website statistics

Archive for the 'Newspapers' Category

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.

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, Newsweek, Publishing, Scandal, Stephen Colbert, Television and William Beutler. 2 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.

What’s the Matter with Conservative Journalism?

Published by William Beutler on March 30, 2008 in Conservative movement, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, MSM, National Politics, National Review, New York Times, Newspapers, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and William Beutler. 3 Comments

The cover story of the New York Times Magazine this weekend is either called “The End of Republican America?” or “A Case of the Blues,” depending on whether you look at the cover (whence the image below right comes) or the online version. The author, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, spent some time with NRCC chairman Tom Cole and catalogues the myriad, perhaps insuperable, challenges facing the House GOP as it tries not simply to win back seats lost in 2006, but stave off yet more losses this cycle.

It’s certainly a legitimate article, if not exactly a groundbreaking one, and I have no particular complaints about it. But I did find myself wondering: Couldn’t they have found a reporter from a conservative background to write this story?

Deflated elephant from New York Times MagazineIn his day job, Wallace-Wells writes for Rolling Stone (as Ben, actually) where the tone of coverage is anything but sympathetic to Republicans. Before that he wrote for the left-leaning Washington Monthly.

So, to answer the question above: Yes, they probably could have. Not that anyone would expect it. Nor does the Times Magazine have a graduate of National Review writing about the Democrats. That’s Matt Bai, and his previous job was — perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not so much — Rolling Stone.

And it’s not just the Times Magazine; there is in fact a dearth of experienced, right-leaning feature reporters who write for mainstream magazines and newspapers. The mastheads of Time and Newsweek are filled with reporters who graduated from left-aligned publications. The New Republic is another example, but the Washington Monthly may have no rival as a journalist factory. Among the many former staffers who populate the list of Contributing Editors, here are just the ones I know currently write for major newspapers or magazines:

    Jonathan Alter, Katherine Boo, Matthew Cooper, Michelle Cottle, James Fallows, Joshua Green, Michael Kinsley, Nicholas Lemann, Jon Meacham, Timothy Noah, Joseph Nocera, David Segal, Walter Shapiro, Amy Sullivan, Nicholas Thompson, Steven Waldman, Wallace-Wells, Robert Worth

That doesn’t even include Joshua Micah Marshall, who has set up a viable and valuable media company of his own. (Full disclosure: I once wrote an article for the Monthly; Sullivan was my editor and made it a much better piece.)

Conservatives grouse that the writers and editors at the national magazines lean left, and there is definitely some truth to that. Not to a man and woman, and this does not mean their reporting follows the Democratic Party line, but it does have consequences on which stories are covered and how they are covered. But I think the lessons learned are wrong, or at best incomplete.

Wikipedia and Conservapedia logosThe reaction is usually to set up an alternative forum which is defined as being explicitly conservative. The problem is that these alternative organizations often operate inside a bubble which their “liberal” counterparts do not. This can be the case beyond journalism as well. On the web we can see this very clearly: The non-partisan but in some ways “liberal” Wikipedia has been answered by the conservative-minded, low-quality Conservapedia.

You could see this in journalism when, last month, new Washington Times editor John Solomon brought the newspaper’s style book closer in line with the standards at every other daily broadsheet in America. Some on the right yelped that this was giving in to the “reigning liberal sensibilities.” But this gets it exactly backwards: instead of “liberal” coming to mean “neutral,” these conservatives are letting “neutral” come to mean “liberal.”

For the record, among the “liberal” sensibilities to which Solomon’s paper succumbed: calling Hillary Clinton “Clinton” rather than the more personal “Hillary” and referring to “illegal immigrants” instead of the antagonistic “illegal aliens.”

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. Look at the Newsweek masthead, liberal Jonathan Alter does indeed have an opinion column, but his full title is Senior Editor and Columnist. George Will is just Columnist. The columnist can make overt arguments the way a reporter cannot, but the columnist’s words are also unmistakably opinions. But decisions that go into how a story is reported are the product of a reporters’ opinions, too. These biases are not always obvious. (And it’s worth noting, there are many other biases besides political outlook in play.)

Conservatives’ railing against the New York Times for being liberal has some salutary effects, and certainly creates some new jobs. A few years ago, Bill Kristol admitted this was “working the refs” (not his phrase). And look: today Kristol himself is a New York Times columnist.

Byron York’s Vast Left Wing ConspiracyUp to a point, there is a structural bias to the newspaper industry. This can be summed up in three words: “Woodward and Bernstein.” Oftentimes journalists look for something that needs to be fixed by the government. Right-minded individuals, to use an intentionally tendentious phrasing, do not clamor to fix every last societal ill. But then, why doesn’t the right of center dominate investigations into the abuse of government powers? Surely this has a lot to do with Republicans holding a lot of government power for a long time. But then Reason magazine, which is certainly right of center on economic issues, is mostly a lifestyle magazine. It’s Slate for libertarians, with a print edition.

One exception that comes to mind is Byron York. He is not the only reporter at National Review, but he is the only one whose articles include a dateline. His 2005 book “The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy” was a detailed look at how the left has set up its own alternative apparatii in response to conservative ones. Nothing against Wallace-Wells, but York too would have been an excellent choice to write a story about the NRCC’s misfortunes.

Which raises a question conservatives should be asking themselves: If the left builds itself a successful activist structure mirroring that of the right (and to a large extent, they already have) while maintaining a soft grip on ostensibly non-aligned political media institutions, what kind of position will the conservative movement be in then?

When one says “conservative journalist,” too often this means “columnist,” not “reporter.” If the right can fix this, they’ve got a chance.

Web 2.0 May Change Media, But You Can’t Trace Web 2.0

Published by William Beutler on October 31, 2007 in Asymmetrical Media, Blogger Panels, Blogs vs. MSM, CNN, Direct Mail, E-mail, Journalism History, Journalist Bloggers, MSM vs. Blogs, Meatspace, Metapost, Newspapers, Technology, Web video and William Beutler. 1 Comment

Not to turn Blog P.I. into a catalog of things I did last weekend, but on Saturday I sat on a panel at the Phillips Foundation’s fall retreat for recipients of its journalism fellowships (about which more below). My co-panelists were Jose Vargas from the Washington Post, Amy Schatz from the Wall Street Journal, and Abbi Tatton from CNN. I was a replacement fill-in, which is why I was the lone non-journalist — but hey, I was a licensed journalist not too long ago, so, close enough for (the discussion of) government work.

The subject was how technology is changing politics — a mandate broad enough to take it in almost any direction. And if anything, I was the wet blanket of the panel. My opening comments focused on how the Internet is changing politics in ways not unique compared to previous technologies, techniques and politics. I didn’t get all the details out on Saturday, but the argument went something like:

Radio : FDR’s fireside chats :: Blogs : The Fred File* and ‘04/’06 predecessors

Television : Nixon/Kennedy Debate :: YouTube/Internet video : “Macaca”

Direct mail/voter files : Richard Viguerie’s first claim to fame :: E-mail lists/subscribers : Why John Kerry matters in 2008

Radio and blogging both gave candidates ways to bypass established media channels and speak directly to supporters and voters. Television and online video can reframe the public’s perception of political events. Direct mail then as e-mail now communicate around the media as well as solicit campaign funds from an (ideally) opt-in crowd.

Panels such as these are at their best when the most interesting comments come from the audience. One theme that emerged in discussion was how even print journalists are being asked to produce short video (and audio) segments for the Internet when reporting from the road. To some extent, each of my fellow panelists had witnessed or dealt with this issue. It’s an interesting and even logical development, as online ad revenues rise compared to the dead tree edition. One also has to also wonder how thin it stretches their already-dwindling reportorial resources. At least in the Morissettean sense, it’s ironic that the migration of news content to the web coincides with layoffs owing to competition from the web.

My friend Robert Bluey, also present, volunteered that his alma mater, Ithaca College, is now offering a course it calls “Backpack Journalism.” He explains in an interesting post at his own blog:

Students are given a backpack with a MacBook, video camera, digital camera, a recording device and other instruments to produce a story. After receiving their assignments, the students are dispatched to cover the story using multiple media.

I find this new kind of journalism fascinating. However, I also sympathize with working journalists who are primarily writers, who may now find themselves needing to acquire new skills to adapt to a changing industry. My co-panelists are among the lucky ones — I suspect they’ll learn new tricks more quickly than some of their older colleagues.

One of whom might be Michael Scully, former journalist, journalism professor and blogger (but not the writer from The Simpsons). I tend to share his fears about what “backpack journalism” will mean in some (many, most?) newsrooms:

If Backpack Journalism is about sending ONE person out into the field to report a story, than Backpack Journalism is a travesty. It’s an accountant’s dream but an editor’s nightmare. Accountants love it because you’re sending one person out into the field to produce the work of three people; it’s an editor’s nightmare because the quality of the work is diminished.

I submit that the true business model for New Media must be to send THREE people out into the field. Let one report, one produce, one shoot. Each skill is very important, each skill is very different, each skill has a professional value.

On the other hand, someone who could do all three well would be highly sought-after and accordingly compensated. If the job description caught on, it would presumably spur different kinds of students to enter journalism in the first place. Myself, I actually applied to film school out of high school, but instead pursued print journalism in-state, as I that proved more realistic. But if becoming a “backpack journalist” was an option at Allen Hall, I’d at least have given it the old college try. Heck, I might have even finished my Journalism double-major.

· · ·

And you know, I bet we can fit this into a hastily-assembled anti-triumphalist SAT problem like the ones above:

Print Journalists : The Internet :: Pre-Internet Journalists, I.e. Mostly Print Journalists : Every New Media Before the Internet

Note: As I promised above, a bit more about the Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellowship Program. They are presently seeking applicants for 2008. If you’re inclined toward constitutional democracy and classically liberal economics, and have less than ten years of journalism experience, then you (yes, you!) could land $50,000 to $75,000 to write on a topic of your choosing. Details here. Tell ‘em Blog P.I. sent you.

*I was also the only panelist with a client of current interest, so it made for a few interesting moments as the subject was indeed taken in almost any direction. Hats off to the Standard’s Michael Goldfarb for trying to get me to make news.

Dear Leaderboard, or: Mmmm… Pie Chart!

Published by William Beutler on October 25, 2007 in Asymmetrical Media, Blogs vs. MSM, Cable News, Charts and Graphs, MSM, Memeorandum, Newspapers, Tech Blogosphere, Technorati and William Beutler. 2 Comments

When Gabe Rivera unveiled his Techmeme Leaderboard a few weeks back, we politically-minded Internet junkies experienced something akin to spending Christmas morning watching another kid open presents. Okay, that’s pushing it. Maybe it’s like comparing your Easter morning haul with a friend who received a Nintendo game, when all you got was chocolate (I’ve forgiven, but never forgotten).

Top 25 sites on the Memeorandum LeaderboardIt made sense, though. The bloggers who show up on Techmeme are much more likely to track themselves on that site than are the bloggers who populate Memeorandum likely to watch themselves. Of couse, all tech bloggers are geeks in good standing, while only some of us political types are. So they get the goodies first.

But as expected, Rivera rolled out his Memeorandum Leaderboard, and he did so this week. As he explained, the Leaderboard

identifies 100 of [the most influential political blogs], ranking sources simply by how much they’ve appeared on memeorandum in the past month. It updates every 20 minutes and offers archives of past days. … The memeorandum Leaderboard doesn’t tell the whole story of course. For instance, influential curators of opinion like Instapundit.com don’t figure highly given memeorandum’s preference for longer articles. Yet it remains a handy portal to many of the sources with the greatest role in framing and shaping the national debate.

It’s handy, all right, and it fills a need. Five years ago, in a very different political blogosphere, The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem was the definitive guide to the top political blogs. But with Rob Neppell (née N.Z. Bear) now focused on other projects, it’s fallen into obsolescence. The Technorati Top 100 was a welcome addition, but its inbound link counts were sometimes unreliable, it never focused on politics per se, and as I pointed out last year, the political blogs have to share the top 100 with many other genres. Since then, Technorati has lost its direction in other ways, and it’s too soon to tell whether founding CEO Dave Sifry’s departure will change things. I’m not counting on it.

So while Rivera’s list is worth analyzing, it should come as no surprise that the analysis so far has come from more tech-centric bloggers. For example, here’s TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley marveling at how important the legacy media remains, especially compared to the ’sphere in which he moves:

According to the list, based on story headlines on Memeorandum the New York Times, Washington Post and AP control over 22.4% of political headlines. The Atlantic Online, The National Review and CNN (twice) also make the top ten, leaving slim pickings for political blogs. … The (perhaps sad) state of the political blogosphere stands in contrast to the tech blogosphere, which dominates the equivalent Techmeme Leaderboard list, holding approx 64% of all spots.

The observation is fair, but I object to the judgment call. For one thing, defining the subject matter of Memeorandum as “politics” is far too narrow. Foreign affairs, U.S. diplomacy, domestic policy, electoral politics and sundry current events make up the subject matter at Memeorandum — a much broader spectrum of news and analysis than what TechMeme covers. Moreover, these subjects often require reporting from around the country and around the world that even in the digital age aged institutions with more resources than resolve continue to dominate. Most of the stories on TechMeme emanate from the Silicon Valley; Memeorandum spans the world at large.

GOP Internet consultant Patrick Ruffini has already taken a crack at evaluating what it says about the Right’s online fortunes. What it says is that Republicans and conservatives need to reinvent their online channels of communication:

Lots of bloggers have been over to Iraq, a commitment which makes the professional activists in the leftosphere look like dilettantes. Guys like Jeff [Emanuel], Bill Roggio, and Michael Yon have been the advance guard for this stuff. But nothing little has been done to institutionalize their work, to create counter-memes by controlling the upstream information flow through a system for nurturing these upstart war reporters. The failure to develop an effective counter-narrative out of Iraq is reflective of the “conservative message machine” and its reluctance to think outside the box.

Myself, I’m still thinking it over. To get started on the process, I separated all the websites on this afternoon’s Leaderboard into a few arbitrary categories and added up the percentages accorded to each. I then created a simple chart with Zoho Sheet (beating out Google Docs by a slim margin and NeoOffice by a much wider one) to visualize the statistical spread. Others will have different ways of breaking this out — and I may have different ways at a later date — but here’s what I came up with:

Memeorandum Leaderboard (by source type) - http://sheet.zoho.com

I should note the numbers taken off the leaderboard do not actually add up to 100%. That’s something I intend to ask Rivera about, and because the Zoho chart rounds them up to reach a sensible 100%, here are the actual numbers as I compiled them:

ARBITARY CATEGORYINEXACT NUMBER
Newspaper/Wire Content 38.65%
Liberal Blogs & Websites 14%
MSM-Backed Online Content11.4%
Conservative Blogs & Websites10.25%
Cable/TV News-Based Content4.7%
Primary Sources Online0.98%
Hard to Categorize Websites0.86%

This dilutes MSM-owned websites only just a bit; as you can see, print and wire-based news stories commanded much, much more attention than websites based on television news, so you can squint and add that back in if you’d like. Add in MSM-created content specifically for the web, and it’s up over 60%. That is also a more arbitrary but, I would argue, more necessary category — “MSM Online” is where I placed any ostensibly non-partisan blog and any non-blog content by more partisan sources. These days established media organizations are creating more and more content for the web, and much of it differs in character from what they publish on dead trees. Liberal and Conservative blogs are more self-explanatory; the hard-to-categorize sites included Drudge Report and The Moderate Voice. The Primary Sources were Gallup, Rasmussen and whitehouse.gov. If anybody cares, I can forward the list as I compiled it. It could probably use some revision, and I certainly reserve the right to have made a clerical error here or there.

I’ll leave you that to chew over for now. I’ll be back with answers when I have them, and with any luck, I will be back inside of a month with a few more thoughts about what all is going on here.

Exclusiva! Debe Acreditar El Perez Hilton!

Published by William Beutler on August 24, 2007 in Breaking News, Entertainment, Foreign Policy, Journalist Bloggers, National Security and Newspapers. 0 Comments

I don’t know whether Fidel Castro es muerte and neither do you. James Taranto thinks he’s been dead since last year, and there is a pretty decent case to be made there. But this evening the Internet is buzzing about his putative demise, as Memeorandum goes to show.

What I do know is that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s news blog is admirably honest about admitting where they first heard the (possibly) big international news story:

Seattle Post-Intelligencer gets its international news from Perez Hilton

Yes, in fact Perez Hilton is even linked on Memeorandum, instead of just the sister site WeSmirch. Nevertheless, it most certainly is not a “big scoop” of Perez Hilton’s. If it’s anybody’s, it belongs to Babalu Blog. And if it turns out that Castro still está vivo, I guess the scoop goes to South Florida’s NBC 6.

P.S. If my Spanish is off, I trust that someone will tell me in the comments.

Weekend Update

Published by William Beutler on February 10, 2007 in Blogs vs. MSM, Entertainment, Iraq, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, New York Times, Newspapers and Washington Post. 0 Comments

The Iraq war-supporting and -opposing halves of the political blogosphere don’t agree on much, but one thing they do have in common is an abiding mistrust (or distrust) of the mainstream media, especially when the subject is Iraq.

This lack of trust often begets outright derision, sometimes even overt attempts at and references to comedic entertainment. Today, as juxtaposed at Memeorandum, the Washington Post takes a whack from the right and the New York Times takes one from the left:

Neo-Neocon, on Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith’s “Official’s Key Report On Iraq Is Faulted”:

Neo-Neocon and Emily Litella

A Tiny Revolution, on Michael R. Gordon’s “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says”:

A Tiny Revolution and Michael Gordon

There’s some mild irony here — the editorial division of the New York Times has mostly opposed the Iraq war, while the Washington Post’s editorial page has mostly supported it. Of course, today’s complaints are directed at the ostensibly impartial news division. Editorial editors may have their fans, but among partisans, the straight news reporter has no advocates.

Bloggers for Sale?

Published by William Beutler on December 3, 2006 in Blog Consultants, Blog Fights, Blogs vs. MSM, Candidate Bloggers, Democrats, MSM vs. Blogs, New York Times, Newspapers and Tough Crowd. 7 Comments

National Journal’s K. Daniel Glover, who never gets too old for this, co-wrote an op-ed for the New York Times today on bloggers who work for campaigns (based on his own reporting, which I later extrapolated into an unwieldy series of charts), and the reaction from the blogosphere could probably be best described as extreme hostility.

On first read, I didn’t quite see what the problem was, but after reading through all the posts available at Memeorandum, I can see what they’re getting at — though the reaction is, to no great surprise, overly negative. The most controversial passage seems to be this one:

Few of these bloggers shut down their “independent” sites after signing on with campaigns, and while most disclosed their campaign ties on their blogs, some — like Patrick Hynes of Ankle Biting Pundits — did so only after being criticized by fellow bloggers.

Among the fiercest detractors are friends of bloggers who worked for campaigns and who did cease their independent blogging, but are not exempted from the mild criticism offered in the story. A good example is Amanda Marcotte, who took over Pandagon from Jesse Taylor when he signed up with Gov.-elect Ted Strickland:

Daniel Glover and Mike Essl are hinting around that a lot of bloggers have undisclosed conflicts of interest and forget to include an extremely important disclaimer about some of the bloggers on their handy little chart here. You know, the part where they clearly state that bloggers like Peter Daou and our own Jesse Taylor have no conflict of interest at all. Because they quit their blogs before starting their campaign jobs so there was no conflict of interest.

Here’s Scott Shields, in the comments at MyDD:

It’s pretty clear … that I was on payroll with the Menendez campaign. I haven’t looked at all of the other examples, but I’d be willing to bet that it was pretty much the same story all around — that full disclosure was offered. What, I wonder, is Glover’s point? That bloggers are “for sale”? … I consider myself an activist first and an ideologically-driven citizen journalist second. That’s just how I’ve defined my role. It’s something I think I’ve been pretty clear about. If I believe in a candidate, I’m willing to work for that candidate. If I don’t, then I’d take a pass. At no point would I ever fail to disclose my work for that candidate. [Note: The original quote here was Jonathan Singer’s which is quoted below. This has been replaced with a quote from Shields’ comment. My apologies to both.]

Conservatives who weighed in had a similar reaction, though they took it less personally. Alabama Liberation Front responded with snark:

I can be bought. I just want to make that clear. If everybody else is going to discard their bloggerly principles and go a-whorin’ after political money, I don’t want to be the last blogger virgin, sitting around drinking lemonade and waiting for the phone to ring.

And a contributor to Done With Mirrors was skeptical about the apparent premise of the op-ed:

Of course I would have a problem with a politician directly paying a journalist employed as such, disclosed or not. (I don’t want politicians paying off staff writers for major newspapers, for example.) But what these bloggers are being paid for isn’t journalism, not in my book. It isn’t even “citizenjournalism,” about which term and which concept, as they are used in the blogosphere generally, I harbor deep skepticism.

All together now: Tough crowd.

The only blogger explicitly criticized is Hynes, a Republican, yet most of the outcry comes from the left. Why? Guilt by association. That’s why I think that the article might not have received such harsh criticism had it not been paired with a chart placing bloggers’ quotes about their employers next to information about what they were paid.

But the chart was a production of the New York Times, with the numbers borrowed from Glover’s original piece and the quotes attributed to each blogger taken from… well, it doesn’t say. The chart seems to imply that there’s something shocking about the fact that a blogger paid to work for a campaign would have positive things to say about their candidate. But do these quotes come from the bloggers’ personal websites? From the official campaign blogs? Were they written before or after being hired? These are important things to know before passing judgment on the propriety of the statements quoted — but the insinuation that these comments are insincere is highly misleading.

Should Glover have refused the op-ed on this basis? Maybe, but I am quite sure I would not have. Perhaps another sentence or two noting a few of the subtleties that the bloggers are pointing out now might have quelled some of the outrage — but then again, perhaps not. Take for instance the ever-subtle Atrios, who carps:

I guess the blogger ethics standard is now if you’ve ever run a blog there’s something unseemly about actually working with politicains [sic], even years later.

No, that’s not what the article says. Not even close. Atrios’ response manages to be even more overbroad than the article quoted. I respect and like Jonathan Singer, who wrote the main response at MyDD today, but he too goes overboard (albeit with more wit and humor):

While Glover does note that some of “these bloggers shut down their ‘independent’ sites after signing on with campaigns” or that “most disclosed their campaign ties on their blogs”, he fails to mention the fact that a number of the bloggers, like Jerome, largely recused themselves of writing during the course of their employment, farming out writing responsibilities to other bloggers like Chris, Matt and myself. The reason why may shock you: Chris, Matt and Jonathan do not exist, despite any previous claims. He got me. We’re all the same person. I (Jerome) have been writing under these aliases the entire time I have been working on other campaigns. I also used to write under the name of Scott Shields until I got hired under that pseudonym by another campaign. Thought you met Matt, Chris or Jonathan at Yearly Kos or some other event? Most likely you met one of the young fellows I paid to play those roles. They’re just out of work, dime a dozen actors from Los Angeles. Anyone could have played them.

At the very least, this mini-kerfuffle highlights just how difficult it can be to generalize about the blogosphere within the constraints of the short op-ed format. And I should know — earlier in the year I wrote a newspaper op-ed (though for the Washington Examiner, nothing like the New York Times) and I was roundly trashed by some of the same bloggers — although I am envious of “Roger Ailes”‘ “K. Douchebag Glover” nickname; I got nothing quite so clever.

So I can certainly sympathize. Looking back on my piece (which unfortunately is no longer online), I got some things right and some things wrong. But if I could have linked to blog posts backing up my arguments, it would have been less controversial. I would imagine the same is true here. Glover’s experience today certainly reconfirms my conclusion that newspaper op-ed columns, with their limited space and lack of hypertext, are almost invariably a terrible place to comment on the blogosphere.

This seems to be what Glover implies in a comment posted at his own blog, in response to an angry reader:

The Times wanted me to focus on people who had their own blogs and then went to work for campaigns. My original piece also included people who were paid to blog for campaigns or advise them on Internet strategy but who weren’t independent bloggers beforehand. … Furthermore, my article neither states nor implies that anyone, candidates or bloggers, is “corrupt” because of ties between the two. I don’t believe that. Candidates have the right to pay for Internet advice, blogging, etc., and bloggers have a right to be paid for that work — or to do it on a volunteer basis, if they so choose.

I get that. But that wasn’t in the article. And with bloggers on a hair-trigger response to any criticism whatsoever, the NYT piece should have said exactly that. Glover and Essl didn’t say (or mean) what many bloggers believe they said — but they didn’t not say it, either.

P.S. Don’t miss the comments, where Danny Glover adds a bit more detail about how the article came together — and adds the important fact (you would think) that Essl’s contribution was limited to designing the chart itself.

Why, You Little—!!!

Published by William Beutler on November 21, 2006 in Blogs vs. MSM, MSM, Newspapers and Seriously. 1 Comment

There’s a curious and twisted form of homerism on display right now at Power Line, where readers have been falling over themselves to first nominate and now vote for their hometown newspaper as the “worst newspaper in the United States.”

I don’t doubt that there are legitimate criticisms to be made about most or all of these papers, but I also don’t doubt that the examples provided are not nearly enough to make such a drastic judgment. Indeed, while a couple submissions refer to specific grievances, the post is characterized by allusive grumbling and generalized complaints. Which gives me an idea…

Can you match the newspaper with its corresponding critique? Answers in the nomination post at Power Line, as well as below the fold. No peeking!

a. Los Angeles Times   1. “Farther left than the Guardian, but without the snappy prose.”

b. The Oregonian   2. “All around worst paper, general purposes”
c. San Francisco Chronicle   3. “Not nominated by any readers, but a paper that few will dispute belongs on this list.”
d. Washington Post   4. “Relentless liberalism, then spiteful revenge pieces.”
e. Kansas City Star   5. “Slavish liberalism (probably all those gummint workers).”

Continue reading ‘Why, You Little—!!!’

Take The Plunge

Published by William Beutler on November 20, 2006 in Journalism History, New York Times, Newspapers and Seriously. 1 Comment

If you missed Jack Shafer’s “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Bus Plunge’ Story” last week, I much recommend it. Not only will you learn about this gruesomely fascinating category of journalism, but by the end you may yearn for the long lost days of the K-hed (not K-Fed; nobody will be sorry to lose him).

As an example of the genre, I have appropriated from Slate the scan of one specimen from the Sept. 1, 1956 New York Times:

New York Times Bus Plunge Story

As Shafer documents, the phenomenon has all but disappeared from the Times. But on the Internet it lives on — not just on the aptly named Bus Plunge! website, but also, just this afternoon, on the front page of CNN.com:

CNN Bus Plunge Story

More on the accident here, but I must warn you — if you enjoy your gallows humor, I don’t recommend clicking through.