Yahoo! style

Yahoo has published an online style guide that promises to teach you how to write for a global audience and to use the magic words that get you listed high in the search results.

And remember:

Text that works best on the Web is text that gets to the point fast and that makes it easy for readers to pick out key information.

Going rogue at the LA Times

Alex Pareene at Salon is the latest to criticize the Los Angeles Times for not labeling its "Top of the Ticket" blog, written by Andrew Malcolm and Jimmy Orr, as reliably conservative, and he ripped the paper for failing to identify Orr as a former flack for President George W. Bush. (Malcolm, as both Pareene and the Times notes, once served as First Lady Laura Bush's press secretary.)

Here's Pareene:

So. A former professional Republican flack is writing for the L.A. Times newsblog without the paper identifying him as such. Or even just saying it's a "conservative blog." ... In fact, nearly everything Malcolm and Orr write is critical of the Obama administration, disdainful of Democrats, and supportive of Republicans. ...

If the Times wants a conservative blog, they can go ahead and launch a conservative blog. The point is to actually identify it as such. Right now the Times seems to be catering their online product specifically for Drudge and the right-wing blogosphere while pretending it's still objective in the traditional old newspaper sense of the word.

I can only assume Pareene, whose story is dated June 28, searched the Times site for relevant information about Orr and came up empty. As of today, the paper does include a bio for Orr that says he was "a spokesman for President George W. Bush and directed the e-communications strategy as the White House Internet Director." The bio is dated June 22, 2010, which is six days before Pareene's story ran - although Orr has written for the blog since at least April.

Prior to Orr, TOTT contributors included Johanna Neuman and Don Frederick, neither of whom were shills for conservative talking points.

A few weeks ago, Eric Boehlert at Media Matters took a stab or two at the blog and Malcolm's "sneering" political wit (here's Patterico hating on Boehlert, if you crave some balance), and LA Observed blogger Kevin Roderick, a former Timesman, had a few words to say about the blog becoming a Republican mouthpiece:

Malcolm has developed a whole second life as a conservative media pundit off his anti-Obama platform at the L.A. Times. It's easy to see what Malcolm gets out of it — he used to be pretty anonymous even within the paper — and the paper's website gets some national Republican eyeballs it wouldn't otherwise. But if you're the Times suits, why not double your pleasure with smart voices whose loyalty is to Times readers over ideological water carrying? If you're gonna go down the cheap hits route with shtick that wouldn't make the LAT's Op-Ed page, at least play the rest of the spectrum. The LAT may soon have to compete at home with the Wall Street Journal and New York Times — and they want to make a stand by boasting they're only interested in engaging the reddest of Republicans?

Malcolm, in a recent interview with his own paper, explains the recipe of his success:

I discovered the freshness of almost live exchanges with the readers. Using in-jokes. Code words for regulars. Past references to favorite phrases. Throwing in little comments. We turned the old-fashioned, robotic inverted pyramid newspaper writing into more of a conversation with friends at a sidewalk cafe. And readers responded by 100s of thousands. So just like back in sixth grade Show & Tell, when the class laughed, I did more of it. Did I mention, I have never had more fun?

Twenty-one years after the Exxon Valdez

Former Pasadena Star-News reporter Cindy Chang traveled to the small fishing village of Cordova, Alaska for the Times-Picayune to survey the lasting damage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Residents there, whose lives and livelihoods were torn apart by the disaster and who can still find pools of oil inches below the surface of the ground, had some grim advice for the people living along the Gulf Coast:

Despite the pain of dredging up the past, most Cordovans are willing to share their stories with visitors. They volunteer advice to their Gulf Coast counterparts, with "Don't trust BP" the most common admonition.

"Don't believe anything the oil company says. They have huge PR departments whose job it is to minimize the collateral damage," said Mike Lytle, a Cordova fisherman. "I hope you have better luck than we did with the oil companies." ...

"A lot of lives are going to be affected. It'll never be the same. It'll take years and years to work through it," said Bruce Robertson, who has fished local waters for close to 30 years. "Nice families will be broken apart. Businesses will be lost. It's not going to be pretty."

Personality journalism

The resignation of blogger David Weigel from the Washington Post has the commentariate in an uproar: Was the Washington Post fair to accept his resignation (de facto firing)? Should fishbowlDC have published emails written on a listserv that wasn't meant to be public? What is the role of a blogger versus a "normal" columnist?

To me, this is the predictable consequence of the celebrification of journalism, as papers looking to increase traffic turn to personalities (brand-name journalists) who are able to rise up through the fractured mediascape. In this case, a well-known libertarian writer was caught sending untoward messages about well-known conservative commentators on a server used by well-known liberal commentators. In a media world context, this was a celebrity cat fight, with name brands facing off in the newest electronic bubble.

Expect it to be a trend.

Four in the morning

1. David Brooks blames the message the messengers choose to deliver for Gen. Stanley McChrystal's downfall. NYT

2. Robert Rector eviscerates a Michigan lawmaker's cheeky proposal to license journalists. Robert Rector

3. Walter Shapiro says the Rolling Stone exposé of Gen. McChrystal means the end of fly-on-the-wall journalism for now (which will make David Brooks [see above] happy). Politics Daily

4. The Internet overlords want to give online pornography its own .xxx suffix. Reuters

In from the cold

Blogger and Los Angeles Times pressman Ed Padgett says his suspension at the paper will be lifted at 4 p.m. today and that he will meet with management tomorrow to "discuss or clarify what content can be published online."

Padgett was suspended Tuesday over posts he made after a production problem that led to delays in the delivery of Friday's newspaper.

Greatest tennis match ever?

The longest tennis match in history, between John Isner of the United States and Nicolas Mahut of France, ended today, after 11 hours and 5 minutes of play, with Isner winning 70 games to 68.

Was it the greatest match in Wimbledon history? Who knows? But the greatest tennis report, with Guardian editor Xan Brooks, about the longest match ever can be heard on today's "To The Point." The interview, which can be downloaded here, starts at about the 45 minute mark.

Brooks live-blogged yesterday's portion of the match. Scroll down to about 2:45 p.m., when he starts to take notice of the marathon session taking shape on Court 18.

Comings and goings

Los Angeles Times reporter Matea Gold, who's been covering entertainment media for the paper from New York, is heading to Washington to work for the Tribune desk there, LA Observed reports.

Every tar ball is an opportunity

It's hard to find inspiration in the oily muck washing around the Gulf of Mexico, but BP is trying. The company has hired a pair of writers, dubbed "BP journalists," to find, as the New Orleans Times-Picayune puts it, the "silvery sheen in the dark cloud of oil."

Unlike most journalists, these "reporters" are not allergic to positive news when it comes to spinning a tragic event. Instead, BP's Paula Kolmar and Tom Seslar have removed the blinders of cynicism and honesty to wax poetic about the cleanup effort. Here's Kolmar on the gift the oil spill has given her:

I saw the skimmers. I saw the relief well drill ships. I saw the support vessels circling the incident site. It was indeed a sobering privilege.

Indeed, she goes on to talk about the "ballet at sea as mesmerising as any performance in a concert hall, and worthy of an audience in its own right." It's enough to make one wonder why Louisianans are having all the fun.

In his travels, Seslar has discovered that Gulf residents see their plight as merely a reflection of what BP is going through:

Paul, a well-spoken man supplementing his Social Security income by driving a Houston taxi, sees BP’s current image challenges as similar to what he faces all day long.

Haven't we all suffered the proverbial failure of our blowout preventer?

Ryan Chittum at Columbia Journalism Review has compiled even more of these paeans to gushing crude.

The new journalism? Or just good journalism?

In defending Michael Hastings and Rolling Stone against complaints from media "hacks," of which National Review's Rich Lowry is the only one named, Barrett Brown of Vanity Fair offers an interesting, and wrong, analysis of what the Hastings piece shows about the future of journalism.

Brown writes:

Yes, Rich; the most impact-laden story of the year, the one in which General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and his aides talked trash about President Barack Obama and members of his administration, appeared in Rolling Stone, not National Review. And it was written by a perfect specimen of the new breed of journalist-commentator that will hopefully come to replace the old breed sooner rather than later, and which has already collectively surpassed the old guard by every measure that counts—for instance, not being forever wrong about matters of life and death.

First off, National Review is chock-o-block full of new-breed "journalist-commentator"s and that's precisely why it would never have done the McChrystal story - N.O. likes the military too much. Second, despite the occasional opining in Hastings's profile, the greatest impact of the article comes from the unadorned quotes, when he lets the subjects in the story speak without a filter - the reader gets the comments in their raw form, and that's why they matter so much. Indeed, that's what the "old guard" media is supposed to be doing, according to its own standards. It often fails because it wants to maintain access or has to agree to ridiculous rules under military embed rules.

The point is, Hastings did not do a modern-day Hunter S. Thompson job on McChrystal, nor did his opinions about the war effort lead President Barack Obama to relieve McChrystal of command. It was the fact that McChrystal and his top aides expressed such open contempt for civilian authority in front of Hastings - had Hastings decided to be a commentator instead of a journalist, a participant or columnist instead of a faithful witness, the story likely would have flopped. He got access, he got close to his subjects, he listened and he reported. Just because the story appears in Rolling Stone and contains some cuss words, or because Rich Lowry said something silly, or because Hastings called the Marja offensive "doomed," shouldn't overshadow what really matters about the story.

(h/t fishbowlLA)

Rolling Stone gathers few comments

New media hawks have noted that Rolling Stone magazine failed to garner the attention it deserves on its website commensurate with the media attention it received for publishing Michael Hastings's profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal - you know, the article that apparently got the hand-picked commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan fired by the man who hand-picked him.
Here's how Nieman Journalism Lab saw it:

After the piece ran, it started picking up incoming links, presumably driving tremendous traffic to the site. I checked in on the story today, exactly 24 hours later, to find that, despite the story completely dominating the news cycle — TV, blogosphere, Twitter, newspapers — only 16 comments had been posted to the story (not counting a couple dozen comments responding to those comments). When you try to view all 16, you get a 404 error message. No users had “shared” or “liked” it, according to the story’s social media meter. (Although that’s probably an error — I tried liking it and it still says zero.) In any event, that’s rough — the vast majority of the conversation is happening elsewhere.

Does the lack of comments mean the story or the publisher failed in some way? Or does it show that most readers no longer worry about checking original sources for information, choosing instead to digest the fast-food version of complex and important news reports?

Archibold, Cave head to Mexico

Former Los Angeles Times reporter and editor Randy Archibold is headed to Mexico to become the new Mexico City Bureau Chief for the New York Times. Archibold is the paper's L.A. correspondent and has mostly covered immigration and border issues in recent years. He'll be joined in Mexico City by reporter Damien Cave, who served as Miami Bureau Chief for the New York Times and was in Baghdad before that.

Current Mexico City chief Marc Lacey is headed to Phoenix

Here's part of the memo:

Before his stint in L.A., Randy worked in Metro writing about education, politics (including the 2000 Senate race between Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio and the 2004 vice presidential race of John Edwards), as well as anchoring a series, 125 Cedar Street, about people who lived in the shadow of the twin towers and found themselves without homes after 9/11. Before joining The Times in 1998, Randy worked at The L.A. Times for five years as a reporter and editor.


Damien arrives in Mexico via Miami and Baghdad, with a detour to Haiti to contribute a stream of memorable stories as part of our team coverage of the earthquake. As Miami bureau chief, he ranged widely, from memorable long form pieces like the psychological scars among women in combat to a smart political take on the Charlie Christ (sic) race to his knowing, fun essay on Tampa as host of the 2012 Republican convention. In Baghdad, he helped cover a pivotal year, including a memorable collaborative effort that showed street-level fears in Baghdad's neighborhoods about security. He also brings to his new assignment a commitment to innovative approaches on the Web and in video, working with his wife, Diana.

In related news, chief political correspondent Adam Nagourney is slated to become the new L.A. bureau chief for the New York Times. He will replace Jennifer Steinhauer, who is heading back to Washington to cover Congress. The change was reported back in March.

LA Times suspends pressman blogger

Los Angeles Times pressman Ed Padgett says his bosses suspended him for blogging about last Thursday's production problems that led to delivery problems Friday morning.

Padgett, who posts at the Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20 Year Club, said the suspension could lead to termination, pending the outcome of an internal investigation:

I was told I had been warned in the past regarding my blogging, but I was only warned about broadcasting circulation numbers and nothing else. 

So much for first amendment rights.

Padgett posts included the news that the Times had to restart its Orange County printing presses after having shuttered the facility days before and the rising temperatures inside the Olympic plant. (The warning he refers to came last June when he reported that the paper's circulation had fallen below one million.)

Padgett also called for unspecified changes at Times in response to the production problems, which might be the post that got him into hot water. Here's part of what he said:

I’m not certain how many subscribers have fled the Los Angeles Times over the fiasco yesterday, but the numbers will be revealed to the pressmen shortly as the amount of newspapers produced daily will most definitely decline deeply. ...


The public relations damage at the Los Angeles Times was great, with thousand’s of dollars in rebates to the advertisers for newspapers not delivered to our readers. We have a few anchors here at the LA Times that need to be jettisoned overboard, and quickly.

MediaNews to start building walls

Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group will begin its experiment with paywalls sometime next month, the industry trade publication News and Tech reports.

From the story:

The publisher will use the Enterprise Record in Chico, Calif., and the York (Pa.) Daily Record and York Dispatch to evaluate paywalls, according to David Bessen, IT director and Howard Saltz, editorial director, at MediaNews Group Interactive. ...

MNG is calling its model "member zones." Consumers will be able to read up to 10 stories for free each month before they are asked to begin paying for access.

More details to come.

Four today

1. A new news filter that promises unfiltered news. LAO

2. Howard Kurtz profiles the Center for Public Integrity. WaPo

3. Corporate puppets versus hometown publishers. Anniston Star

4. Lemon juice does not make you invisible. Errol Morris

Back to Orange

After Friday's delivery troubles, the Los Angeles Times has restarted the presses at its Orange County facility, only days after shutting the plant down.

Needless to say, the Times' pressmen are not happy - but are trying to keep cool.

Four in the morning

1. Not sure if this is a consequence of the closure of the Orange County printing plant, but the Los Angeles Times got delivered late today in parts of L.A. and Orange County due to problems with its remaining presses. LAT

2. The iPad revolution continue to revolve, with Time magazine's latest app getting the Gizmodo staff all googly eyed. Gizmodo

3.Making Twitter shorter. New Yorker

4. (Self-promotion alert) On today's "To The Point," Wikipedia is more popular than ever but fewer people are contributing - that's led to an interesting change in policy. TTP

Newsroom cuts in San Diego

The creation of the "Jr. Staff Writer" at the San Diego Union-Tribune isn't as funny as it first appeared. Apparently the lower paying position coincides with yet another round of newsroom layoffs. Between 34 and 40 reporters, web editors and copy editors could lose their jobs, according to NBC San Diego.

Comings and goings

J. Patrick Coolican has joined the LA Weekly as a web editor and reporter. Coolican comes from the Las Vegas Sun, where he covered politics. It is no coincidence that Weekly editor Drex Heikes served as deputy managing editor of the Sun during much of Coolican's tenure there.

Know your audience

The Boston Globe stops being so high and mighty and finally listens to what it's readers want.

Can he say "f*&k you" in a deposition?

Sam Zell is scheduled to be deposed on June 28 in the Tribune Co.'s never-ending bankruptcy case, the blog ProtectConsumerJustice.org reports.

Noted: Eric Bailey Scott Martelle, who was cut from the Los Angeles Times just months before Tribune filed for bankruptcy, authored the post.

Journalism lite

The San Diego Union-Tribune has a job listing for something it calls a "Jr. Staff Writer," which one person described to me as "reporter lite."

Here's the description of duties:

Under supervision, will research and write news and straight forward short stories with low level of complexity, analysis and narrative, in accordance with identified style and structure; compile lists, contribute regularly to blogs during the course of the work day; work with reporters as directed to enhance larger trend stories; may “fill in” in other areas as assigned when reporters are away from their beats; may use social media to enhance readership and find sources, and assist with daily cops calls.

Salary is negotiable.

To be young and struggling

National Journal and Atlantic writer Ron Brownstein will be on the UCLA campus Tuesday, along with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, to talk about economic challenges facing the so-called Millenial generation (people born between 1981 and 2002). Brownstein summarizes here a recent poll that explores the ways young people are experiencing the economic meltdown and how it is shaping their views.

The program runs from 9 to noon and will be held in the California room at the UCLA Faculty Center, 480 E. Charles Young Dr. To RSVP, visit thenexteconomy.eventbrite.com.

Four in the morning

1. You might want to curb your sexting while at work, thanks to a unanimous ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court. LAT

2. Get to know the semantic web - before it gets to know you. Nieman Journalism Lab

3. Faced with a lagging number of contributors, Wikipedia plans to change protocals for editing "sensitive" articles. NetworkWorld

4. The L.A. Press Club bets on celebrities. fishbowlLA

Bakewell to buy the Watts Times

Real estate developer, activist and LA Sentinel publisher Danny Bakewell is in final negotiations to buy the LA Watts Times from publisher Melanie Polk. Here's Bakewell quoted in the Sentinel:

"I am proud and honored that Melanie chose me and my family to continue the great legacy of the Watts Times, its founders and her parents. We thank and applaud her for the great work she has done in making this newspaper one of Black L.A.'s finest."

The Sentinel bills itself as the largest and most influential African-American newspaper in the Western United States.The LA Watts Times calls itself the most widely distributed African-American newspaper in Los Angeles.

(via fishbowlLA)

Comings and goings

Pasadena Star-News reporter Emma Gallegos is leaving the paper for a job at the Los Angeles Daily Journal. Her final day is Monday.

The "them" generation

We are all marketers now. To succeed in today's media, one must successfully engage The Audience - which often means repeated and desperate attempts to meet the mysterious and mercurial expectations of a largely unknown "them."

In this cause, former Chicago Tribune editor Jack Fuller argues that journalists need to better understand the human psychology to devise ways to carry forth good journalism in an age when the Audience makes all the decisions.

From his post at Nieman Journalism Lab:

The sciences of the mind offer a lot of help if we are willing to learn from them. They explain, for example, why the immediate crowds out the important. Why bad news attracts attention more than good news does. They can show us how emotion interacts with the human brain’s inherent mental shortcuts to lead us systematically to erroneous conclusions. They can point us to the ways in which search algorithms interact with emotions and these mental shortcuts to mislead people about the relative importance of various pieces of information. They can even help us understand the way our ability and impulse to read other people’s minds draws us to a story and light up other secrets of how and why narrative works.

It should be clear by now that the challenge for journalists from here forward is not only the steadfast adherence to the values of accuracy and independence and the social responsibility to provide a civic education but also the development of new ways of thinking and talking about how to advance the social mission of journalism in a radically and rapidly evolving environment. The answer is not to figure out how to transport 20th century news presentation into 21st century delivery mechanisms but rather to create a new rhetoric of news that can get through to the changed and changing news audience

Phrases like the "sciences of the mind" sound anachronistic to me, but let's set that aside. Frankly, I'm not sure how practical any of this is, even though I sympathize with the goal. Grasping the basic tenets of human behavior is hard enough; do we really believe we have the ability to use that limited knowledge to create a "new rhetoric of news"?

It's not that change is bad - or that new ways of communicating the news impossible to construct. What I'm critical of is this bizarre faith that measurements and data are the keys to better communication. We should embrace the author/ego vs. crowd/id dynamic and let new forms of news develop organically - indeed, that's going to happen whether we plan for it or not. We should stop being slaves to the metric and stop condescending to the "them."

Four in the morning

1. At least the headline isn't editorializing ... oh wait. Politico

2. The coming onslaught of privacy legislation. San Jose Mercury News

3. Journalists need to make readers understand why they need to pay attention. Nieman Lab

4. Like his Republican opponent, Jerry Brown will release a budget plan that can safely be ignored. PropZero

The Huffington Post sectional

The revolutionary Huffington Post seems to be following the old newspaper model in developing sections that focus on different interests. The latest, HuffPo Arts. From Amy Wicks at WWD (via Romenesko):

The section is an outgrowth of the kind of stories that formerly ran in local editions or relevant sections, such as Style. “It won’t be overly formal,” said editor Kimberly Brooks (who happens to be married to filmmaker Albert Brooks, so she should get lots of film world dish). Brooks talked about posting photography of emerging bands and mentioned a new feature called “The Skinny,” which will have the latest on the arts scene, including gallery and museum openings. “The site will also have blogs that people are not normally exposed to,” Brooks added. Senior editor Willow Bay (who is married to Disney chief Robert Iger, so there could be lots of gossip about Mickey, Buzz and Miley) noted that stories about the arts have been popular on The Huffington Post, especially in New York and Los Angeles, and it “felt like the right time” to create a dedicated section.

A new L.A. magazine

Former LA Weekly editors Laurie Ochoa and Joe Donnelly plan to deliver the first edition of their quarterly literary journal Slake in early July. LAO

The big merge

Wired has more on the big public media platform merger being shepherded by NPR president Vivian Schiller. From the story:

The country’s five silos of public radio and television are spilling into each other with a joint program that will allow them – and eventually the public itself — to build apps, stations, websites and other media services combining audio, text and video content from every public radio and television outlet in the country.

-snip-

The Public Media Platform will cross-pollinate news across those five networks, and will provide data analysis to help reporters inside and outside those organizations present complex information more effectively. Both will be subject to various licensing rules, but the idea is to allow member stations and eventually third parties to distribute this information however they see fit.

We’re going to spend the next six months figuring out exactly [the] rights [and metadata] issues, but the ultimate goal of this is to make this content available,” said Schiller. “Say there’s a blogger who is particularly focused on the BP crisis in the Gulf — they will be able to pull out still photographs, national and international reporting, reporting from local stations, video from PBS, data, and mash that all up together.

(found via Nieman Journalism Lab)

Orange crush

The Los Angeles Times shuttered its Orange County printing plant today, according to Times pressman Ed Padgett:

The Los Angeles Times Orange County Production Facility, opened in 1968 to much fanfare, died on a quiet note early this morning with the printing of the LAT Extra edition.

The remaining two crews at the facility will now move to the downtown Los Angeles production facility this weekend.

There had been some hope that changes in ownership at the Orange County Register could win the plant a reprieve. It wasn't to be.

Has it come to this? Yes.

Grist's Jennifer Prediger (a former colleague at the Claremont Courier) donned a fox mask and asked for donations to keep the nonprofit website's environmental journalists on the payroll. Cutesy or not, direct appeals will have to become more the norm than the exception if important - but often neglected - forms of journalism are to continue to thrive.

Here's the video:

Entrapment journalizm

Simon Owens at Bloggasm attempts to dispell the silly notion that conservative political activists with cameras are doing the hard work of uncovering corruption that the lamestream media chooses to ignore. Instead, he argues, the likes of James O'Keefe and Jason Mattera are seeking attention - and YouTube hits - for their political views.

A link to Owens' column is here.

The ambush method, as described by Owens, seems to borrow from the work of the Daily Show and even the old Howard Stern radio program. Except that instead of being funny, and possibly satirical, the right-wing videos seethe with a raw, impotent anger that makes the whole enterprise humorless.

Isikoff heads to NBC

Investigative reporter Michael Isikoff is jumping ship from Newsweek to join NBC. Here's the scoop from Gorkana USA:

Michael Isikoff, an Investigative Reporter at Newsweek, will be joining NBC News as National Investigative Correspondent. Michael, who worked at Newsweek for 16 years, will continue to be based in Washington, D.C. He will report for all platforms of NBC News including NBC Nightly News, Today and MSNBC.

Bring out your dead

The drug wars in Mexico have left thousands of people dead - often the result of gruesome killings - and one tabloid, El Nuevo Alarma!, has made it its business to feed the appetite of readers who want to see the gory aftermath.

From the Daily Beast:

With every ritual execution, with every decapitation, the editors of Mexican tabloids like El Nuevo Alarma! (warning: graphic photos) snap into action. Alarma! is Mexico’s most shameless tabloid, like the New York Post with one-100th of the editorial discretion. Since 1963, Alarma! has specialized in publishing graphic photos of Mexico’s dead, and, now, the drug cartels have handed the paper an unending stream of bodies. “Ellas También,” reads the cover headline of a recent issue, alongside the photo of two youngish women who had been murdered by the cartel that calls itself La Familia. The editor, Miguel Ángel Rodriguez Vazquez, told me the photo piqued his interest, because it’s not every day he sees a woman so casually executed.

-snip-

Alarma! is a weekly newspaper. It claims a circulation of 80,000, with 15,000 to 20,000 of those copies sold in the United States—the bulk of them in southern California, Texas and New York.

A new television guide in the LA Times

The Los Angeles Times plans to bring back its weekly TV book, after having dropped it three years ago. From the press release:

The Los Angeles Times will re-launch its TV Times™ guide on Sunday, June 13^th via newsstands and retail outlets throughout Southern California. Being undertaken as a tiered roll out, with an opportunity for subscribers to opt-in now for home delivery beginning September 5th, the TV Times joins the paper's Sunday line-up of news, opinion, entertainment, feature coverage and classifieds as a 44-page tabloid section. 


The new TV Times turns up the volume on The Times' former 28-page book, last published in April 2007, to now offer 24-hour daily grid listings spanning morning, afternoon, primetime and late-night programming, four pages of alphabetized TV/cable/satellite movie listings, a full-page cover story, a TV-related crossword puzzle, episode highlights and synopses, and a dedicated sports programming page. Ad units are available on the front and back covers.

Four in the morning

1. The Wall Street Journal is making googly eyes at Los Angeles, hoping, as the New York Times does, to take advantage of a severely weakened Los Angeles Times. LAO

2. AOL plans to be the "largest net hirer" of journalists next year. Ad Age (via Romenesko)

3. Yahoo and Huffington Post are getting cozy. Beet.tv (via Romenesko)

4. Meg Whitman wants to buy your vote, but you'll have to buy your own drink. fishbowlLA

From gray to black

Nieman Journalism Lab has the 50 words most often looked up by New York Times readers in the first half of the year. Many of the words walk the dark side of the dictionary, reflecting the times we're in.

Trends that need to stop

Dear Technology,

Would you please put an end to this?:

ABC News' "Good Morning America" now has a "Magic Wall" to call its own.

This morning GMA co-anchor George Stephanopoulos unveiled the "Frustration Index," which used the wall to visually present public attitudes on the President's performance, the economy, satisfaction with the government and support for incumbents.

 Thank you,

America

Setting the bar low, then jumping it

Slate blogger Mickey Kaus has set an exceptionally low bar for himself in his windmill-tipping battle to embarrass Sen. Barbara Boxer in today's Democratic primary. He's declared that if he wins more than 5 percent of the vote it will be, as LA Weekly reporter Gene Maddaus put it, "a historic repudiation" of the three-term incumbent.

Except that even the most obscure challengers often exceed the 5-percent mark in primary elections. Meaning Kaus will almost certainly succeed in his effort of a historic repudiation, and probably with two or three percentage points to spare. But will anyone notice?

Where have all the watchdogs gone?*

Jodi Enda at American Journalism Review chronicles the decline of watchdog reporting on government regulators - including those that oversee mining and oil operations. As media companies decided to cut back on all that boring reporting (and the expense of paying for reporters to cover those boring beats), we ended up with less coverage overall. Instead, the journalists increasingly arrive after the tragedy and start to ask 'why?'.

Funny how that happens.

From the story:

Nine years ago, AJR documented how newspapers and wire services had shifted from covering government "buildings"--shorthand for a blanket approach to reporting on departments and agencies--to covering issue-oriented beats. (See "Where Are the Watchdogs?" July/August 2001.) Reporters abandoned their desks in what once had been bustling pressrooms in stately federal buildings all across the capital and worked from modern news bureaus in staid rooms that often resembled insurance offices. At the time, bureau chiefs explained in what might be described as lockstep language that the change was a way to bring alive coverage of dry policy issues, to engage readers who had tuned out incremental Washington stories.


"There's been a real castor-oil quality of coverage," Kathleen Carroll, then Knight Ridder's Washington bureau chief and now executive editor of the Associated Press, said in 2001. "If you look back at the way Washington stories were written in the past, you see that it's just boring as hell."


Bureau chiefs trumpeted their move to issue-related coverage, saying that by leaving the daily drudgery to the wires, they had more time and more resources to devote to investigative and enterprise reporting.

But toward what end? Did journalists use their newfound freedom from daily coverage to keep closer tabs on what really was happening behind the imposing façades of federal buildings? Did they do a better job of telling readers what was going on before and after, rather than during, press conferences? Did they forgo the dull, incremental stuff to better serve the American people, to make sure their elected and appointed officials were using taxpayers' money wisely and honestly, using sound judgment, serving the public good? Were they better watchdogs?


The evidence suggests the answer is no. Certainly, there have been some standout stories in the past decade--Knight Ridder stood virtually alone in questioning the Bush administration's march to war in Iraq; Copley News Service sent a corrupt member of Congress to prison. But it is no secret that the story of Washington newspaper bureaus in the 2000s is one of cutbacks and closures, and less coverage.

*Update: Jodi Enda will be a guest on today's "To The Point" to talk about her article. The segment will air just after 12:45 p.m. Pacific on KCRW 89.9, or stream it here.

Comings and goings

Los Angeles Times reporter Phil Willon is leaving the City Hall beat and will become a "roving" state reporter for the newspaper based in the Inland Empire, where he currently lives (imagine his commute).

Taking his place on the City Hall beat will be Patrick McDonnell, a veteran Times reporter with a good deal of experience overseas. Most recently, he's covered labor issues for the paper - which seems quite appropriate for someone covering L.A. politics.

Read the memo at fishbowlLA.

Four in the morning

1. James Rainey profiles "Roger the Scanner Guy," Santa Barbara's police blotter phenom. LA Times

2. The military denies a reporter entry to a murder trial because the reporter won't sign away his rights. Fayetteville Observer (via Romenesko)

3. What the Intertubes have done to our fragile brains. Atlantic

4. Politifact's Truth-o-Meter goes on down to Georgia. PolitiFact

Helen Thomas retires

Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas will retire in the wake of a controversy that erupted when she said Israelis should "get the hell out of Palestine." Thomas, 89, has covered the White House since the Kennedy administration.

Next in line

The Latino/labor political machine has a finely tuned process for anointing new leaders in the age of term limits. Gene Maddaus at the LA Weekly profiles the emergence of Ricardo Lara, a nobody to outsiders and already a favorite to win California's 50th Assembly District seat.

Silver and Gray

Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog became essential reading during the 2008 presidential campaign and won him a couple snazzy book contracts. Now, the New York Times has decided to host the blog on its site and make Silver a regular contributor at the Sunday magazine. NYT

In iPhone case, shield law doesn't matter

A court has set aside concerns that police trampled the state's shield law protecting the free-press rights of journalists and appointed a "special master" to search through the computer files of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen in hopes of finding information about a prototype iPhone. Apparently Chen's attorney, Thomas Nolan, brokered a deal to let the search happen.

Chen published several online stories and videos about the prototype, which he obtained after Gizmodo's parent company, Gawker Media, agreed to pay $5000 to a man who said he found the phone in a bar.

Four today

1. California Watch, run by the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, has hired three new reporters: former Los Angeles Daily Journal and LA Times reporter Joanna Lin; Pulitzer Prize-winner Ryan Gabrielson, and reporter Susanne Rust. LA Observed

2. The San Diego Union-Tribune appears to be contemplating more newsroom cuts. fishbowlLA

3. Blogger Danny Sullivan accuses the "mainstream media" of doing what he claims the mainstream media accuses bloggers of doing: taking a scoop without giving due credit. Daggle

4. The San Diego News Network, bolstered by big donations and rosy talk, has followed its cousin, the Orange County News Network, into oblivion. All writers and freelancers were fired as of June 1. San Diego Reader

Pay with your publicity

The rise of social media could make pay walls for news sites unnecessary, according to Felix Salmon, who argues that advertisers will pay more if they can target their ads to consumers with Twitter or Facebook accounts than consumers who merely subscribe to the site.

From his post:

The fact is that if I sign in to a free site using my Twitter login, I’m actually more valuable to advertisers than if I paid to enter that site. That’s because the list of people I follow on Twitter says a huge amount about me, and a smart media-buying organization can target ads at me which are much more narrowly focused than if all they knew about me was that I was paying to read the Times.

He goes on to say news sites would be smarter to let readers register through their existing social-media accounts, rather than use their own registration systems:

At that point, they’re not “useless tourists” any more: they’re highly valuable and targetable news consumers. And the question of whether or not they’re paying for their news becomes much less important to advertisers. And, therefore, to publishers as well.

The success of such a system depends on whether news sites draw a large enough crowd that advertisers actually do find the information useful. The New York Times probably does, but are there enough Twitter users in Pasadena to make this registration system profitable to the Pasadena Star-News?

(Found via Recovering Journalist)

Masters to THR

Kim Masters, host of KCRW's "The Business," will become an editor-at-large for The Hollywood Reporter. fishbowlLA