Four today

1. Four New York Times journalists are missing in Libya, including two-time Pulitzer-winner Anthony Shadid. NYT

2. Pew's State of the Media report for 2011. Pew

3. KPCC is looking for a web designer/developer. APM

4. A neo-Nazi rally is planned for March 19 in Claremont to "respond" to a pro-immigration rally at the Claremont Colleges. Daily Bulletin

KPCC news staff could grow by leaps and bounds

Bill Kling, the soon-to-be retired president and CEO of American Public Media, wants big boosts in reporting staff at four APM stations, including KPCC in Pasadena. If his fund-raising dreams come true, he'd flood the L.A. market with as many as 100 reporters, each with salaries that will make most journalists in Southern California drool.

This could all be pie in the sky, of course. But even if he's only half successful, this could be a major shift in how L.A. gets covered. Ken Doctor at Newsonomics has the story, and here's an excerpt:

The initial four stations involved in the alliance planning are WNYC in New York, WBEZ in Chicago, KPCC in Los Angeles and Minnesota Public Radio, in the Twin Cities, says Bill Kling, current (and now retiring, ”MPR’s Bill Kling Steps Down — and Up — From Public Radio“) president and CEO of the American Public Media Group (APMG), the parent of the L.A. and Twin Cities stations, as well as a major syndicator of public radio programming.

One hundred “public media” reporters and editors in a market is a huge increase. Among those four stations, the news staff now ranges from 12 to 30 each. It’s tough to count precisely because these are legacy radio operations, and radio requires different job descriptions than digital news. Still, at those numbers, the alliance members are aiming at adding more than 300 reporters and editors in four markets, if the plans succeed. Kling says the positions created “would be a very good job for people who love journalism,” in the six figures with full benefits.

Kling and his colleagues are strategizing their plans and foundation asks — and his hope is that funding can be locked down by next June, when he formally steps from his APMG post. He says his post-retirement plan is to focus on the building out of public media. If it is, hiring could commence by mid-2011.
How much funding?

The plan will cost about $5 million per market per year, says Kling, or $25 million for a five-year funding plan, which is what the group aims to obtain. So that’s $100 million if four markets can be launched; $150 million, it it’s six markets. After the first four markets, Kling says, “we’d go on to five, six, seven, eight.”

Journalism's top ten

NYU's journalism institute has listed its ten favorite stories of the decade. The New York Times' coverage of the 9/11 attack comes in first. The Times also makes the list for its reporting on the Afghanistan war and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx is the second pick.

This American Life's explanation of the subprime mortgage crisis, "The Giant Pool of Money," is in fourth place, with Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side" in sixth. The Times-Picayune gets eight place for its detailed coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

The full list is here.

Journalism and the public interest

American Public Media, which producer Marketplace and other public radio shows, has a job opening in Los Angeles for something called a "public insight analyst." The job entails gauging public opinion through the use of surveys, meetings and games to shape news coverage.

Here's how the listing describes it:

The analyst job involves using many tools - from knowledge management and database software to interactive games and public meetings – and applying news judgment to turn public insight into coverage.

The hybrid PR-news position stems for Minnesota Public Radio's Public Insight Journalism initiative, which helped launch the Center for Innovation in Journalism.

The CIJ sounds a little like the community journalism movement of old, except with more sophisticated tools. Here's CIJ what it has to say about traditional newsers:

Yet most newsrooms still operate with a "we know best—and we'll tell you what you need to know" model. That world is vanishing and taking the audience with it.