Four Friday

1. Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi gets slammed for arm-chair reporting on GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann - and the word "plagiarism" gets thrown about. City Paper

2. People like Andy Carvin and NPR wants to capitalize on that. Nieman Journalism Lab

3. Gene Weingarten skewers self-branding and journalists patronizing their readers. Washington Post

4. A Patch reporter doesn't break a story. fishbowlLA

Four in the morning

1. A welcome respite from the Larry King love fest: "As refreshing as it has been that King generally checked his politics at the door, it also happens that he sometimes left his brain there too." LAT (via LA Observed)

2. The deal that gave the Tribune Co. to Sam Zell, and landed the company in bankruptcy, also made many executive rich(er). The Chicago Reader got a list - and points out that the bankruptcy court might claw back some or all of it. Chicago Reader

3. The whitewashed wall at MOCA that the LA Downtown News first reported on is finally starting to get the attention it deserves. fishbowlLA

4. The Rolling Stone website is no longer a complete mess. fishbowlLA

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?

Rolling Stone shrinks

Rolling Stone Mexico is kaput.