The Kicker

  1. May 25, 2012 11:09 AM

    David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, on the Times-Picayune cuts

    It's grievous what is happening to regional newspapers, especially. But the whole industry will continue to collapse until everyone swallows hard and goes behind a paywall. The New York Times has shown us the end of the beginning; they've embraced the paywall and they are seeing significant revenue. The Washington Post, LA Times, others have to follow. Once the content of the larger papers is no longer available to aggregators, then regional papers can safely take that same path and, maybe, there is an online revenue stream that will allow high-end journalism to survive.

    Short of that, the great Molly Ivins is right, this is nothing more than slow suicide.

    That newspaper executives listened to the mavens of new technology and decided to give away their content and copyright without securing a revenue stream is incredible enough. That they continue to do so amid this collapse is just astonishing, especially since The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times are showing us a plausible future.

    Folks who decry the idea of subscriber fees argue that paywalls won't work, and that those who advocate for them, don't understand the Internet. The opposite is true. These folks don't understand the first thing about actual journalism. It costs money to cover a metro region, or a nation, or the world comprehensively, to place reporters at key points and maintain them while they cover a beat and glean information year after year. Anyone who still thinks that this can be achieved by amateurs or hobbyists are embarrassing themselves. It hasn't happened in a consistent fashion anywhere, and it won't happen anywhere. Journalism is a profession; it requires careers, and careers require a living wage, and until newspapers recover a revenue stream for their online product, they have no future.

  2. May 24, 2012 11:20 AM

    The Times-Picayune cuts staff and print runs

    The news hit late Wednesday night that the storied New Orleans Times-Picayune, the newspaper that served as a community rock in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, will be cutting its print run to three times a week and slicing its staff by up to a third.

    "We did not make this decision lightly," the new company president, Ricky Mathews, said in corporate-speak of the layoffs in the Times-Picayune’s own announcement. "It's the toughest part of transitioning from a print-centric to a digitally-focused company.” Most of the paper's own staff found out initially about the restructuring by reading Wednesday night's New York Times story, New Orleans's alt-weekly reported.

    Depriving a region of a vital public resource—one that, according to Romenesko, remains profitable—seems a shortsighted decision by parent company Newhouse.

    To get a sense of the paper’s ongoing importance (as hurricane recovery continues seven years later), here are some links to past CJR coverage:

    Here is a snapshot of the Times-Picayune in 2010, five years after Katrina

    Here is a three-part series on how the paper continued to get reported coverage to its readers in the midst of utter chaos

    Here is a profile of TP columnist Chris Rose, who became the voice of New Orleans’s struggles

  3. May 22, 2012 04:51 PM

    Broadcasters sue to keep political ad buy data offline

    The National Association of Broadcasters—which represents parent companies of NBC, CBS, and Fox, among others—yesterday moved to halt the Federal Communications Commission’s recent ruling requiring TV stations to post political ad buy data online (data the stations currently keep in paper form in their own filing cabinets—some of which CJR recently explored).

    The NAB petitioned the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Monday for

    relief from the [FCC’s] action on the grounds that it is arbitrary, capricious, in excess of the Commission's statutory authority, inconsistent with the First Amendment, and otherwise not in accordance with law.

    CJR has been writing about this issue for months (with frequent help from Steven Waldman, a former adviser to the FCC). Stay tuned here in the coming days for more on this latest development and what it might mean.


  4. May 21, 2012 03:17 PM

    The Pulitzer Prize luncheon, storified

    The Pulitzer Prizes were officially presented to recipients on Monday afternoon at Columbia University's Low Library rotunda. See attendee reactions in (reverse chronological order) real time below:
  5. May 18, 2012 03:00 PM

    A game of telephone fools the Times

    The New York Times posts a nasty correction on its Sunday op-ed by William Deresiewicz, who asserted that a study had found that 10 percent of people on Wall Street were "clinical psychopaths."

    That 10-percent-psycho baloney was the lead anecdote—critical framing for the whole op-ed. The Times has since re-written the lede paragraph almost entirely, disappeared the errors, and attached a correction at the very end of the story:

    An earlier version of this article misstated the findings of a 2010 study on psychopathy in corporations. The study found that 4 percent of a sample of 203 corporate professionals met a clinical threshold for being described as psychopaths, not that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are clinical psychopaths. In addition, the study, in the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law, was not based on a representative sample; the authors of the study say that the 4 percent figure cannot be generalized to the larger population of corporate managers and executives.

    That's not good enough. Here's the original lede, which I snagged via Factiva:

    THERE is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are ''clinical psychopaths,'' exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an ''unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.'' (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

    Here's the lede, as rewritten:

    THERE is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A 2010 study found that 4 percent of a sample of corporate managers met a clinical threshold for being labeled psychopaths, compared with 1 percent for the population at large. (However, the sample was not representative, as the study’s authors have noted.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

    The NYT is effectively saying, "We originally said a study found 10 percent of Wall Streeters were psychopaths. But that was false. It really said 4 percent of executives are psychopaths. But even then, the study was not based on a representative sample, according to its own authors, which means that it's just bullshit, which means that this op-ed is fatally flawed."

    But rather than say something like that, the paper just rewrites the false part—without noting it has done so until and unless you get to the very bottom of the piece. The Gray Lady doesn't do strikethroughs, you know.

    The "study" the original NYT piece linked to was an article in CFA Institute magazine, as Edward Jay Epstein writes at The Daily Beast. Actually, Epstein writes that the Times linked to an aggregated version of CFA's story that ran in The Week, which itself was aggregating the story via other aggregators.

    In other words, the Times's false information was sourced from The Week, which sourced it, via aggregated posts at master aggregators Business Insider and Huffington Post, from CFA Institute magazine which sourced it, erroneously, from "Studies conducted by Canadian forensic psychologist Robert Hare."

    This is telephone, press style. The Times was at least four derivative sources removed from the original source of the information. If anyone along the way messed it up, as the first reporter did, the whole chain was vulnerable. Some editor at the Times should have noticed that the column's most eye-opening claim, one on which it hung its whole thesis, was sourced not to the APA or some academic journal, but to The Week, which in turn was sourcing it on down the line.

    This isn't to say that columnists and bloggers have to re-report everything that has already been reported elsewhere. But editors have to fact check the lede graph of a provocative, edited column in your paper of record that accuses a big chunk of people of being "clinical psychopaths."

    The worst part of this is that the 10-percent-psycho claim spread by CFA and aggregators was debunked more than two months ago by John M. Grohol, the editor of Psych Central, who thought the number sounded fishy and called up the author of the study.

    The viral nature of this error shows why corrections, prominently displayed, are so critical. None of the articles in the telephone chain above have been corrected—even after the Times's fix—and the Times itself has yet to correct its error in print.

    That's how misinformation becomes conventional wisdom.

  6. May 18, 2012 01:26 PM

    What Warren Buffett sees in local newspapers

    On Thursday, Warren Buffett announced he will spend $142 million to purchase 63 local and regional newspapers from the Richmond, Virginia-based Media General chain--and the Berkshire Hathaway chairman says he's ready to buy more. "Any time we can add properties we like, to management we like, at a price we like, we're ready to go,” Buffett told the Omaha World-Herald, which he also owns. On its face, sinking money into newspapers seems a counterintuitive investment strategy in this era of layoffs, shutdowns, and we-need-a-business-model hysteria. Does Warren Buffett see something the rest of us don't?

    Actually, it's not hard to understand what Buffett sees in these papers: they are largely entrenched, long-lived dailies and weeklies that draw their advertising from local businesses. The Southern communities they serve are not, by and large, hotbeds of broadband access and online news entrepreneurship; for their older, Internet-ambivalent residents, newspapers remain an important source of news and information. As Erik Wemple put it: "While the big regional and national newspapers have elevated the crisis of newspapering to a countrywide obsession — complete with constant updates on circulation losses, drops in advertising revenues and the like — small weeklies and dailies have been plodding along. Not printing money, mind you, but making a living."

    Casual observers tend to view the news industry as a monolith, when, in reality, it's comprised of various segments, some quite different than others. The New York Times has relatively little in common with a paper like The Goochland Gazette, one of Buffett's new acquisitions. Whereas the Times wants to be the paper of record for the English-speaking world, the Gazette serves the 21,717 residents of Goochland County. It's theoretically easier for a small paper like that to make money, because the circumstances under which it operates are more tightly defined.

    Buffett, perhaps the least spectacular billionaire in the history of money, made his fortune investing in boring assets that are nevertheless financially sound. He's done the same thing with the Media General purchase. The Times might win more awards, but the Gazette might ultimately be a more stable financial bet.

  7. May 17, 2012 07:10 PM

    Don’t take my traditional Internet away!

    Over at Nieman Lab, Adrienne LaFrance has an interesting interview with Talking Points Memo publisher Josh Marshall about his efforts to “formally deconstruct” the idea that TPM is primarily a website. It’s a good, short look at one of the original Web journalism entrepreneurs as he transitions his organization to a greater emphasis on mobile and video.

    Which, I realize, is something to be applauded. If readers want to move their consumption from desktops to mobile—and TPM’s numbers show that, increasingly, they do—of course news organizations should be prepared to move with them. And if the economics of video are changing so that pre-roll ads can become a meaningful revenue source, of course news organizations should take advantage. We’ve all seen what happens when media institutions choose not to adapt, and it’s not pretty.

    But as one particular, idiosyncratic, prematurely old-fogey-ish member of the audience, I’d like to register a plea: let’s not let the old-fashioned technology of text in a Web browser, meant to be read on computer screen, be forgotten in the brave new world.

    I own an 18-month-old Droid2, which runs on Verizon’s network—hardly a cutting-edge smartphone, but not terribly outdated among the non-techie set, either. And I love it. It’s my favorite way to scan Twitter, I can listen to Mets games anywhere, the GPS outperforms my Garmin, Gmail works great, etc., etc.

    What I don’t love it for is what I spend the bulk of my time on the computer doing: reading the news. Media-company apps are, in my experience, frustratingly inconsistent. (If anybody at Slate is reading this: I want to be able to read Matt Yglesias’s blog without going through a whole lot of your other “business” content. I can do that on my computer—can I please do it on your Android app, too? And ProPublica: your app may have stopped crashing on my phone. But I wouldn’t know, because I’ve stopped using it.)

    I don’t have to use apps, of course. But once you’ve gotten accustomed to broadband speeds, mobile browsing is just barely tolerable. Browsing on sluggish mobile sites—hello, WaPo—is intolerable. Since the ability to click between stories is a basic part of digital news consumption, this is pretty annoying. Also annoying: the browser needs to reload a window every time I leave it and then return. Since I work in Manhattan and spend most of my commute—when I’d really like to be able to read stories that I’ve found earlier—underground, this makes the browser not only slow but unusable for a good part of the day.

    As for video... I know that there are people who like to get their online news from videos rather than text, much like I know that there are people who prefer milk chocolate to dark. I just don’t get it.

    I’m aware that this is petulant griping and special pleading, not sound business advice. I’m also aware that my own preferences are likely to change as expectations and circumstances change: mobile speeds will improve; media apps will get better; maybe we’ll get wireless in the subways; maybe once I get a tablet I’ll learn to love video. And I’m aware, too, that the thing that I like—text articles on websites—is not going away, at least not anytime soon, just because publishers are sensibly working to give other people things that they like.

    Still, I can’t help it: stories like this one evoke the kind of response in me that computer-phobic readers must have felt as they saw resources being shifted from print to the Web. Don’t take my traditional Internet away!

  8. May 17, 2012 01:15 PM

    Why China ejected Melissa Chan

    Is this the kind of reporting that got Al Jazeera correspondent Melissa Chan expelled from China last week? The foreign ministry did not give an official reason for the first expulsion of a journalist in 15 years, except to say that “the media concerned know in their heart what they did wrong."

    Chan's probe into “black jails”—detention centers where whistleblowers are often held without charges—was only one of several probing stories that she had done. Peter Chovanec, a professor at Tshingua University who knows Chan well, says, “She wasn’t trying to make China look bad, although sometimes the truth wasn’t pretty.”

    According to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China, officials had been angry over a documentary that was shown in November on Al Jazeera English about the alleged use of prisoners to manufacture export goods. Chan was not directly involved in the production of this documentary, but she had separately been accused of violating unspecified rules and regulations.

    As the foreign press zeroed in on the story of blind dissident Chen Guangcheng, Chan was told that her press credentials would not be renewed. The Foreign Correspondents Club says the expulsion was the “most extreme example of a recent pattern of using journalist visas in an attempt to censor and intimidate foreign correspondents in China.”

    Communist Party officials have been feeling the heat lately from the increased foreign press scrutiny. The Bo Xilai scandal has been playing out in western media, revealing deep divisions in the top rungs of the party. The headlines over Chen Guangcheng pushed China further, and it seems to have retaliated against Chan, meanwhile sending a strong signal to other foreign journalists. Ironically, this comes at a time when China's official media is trying to expand its own reach across the world, aiming to change the “wrong perceptions” of China that the western media projects.

    And as China engages with the world more than ever, the government's way of doing things will come under more intense examination by foreign journalists. Meanwhile, Chan's stories online will likely get more views now that she has been expelled.

    Melissa Chan summed up the duality of China in her final post as she left the country after five years and almost 400 reports. “China is a country of contradictions. One minute you marvel at the speedy transformation, the new wealth, the great hope of many. Another minute, and in this case powerfully felt because it can all happen in one day, you're disgusted by the corruption, the systemic problems of a one-party authoritarian state, and the trampling of individual human rights and dignity.”


  9. May 14, 2012 06:50 AM

    Seattle news site PubliCola is out of business

    The Seattle-based political news site PubliCola is closing, despite strong readership. As founder Josh Feit describes in a post, the site is quite popular, with “more than 400,000 monthly page views during the election season and currently more than 10,000 Facebook and Twitter followers.” But that doesn’t always equal commensurate returns. Feit writes, “We haven’t been successful as a business. Advertising revenue has been limited and inconsistent.”

    But PubliCola isn’t completely disappearing—the for-profit site will be folding into the nonprofit Seattle news site Crosscut. PubliCola will be “squatting” in CrossCut’s offices, and Feit writes that, starting Monday, Crosscut will feature PubliCola’s Morning Buzz and Afternoon Jolt columns.

    PubliCola was the first online-only news source to receive media credentials to cover Washington’s state capital, and it’s great that their political reporting seems to have found a new home. “Local online pioneer Crosscut.com has some exciting expansion plans—and PubliCola’s voice and daily reporting figures prominently in their new vision,” writes Feit.

    The end of PubliCola as an independent entity comes almost a year after fellow startup, Seattle PostGlobe, went out of business. The PostGlobe began in 2009 as a way to fill the void left behind when Hearst closed the 146-year-old newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. At one point, PostGlobe had a part-time staff of 30 former P-I staffers. Lacking a long-term sustainability strategy, the site ended less than two years after its launch.

  10. May 11, 2012 04:22 PM

    Poynter chat: How to mine TV stations’ political files

    CJR has been writing since late last year about a proposed FCC rule that would require local TV stations to post their public records of political ad sales on the Internet.

    So with the new rule announced in late April and set to go into effect soon, we were delighted to team up with the folks at Poynter Friday afternoon on a chat about the opportunities this move creates for journalists—and the considerable reporting challenges that still remain.

    Staff writer Greg Marx participated, along with Steve Waldman, who has written frequently for CJR on this subject, and Stuart Watson, an investigative reporter at WCNC-TV in Charlotte.

    You can find the chat at the Poynter site, or replay it below.

  11. May 11, 2012 11:56 AM

    So you think you can dance?

    Sarah Tressler, the Houston Chronicle society reporter who was fired in March shortly after the Houston Press exposed she also moonlighted as a stripper at Houston’s high-end gentlemen clubs—and blogged about it under the alias ‘Angry Stripper’—is now suing the Chronicle for gender discrimination.

    Tressler, who filed the suit with help from celebrity attorney Gloria Allred, alleges she was fired for not disclosing her work as an exotic dancer:

    "I was very upset that I was fired because I had been told by many editors that I was doing a good job ... There was no question on the form that covered my dancing. I answered the questions on the form honestly," Tressler said in a statement.

    We’ll let the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sort this out, but the Chronicle may have a case as to why Tressler should have disclosed her gig, however infrequent. I’m no Houstonian, but I imagine there might be some overlap between Houston society and the clientele at a high-end gentleman’s club. That raises the possibility of a pretty plausible conflict of interest—if the prominent citizens Tressler covered by day are the same people who saw her strip by night, that's going to affect reporter-subject dynamics and it's going to compromise Tressler's position as a neutral observer. Tressler, who went to journalism school and is an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Houston, ought to know that.

    And let’s not forget the strip club. Had she disclosed her day gig to them? One can imagine having a journalist in the line-up could be pretty bad for business.

  12. May 9, 2012 03:10 PM

    OffTheBus takes a ‘breather’

    OffTheBus, The Huffington Post’s citizen journalism program for campaign coverage, hasn’t posted new content in almost a month. But the company says, though it may look like the wheels have popped off the bus, it’s just taking a pit stop. “It’s giving that brief breather before the rush begins,” says HuffPost Media Group’s chief of staff, Jimmy Soni.

    The lull is an opportunity for the four-year-old initiative to work out a couple of new, mobile technologies. “We’re creating a set of tools that allow citizen journalists to send things to us directly, and speed up time between when they submit something and when we look at it editorially,” Soni said.

    Some of the technological changes will involve new partnerships, especially around streaming video.

    Web traffic to OffTheBus “is lower compared to a similar point in 2008,” says Rhoades Alderson, HuffPo’s director of communications. But “social and community contributions have exploded,” so it isn’t an “apples to apples comparison,” says Alderson. Soni says traffic was “not a determining factor at all” in the decision to implement new technology.

    The project’s early years were described by Amanda Michel for CJR in 2009, but much has changed in the media landscape since then. OffTheBus began in “a world of first generation iPhones and BlackBerry proliferation,” Soni says. Now, OffTheBus’s citizen journalism techniques are “a baked in part of the HuffPost DNA.”

  13. May 9, 2012 12:31 PM

    9 newsroom buyouts at the Hartford Courant (updated)

    First, a disclosure: I have a soft spot for the Hartford Courant. It’s my hometown daily. I interned there twice during college, and they later hired me for two freelance stints when I was between jobs. As an intern, back in 2006 and then 2007, the newsroom was an inspiring place—Matthew Kauffman and Lisa Chedekel won a Dart Award for their series about mentally ill soldiers who were redeployed, and I sat among career reporters talented enough to work at the biggest publications but who chose to remain in Connecticut, working for “America’s Oldest Continuously Published Newspaper.”

    Things have changed since then.

    The Courant—owned by Tribune since 2000, when the Chicago-based company merged with then-owner, Times Mirror—was caught in the fallout from Tribune’s bankruptcy in late 2008. The newsroom has shrunk from some 400 employees 15 years ago to fewer than 150 today.

    The most recent buyout offer, which expired last week, has resulted in the loss of nine more newsroom staffers, including rock critic Eric Danton, columnist Susan Campbell, night editor Nancy Gallinger, reporter Mark Spencer, reader-submitted articles editors Mary Wilson and Sandra James, newsroom assistant Lynne Maston, and sports reporter Shawn Courchesne. I don’t know who the ninth person is, or whether this buyout will be enough to avert layoffs. (update: I'm told the nine employees won't know officially if their buyout requests are accepted until Friday.)

    The buyout was offered to the finance, advertising, circulation and print-side departments, but not Web staff or the TV staff from FOX CT, which took over a sizable chunk of the newsroom in 2009. (When the newsroom was renovated to include a TV studio, old carpeting was replaced everywhere except beneath the print reporters’ cubicles, creating a stark, visual line between the new and the no-longer-valued.)

    The writing would seem to be on the wall for the paper whose staff quasi-affectionately calls it "Mother Courant." But I can't help hoping, magical thinking though it may be, that the paper that made me want to be a journalist will somehow continue its tradition of great reporting through the digital shift and despite its negligent ownership.

  14. May 8, 2012 10:36 AM

    Who you calling ‘working-class’?

    Attention all political reporters and editors. If you don’t know about the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State, in Ohio, I urge you to bookmark its blog (Working-Class Perspectives) and check it frequently as the primary campaign unfolds. Below is a sampling of the latest, directed squarely at you, from John Russo, who runs the center. Read the full post here.

    Most journalists covering electoral politics define the working class as those without a college education. That definition is widely used, not only by reporters but also by some scholars and political analysts, in part because it’s easy to measure. I caution reporters that if they use this definition, then the working class seems to be shrinking as more people attend college. While some commentators have suggested that this shift makes the working class less important politically, I argue that this is simply a statistical shift. These days, many working-class people have at least some college education, and the working class continues to matter in American politics. In part because of that, I try to help journalists understand why class is not just a matter of education. It also has to do with occupation, income, wealth, and - among the hardest aspects to measure - culture.


    At the same time, I remind reporters that class is not the only identity that might affect how people view political candidates and issues. For example, white working-class men might well view economic and policy issues differently from white working-class women or black working-class men. I also try to help journalists understand that the working-class varies politically by region and state, in part because other issues, like race and types of employment, shape working-class cultures. When we add religious affiliations and social values, things become even more complicated, but that’s the point. I want to encourage reporters to get beyond their assumptions and stereotypes when they write about working-class voters and issues.


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