and staring at the built-in iSight of a MacBook Pro while talking to Bill Scher of Liberal Oasis. I did so at the invitation of Conn Carroll, who usually holds down the righthand slot on Bloggingheads.tv, while he was celebrating his fifth wedding anniversary (congrats, by the way). Bill was an upbeat, friendly debate partner, and so far it looks like the loyal Bloggingheads commentariat doesn’t want to kill me.

The show plays like a funky, freewheeling, not-ready-for-cable TV “Crossfire” with less point-scoring, featuring a recurring cast of quirky political bloggers and policy wonks. I’ve been a constant viewer/listener back to when it was just Bob and Mickey figuring it out as they went along.

I should warn, around the middle there are audio-video sync problems, so this might be a good time to subscribe to the audio-only Bloggingheads podcast in iTunes.

What’s So Difficult About a Hat Tip?

Published by William Beutler on May 21, 2008 in Asymmetrical Media, Entertainment, Journalism, MSM, MSM vs. Blogs, Mickey Kaus, Newspapers, Publishing, Scandal, Stephen Colbert, Television and William Beutler. 3 Comments

A movie news and reviews website named Latino Review has a pretty interesting lead article on the front page right now, titled “Why both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter TOTALLY SUCK!” Here’s an extended excerpt, although there is much more in the full piece:

A little over a week ago, on May 14, 2008 we exclusively broke the news that Jason Reitman, the director of Juno was adapting the book UP IN THE AIR which you can read HERE. Later on that afternoon, Jason Reitman’s publicist Bebe Lerner of ID PR called me personally and asked me to update our story. Our scoop forced her to go into spin mode. Bebe wanted us to say that Reitman’s directing deal for UP IN THE AIR was not yet in place. We kindly obliged. In return, the only thing we asked Ms. Lerner to do was to tell the Hollywood trades to either mention or credit us with breaking the story. She agreed. As a precaution, when we broke the story we even emailed Borys Kit over at The Hollywood Reporter and a reporter at Variety. …

Later that night at Midnight (EDT), Variety posted the story on their site which you can read here. Guess what? We weren’t mentioned. We emailed Tatiana Siegel and Michael Fleming (Variety) and kindly requested that their story recognize our contribution and properly credit us. We were ignored.

An hour later at 1A.M., The Hollywood Reporter ran their story without crediting us over here. We were heartbroken.

Later that morning on May 15, 2008, we again emailed Ms. Siegel and Mr. Fleming at Variety and once again we we’re ignored. At least Borys Kit from The Hollywood Reporter was kind enough to email us back, apologize, and explain the situation.

That apology is bittersweet though because Borys Kit and Variety did it to us again today with the news of Jake Gyllenhaal being cast as the lead in Prince of Perisa which we first broke HERE ABOUT A MONTH AND HALF AGO ON APRIL 8TH. This not only happens to us but to all movie websites and bloggers that break exclusive news.

I’d never heard of the site before and unless you’re a serious upcoming movie junkie (once upon a time when I subscribed to Entertainment Weekly, I was) you may not have, either. But here’s one I bet you have: Ain’t It Cool News. According to Latino Review, AICN has been mentioned by Variety and THR “a grand total of 7 times.” That sounds awfully low, but it also doesn’t sound impossible.

Indeed, this not only happens to movie bloggers but all bloggers that break exclusive news or develop new stories. Blog P.I. has noted this phenomenon more than once:

Mickey Kaus, who left the MSM of his own volition for the relative freedom (”no money, no editors”) of the blogosphere, complained about this earlier in the week:

There’s an implicit model underneath [Newsweek's Jonathan] Alter’s comments–blogs as the minor leagues, Off Off-Broadway, trying out storylines and scoops that may or may not make it to the Big Show. I have to admit I’ve embraced this model myself, as “Model Two.” I think blogs are (for the moment***) particularly suited to functioning as a sort of intermediate tryout area for burgeoning scandals (”undernews”). …

Alter makes big bucks because he’s called on to write about the story of the day at the precise moment it breaks out into the mainstream–and not a moment too soor! If the US bombs a Syrian nuclear reactor, the public wants to know about it right then–and Alter more or less has write about it or have a pretty damn good excuse why not. Newsweek’s editors, in effect, can make Alter jump. He’s very good at it. I’m not.

The problem with the “minor league” model of the blogosphere, is that it’s simply an extension of this “just in time” model of journalism–blogs are a conveyor belt, if you will, delivering news. ideas and angles to the MSM on a precise production schedule.

Of course, we also know that some of the brightest lights in the mainstream media both fear and loathe the blogosphere, simultaneously viewing them as competitors and parasites. To their mind, both are reasons to deny bloggers credit for the work they contribute in this asymmetrical media landscape.

The best defense they can offer, which Latino Review addresses in its rant, is the claim that blogger scoops are unverified gossip, while their reports are confirmed and fact-checked. They can say this without being effectively challenged because a) many bloggers, Kaus notoriously so, will write about unconfirmed stories that rise only to the level of gossip, and b) newspapers and magazines have multiple-source standards and established procedures for confirming their reporters’ work.

But it’s also true that sometimes blogs break legitimate news the MSM initially won’t touch or simply miss, and that sometimes the established news-gathering and -publishing processes break down. But never mind that — mainstream outlets hog the credit and spread the blame.

A blogger’s best hope is to be called up to the big leagues like Justin Rood, who went from TPMmuckraker to ABC News, or Brian Stelter, who went from TV Newser to the New York Times.

But we’re starting to get off track here, so let’s return to Latino Review’s narrow point: what to do when mainstream news organizations won’t acknolwedge true reports that originate in the blogosphere? In the short term, all anyone can do is raise the issue when it happens. Plagiarism is a serious issue in journalism, and eventually, some newspaper will be embarrassed enough that a visionary editor will require its reporters to acknowledge when a story they’re covering started online. Not only will this give credit where it’s due, but it will help news consumers look into the matter for themselves.

And when will this actually happen? My guess is about the same time the Pulitzer committee starts handing out awards for online journalism. In other words, I hope you’re very, very patient.

All the News that Fits Your Bias

Published by William Beutler on May 6, 2008 in Barack Obama, Entertainment, Journalism and Television. 4 Comments

Here are two stories presently featured on Memeorandum that make for a revealing juxtaposition. First, this headline on a Huffington Post item by lefty activist Josh Silver:

Josh Silver in Huffington Post on the FCC

And here’s Michael Calderone of The Politico, reporting on a speech by Chris Matthews last night:

Politico’s Michael Calderone on MSNBC

First of all, Silver is wrong about TMZ.com; it belongs to Time Warner, not News Corp. This mental slip does betray the likelihood that Silver is one of those who also considers Fox News to be something other than a “real news network” because many of its hosts, and even some of its anchors, evince support for conservative causes and politicians. Meanwhile, I have no doubt that he would characterize MSNBC and its Obama activist/TV presenter Keith Olbermann as “bona fide news.”

To my knowledge, TMZ and 700 Club are not just making it up. I do know that 700 Club features as a correspondent David Brody, who is a legitimate journalist, even if he is one with a point of view. But then, so are many of Silver’s HuffPo colleagues. (I should note, the last time I watched 700 Club, Pat Robertson came out in favor of medicinal marijuana.) And TMZ’s idea of what’s news differs greatly from my own, but they cover those frivolous stories very, very well.

What Silver really wants is for the FCC to legitimize the kind of news he likes and de-legitimize others. I’m not sure which I find more disturbing: the fact that Josh Silver wants a federal agency to decide what counts as news, or the fact that a federal agency actually does get to decide what counts as news.

The Angriest Man in the Blogosphere

Published by William Beutler on April 7, 2008 in Asymmetrical Media, Breaking News, Journalism, Journalist Bloggers, MSM vs. Blogs, Television and William Beutler. 3 Comments

The title of this post derives from: a) a somewhat unfair Mark Bowden essay in The Atlantic criticizing “The Wire” Creator David Simon, and b) Simon’s reputation for showing up in the comments of blogs that discuss his show.

Simon is probably far too busy preparing his next HBO project — “Generation Kill,” set for July — to respond this time. But if he reads this, he should know I consider his conflicted love letter to Baltimore not just better than any other television drama, but much better by far. (I am a typical white person in this regard.) I still love “The Sopranos,” but let’s face it — it’s a cartoon, and not as well-crafted.

That said, I find Simon’s smug insult of the blogosphere in a handful of recent interviews rather less enlightening. For instance, take a long e-mail interview published in the Baltimore City Paper following the series finale in early March. Asked why he didn’t include bloggers in his portrayal of the troubled newspaper industry, he volunteered this hypothetical scene:

INT. GARDEN APARTMENT/ANYWHERE – DAY

A white MALE, thirties, unshaven, sits in his underwear typing on a desktop computer. C.U. on computer screen. As he links to Baltimore Sun coverage off the newspaper’s web site, creating a link on his own blog. The MALE scratches his left testicle, then satisfied, begins typing. C.U. on the moving cursor as commentary ensues.

CUT TO: EXT. DRUG CORNER/WEST BALTIMORE – DAY

This is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but he wasn’t kidding:

The internet is skimming the froth of commentary from the first-generation news gatherers like The Sun. They have parasitically achieved immediacy and relevance by co-opting the debate, the humor, the rage, and the provocation that results from the news product–WITHOUT ACTUALLY INVESTING OR COMMITTING IN ANY SERIOUS WAY TO THE SYSTEMIC ACQUISITION OF THAT NEWS.

And the parasite is killing the host. Is the internet a marvelous tool in myriad ways? Of course. Is it the future? No doubt. But thus far it is not a responsible or viable alternative to a major metropolitan newspaper.

Criminy. This is the mirror image of the kind of blogger triumphalism that died out several years ago. Blogs aren’t killing newspapers (although Craigslist might be) and it’s not far off the misguided rant of Sam Zell, who lit into Google News for supposedly killing newspapers shortly after purchasing the media company which owns… the Baltimore Sun, Simon’s former employer.

Look, Simon is correct that many bloggers depend upon newspapers for stories to comment upon. It’s true that most of them couldn’t do this without the old media’s content. But this is not his unique insight; bloggers themselves have been dealing with this paradox for years. And they are not all sitting around in their pajamas (as another memorable slur had it). Some have set up their own news organizations: Josh Marshall’s TPM empire includes reporters as well as commentators.

Meanwhile, journalists are moving in on bloggers’ turf as well. Reporters such as Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post or my old colleague Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic do almost all of their reporting on the web. This is a genuine ecosystem with much give as well as take. Bloggers who work for free send traffic back to newspapers. And some of those bloggers have bigger audiences than the newspapers.

Of course, bloggers working for free, or very little, is part of what many perceive to be a problem. What bloggers are really doing is taking over the kind of opinion journalism — in politics, music and movies — that were traditionally the province of newspapers. If the blogosphere is killing newspapers, it’s because much of their product is easily done by amateurs who simply didn’t have a platform before the Internet and didn’t have the tools until Pyra Labs cooked up a software program called Blogger while killing time between other projects.

David Simon at a podium, courtesy Brad Searles at Flickr.Moreover, Simon is also wrong to portray bloggers as adding nothing to the debate. The signature counter-example is when Republican-leaning bloggers asked questions about CBS’s reporting on President Bush’s National Guard service that major news organizations didn’t. Dan Rather is the most prominent scalp, but before that Trent Lott had to step down from his leadership position because of comments about Strom Thurmond’s legacy that Marshall kept alive.

Not all these stories are as prominent, and they don’t all end in firings. More recently, The Smoking Gun fact-checked a Los Angeles Times story fingering Sean Combs for the murder of Tupac Shakur; the story was based on documents that were easily shown to be unreliable, not unlike those CBS relied upon.

It may be that The Smoking Gun is not a blog, but now we’re just quibbling about content management systems. It is also true that TSG is owned by truTV (formerly Court TV), but it began as an independent website, as most blogs are. Speaking of which, Simon gave an interview with a similar rant to Salon — still independent against all odds — and still doing journalism and commentary on a daily basis.

And the competition has also likely caused major news organizations to look closer at their colleagues’ reporting. In the best of cases, it’s forcing news organizations to focus on what they’re best at — where their comparative advantage lies. Obviously that’s reporting, as Simon says. Newsgathering is moving away from newspapers to some extent, but commentary is moving away from newspapers at a rapid clip. In the worst of cases, people like Zell are making bonehead moves that will expedite the shakeout. And the guy scratching his balls in front of his MacBook is just a bit player in a changing media landscape.

I know David Simon isn’t the biggest fan of capitalism, but does he really think that competition is bad? I am sure he can’t really think that more speech is bad.

Image courtesy Brad Searles on Flickr.

The Fall of the Report of Drudge

Published by William Beutler on April 3, 2008 in Charts and Graphs, Journalism, Metapost, Metrics, New Media Strategies, Online Campaigns, Site Traffic and William Beutler. 3 Comments

This morning I spoke to a group of journalism interns at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism, along with David All. Now in its 19th year, the program run by Terry Michael is a special one for me: it’s what brought me to Washington in the first place. I’m not sure whether I’m a success story or a cautionary tale, as I’ve heard Terry ruefully note how many of his alumni eventually leave traditional journalism. Alas, I’m one of them.

In any case, it was a freewheeling discussion of digital politics, broadly defined. With a keyboard and projection screen at our disposal, we rambled from David’s YouTube projects for Rep. Jack Kingston to the website of my employer (and this site’s host) New Media Strategies. At one point, the question arose of Matt Drudge’s influence in the past compared to RealClearPolitics. We didn’t know the answer, so I went to Alexa (an imperfect tool, but more accurate the more traffic a site gets) to get an idea:

Alexa Traffic Ranking: Drudge Report vs. RealClearPolitics

Wow. Now that’s a mighty steep fall for a website that once almost brought down a president, yadda yadda yadda. Now, I’m sure his influence remains greater than his traffic; after all, Washington journalists are still reading his website out of sheer inertia. As recently as September 2006, “Gang of 500″ coiner Mark Halperin said “Drudge rules our world,” which pretty much sums it up. Meanwhile, RCP has had a strong 2008, even if their traffic only spikes around the elections (David noted the first, biggest spike was election night 2004 when the site was a destination for leaked exit polls).

Back in the office this afternoon, I decided to look up another site often compared to Drudge, especially at the outset in early 2005. This one surprised me even more:

Alexa Traffic Ranking: Drudge Report vs. Huffington Post

Surprising? Yes, at least if you remember how ubiquitious the Drudge Report once was. But let’s take a few things into consideration: for one, there is much, much more content on Huffington Post. The above chart is measured in page views, and every time someone clicks from the front page of HuffPo to Eat the Press or Nora Ephron’s latest Dear Jane letter to Hillary Clinton, that counts as another. Drudge meanwhile has just one page, and if my clicking habits are representative of others’, the tendency is to click on a story, hit the Back button, click again, go Back, etc. On many browsers, each subsequent view may draw upon the local cache and not register another hit for Drudge. Then again, he’s enabled that insidious technique known as auto-refresh, so if you accidentally leave his page open for any length of time, it will reload however often

    var timer = setInterval(”autoRefresh()”, 1000 * 60 * 3);
    function autoRefresh(){self.location.reload(true);}

is. Another thing to consider: Huffington’s numbers are nowhere near Drudge’s at the peak, and it’s highly unlikely she ever will — unless maybe she manages to bring down another President Clinton. (And I wouldn’t count on it.) Like M*A*S*H vs. American Idol or Star Wars Kid vs. Leave Britney Alone, there is too much competition for eyeballs, with the advent of cable television and YouTube respectively, for new programming to outperform the old.

And, clicking around a bit more, I realize I am not the first to note Arianna’s upset: Kara Swisher at All Things Digital first noted it about two weeks ago. But you know how it is. Too much demand on our attention to see everything we’d like.

P.S. Come on, Alexa. Why can’t I embed more than one of your charts on a page? The screen caps look terrible when I shrink them them to fit the column width.