Warren Olney gets an award

Warren Olney, host of KCRW's "Which Way, LA?" and "To The Point" will be one of three honorees on Tuesday to receive the inaugural Bill Stout Award for excellence in broadcast journalism. KPCC's Larry Mantle and Patt Morrison will also receive the award.

Cracking open the reporter's brain pan

One difference between a good reporter and a bad one is that a good reporter usually knows a great deal more about a story than he or she is able to squeeze into a single article. In the old days (BI: Before Internet), the workaround to this information choke was to give the reporter a series, or a niche beat, or even a book. When the institutional/insider knowledge built up to dangerous levels, a reporter might even get a column.

But all of those solutions cost money. Today, mostly the blog serves as the information release valve. The problem is, however, that blogs demand too much and too little at the same time. They need constant feeding, but only want snacks. But for readers to care, the reporter needs to craft the bite-size story into something akin to a funny joke. That's a talent in and of itself, which means many blogs are full of time-consuming flops, flabby and/or caustic criticism, or boring notebook detritus.

As a radio producer, my job is, in part, about giving reporters a chance to say all the things they couldn't fit into a story (after they recount what they did put in the story). Then we give the story a second life by getting people, often experts, to talk and debate. The key is the host - the interlocutor who directs the discussion and asks the questions.

There are news and commentary sites springing up that follow a similar model. Calbuzz, started by Phil Trounstine and Jerry Roberts, is one such outlet. On occasion, it allows good journalists to go deeper into the weeds on stories than most general interest newspapers, but they have an audience that will willingly follow. In this case, too, the two hosts - and their curiosity - drives the conversation.

A good example of this is today's special report from Gene Maddaus, political writer at the LA Weekly. Maddaus took exception to some overly generalized CW on Calbuzz and, in response to his message, the editors asked him to write what most good political writers wish they could cram into their campaign coverage - but don't.

This kind of interaction improves journalism without robbing anyone of their valuable time (Gene didn't have to post the piece if he didn't want to) and without mindless consolidation or content-farming other news outlets have embraced (cough, AOL, cough, MediaNews).

Patch, Patch, Patch

AOL's Patch network hit 750 today - that's 750 individual Patch sites now running across the country. It's up from 500 in early December and up from 30 at the start of the year. I'm told the rapid roll out earned some top managers their holiday bonuses, and that some Patchers worried quality could suffer in the furious effort to meet the goal.

At least AOL realized that the mini-plagiarism outbreak needed a response. A reliable source tells me Patch editors will get mandatory plagiarism-prevention training.

And since I've gotten into a one-way argument with the LA Weekly over all this, here's another thought:

While the Weekly likes to describe Patch as the WalMart of news, I think it risks becoming like a fast-food chain - each franchise operated locally but serving a narrow menu of nearly identical content and dictated to by national headquarters. Think of AOL as the McDonald's Corp. of information and each Patch site as a local joint. Different kids in the play yard, but every Happy Meal the same.

Now, AOL's stated goal is to let individual editors cater to their local communities using only a common platform. Editors are expected to tailor content to local readers, not follow a single AOL formula; and if AOL can resist top-down meddling, and encourage bottom-up innovation, then the network might avoid the fast-food stamp.

But AOL will inevitably count hits and ad dollars and wonder why some site are doing better than others. Being the conglomerate that it is, AOL will think conformity is the best prescription for uneven performance. When controversy strikes - lawsuits, boycotts, plagiarism, etc. - AOL will be tempted to craft one-size-fits-all edicts that will, over time, narrow the menu to the things that work best - i.e., draw the most traffic at the lowest cost.

Of course, news stories aren't Happy Meals and different cities will always have different issues to cover. The best editors at the best Patch sites will resist the mothership. But I haven't seen a newspaper chain yet that hasn't consolidated and embraced sameness as a way to cuts costs in tough times. If Patch can buck the trend, that would be something special.

Medill embraces lousy name change

The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University wants a longer, uglier name. It's fitting, given the state of communication these days - lots of vague words and neo-jargonism trying to show a sense of knowledge about an unknown future.

The new name: The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing

Mark Oppenheimer does a good job explaining why the change is misguided:

First, what an ugly, clumsy name! What the hell is “integrated marketing” anyway? Anybody who knows probably doesn’t need to take a class in it. And if a journalism student of mine ever wrote anything as obtuse as that, I would give him or her a C, at best.

Second, we all should be a little concerned that the same schools that teach people to see through bogus claims are also the same schools teaching students how to perpetuate bogus claims. Journalism and marketing are at odds. Not always, of course. Heck, most journalism is not about exposing some hidden truth, and most marketing is not about deceiving people. But much of the time journalists and marketers are at odds: the former trying to see through spin or propaganda or advertising, the latter trying to spin, propagandize, advertise.

Press-Enterprise's owner wants to toss the old newspaper image

The Press-Enterprise Company, which owns and operates the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, La Prensa, and a few other publications and websites, has adopted a new name: Enterprise Media.

The name change has several purposes, not the least of which is to shed the image of a company tied to a tired, "one-dimensional" product: newspapers.

The new name also appears designed to position the company to better capture new revenue sources - Belo, Enterprise Media's parent, is going to experiment with paywalls come spring - and could simplify matters if Enterprise Media chose to partner with other media companies in the region.

From the memo to staff (my emphasis):

This change in our Company name has been planned for some time to ensure our business is seen by our clients as keeping pace with the significant, rapid and dynamic changes that are happening in the media industry. It also is aligned with the long-term vision for our business to reflect the innovation, new directions and forward-thinking multimedia strategy that our Company is actively pursuing. We have expanded from being a newspaper company to become a diversified media company. It’s now time for our customers to know us as more than a newspaper company as well.

The name Enterprise Media describes and defines who we are as a company. It effectively conveys our position as a future-focused media company; a leading and digitally savvy, multi-media news and information content provider. It is a name that will impress and influence our advertising and business-side clients to change their minds and attitudes about who we are.

This change is important because the name ‘Press-Enterprise Company’ does not align with our strategy. It is inextricably tied to our daily newspaper, ‘The Press-Enterprise,’ and it does not communicate to our customers the size, scale and capabilities of our multi-media product portfolio. ...

[T]he name ‘Press-Enterprise Company’ is tied to their past experiences with a newspaper company and it evokes attitudes and perceptions that are:

· One-dimensional. It causes our B2B [business-to-business] clients to see us as a one-product company; in their minds, one that has limited, if any, value for their needs. Reality is we are so much more as a business partner.

· Geographically limited. In the minds of our B2B clients our Company’s market and audience reach is limited to the geography of our newspaper circulation area. Reality is that our sphere of influence and audience extends well beyond the geographic area our newspaper serves.

· Institutionally bound. It says “newspaper” which means “inflexible,” “high rates,” and “old media” to advertisers who are looking for new ways to reach their clients using social media, mobile, and more. We want our name to convey that we’re playing in that space too.

The full memo is here.

How to cover a book burning

Whatever ridiculous forces put a fringe Florida pastor on our front pages and TV screens, and into the mouths of our president and top Pentagon officials, there's little doubt that Terry Jones' planned Quran burning on Sept. 11 will be covered. Indeed, the story has already taken root in the Muslim world, and the reverberations are very real.

So how should a news organization cover this publicity stunt?

The Associated Press has a memo outlining its intentions, including a policy that the news service "will not distribute images or audio that specifically show Qurans being burned, and will not provide detailed text descriptions of the burning."

 Poynter ethics leader Kelly McBride offers her take here, noting that even ugly events like this demand coverage: "[P]art of our job as journalists is to document events. When we ignore acts of hate, no one has the opportunity to react, to condemn them or to proclaim a different belief system."

Plot a massacre, pass the adobo

Planning murder will apparently make one hungry. From the New York Times:

The clan accused of orchestrating the Philippines’ worst political massacre — also considered the single worst killing of journalists on record — plotted the attack over a family dinner, a longtime housekeeper testified at the start of a long-delayed trial here on Wednesday.

The patriarch of the clan that has long controlled the province of Maguindanao in the southern Philippines, Andal Ampatuan Sr., gathered his sons, brothers and other guests at the dinner table six days before the killings of 57 political rivals and journalists last November, the witness, Lakmudin Salio, said.

The Wikileaks leak

Has the Wikileaks, an online source of confidential documents, changed the nature of news by releasing 92,000 pages of secret U.S. military logs about the war in Afganistan to the New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian? Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic explores the question and pulls this from NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen:

Rosen calls WikiLeaks the first "stateless news organization" in an excellent post on this episode."In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it," Rosen writes. "But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new."

Keeping us safe from a free press

Today's "To The Point" is about the new "safety zone" established by the Coast Guard that blocks reporters and photographers from getting close enough to the Gulf spill zone to do their job effectively. The show was produced by Katie Cooper. TTP

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)

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.

With the men in black

For several weeks, former Pasadena Star-News reporter Todd Ruiz has been filing dispatches from the front lines of the sometimes violent anti-government protests in Thailand at his Reporter in Exile blog. His connections got him an exclusive look at the "men in black," a "secretive and heavily armed" band of fighters who used violence to bolster the officially "nonviolent" red shirt movement.

From the story:

'Not Terrorists Not Violent; Only Peaceful and Democracy,'' read a banner hanging outside the barrier of jumbled tires. Inside, it was an open secret who the gunmen were; no less secret were the perimeter bombs, connected by dirty gray cables, designed to inflict heavy casualties on any advancing government army soldiers.

Some of the men held their firearms tightly concealed under jackets. Just after sunset, oblong packages wrapped in black plastic were carried into tents in Lumpini Park from elsewhere in the camp. Running at a crouch, we were moved to a different tent nearer the memorial statue of Thai King Rama VI. The Ronin moved between tents often in this way to avoid detection from government snipers.

Twenty-seven men crouched in darkness inside the tent. Newspapers covered any illuminated displays from radios or other electronics, and we were asked to turn off our cell phones. One gunman suggested army snipers would kill them all at first light if they had the chance.

''Don't worry; safe. Thai-style,'' their combat medic said to us in English, gesturing to layers of tarps obscuring the ground from potential snipers where we were camped with them.

The story was published in Asia Times.

Ethics not wanted

A Bay Area-based online business site has a job listing for journalists willing to write high-quality copy at $155 per story. Only one catch: If you're interested in ethics, they're not interested in you. From the ad:

Seeking a group of 2-3 former or current journalists who are willing to write high-quality freelance pieces for our Web site.

Important: This is not "traditional" journalism in the sense that the articles you will be assigned will be partially advertorial. You will be given potential leads to call and information on how the story should be written. We understand if you desire to maintain journalism ethics, but this gig would not be for you.

Police search Gizmodo editor's home*

In the ongoing investigation into how Gawker Media's Gizmodo blog got hold of a prototype of Apple's next generation iPhone, police in Fremont, California, raided the home of editor Jason Chen and seized computers, cellphones, digital cameras, an iPad and other gadgets.

Business Insider has Chen's firsthand account of the raid here.

*Updated: New York Times gets a response from Gawker:

Gawker’s chief operating officer, Gaby Darbyshire, said it expected the immediate return of the computers and servers.

“Under both state and federal law, a search warrant may not be validly issued to confiscate the property of a journalist,” she wrote in a letter to San Mateo County authorities on Saturday. “Jason is a journalist who works full time for our company,” she continued, adding that he works from home, his “de facto newsroom.”

Dead trees still rule

Most newspaper readers still prefer paper over computer screens. Martin Langeveld updates a study he completed last year and finds that of the total time people spend reading papers, 95.4 percent of it takes place with the paper in hand and 4.6 percent is online.

From his post at Nieman Journalism Lab:

U.S. newspapers have not pushed much of their audience to their websites, nor have they followed the migration of their readership to the web. Their combined print and online readership metrics, whether measured in pageviews or in time spent, show that there’s been significant attrition since last year in the total audience for newspaper content, and that the fraction of that audience consuming newspaper content online remains in the low-to-mid single digits.

The bad news is that people are spending less time with newspapers. Langeveld calculates that readers are spending about one-fifth less time with a paper this year compared to two years ago.

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.

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.

The Bay Citizen lands Fainaru

Former Washington Post reporter Steve Fainaru, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a series he did on the abuses of Blackwater and other private contractors, has taken over as managing editor of the nonprofit journalism site The Bay Citizen in San Fransisco.

(found via fishbowlLA)

A Pasadena journo in Bangkok

Todd Ruiz, former City Hall reporter for the Pasadena Star-News and current expat, is filing dispatches on the anti-government protests in Thailand from his home in Bangkok. From the latest entry:

A red riot of celebration erupted along Rajdamnoen as demonstrators hoping to bring down the government reveled in their strength of numbers and unity.

Turnout is difficult to gauge and always subject to spin, especially in a country where sources can essentially smile and say whatever they want without being pressed further. The government is playing it down in the tens-of-thousands range; UDD organizers are claiming half a million. Based on my own experience with such things, I'd estimate well over 100,000.

Most of the red constituency are readily filed into handy categories. "Rural" and "poor" being the adjectives within easiest reach.

Ruiz is blogging at Reporter in Exile. His latest updates can be found here and here.

Local television news is rarely local and hardly news

A USC journalism school study of local television news (which can be found here) finds little in the way of local news ever makes it to air. The average half-hour news broadcast spends more time on teasers than it does on business or the local economy. Less than 2 percent of total airtime (minus those teasers) pertains to local government.

Here's part of the summary:

An average half-hour of L.A. local news packed all its local government coverage – including budget, law enforcement, education, layoffs, new ordinances, voting procedures, personnel changes, city and county government actions on health care, transportation and immigration – into 22 seconds.

But crime stories filled 7 times more of the broadcast, averaging 2:50. Sports and weather took the most time: 3:36. Soft news – human interest, oddball stories and miscellaneous fluff – took up the next-largest chunk after crime, averaging 2:26.

Other highlights:

Coverage of business and the economy in Los Angeles averaged 29 seconds. Teasers (“coming up on the Southland’s best news…”) lasted more than four times that amount (2:10).

The time spent on ads (8:25), teasers, and sports and weather takes up nearly half of a typical half-hour of local news. Of the time left for everything else (15:44), almost half (8:17) was made up of stories taking place outside the L.A. media market.

If you add up all the time given to all stories focused on L.A. government, business and economy; all crime-related stories of civic importance (e.g., rewards offered, public corruption, police shootings); all stories about people dealing with local issues like traffic and the environment; all local public health news; and all coverage of the L.A. wildfires and water main breaks (which occurred during the study’s sample), all that news combined took up about 4 minutes of a composite half-hour.

The study, which was done by Martin Kaplan and Matthew Hale of USC's Norman Lear Center, confirms what most local TV news watchers already knew - there's not much there there. As a point of comparison, the study also looked at local news coverage in the Los Angeles Times:

The L.A. Times devoted 10% of its front page stories to local government, compared to 2.5% of TV news lead stories about it.

The paper allocated 7.8% of its news hole to L.A. business and economy, compared to TV’s 2.3%. Six percent of the Times’s front page stories focused on local business and economy, compared to 0.5% TV leads about L.A. business/economy.

TV spent 9 times more of its news hole on soft, odd, and miscellaneous stories, and almost three times more on crime, than the paper. Fourteen percent of the paper’s front page stories were about crime, compared to more than a third of TV’s lead stories.