Four Monday

1. David Grann is a fascinating journalist. Slate makes the wise decision to profile him and his work. Slate

2. NPR has a digital strategy that supposed to help local stations. If you have the patience to read about it, click: Nieman Journalism Lab

3. If you "like" the New Yorker, they'll let you behind the paywall. Bloggasm

4. Privacy isn't all that it's cracked up to be ... online, anyway. Farhad Manjoo

Four in the morning

1. The AOL-Huffington Post deal is great, as long as you don't care much for journalism. LAT

2. If you have the data, the guvment will help you map it. IssueMap (via Nieman Lab)

3. Arianna Huffington trumpets the AOL-Huffington Post deal; Marc Cooper and others analyze the consequences for online and offline news operations in Southern California. WWLA?

4. Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology. New Yorker

Four in the morning (the Huffington Patch edition)

Did AOL just pay Arianna Huffington $315 million to figure out how not to pay its writers? This and other questions mulled in today's AOL Way-HuffPo roundup:

1. Huffington and her cohorts say the deal will change nothing and everything, "it will be like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet." Atlantic

2. Ken Auletta on Tim Armstrong's "Hail Mary Pass." New Yorker

3. Nick Denton calls the Huffington Post "remarkably ugly" (scroll to bottom of Q&A). Atlantic Wire

4. Gawker makes fun of the whole thing. Gawker

New Yorker profiles AOL and Patch

New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta has written a profile of AOL and its effort to become a major online content provider (i.e., online news operation) - including the recent explosion Patch sites around the country. Auletta's assessment isn't kind, saying the content is "piffle."

Here's how PaidContent summarizes Auletta's view of Patch (New Yorker story is subscription only):

Patch, which Auletta puts at 700 outlets and has 750-plus now, is too much like “digital Yellow Pages” plus has tension between journalism and boosterism—and probably costs too much to last at an estimated $30 million a quarter.

The hectic effort to get Patch to the 750 number before the close of 2010 certainly had an effect on quality - something the managers of Patch admitted internally. Whether AOL has a strategy to turn this around, now that it has numbers, remains the central question. Auletta doesn't think it will. Again, from PaidContent:

AOL gets points for hiring hundreds of journalists for Patch and hiring some talented journalists overall, but loses some for failing to hire an editor in chief. It also loses some for losing reporters. AOL refugee Jeff Bercovici told Auletta one reason he switched to Forbes.com was to get his calls returned but also cited the pressure to reverse a downward trend. And this was written when FanHouse was an AOL brand; late last week Armstrong announced plans to outsource most of sports, health and real estate. Auletta’s take: AOL does not seem to be saving journalism, and journalism does yet seem to be saving AOL.” He carefully leaves the door ajar for that possibility but clearly doesn’t expect it.

 The New York Times had a story yesterday that gives us a glimpse of the Patch metrics (found via LA Observed):

Traffic on individual sites is low; former editors say that the average post attracts just 100 views and that they considered 500 page views a wild success. But the overall traffic is growing quickly.

In December, Patch had just over three million unique visitors, 80 times that of a year earlier, according to comScore.

Yet over the years, a number of so-called hyperlocal news sites have failed, and the idea is largely unproved financially.

Dexter Filkins, NYT war correspondent, moving to New Yorker

The Observer reports that Dexter Filkins, author of the "The Forever War," a gripping account of combat in Iraq, and one of the New York Times's top correspondents in Afghanistan/Pakistan, will leave the paper to work for the New Yorker. He won't be covering the war for the magazine.

The actor as the artist at MOCA

The New Yorker writes about actor James Franco's recent trip to the Pacific Design Center on Melrose Avenue, where he played a deranged artist on "General Hospital" who used an installation at the MOCA facility to lure a fake hitman to Los Angeles.

Four in the morning

1. Not sure if this is a consequence of the closure of the Orange County printing plant, but the Los Angeles Times got delivered late today in parts of L.A. and Orange County due to problems with its remaining presses. LAT

2. The iPad revolution continue to revolve, with Time magazine's latest app getting the Gizmodo staff all googly eyed. Gizmodo

3.Making Twitter shorter. New Yorker

4. (Self-promotion alert) On today's "To The Point," Wikipedia is more popular than ever but fewer people are contributing - that's led to an interesting change in policy. TTP

Politics, the game

George Packer laments the shift to zero-calorie political writing in American journalism. New Yorker

Four in the morning

1. God is dead... No, wait. The mainstream media is dead, and Andrew Breitbart is coming to collect the body (just as soon as that thing with James O'Keefe is taken care of). NPR

2. The Los Angeles Times shuffles a few editorial positions and hires former Daily News sports reporter Steve Dilbeck to blog about the Dodgers. LAO

3. The Twitter bullies are out. Nick Bilton at the New York Times is highly offended that New Yorker writer George Packer is leery of the new "information economy" that comes in the form of Tweets. NYT (Packer's original post)

4. The Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has honored five journalists: Celeste Fremon of WitnessLA, Denise Nix of the Daily Breeze, Claudia Peschiutta of KNX 1070, Dave Lopez of CBS2/KCAL9, and Andrew Blankstein of the Los Angeles Times. SPJ

The soul of journalism

At the annual gala to raise money for the Committee to Protect Journalists, the biggest names in the profession get served a reminder of the nameless journalists who often at great peril battle the darkness in places desperate for light.

From George Packer at the New Yorker:

At just the moment when any half-conscious journalist is beginning to feel a little sick—sick of the rich food, of the self-congratulatory tone, of the overdressed guests, of himself or herself, of the gap between what we say we do and what we aspire to do and what we all-too-often really do—it’s at that moment that the hosts announce the winners of the year’s awards. Along with the awards come videos that tell the recipients’ stories. The hum of chatter across the tables suddenly dies—for the stories are of brave, humorous, quietly defiant men and women, rarities and eccentrics who nonetheless seem to exist in every country, upholding high journalistic standards in the world’s most dangerous places, with no powerful backers, and almost no one paying attention except government thugs or anonymous gunmen.

Read the full post here.

Four in the morning

1. I guess we now know what Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy thinks of prior restraint. NYT

2. California Watch and KQED's public radio program California Report have teamed up. CW

3. The LA Weekly has hired a new blogger. LAO

4. It's good to be a New Yorker: The magazine hasn't suffered the kinds of cuts that its sister publications have. NYO

Texas governor slows execution investigation

Texas Gov. Rick Perry removed three people from a specially appointed forensic science commission just two days before it was set to hear expert testimony disputing much of the evidence used in the trial of a Texas man found guilty of murder and later executed.

From the Dallas Morning News:

The hearing of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, scheduled for Friday in Irving, was abruptly canceled by the new chairman the governor chose, Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley. He is considered one of the most conservative, hard-line prosecutors in Texas.

The commission was to hear from Baltimore-based Craig Beyler, a nationally recognized fire expert, who had been hired by the panel to review the Cameron Todd Willingham case. Beyler's long-anticipated report, released in August, called the Willingham fire investigation slipshod and based on wives' tales about how fire behaves and possible arson evidence.

A recent New Yorker story looked into the 1991 case and also found serious flaws in the evidence used to convict Willingham of murdering his three daughters by lighting their house on fire. Included was a report from another arson expert who said investigators relied shoddy technique and discredited methodology to conclude the fire was intentionally set. That report, done after the trial but before the execution, went to Texas authorities and was included in the clemency plea sent to Gov. Perry.

Role of the fixer

The death of Sultan Munadi has drawn attention to the important role local "fixers" play in helping foreign journalists cover foreign wars.

Munadi, who worked with the New York Times in Afghanistan, was killed in a gun battle on Wednesday as British commandos attempted to rescue him and New York Times correspondent Stephen Farrell from their Taliban captors. Farrell survived.

New Yorker writer George Packer, who reported extensively on the Iraq war, shines some light on the work fixers do and how foreign bureaus rely upon their cultural, historical and linguistic knowledge.

The relationship between fixers and foreign correspondents can be very close. Shared dangers and successes will do that, especially when the work done together, the tie between you, is what puts you at risk. In Iraq and Afghanistan and a growing number of other places, the foreign correspondent would be a target with or without the fixer, but the fixer is a target because he or she is with the foreign correspondent. Both are considered spies, but one is only an infidel, while the other is something worse—an apostate, a traitor. In my experience, this mutually voluntary risk is rarely a source of resentment on the part of fixers. They are generally young, cosmopolitan, quick-witted, stoical, tinged with idealism, implacable foes of their countries’ extremists; and, after all, they understand better than anyone what they have signed up for. For the most part, the risk strengthens the bond. It becomes a cause of tension only when it’s borne by just one side.

New York Times reporter David Rohde knew Munadi and wrote a remembrance of him for the paper here. Rohde was also captured by the Taliban and later escaped along with his fixer:

The death of Mr. Munadi illustrated two grim truths of the war in Afghanistan: vastly more Afghans than foreigners have died battling the Taliban, and foreign journalists are only as good as the Afghan reporters who work with them.

Munadi wrote about some of his own experiences at the Times' War blog:

Being a journalist is not enough; it will not solve the problems of Afghanistan. I want to work for the education of the country, because the majority of people are illiterate. That is the main problem facing many Afghans. I am really committed to come back and work for my country.

New Yorker hires ME

The New Yorker has hired Amelia Lester as the magazine's managing editor. She's 26 years old.

According to the New York Observer, Lester grew up in Sydney, graduated from Harvard, where she wrote for the Crimson, and most recently worked as an editor at Paris Review. She used to be a fact checker at the New Yorker, working with writers Sy Hersh and Jane Mayer.

Lester replaces Kate Julian, who's moving to DC, the Observer reports.

Author of "Crash," "Empire of the Sun" has died*

Novelist J.G. Ballard died this morning. He had cancer. He was 78.

*Updated: The New Yorker remembers Ballard

The trouble with free (redux)

Setting aside such questions as, 'Should journalism become a web of interlinking updates?', "Should we change the definition of journalist?', and 'Are editors an arrogant and unnecessary appendage that need to be surgically removed?', what's eating the bottom out of newspapers' bottom lines?

James Surowiecki, economics writer for the New Yorker, agrees with David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of "The Wire," that newspapers (and other forms of media that compete with themselves online) cannot hope to survive financially as long as they give away the news for free.

From Surowiecki's blog post:

Usually, when an industry runs into the kind of trouble that Levitt was talking about, it’s because people are abandoning its products. But people don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.

-snip-

For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

I've argued before that giving away the news for free affects more than profit. It diminishes the value of news - and of newsrooms - in the minds of both the reader and the owner; and, to some extent, in the mind of the reporter.

*UPDATE: Brian Till indicts himself as a media murderer in a column in the Las Vegas Sun (via Romenesko).

538 = 700,000

FiveThirtyEight.com may be one of the few truly innovative blogs out there. Rather than simply repackaging other people's work and commenting on it, creator Nate Silver took polling information and refined it in such a way that it became more valuable and accurate than what he started with.

Now Nate, who once had plenty of time to do our show, has signed a $700,000 deal to write two books for Penguin.

Penguin also inked a deal with another guest and favorite of mine, the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza, for a book on the Obama presidency.

Are you regular to?

Maybe those East Coast liberal media elites don't get Sarah Palin, but the New Yorker does:

Now, let us discuss the Élites. There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Élite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn’t go there slightly earlier than I didn’t go there. But, had I been younger, we possibly could have not graduated in the exact same class. That would have been fun. Sarah Palin is hot. Hot for a politician. Or someone you just see in a store. But, happily, I did not go to college at all, having not finished high school, due to I killed a man. But had I gone to college, trust me, it would not have been some Ivy League Élite-breeding factory but, rather, a community college in danger of losing its accreditation, built right on a fault zone, riddled with asbestos, and also, the crack-addicted professors are all dyslexic.

The fate of the American newspaper

Eric Alterman writes in the New Yorker about failing newspapers and what might come next.

The economy and you

Want to know more about the housing crisis everyone's talking about? Then list to my show.