San Jose Mercury News: Wanted: Los Gatos bloggers. We’re looking for community bloggers in Los Gatos who can write about such things as events in town, school fundraisers, the score of the latest football game. We need someone who would love a forum for reflecting on the latest buzz story in town, or even write things to do for runners, kids, moms, retirees or other groups in town.

This could be a fairly big deal, especially if it means the paper will do more than just highlight what the bloggers do (i.e. pay them for what they do).

But the very fact that the paper has recognized what has been obvious for years — that the bloggers and others running websites in a community are able to supplement, and in some cases replace, what the newspaper has been doing, or failing to do.

Every newspaper should be a portal to the bloggers, Flickr and YouTube posters and others who are creating media about the towns and neighborhoods in the circulation area. That so few understand this is testament to the industry’s continuing cluelessness.

The Merc is owned by a company that has, from all available evidence, vastly more concern for profit than journalism — a company that appears not to see the value of excellence as a business proposition. So if this move is essentially to get more “content” for less money, it’s a loser.

But to the extent that the Mercury News is recognizing and helping to promote a wider and more diverse media ecosystem, this is a potentially noteworthy move.

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Job Descriptions:
__________________________________________________________

CO-EDITOR FOR MASHABLE

With more than 160,000 RSS subscribers, Mashable.com is one of the world’s
largest blogs focused on the latest Internet trends with a focus on social
media and Web 2.0 news. Mashable is currently hiring a Co-Editor who will
report directly to Mashable’s Editor-in-Chief.

Job Responsibilities Include:
- Assisting the Editor-in-Chief in making editorial decisions
- Assigning stories to other members of the Mashable team
- Writing breaking news stories
- Reviewing new Web 2.0 sites and services
- Interviewing executives from companies that Mashable covers
- Routinely discovering scoops that are relevant to Mashable’s audience
- Administrative duties (email, scheduling, etc.)

Requirements and Qualifications Include
- 3+ years of working in the social media space in an editorial role
- Exceptional writing skills and news judgment
- A strong social media presence (Blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Ability to source your own stories via your own network of contacts
- In-depth knowledge of key companies and figures in the Web industry
- Strong technical savvy and acumen that shows in your writing
- Familiarity with WordPress and Photoshop (or a comparable image software
package)
- Journalism degree preferred

______________________________

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER FOR MASHABLE

With more than 160,000 RSS subscribers, Mashable.com is one of the world’s
largest blogs focused on the latest Internet trends with a focus on social
media and Web 2.0 news. Mashable is currently hiring an Investigative
Reporter who will report directly to Mashable’s Editor-in-Chief.

Job Responsibilities Include:
- Writing breaking news stories
- Reviewing new Web 2.0 sites and services
- Interviewing executives from companies that Mashable covers
- Routinely discovering scoops that are relevant to Mashable’s audience
- Administrative duties (email, scheduling, etc.)

Requirements and Qualifications Include
- 3+ years of working in the social media space in an editorial role
- Exceptional writing skills and news judgment
- A strong social media presence (Blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Ability to source your own stories via your own network of contacts
- In-depth knowledge of key companies and figures in the Web industry
- Strong technical savvy and acumen that shows in your writing
- Familiarity with WordPress and Photoshop (or a comparable image software
package)
- Journalism degree preferred

*For immediate consideration, please send resumes and cover letter to
adamo@mashable.com.

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Today, however, he channels a common refrain in defending corporate executives in their shameful practice of backdating stock options. In this case, writing about Broadcom’s founder and CEO, Henry Nicholas, he says:

Mr. Nicholas did not benefit from any backdated stock options. He was Broadcom’s largest shareholder, thus had no natural or unnatural interest in overpaying employees with backdated stock options. What’s more, Ernst & Young, the company’s outside auditor, appears to have blessed the accounting in full knowledge that option grant dates had been assigned retrospectively to make sure employee options had the intended value.

As I said in a column last fall in PR Week magazine, this is bull:

Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that the backdating is flagrant dishonesty when not disclosed to shareholders (and that was the norm). Companies have had to restate billions of dollars in lower earnings to account for their lies.

In cases where executives did not personally have any of their own options backdated, the reasons cited for the backdating are pretty much the same: Everyone did it, because it was necessary to recruit and reward employees, and thereby make the company better, which was good for shareholders.

Well, then, so much for the no-personal-benefit garbage, unless somehow the executives’ interests are independent from what their employees’ interests. They’re not.

If backdating options - a procedure that would be legal, if still somewhat sleazy, if disclosed at the time - was beneficial for the company, it was by definition beneficial for the executives.

“Much of CEOs’ bonus pay is tied to reported earnings,” noted Jesse Fried, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in an op-ed column last year in the San Jose Mercury News. “So is the price at which executives can unload their stock. The firm-wide back-dating of options jacked up earnings, and the amounts involved were not trivial.”

This has been true since the backdating scandal broke. Why, then, are journalists still being stenographers for the spinners who recite the “didn’t personally benefit” mantra, as if it was the other side of an issue that has two legitimate points of view?

Perhaps the topic is too arcane — but arcane to the Wall Street Journal’s senior business columnist? Right.

Or perhaps it’s just journalistic laziness. Not in this case, either; Jenkins obviously spent some time learning the facts of the situation.

Maybe, as I’d guess in this case, it’s the journalist’s belief that options backdating is simply not a problem. He’s clear enough about that. But he should have the journalistic integrity to acknowledge that Nicholas did indeed benefit from the backdating.

Look, this is simple: If it’s good for your employees, and if your pay depends on their work or you own a substantial part of the company’s stock, it’s also to your benefit. That isn’t rocket science. It’s basic logic. Journalists shouldn’t let executives and their spinners — and Jenkins is clearly one of the latter group — get away with flouting it.

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Again, it’s his company’s paper now, and he and his team get to make these decisions. But the Not-so-Special Committee was always an unfunny joke, and clearly was designed that way.

These folks get paid $100,000 a year for their supposed work. What a crock.

They are: Susan Phillips, Tom Bray, Louis Boccardi, Jack Fuller and Nicholas Negroponte

They are apparently shameless. How do they look in the mirror?

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Actually, only the naive gave this “editorial independence” committee any credibility whatsoever. It’s Murdoch’s paper. He’s doing exactly what he wants to do with it, and no one should ever have given even a micro-second’s thought to any other possibility. Anyone who spends any more time discussing this committee’s meaningless activities is wasting time.

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It is never a good thing if many of your customers can no longer afford what you are selling. The UnitedHealth Group, which announced disappointing first-quarter earnings on Tuesday, said the weakening economy was causing fewer businesses and employees to sign up for its health insurance. UnitedHealth, whose stock fell sharply on the report, also cut its overall profit outlook for 2008.

The Times “outdoes itself in covering the news from an elite perspective with this piece,” Tom observes.

“Reporting and writing the piece from the perspective of people in the third to seventh deciles of the income distribution would all but certainly yield a lede something like: ‘The weakening economy is setting off a surge in the number of Americans without health coverage.’

“People want to know this, not just investors. Journalism needs to inform them, but is failing.”

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NY Times: Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand. Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

It is, of course, a scandal. What’s worse is the non-response of the media companies that have been suckers for this propaganda. Stonewalling is what we should expect from the government, not supposedly responsible news organizations.

Kudos to the NYT for exposing this outrageous behavior.

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Tom Shales, Washington Post: In Pa. Debate, The Clear Loser Is ABC. For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with.

Just when you thought traditional media couldn’t demean itself more, ABC’s tag-team does it. A dismal performance.

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the new documentary film about the journalism ethics battle and meltdown at the Santa Barbara News Press. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion on the state of journalism with former News Press Editor Jerry Roberts, “Citizen McCaw” director Sam Tyler and San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Page Editor John Diaz, moderated by journalism school professor Cynthia Gorney.

“Meltdown” is an understatement for what has happened at the Santa Barbara newspaper, a once-respected journal that has fallen under harsh times during the Wendy McCaw ownership.

If I were going to be in California tomorrow I’d be at this screening. If you’re in the neighborhood and have the time (and nontrivial but $50 admission going to the legal defense fund of people who were kicked out of the paper), please consider it.

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