UPDATED
The Commonwealth Club event is scheduled for Thursday evening, March 30, in San Jose. (Details here.) Howard Weaver, VP of News for McClatchy, which is buying (some of) Knight Ridder, is the latest panelist. Howard Weaver, who was scheduled to be a panelist, has pulled out, unfortunately, but it still should be an interesting conversation.
Knowledge@Wharton: Are Newspapers Yesterday’s News? To remain competitive in the coming years, these scholars say, daily newspapers will have to strengthen their efforts to attract younger readers, make more imaginative use of the Internet, and develop stories, mostly local in nature, that better meet the needs of readers who have thousands of news and information sources at their fingertips.
There’s something facile about this analysis, though it makes many worthwhile points, because even the most dense people in the news business recognize the reality of the situation.
But the chief problem with this analysis is its apparent view that newspapers are telling stories to audiences, in whatever medium. There’s far too little recognition that the audience is part of the journalism process, or should be, in a world where newspapers’ most valuable roles may be as conveners of community conversations.
This is a huge leap for the industry. It’s fundamentally not in the DNA. It will be, or the papers won’t survive.
Salon: Washington Post on Domenech: “We did plenty of background checks”. Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, told Salon Friday that Post editors had thoroughly vetted young right-wing blogger Ben Domenech before they hired him to write for the site. He said editors saw no “red flags” that Domenech was a plagiarist. Domenech resigned from the Post site Friday after bloggers discovered that he’d copied entire passages from publications, including Salon and Rolling Stone, while he was working for his college newspaper. After he graduated, he wrote articles for the National Review Online and New York Press that also contained plagiarized passages.
Ouch all around…
You’ll find them — including instructions on what channel to set the TV (Fox News; you had to ask?) and what temperature to set in the room (apparently the veep and staff don’t know how to work the thermostat) — in Dick Cheney’s Suite Demands. Makes you proud, doesn’t it?
The BBC’s Rhod Sharp points me to “Portrait of a flashover,” in which New Orleans resident Gibbons Burke, armed with a digital camera and sound instincts, covers a fire. Sample from the text:
It appears firefighters are in the house from what look to be flashlights shining in the window, but this is a reflection of lights from the fire truck. There are six fire trucks on the scene. At this point the men are fighting the fire is in the bathroom of the second story above the front door near the flames.
Something happens and the south wing of the home blows up – fire ignites the hot burning gases that must have been accumulating in the attic adjacent to the upper bathroom. Tongues of ignited hot gases spew out several feet from the eaves under the roof line…
As Rhod notes, “There’s not much out there that qualifies as citizen journalism if this doesn’t.”
Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: By the end of 2005, 50 million Americans got news online on a typical day, a sizable increase since 2002. Much of that growth has been fueled by the rise in home broadband connections over the last four years. For a group of “high-powered” online users – early adopters of home broadband who are the heaviest internet users – the internet is their primary news source on the average day.
And it’s the younger readers who’ve forsaken newspapers almost entirely.
Meanwhile, McClatchy is taking bids for the 12 Knight Ridder papers it’s dumping, um, divesting, in the buyout of the bigger chain.
Good news for citizen journalists everywhere: Jonathan Weber’s New West Network has raised equity financing to continue and expand one of the best initiatives of its kind. New West has more in common with traditional media than most citizen media, but it’s engaging the audience at several levels.
I’m going to look at ajaxWrite as soon as the company’s servers come up for air (they’re swamped at the moment). It’s a Web-based writing tool that emulates Microsoft Word, according to the site created by Michael Robertson and his team.
Sounds interesting, anyway…
The fists haven’t stopped flying over the Huffington Post’s bad move in reprinting George Clooney’s statements in other venues as blog postings, and Arianna Huffington’s mea culpa is not placating the critics. The more I learn about what happened, the more I agree that this was an egregiously bad move on her part.
It all raises a question about a practice that is utterly routine in traditional journalism: the ghost-written op-ed piece. I recognize that although there are some similarities (Clooney’s representatives were at least partly complicit in the words’ republication), the situations are not the same — but I don’t consider it especially ethical of publications and the “writers” of these op-ed pieces to be passing off their words as authentic, either.
Such essays, usually under the bylines of politicians or celebrities, amount to deception. They are written by staffers or others, not by the big names themselves.
I hope that the newspapers now carving Huffington up for her transgression will take a long look at their own shops. Because the ghost-written op-ed piece is somewhat fraudulent, too.
Mark Glaser: Digging Deeper::Your Guide to Personalized News Sites. The perfect Daily Me would be the central place that has the news, blogs, discussions, podcasts — everything we want that’s tailored to our particular tastes — in one convenient place. While many sites have tried to reach this ideal, no one site has totally perfected it quite yet.
I’m more interested, ultimately, in the Daily We, but these sites are great starts on where we’re going.