Sidney Harman has died at 92

Sidney Harman, the man who bought Newsweek for $1 and its debt, has died. From the LA Times obit:

Harman died Tuesday night in Washington, D.C., of complications from leukemia, according to a statement from his family on the website of the Daily Beast, which Harman merged with Newsweek. He was married to former Democratic Congresswoman Jane Harman of Venice.

The path of Harman's long career took him from the electronics industry to government, academia and, finally, the Fourth Estate. His passion for the arts and philanthropic impulses led him to provide funding for Washington, D.C.'s Sidney Harman Hall, a popular performance space. An indefatigable reader and thinker who was fascinated by creative geniuses, Harman also at age 92 founded the Academy for Polymathic Studies at USC. From heart, he could recite long passages from Shakespeare, or Abraham Lincoln or Maxwell Anderson, and would often embroider a thought or regale dinner-party guests with an apt quote.

In November 2010, when Harman was being hammered by critics skeptical of his deal to merge Newsweek with Barry Diller's Daily Beast website, he offered, in an interview, a quote from Lincoln's speech before Congress in 1862: "The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation."

Four in the morning

1. Liberal columnist Frank Rich bails on New York Times, goes to New York magazine. NY

2. A map of 17 "muckraking" bloggers having an impact on world affairs. Daily Beast

3. The Denver Post continues to sue bloggers for using its content without permission - and catches a destitute writer in its dragnet. Westword

4. Los Angeles Times reporters Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives win the Seldin Ring Award for Investigative Reporting for their city of Bell stories. USC

Mixing metaphors, and Huffington Patch vs. NewsBeast

AOL's purchase of Huffington Post is a fascinating case study of old and new media feeding off one another in a strange orgy of mutual cannibalism - legacy eats innovator eats legacy; pay eats no pay eats pay. It seems so incongruous, and yet so dirty natural as to be inevitable.

Here is Arianna Huffington, maven of the progressive blogosphere and mistress of the skimpy or nonexistent paycheck, and AOL, a company mostly associated with dial-up Internet and a panicky but paid-for venture into local news, making common cause to take on the likes of Yahoo News and NewsBeast (the royal marriage of the money-losing Newsweek and Tina Brown's mostly paid-in-exposure Daily Beast).

On one hand, we have once mighty media companies struggling to survive on a model of paid news staff who generate original content and, on the other, surging media companies that have learned to harness the power of ideological branding, agenda journalism and exposure-as-compensation to drive enormous traffic, though without the ad dollars to match. Given the triumphalist social media chatter, one would think the likes of HuffPo and the Daily Beast would leave their crippled ancestors to die upon the banks of the primordial swamp; instead the oldster companies have swallowed their offspring to serve as a sort of mitochondrial life force.

Which raises the obvious question: Will most or all of the writers and bloggers working for these hybrid media empires get paid? Even Dan Gillmor thinks they should.

And some writers do. Before Huffington Post and the Daily Beast got gobbled up, they'd hired veteran journalists from the likes of Newsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post to invigorate their journo credentials and gain seats at the pundits' tables. Howard Kurtz, who worked at the Washington Post, which sold off Newsweek, has gone to the Daily Beast. Howard Fineman, who worked at Newsweek, which merged with the Daily Beast, is now senior politics editor at Huffington Post.

This feels like the kind of viral cross-contamination that has to happen for online media to move forward, though the evolution/mutation is far from over.

In strictly business terms, AOL-HuffPo has a built in advantage over NewsBeast. Huffington Post is more popular than Daily Beast and AOL has a large stable of news sites, such as TechCrunch and the relatively new Patch network, both giving AOL a foot in the niche/hyperlocal markets. These sites now fall under Arianna's editorial guidance. She's proven extremely adept at managing a single brand, her own, but can she manage multiple brands with different editorial missions? Or does everything AOL go The Huffington Way?

(edited)

Rep. Harman heads to think tank

Rep. Jane Harman, D-El Segundo, will announce tomorrow that she is leaving Congress to head the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars think tank. Her departure leaves Democrats scrambling to find a suitable replacement (The City Maven tweeted that LA Councilman Janice Hahn has already announced she'll run and Marcy Winograd, president of the Progressive Democrats of Los Angelse, has been mentioned as well).

Harman, who sits on the influential House Intelligence Subcommittee, is a staunch defender of Israel and a reliable hawk. Her departure opens the door to Democrats who'd like to see a more liberal person in the seat. It's unlikely Republicans will be able to take the South Bay district,  which runs from Venice to Redondo, then curls around the Palos Verdes peninsula to take in part of the Port of Los Angeles.

Harman's husband is Sidney Harman, who recently bought Newsweek magazine, which he quickly mated with Tina Brown's The Daily Beast, and which will probably be a prime competitor against the newly formed AOL-Huffington Post and Yahoo News. Thus begins the battle of the Howards (Howard Fineman, formerly of Newseek, now at Huffington Post, versus Howard Kurtz, formerly of the Washington Post, which sold Newsweek to Harman, who is now a Daily Beast writer).

Correction of the day

Howard Kurtz, now writing for the Daily Beast, issued a whopper correction today for a story he wrote back in November. Turns out he confused Rep. Darrell Issa's spokesman for the congressman. Here's the correx:

When I conducted the telephone interview for my Nov. 27 article on California Rep. Darrell Issa, my unambiguous understanding was that I was speaking with Rep. Issa. I subsequently learned that I was speaking to his chief spokesman, Kurt Bardella. None of the views ascribed to Issa are inaccurate, but the attribution throughout the story should have been to his spokesman, not to the congressman. We have since corrected the article. The earlier version also mentioned Darrell Issa’s “tendency to refer to himself in the third person.” In fact, that usage was appropriate because the interview was with his spokesman.

At least he corrected it, I guess.

Fox News and the impartial partisans

Want to see what happens when a news operation drops impartiality as the framework for gathering and disseminating information? Look at how Fox News decided to frame the health care debate. Howard Kurtz has the report at the Daily Beast - the piece starts with Republican pollster Frank Luntz coaching Fox host Sean Hannity on the right words to use:

“If you call it a public option, the American people are split,” [Luntz] explained. “If you call it the government option, the public is overwhelmingly against it."

“A great point,” Hannity declared. “And from now on, I'm going to call it the government option, because that's what it is.”

On Oct. 27, the day after Senate Democrats introduced a bill with a public insurance option from which states could opt out, Bill Sammon, a Fox News vice president and Washington managing editor, sent the staff a memo. Sammon is a former Washington Times reporter.

“Please use the term ‘government-run health insurance,’ or, when brevity is a concern, ‘government option,’ whenever possible,” the memo said.

Sammon acknowledged that the phrase "public option" was “firmly ensconced in the nation’s lexicon,” so when it was necessary to use it, he wrote, add the qualifier “so-called,” as in “the so-called public option.” And “here’s another way to phrase it: ‘The public option, which is the government-run plan.’”

Advocacy organizations like Fox News deny their partisan framing all the while claiming to be impartial, and blaming all the media that isn't conservative-leaning of having a liberal bias. In this case, "public option" is also a partisan framing preferred by supporters of the plan. Had Fox health care reporters come up with a way to describe the plan based on their own reporting, they might have called it "government-run." Instead, they borrowed the phrase most favorable to the Republican position. That's what happens when journalists claim the mantle of impartiality without actually practicing impartiality.

(found via LA Observed)

Newsweek swallowed by the Daily Beast

A merger between the online Daily Beast and Newsweek is expected to be announced tomorrow, according to the New York Times. The deal would put Tina Brown in charge of the print magazine and its website, and gives the Daily Beast website a print product to boost revenues.

Millionaire Sidney Harman recently bought Newsweek for $1 in exchange for taking on its debt. The magazine has lost much of its top staff in recent months.

From the Times:

Newsweek, bled by an exodus of staff members, a rapidly declining readership and a flight of advertisers, is a shell of what it used to be: a member of the prestigious club of weekly magazines that helped set the tone for news coverage.

Dr. Harman’s purchase was seen as a savior for the magazine and a way to help it build back its reputation. But he has struggled to find an editor for three months, leaving the magazine effectively rudderless.

But the Daily Beast partnership not only solves a problem for Dr. Harman, it gives Mr. Diller a print publication, something he has said recently he believes his website needs in order to be profitable.

Pelisek leaves for the Daily Beast

Christine Pelisek, who broke the Grim Sleeper story, has left the LA Weekly for Tina Brown's Daily Beast. The post from LA Observed is here.

Reveal your sources for unknown riches

If you ever do a story about Viacom/CBS boss Sumner Redstone with an unnamed source, you just might get a call from the man himself: Gawker

What rough beast is this?

Joe Mathews, formerly of the LA Times and now with the New America Foundation, takes a stab at interpreting the logic behind Sarah Palin's resignation as governor of Alaska and finds it shows a hyper awareness that America has entered the age of hyper politics. Mathews goes so far as to call the move brilliant, at least when compared with the sad displays Mark Sanford and Bobby Jindal made in their respective 2012 presidential campaigns. By contrast, Palin will be able to fortify herself financially and politically, unburdened from the distraction of governing, as the campaign drags into 2010.