My influence is profound

Washington Post staff writer Ezra Klein asked readers of his Wonkbook blog to come up with a name for his daily list of five headlines published every morning. I suggested "Five in the morning," a recommendation that proves my creativity is limited to plagiarizing myself* and adding one. From Klein:

Housekeeping: “High Five” and “Fab Five” were definitely the most popular suggestions to replace “Top Stories.” I also liked “Starting Five” and “Gang of Five.” But the winner, from Gary Scott, managed to flatter the odd hours Dylan, Michelle and I keep to bring Wonkbook out. So, introducing:

Five in the morning

*I haven't yet decided whether to retire my occasional "four in the morning/afternoon" list. I probably should, and take the opportunity to "innovate" on my own blog.

Oh, and since I'm self-promoting - today is my first day as supervising producer at KCRW. Here's the note Warren Olney sent to staff:

Gary Scott has been promoted to the new job of Supervising Producer for "To the Point" and "Which Way, LA?"  He'll be in charge of editorial issues and centralized planning, including development of our New Media activities and their integration with what we do on the air. His duties will also extend to KCRW's other news operations on "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered."  Karen Radziner will continue to be our Managing Producer. 

The "other news operations" he refers to are the local news reports that run in the breaks of Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

How to create talking points for right-wing media critics

The moment then-American Spectator writer Ezra Klein created the semi-private Journolist listserv for liberal journalists and thinkers, a ticking political time bomb was created. No matter what the rationale for this closed online discussion group, no matter that contributors were mostly columnists and bloggers who self-identified as liberal commentators, the contents were bound to become fodder for those who claim the mainstream media holds a liberal bias. And so it came to pass, when the Daily Caller, an online outfit started by conservative-pundit Tucker Carlson, began publishing comments made to the list during the 2008 presidential campaign. The fact that liberal opinion-makers expressed liberal opinions doesn't seem all that newsworthy, but to those news operations that wish to blend opinion and news, this incident should serve as a cautionary tale.

On that note, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that today's Daily Caller post mentions KCRW. Since I work for the station, I'll hand it off to LA Observed to lay out what happened, which you can read here.

Four in the morning

1. Ezra Klein consider the success of NPR and the Economist. WaPo

2. Tribune Co. takes a step closer to finishing bankruptcy proceedings. Chi Trib

3. Will the iPad deliver another blow to journalistic standards? Newspaper Death Watch

4. Over at Bitter Lemons, there's a lot of chattering/rationalizing/explaining/parsing going on about getting a story completely wrong. fishbowlLA and Bitter Lemons

Facts for factions, second take

The people most opposed to the idea of objective journalism often are people who believe in objective truths. They consider editorial efforts to moderate language and viewpoints on tough issues - illegal immigration, torture, war, abortion - a cop out.

Subjective journalism rose up to cater to this crowd and has at times focused laser light on controversies that got swept aside when presented in moderated tones. But there's a viral strain of subjective journalism that claims to be objective and it is has helped erode the belief that any journalists can their facts straight.

To be sure, not all journalists can, and there are some newsrooms that get so careful with words that they serve up water and pretend it's soup. For these reasons, public skepticism of the media is healthy. But the selling of subjectivity as objectivity has done far worse damage to the idea of impartial journalism and accelerated cultural factionalism as consumers are emboldened to regurgitate belief to friends and neighbors and to call it fact.

Ezra Klein noticed a Fox News executive inadvertently copping to this slippery game in an interview given to Time magazine. Here's what Fox VP Michael Clemente had to say:

The fact that our numbers are up 30 plus in the news arena on basic cable I'd like to think is a sign that we are just putting what we believe to be the facts out on the table.

Here's what Klein had to say about that:

Most news organizations, in my experience, do not have to qualify the word "facts" with the words "what we believe to be." On the other hand, as Fox says, that model is good for ratings.

What's all the hubub about health care?

Who's fighting against health care reform? And who's fighting for it? Listen to today's "To The Point" with Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, Republican strategist David Winston, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter and Steve Kornacki of the New York Observer. The cure for sound-bite journalism.

Klein gets post at Post

Irvine native, UCLA grad and "liberal darling" Ezra Klein is moving his blog from American Prospect, where's he's listed as associate editor, to the Washington Post.

Ad delivery system failure

Ezra Klein at the American Prospect gets tired of seeing "I told you so" listed as a qualification for curing what ails the newspaper industry:

Over at BoingBoing, Clay Shirky engages in a bit of self-congratulatory schadenfreude for predicting the collapse of the newspaper business model back in 1993. And no doubt: He was prescient. But like a lot of folks (many of them named Jeff Jarvis) who write these posts, there's an odd lament laced through the triumphalism: If only they'd listened.

-snip-

What's never quite explained is what would have happened had everyone treated lay Shirky's utterances like aural treasure. Because I believe in Shirky's original analysis. "The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now, it will continue to fall long before it hits bottom, and when it does whole categories of currently lucrative businesses will be either transfigured unrecognizably or completely wiped out, and there is nothing anyone can do about it," he wrote. And he was right then. There was nothing anyone could do about it. More content aggregation and web chats and transparency would not have altered the fundamental force ripping apart the industry. Newspapers were built on local advertising monopolies. The internet deprived them of those monopolies. Less important than an individual's ability to access the BBC's news feed was his ability to access Craigslist's classifieds. In the internet age, midsize newspapers are an inefficiency. And they are being eliminated.

Jarvis had no answer for this, and nor, so far as I know, does Shirky...