Four in the morning

1. More eager gossip about Apple's iTablet - for journo-techs, this is the second coming. Time

2. The biggest loser in MediaNews Group's bankruptcy? Hearst Corp. Alan Mutter

3. LA Magazine profiles longtime KCRW general manager Ruth Seymour, who's stepping down in February. LAmag

4. Analyzing the collapse of the Washington Post. New Republic

Four today

1. Steve Lambert at the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group is merely asking for suggestions; the Miami Herald is asking readers for donations. NBC Miami

2. Dan Kennedy defends journalists' use of anonymous sources (and I agree with him). The Guardian

3. Layoffs at the New Republic. Politico

4. Edmund Andrews, the New York Times economics reporter who wrote about his mortgage problems, has taken a buyout from the paper (but not so he can make his mortgage, he says). NYO

Maybe journalism

In his morning-quarterback analysis of the media's coverage of the public anger displayed at tea party rallies and town hall meetings, Howard Kurtz asserts somewhat passively that: "Maybe journalists have been asking the wrong question." He lays out his list of wrong questions and then offers a new route of investigation. Except the route is one many smart journalists have already traveled - including the three opinion writers Kurtz later quotes in his column. Kurtz then concludes his anger exploration with a second passive assertion: "Maybe the president needs to show just a smidgen of anger himself."

Maybe. Maybe not. Who can say?

Since neither the media nor the right-wing is in the business of supporting President Obama's agenda, maybe a more interesting line of inquiry is why liberals are so uncomfortable touting the president's proposals and accomplishments.

Slipping down the slope

What could be worse than "death panels" for grandma? Gays with scalpels! TNR

Capturing mindshare

The New Republic today published an internal memo from Politico on what makes a story a Politico story. From the memo:

Stories need to be both interesting and illuminating--we don’t have the luxury of running stories folks won’t click on or spend several minutes with in the paper.

a) Would this be a “most e-mailed” story?

b) Would I read this story if I hadn’t written it?

c) Would my mother read this story?

d) Will a blogger be inspired to post on this story?

-snip-

If your friends or source are buzzing about something related in any way to public affairs, don’t ask yourself WHETHER it’s a Politico story. Ask yourself HOW you can make it a Politico story, to capture built-in traffic and mindshare.

A sort of side note: Politico recently expanded its print edition to five days a week. Why? Because print is where the publication makes most of its money.

Where has the good Times gone?

Former Los Angeles Times reporter Joe Mathews, now at the New America Foundation, writes in the New Republic about what's gone missing at his hometown newspaper:

You can count up the journalists who have left the profession and are out of work, but much of the carnage of the ongoing media industry can't be measured or seen: corruption undiscovered, events not witnessed, tips about problems that never reach anyone's ears because those ears have left the newsroom. With fewer watchdogs, you get less barking. How can we know what we'll never know?

-snip-

Gone is the stuff my neighbors and relatives read, the straightforward news about their local communities, particularly in the suburban counties that ring Los Angeles, a county of ten million people and 88 cities. A decade ago, the Times fielded more than a dozen reporters in the some of the county's larger cities. Dozens more toiled in the big, growing areas that border L.A.--Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange. Yes, those writers were young and green. Yes, they missed things, as inexperienced reporters do. But they were there. They watched council meetings and school board meetings and county supervisors meetings. They called the cops. They looked at court filings. The most ambitious dug deeply into problems of transportation and development.

And how many of those inexperienced reporters, now gone, won't grow up to become the experienced journalists leading the newsrooms of the future?

One point Mathews makes that I'd quibble with: Local papers cover the smaller cities and suburban counties of Southern California...

The line seems to imply that the local papers remain intact. Local papers have not escaped the carnage. Many have suffered far more damage than the Times - although far fewer people depend on them for comprehensive coverage. Still, even before the Times began amputating its limbs, it depended on healthy local papers to beat the bushes and scare out stories it never had the resources to find. That, too, is disappearing and shouldn't be ignored.

No R-E-S-P-E-C-T

The reviews of Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric are overwhelmingly ugly. Is it really her fault, though? Christopher Orr at the New Republic surmises that she's been broken by an overly tough coach:

I'm reminded of the situation you see every now and then in sports, when a talented athlete--which, conveniently enough, Palin was--gets a taste of heavy duty coaching and, rather than being built up, is broken down, losing confidence in his game, becoming tentative, second-guessing himself even to the point of paralysis. I don't know whether that's what's happened to Sarah Palin. But from where I sit, it sure looks like it.

Orr stops short of saying why the campaign would treat its top draft pick this way. Once again, I have to ask: Does McCain respect his VP pick?