Four in the morning

1. The judge in the Tribune Co. bankruptcy case has appointed a mediator to work through the impasse. LAT

2. Media critic Jack Shafer says hostage situations should not be covered as de facto breaking news. Slate

3. Press freedoms in Latin America are being chipped away despite the democratic reforms. Newsweek

4. The Associated Press has released new guidelines for giving credit to news organizations that originally reported information that's been assimilated into AP stories. AP

Misery's company

Maybe you were up late last night obsessively going over your lede in your head, or wondering if the verb you chose to describe a politician's decision on a controversial item truly captured the audacity of the moment without stepping over a line.

Was it an "avenue" or a "boulevard"? Was he accused of three felonies or four? Should that quote have gone higher up in the story?

Well, Jack Shafer at Slate does a good job describing something that most non-journalists don't get about the job and it's worth sharing. It's from a piece on Politico and The Atlantic publishing a memo they could not authenticate.

Not to let Politico and the Atlantic off lightly, but show me a journalist who has never published something he later regretted, and I'll show you a piker or a liar. The conscientious journalist—no matter whether he does his work on the Web, in print, or via broadcasting—goes to sleep every night with the dread, boiling in his belly, that he didn't check this thing or that thing closely enough before he filed his story.

Enjoy the glamor, citizen journalists.

Remember the days

Since many new media gurus think "old school" journalism is "baggage" to be tossed overboard, and many shrinking newspapers shuffle business concerns with news decisions, it's refreshing to read Jim Barnett's anecdote about his old publisher, Frank Daniels:

Frank stayed away from his newsroom for one simple reason: He knew that meddling was a bad idea. No reporter or editor worth his or her salt would ever want to be associated with a newsroom where the publisher determined what beats got covered and what stories got written. If Frank’s paper appeared to harbor biases or pick on certain politicians, that was a matter to be settled between the journalists and their sources. With that philosophy, Frank ran what was widely regarded as one of the nation’s best regional newspapers.

Barnett wrote about Daniels in response to Jack Shafer's criticism of nonprofit newsrooms, which he says are spreading like algae. Barnett argues that nonprofit, not for profit or for profit, the key is having the right mission and mindset in the newsroom. Again, from Barnett:

The point here is that journalistic bias is a function of human intention, not the business model under which the story is produced. For-profit, nonprofit, it does not matter. If a reporter or editor has an axe to grind, he or she is going to find a venue to grind it. ...

I think back to the stories I used to write at the N&O. A lot of them were about marketing abuses by one of the major drug companies based in nearby Research Triangle Park. The CEO, a friend of Frank’s, once called asking him to pull me off the beat. Frank’s answer, relayed by my editor, was to tell the CEO to go to hell. The truth — that the marketing abuses hurt people — didn’t sell ads. But by telling it, the N&O did its community a service that never could translate into an ad rate.

How many people still work for for-profit papers in which publishers who know not to meddle? How many now work for publishers who happily recommend certain articles - and prohibit others? How many people now work for publisher/editor hybrids, people who spend time talking to the ad department before holding the editorial meeting?

Four in the evening

1. A memorable lede. New York Magazine

2. California's April tax receipts are underwhelming (i.e., budget trouble ahead). California's Capitol

3. Warren Buffet saw trouble for newspapers in 1992. It's a franchise thing. Slate

4. As newspapers shrink, someone at least is reporting neighborhood crime in Los Angeles. Eastsider LA

The nonessential essentials

In his latest column, Slate's Jack Shafer sets out to debunk the notion that newspapers are essential to the workings of American democracy. From his column:

The insistence on coupling newspapering to democracy irritates me not just because it overstates the quality and urgency of most of the work done by newspapers but because it inflates the capacity of newspapers to make us better citizens, wiser voters, and more enlightened taxpayers. I love news on newsprint, believe me, I do. But I hate seeing newspapers reduced to a compulsory cheat sheet for democracy. All this lovey-dovey about how essential newspapers are to civic life and the political process makes me nostalgic for the days, not all that long ago, when everybody hated them.

Shafer is right, in his cheeky way, that democracy does not need newspapers to function, just as the function of newspapers is not to become a "cheat sheet for democracy."

But Shafer's argument ignores a couple peculiar features of America's democratic system: It's a representative democracy and it sits in the middle of a capitalistic society. Both features have a tendency to concentrate power and money in the hands of a relative few. Newspapers aren't essential to democracy, but neither are lobbyists or HMOs or weapons manufacturers or social-safety nets or public education or Wall Street or Congress. For all their flaws, newspapers serve as a place where we can concentrate our power - not as partisans, not as sectarians, not for our profit or their loss - to hold these other institutions accountable on a daily basis.

Four in the morning

Furloughs in Florida

Layoffs in Denver (Post's managing editor included)

What should journalists do? Wait

What we're willing to pay for