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Thu, 3 Jul 2008
Why Buy The Cow...
Thoughtful post today about the newspaper industry on the New York Times's Outposts blog. In the wake of "perhaps the bloodiest week yet of a year where many papers are fighting for their lives," Timothy Egan notes that, be it in print or online, more people are reading newspaper content than ever before. Why, then, are newspapers finding it so hard to keep up with their online competitors? Parts of Egan's post are inexact, and parts are overwrought, but he does raise several valid points. Like this one:
And just how much do most contributors at the The Huffington Post make? Nothing! “Not our financial model,” as the co-founder, Ken Lerer famously said. From low pay to no pay — the New Journalism at a place that calls itself an Internet newspaper.Posted by at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comment on this post
Yes, the Brentwood bold-face types who grace HuffPo’s home page can afford to work for free, but it’s un-American, to say the least.
Long ago, I was a member of the steelworkers union, and also a longshoreman. If any of those guys on the docks heard that I was now part of a profession that asked people to labor for nothing, they’d laugh in their lunch buckets — then probably shut The Huffington Post down. Doesn’t the “progressive” agenda, much touted on their pages, include a living wage?
A Day at CJR
The Nation is running a little contest to get people to sign-up for their email lists. The grand prize? One lucky subscriber will spend “A Day at The Nation.” The promo offers a peek at editor in chief Katrina vanden Heuvel’s datebook (“9:30 am-finish article, 11 am—editorial meeting…”). Now doesn’t that sound exciting!
The problem here is that actually working at a magazine, I can assure you, involves a lot of solitary staring at computer screens and page proofs, punctuated by phone calls and the occasional meeting. I love it, but I’d be the first to admit it doesn’t make for a thrilling site visit.
Still, this Nation gambit led me to wonder, tongue-firmly in cheek, as to what “A Day at CJR” might look like. Here, in the spirit of a holiday weekend, it is.
9:45 am—impromptu discussion of highlights/lowlights from MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”10:00 am—editorial meeting scheduled
10:48 am—editorial meeting begins
11:15 am—Audit boss Dean Starkman joins editorial meeting
12:30 pm—redirect lost delivery person/prospective J-school student who has inadvertently wandered into office
1:30 pm—impromptu Andrea Mitchell joshing
2:00 pm—chit chat with intern
3:13 pm—paper jam
4:00 pm—chit chat with intern
4:30 pm—file piece to that you'd implied would be done by noon
(FYI, CJR’s newish email list sign-up is on the right side of our landing page. But no day promised, ok?)
Skewering The "Green Issue"
The Onion works its customary magic in its newsstand edition this week with a special edition “All-Paper Salute to the Environment”, that's as to-the-point a mocking of the hypocrisy of the publishing industry’s green issues as we’ve seen.
Inside it has a well-worth-reading oldie but a goodie headlined “450,000 Unsold Earth Day Issues of ‘Time’ Trucked To Landfill.”
Bonus headlines in the rail: “COMPANIES: How To Make Millions By Switching To A Green-Colored Logo” and on its online fake-magazine cover: “Our Fragile Ecosystem. Can it Continue To Turn A Profit?”
Fox and the...Hounds?
So the people at Fox & Friends aren't feeling so Fox-&-Friendly, apparently, toward The New York Times. On June 28, the Times published an article, "Fox News Finds Its Rivals Closing In," written by media reporter Jacques Steinberg and edited by TV editor Steven Reddicliffe, that discussed "ominous trends" in the network's viewership:
The most dominant cable news channel for nearly a decade and a political force in its own right, Fox has seen its once formidable advantage over CNN erode in this presidential election year, as both CNN and MSNBC have added viewers at far more dramatic rates.
The article was based, incidentally, on Nielsen ratings, and a Fox spokesperson, the piece notes, "refused several requests this week for comment about the channel’s ratings and strategy. "
And here are photos of Reddicliffe and Steinberg, respectively:
So. Why do we bring this all up, you may ask? Because of this, below (h/t: Media Matters), F&F's super-mature and journalistically rigorous response to what they're calling the Times's "hit piece." Submitted without further comment, except to note (in surprise) that neither Doocy nor Kilmeade mentions the word "Photoshop" in his tirade, and then to sigh (in frustration): Guys. Ugh. Seriously?
Covering Flip-Flops (A How-To)
Over at Time.com, Michael Scherer (who once worked here at CJR) observes:
Every day, flip-flop charges bang up against the political press like moths on a screen door. And we let some of them in, sometimes with the unexamined conceit that any shift in position is a window into the candidate's lack of character, toughness or principle...So how do we cull the moths to separate bogus flip-flop charge from valuable one?
With Scherer's homemade moth repellant -- in the form of "three questions that matter most" that, I presume, he believes he and his fellow campaign reporters should ask themselves when facing a flip-flop and a deadline. "Is the change substantial, or superficial? Was it done for political expediency? Was it done to fool the voting public?"
I am all for political reporters pausing to ask themselves a few questions before automatically writing up the flip-flop du jour, but the whole assigning of motives (why this flip? what motivated that flop?) can be tricky, mind-reading business.
Posted by at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comment on this postMore on That WaPo Obama Mortgage Story
Yesterday, my colleague Justin questioned the Washington Post's news judgment in running its Obama mortgage story.
At Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum "demand[s] that Barack Obama release his FICO score" before wondering, "seriously, folks," whether "the beltway press corps" has gone "insane," calling the story "a complete non-scandal over the fact that people with high incomes generally qualify for slightly better mortgage rates than regular working stiffs."
The Cult of Kiernan
Pat Kiernan, the NY1 News anchor who reads New Yorkers' newspapers to them every morning in his In The Papers segment, offers these thoughts-- in a New York Observer profile -- on what ails TV News :
I think the presentation of TV news is as much the problem as the technological changes. People like a more honest presentation of the news. I don’t shy away from that honesty and presentation of analysis in the news.
Nor did he shy away from mentioning the Pat Kiernan profile during yesterday's In The Papers:
This is a story that has one of those wacky sketches of me... A profile that makes an interesting point. It says there's a good percentage of the audience for this program that isn't the typical local news audience. The story says that "thousands of culturally literate New Yorkers" are drawn to NY1 every morning... We thank you for that....Posted by at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comment on this post
Wed, 2 Jul 2008
The V-Word and Dick Grasso
Was Dick Grasso’s win in court yesterday a personal “vindication” for him?
That’s what The Wall Street Journal says in the second paragraph of its page-one story. The New York state appeals court ruling—on a technicality—lets Grasso keep all of his $187.5 million pay package, which he, ahem, earned as head of the New York Stock Exchange, which as a nonprofit was effectively subsidized by taxpayers by not having to pay taxes.
But down in the ninth paragraph the WSJ says the ruling is a “technical knockout” and that the court didn’t rule on the merits of the case. That’s hardly vindication for Grasso even if he did ultimately win. The New York Times doesn’t get to the technicality until the eleventh paragraph of its Grasso Wins story.
The court ruled that since the NYSE is now a public company, the state has no right to sue it for excessive compensation—even though the exchange was a nonprofit the entire time Grasso was its chief.
We're pretty sure vindication is not what just happened, and we question the use of the term.
And if any legal principle was vindicated it was a fairly narrow one: An executive can have his way with a nonprofit and get off clean if it goes public before a court can rule on whether what he did was wrong.
This is not exactly Marbury vs. Madison material. Nothing was vindicated here, and that goes double for Grasso.
NYT's MTV Cribs-Like Limbaugh Profile
At one point in his 7,000-plus-word profile of Rush Limbaugh for this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, reporter Zev Chafets lays out his purpose: "I had come to talk to Limbaugh about his role in Republican Party politics."
But along the way, it seems Chafets was distracted by all the bling in Rush's World, so that the piece reads more like an episode of MTV Cribs (complete with the requisite look at what's in the entertainer's garage(s) -- in this case, "a black Maybach 57S, which runs around $450,000 fully loaded" and "half a dozen similar rides") than it does an effort to explore the questions posed (and hinted at) by the article's official Web blurb: "Bush is wildly unpopular. McCain is nobody’s idea of a movement guy. Conservatism is cracking up. What’s the king of talk radio to do?" Sounds promising. But what readers get is more like nine pages of anecdotes confirming that Limbaugh is both incredibly wealthy and incredibly insecure.
Writes Chafets: "Limbaugh informed me that I was the first journalist ever to enter his home" -- the 24,000 square feet Palm Beach one; there are five -- where, Chafets reports, "a life-size oil portrait of El Rushbo, as he often calls himself on the air, hangs on the wall of the main staircase" and "his staff lights fragrant candles throughout the house to greet his arrival from work each day." Totally Cribs!
Over dinner in Palm Beach (Limbaugh was, Chafets writes, "tickled... to be taken out to eat on The New York Times"):
Table talk focused on Limbaugh’s house, or rather his concern over my reaction to it...“When you saw my house today, you probably noticed that it isn’t filled with pictures of me and famous people,” [Limbaugh] said. “That’s not me. I don’t have a home that says, ‘Look who I know!’ ”
“No, you have a home that says, ‘Look what I have.’ ”
Must have been the wine talking.
Insecurity anecdote: Limbaugh tells Chafets that he "assumed there was a fraternity of broadcasting guys in New York. I thought my success would launch me into a circle of accomplished people. Look, I admired these people. Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather — people watched these guys. I thought they would welcome me as one of them. I was wrong.” Really? Limbaugh really thought that he'd be embraced by television news anchors as "one of them?" Fascinating.
Limbaugh on Bill O'Reilly: "Limbaugh expressed his opinion of the Fox cable king. He hadn’t been sure at the time that he wanted it on the record. But on second thought, 'somebody’s got to say it,' he told me. 'The man is Ted Baxter.'" Also, Limbaugh "has a deeply conflicted attitude toward Sean Hannity, his one-time stand in and now perpetual No. 2 on the Talkers list."
Chafets revels in poking at and stoking that insecurity:
From New York, I sent Limbaugh a teasing e-mail message: “Hannity has been first and hardest on the Reverend Wright controversy and the Bill Ayers thing. Is it possible that he is running a separate Operation Chaos with superior intel?”Limbaugh didn’t dispute that Hannity was first on the Wright and Ayers controversies. But, he wrote: “Things only take off when I mention them. That is the point.”
Two weeks later, The Daily Telegraph in London published a list of America’s most-influential pundits. Limbaugh finished fourth, behind Hannity. Once again I wrote a message to Limbaugh: “Are we looking at a changing of the guard on the right side of the dial?”
Limbaugh scoffed. “Since when have I cared what the media says?” he wrote. “Media polls are not the measure. Ratings ‘polls’ and revenue are. And it still ain’t close.”
I couldn’t resist. “I wasn’t asking about the media,” I wrote him. “I was asking about Hannity. Hannity can fairly take credit (as he does now, every night) for being more influential than any other commentator in changing the course of this election. That strikes me as new. Or am I wrong?”
At which point Limbaugh, who patiently and graciously answered dozens of my questions, allowed me to invade his bunker and his castle, shared hours of his time, permitted me access to his closest family and most-intimate friends, even his therapist, had enough. “Write what you want,” he snapped across cyberspace.
One thing that Chafets delivers -- after compiling many colorful descriptions and comparisons previously assigned to Limbaugh ("I've heard him compared to Mark Twain and Jackie Gleason, the Founding Fathers and Father Coughlin. Serious people have called him a serial liar and a moral philosopher, a partisan hack and a public intellectual..." )-- is his very own:
Like the great black singers of his generation, Limbaugh took the familiar pieties and ambient sounds of his time and place and used them to create a genre of entertainment, full of humor, passion and commercial possibility. There are many ways to look at Rush Limbaugh III: one is that he is the first white, Goldwater Republican soul shouter.
About That CW on Bush's HIV/AIDS Legacy
"Even human rights purist [and New York Times columnist] Nicholas Kristof" has lauded President Bush's HIV/AIDS work, writes Danielle Maestretti in the Utne Reader in a piece headlined "Bush, the AIDs President? Don't believe everything you read in the newspaper," in which she convincingly questions the congealing conventional wisdom about this Bush "legacy" and whether The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe should be "assigning legacy-level success to Bush's $15 billion global HIV/AIDS initiative."
