So when you combine the fact that our audience is bigger with the fact that we are doing a better job, and then with the fact that there is finally some really positive, albeit tentative, news on starting to figure out a business model in this new landscape—and we’re not alone in that—all that makes it an exciting time to be doing what we’re doing. Especially when you combine it with the scale of many of the stories that we’re covering right now—whether you think they represent progress or regression, we’re covering incredibly important stories.
Campaign Desk
09:44 AM - August 3, 2011
The NY Times’s New Top Editor in D.C.
A conversation with incoming Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt
#Realtalk: This isn’t another ‘golden age’ for print - But it is one for media
Social media in smaller markets - How three social media managers deal with smaller markets and more local coverage.
A rally for laid-off Sun-Times photogs - A protest Thursday morning drew about 150 picketers to the newspaper’s headquarters
Reporting, or illegal hacking - Scripps reporters are accused of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
Exchange Watch: California Dreaming - Low healthcare premiums on the West Coast were trumpeted as a big, good-news Obamacare story. But: “Compared to what?”
Oops! LAX TSA officer shamed a BoingBoing writer’s daughter
And he used his media clout to make it a thing
Can ladymags do serious journalism?
Some people don’t seem to think so
Atlantic launches weekly iPhone mag
The paid product its prez teased a few months back has arrived
The usefulness of pie charts, in two pie charts
Business Insider launched an excellent attack against pie charts. But if all those words are bogging you down, WaPo has a simpler version
CJR's Guide to Online News Startups
Uptown Messenger – Hyperlocal news for a neighborhood in New Orleans
Who Owns What
The Business of Digital Journalism
A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Questions and exercises for journalism students.
This is a good interview with thoughtful questions. What might seem to leap out for the reader is that The New York Times is operating with a silo model when that format is obsolete.
It will slow reaction to IT changes, for example. The Telegraph in the UK has produced a must-read live news phone-hacking blog beautifully incorporating Twitter, even if The Guardian's blog is better at breaking news. The NYT, which might have been able to buy Twitter in the past, is stuck with about.com. (Twitter is now apparently worth $8B.)
Major news stories in The NYT are often great reads. But the silo method means that large areas of experience go unreported. For example, there is nothing in this interview about the need for America to engage in a formal audit of practices in education, especially for colleges. By studying course descriptions online, we can easily see that colleges can't orient quickly enough to tools in Modernism, the brilliant iPad App for "The Waste Land," and the Yale annotations to same.
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are happy to be obsolete. There is no way to get traction on this issue. The federal government is non-existent in this area. If The NYT had a formal Higher Education section, as The Australian does, it could cover these matters from a Washington perspective. Instead, it has "Education Life." Spare me.
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Wed 3 Aug 2011 at 11:57 AM
Though Mr. Leonhardt is a clever rhetorician, the following contradiction can not be glossed over.
Here, he lays out the NYT's m.o.: "We do not say the way to solve it is X or Y. But we start from a base that the Congressional Budget Office and the vast majority of economists ... are correct."
Later, he regrets blindly trusting those same folks: "[W]e weren’t skeptical enough. ... We were still too affected by the conventional wisdom ... I do think there are times when that happens, when it seems like everyone smart or everyone in power thinks one thing, and we need to say to ourselves, is there a chance that it’s wrong?"
(No, David. You should always ask that.)
The NYT will wiggle, swerve, sidestep, backtrack: whatever it takes to appear independent of the State. But, more so every day, shrewd observers are seeing the Old Grey Lady for the economic- and military-war cheer leader she is and always has been.
#2 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 3 Aug 2011 at 01:38 PM
Not a single question about climate change. Guess it doesn't matter.
#3 Posted by Sam Penrose, CJR on Thu 4 Aug 2011 at 10:06 AM
"I wouldn’t agree, because, in part, I don’t think assigning blame is what our job is."
If your job is to report the facts and to give your audience the best representation of reality that you can manage based on those facts, then your job is to assign the blame if that is the conclusion revealed by the facts (and your economics reporting has done well in this regard in the past when it came to the origins of the deficit).
"For example, we cover the deficit as if the notion that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path is an objective truth. There are some people who essentially reject that truth, but we don’t let the existence of that opinion sway us from covering the deficit story in a way that acknowledges that we have long-term unsustainability problem."
Again there is large agreement on the US being on an unsustainable fiscal path, but there is large disagreements on the cause of that unsustainability and the required policy responses at the present time.
What are the facts of the cause? What are the facts about appropriate policy responses?If the facts point to a large segment of the body politic and punditry being horribly wrong, then the journalists job is not to sustain a true conclusion (the deficit is a problem) based on false reasoning (government spending is too high. We should lower taxes to increase revenues).
The facts are from your own reporting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/economy/10leonhardt.html
And from CBO reports. Taxes are too low. The recession is killing revenues and increasing safety net costs. A giant demographic shift towards the old is about to occur. The American health care industry, both private and public, has costs way out of alignment with outcomes and those costs are going to skyrocket. The wind down of the financial crisis has been protracted and needlessly expensive and the new regulatory measures are not adequate to prevent further crashes. Federal spending salvaged the collapsing state economies at the cost of a worsened federal deficit. Measures to control costs that affect the benefits of private entities - be they regulations on credit, subsidizes for oil companies, cost effectiveness studies for medical procedures, the closing of foreign tax shelters used by American corporations are going to be fought every step of the way by conservative democrats and dirty republicans.
Cutting government spending now is wrong. Cutting taxes is wrong. Ignoring decaying infrastructure while surpluses of cheap capital and unemployed labor are available is wrong. The, "It's not our job," sounds a bit too much like "It's not our role" for my comfort. Please, I've admired your work up until this point, please do not let yourself become another David Gregory:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/01/20/david_gregory
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 4 Aug 2011 at 01:24 PM