Is journalism dying?

That's what my friend Lukas does. He hates it.

Okay Tracer, I am going to drive into Baltimore this weekend and beat up heroin dealers with my shining teeth, blazing feet, and lightning wit. You have to come up with a crazy name for me, though.

I'm betting 4-1 that I have actually been impervious to bullets all along. Who's in?

-- Aaron W (aaro...), May 29th, 2003.

the corruption and cronyism rampant at 95% of alt-weeklies is depressing

-- James Blount (littlejohnnyjewe...), May 29th, 2003.

not nearly as depressing as the awful writing though

-- James Blount (littlejohnnyjewe...), May 29th, 2003.

Couldn't agree more, James.

-- Aaron W (aaro...), May 29th, 2003.

ooh, ooh, count me in on all of this too. and let's not forget how fucking long it takes them to mail cheques. the assholes.

But bitching about them feels counter-productive. People who are frustrated should get together and do their own newspaper.

Meanwhile The WaPo pulled back at the last minute from allowing its publishers and newsroom to mingle with lobbysits.

our wonderful local rag, aka that nasty bunch of hypocrites: http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/news/Town-website-publisher-s-porn-business/article-1883453-detail/article.html

http://i.imgur.com/B5ez7.jpg

http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/216382_1923770406620_1012896840_32277949_7741349_n.jpg

So the Cape Cod newspaper has its very own Stephen Glass:

There is an implied contract between a newspaper and its readers. The paper prints the truth. Readers believe that it's true.

It's not always so simple, of course. There are nuances in how a story is presented, what words are used to describe the action. Papers have personalities, and no two are exactly alike, but at the end of the day, facts are facts. And a good newspaper holds nothing more sacred than its role to tell the truth. Always. As fully and as fairly as possible.

This is our guiding principle, so it is with heavy heart that we tell you the Cape Cod Times has broken that trust. An internal review has found that one of our reporters wrote dozens of stories that included one or more sources who do not exist.

The reporter was Karen Jeffrey, 59, a writer for the Cape Cod Times since 1981. In an audit of her work, Times editors have been unable to find 69 people in 34 stories since 1998, when we began archiving stories electronically.

On Tuesday, Jeffrey admitted to fabricating people in some of these articles and giving some others false names. She no longer works for the Cape Cod Times.

We were able to verify sourcing in many stories written by Jeffrey, mostly police and court news, political stories, and recently a series on returning war veterans. The stories with suspect sourcing were typically lighter fare – a story on young voters, a story on getting ready for a hurricane, a story on the Red Sox home opener – where some or all of the people quoted cannot be located.

In 2011, for example, a story on the Fourth of July parade in Cotuit featured Johnson Coggins, 88, “the patriarch of the family” and a longtime Cotuit summer resident. No one by that name can be found using public-records searches and there is no Coggins in the town of Barnstable's assessor's database. We were unable to locate five other people featured in that story.

In a 2006 story on the Falmouth Road Race, we were unable to find five individuals, including Daniel Fortes of San Diego, a marathon runner who, Jeffrey wrote, has run the Boston Marathon and the Falmouth race but was sidelined with an injury that year. Fortes could not be found using public records and no one with that name had competed in the Falmouth race or the Boston Marathon for the five years leading up to the story, according to the races' websites.

Times editors reviewed Jeffrey's stories using a variety of search techniques, including a public-records database tool called Accurint, searches of voter rolls and town assessor's records, a review of Facebook profiles and attempted phone calls in an effort to find the sources.

1 Herald Plaza is gone.

http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/nyt_hasnt_been_hit_that_hard.php

http://crookedtimber.org/2014/03/27/journalism-and-astroturfing/

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-note-on-sponsors

"You probably think of us as big innovators on the editorial side."

Ha.

former alt-weekly editor, now in the academic world, makes hipster plea to rich folks to buy alt-weeklies

Because if the John Henrys and the Jeff Bezoses can pick up papers for a song, it's a song popular when they had more hair and it was on the "radio." Alt-weeklies, however, can be yours for the cost of a download by a band you've never heard of, but one you will totes YouTube after reading that review by an alt's music writer who wears a knit cap, always, even in summer. Because she knows what she's talking about, and she's talking about it in a medium that continues to be relevant — and even sometimes makes money.

What I'm saying is that alt-weeklies are still a darn good value in today's media market. And here's why:

No. 1: They're cheap! So cheap, even broke-ish dailies are plunking down for them! Baltimore City Paper just got eaten by the Baltimore Sun Media Group. The price? Undisclosed, but it couldn’t be much. The underpaid City Paper staff had concocted a scheme before the sale to pool money and buy the thing outright. And let's visit Chicago, shall we? The Sun-Times bought the Chicago Reader in 2012 for about $3 million, according to sources "close to the deal." Consider that's half a million less than a group of eight people paid on eBay that year to have lunch at a steakhouse with Warren Buffet. So instead of a side of creamed spinach (and a few stilted selfies) you could own an institution that's been kicking tail since 1972

http://www.altweeklies.com/aan/an-open-letter-to-the-guy-who-owns-snapchat-and-other-hip-wealthy-people/Article?oid=7596431

INCREDIBLE STORY

http://www.pressherald.com/news/Squirrel_goes_nuts_as_Maine_teen_takes__selfie_.html

http://m.fredericknewspost.com/news/politics_and_government/delauter-to-the-news-post-don-t-use-my-name/article_e965025f-6c48-5a02-b162-600dfd2b5495.html?mode=jqm

http://jimromenesko.com/2015/01/06/start-suing-mr-councilman/

http://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/politics_and_government/kirby-delauter-kirby-delauter-kirby-delauter/article_da85d6f4-fa3c-524f-bbf6-8e5ddc0d1c0a.html

Just saw this. Was wondering if he was connected to the sovereign citizen movement. And if not, could he be pushed if someone were to send him a few youtubes?

Sovereign Citizen types claim the right not to have their names spoken/published? Damn, those people are crazier than I thought.

Well, they have weird and tricky ownership procedures around them anyway.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/business/media/nudes-are-old-news-at-playboy.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

good vice diss

i've noticed that i have a new anxiety, just before i am about to post something somewhere that links to a news story or anything dated/dateable, i think to double check to make sure it really is 'now' and not like, four days old

i saw that the guardian has started putting, in addition to the dateline, notices at the tops of stories: 'this article is 2 years old' etc

lol The New Day closes before we even bother to take the piss

Upbeat, optimistic approach

Don't remember even noticing this on sale. Business model seems to have been, a free paper, but costing money?

amazed that their innovative pitch of 'A brand new UK National Paper for women and men' somehow failed to grab the attention of readers

it didn't have a political stance

or readers

rip the new day heaven needed a... whatever you were

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeo1V-47BBw

these guys did the pied piper table ad, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdkz9y8LRDI

when she says "that's the fun part" a little part of her dies

that tronc recruitment video would make me run away screaming, rather than be put through a funnel and optimized.

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/google-funds-press-association-robot-reporter-project-which-will-provide-30000-local-media-stories-a-month/

"The Press Assocation has been awarded €706,000 by Google to develop a robot reporting project which will see computers write 30,000 stories a month for local media."

I think it’s within the fundamental responsibility of journalists to call a claim “baseless” if, in their judgment, it is. They’re the people in a position to know (as opposed to, like, us). They’ve just interviewed the relevant experts on both sides of the story. And if an actual judge says that the President’s proxies are trying to undermine faith in an election, using a word like “subvert” is justified. On the other hand, NOT using those words would be granting Trump (or whoever) a legitimacy he hasn’t earned.

I don't really need daily headlines like "Trump Once Again Demonstrates Lack of Scruples" when that kind of thing is all over my social media feed.

fetch my fainting couch!

I don't know, maybe Trump really is as relentlessly bad as the Times portrays him to be, but it's very hard to read that paper day after day and have any sense of why, you know, 72 million people might vote for him, other than they are all crazy, misinformed, racist or what have you. I guess there is a popular sideline in Times analysts trying to explain this great mystery, though no one seems to ever ask if maybe he's not as one-dimensionally evil as they portray him to be, and whether that might explain part of it. I feel like some other news sources have no trouble calling Trump on his bullshit yet somehow seem to present more of an appearance of evenhandedness or objectivity.

Weird genre of post you’re inventing here

can you point to some articles in other press about various scruples that he has demonstrated?

I'm not saying other press sources are constantly writing about his strong moral fiber, just that they tend to treat him more like all of the other politicians they cover (not all of whom regularly cover themselves in glory where demonstration of scruples is concerned) and less like a uniquely corrupt and maleficent force. Anyway, there's no joy to be had these days trying to advocate for old-fashioned journalistic values of neutrality, separation of editorial pages from "hard news" pages etc. Perhaps those values were always a thin veneer of respectability that deserved to be worn away.

Bob McChesney and John Nichols:

https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/the-local-journalism-initiative.php

https://www.esquireme.com/news/48076-how-the-uae-is-celebrating-todays-international-day-of-peace

...

Wow and yikes. I went to the homepage and it's all like that, just puff pieces sucking up to assorted Middle Eastern moguls and hotshots. Gross.

can't believe how far the most trusted name in news, Esquire Middle East, has fallen

I just looked it up, Esquire has a bunch of international editions. Not all of them owned by Hearst, some it looks like they just sold the rights to the name to an in-country publisher. But Esquire ME is an actual Hearst mag. So is Esquire Bulgaria, which I bet is a treat.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/is-the-media-prepared-for-an-extinction-level-event?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_021024&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_term=tny_daily_digest&bxid=5be9da642ddf9c72dc27c25d&cndid=29476922&hasha=f0ef51a738774f8c6d037c5c6beb7573&hashb=7cfed5b1cbcbc6a71fea3c2fc2bc754ee2661f52&hashc=fdd5c8d249d863be98861f55628588b242a4ca01384346986428715bbfdd44db&esrc=CDS_OP

Is the media prepared for utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_021024&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_term=tny_daily_digest&bxid=5be9da642ddf9c72dc27c25d&cndid=29476922&hasha=f0ef51a738774f8c6d037c5c6beb7573&hashb=7cfed5b1cbcbc6a71fea3c2fc2bc754ee2661f52&hashc=fdd5c8d249d863be98861f55628588b242a4ca01384346986428715bbfdd44db&esrc=CDS_OP

Never

I read that article (clean link) and my reaction was that it makes me wonder if journalists fundamentally misunderstand how the average person sees news. Why pay to learn something that will likely bum you out, and about which you can do nothing? Isn't life hard enough already? More and more, I feel like a medieval peasant. The rulers are gonna do what they're gonna do, and the people in charge of telling us about that are mostly cheering them on (in a "can't argue with success!" sort of way), so fuck "the news." I'd rather spend my money on music, books and movies, and if I'm "uninformed," so be it. I don't feel like I'm missing much.

yeah

Urgh, my wife and I are j-school types. We don't really have a lot of backup plans and it's a bit late to generate a backup plan now.

Recently she looked into going to law school at age 46. That seems pretty far-fetched, but it's not like I have a better idea.

We are unlikely to manage mortgage/college/retirement/debt etc. whilst working at e.g. McDonald's. (No disrespect to those who do, just saying it would be a tough bunch of changes.)

if you're considering career moves, as a high school teacher i mean this 100% sincerely, please consider teaching! media literacy is absolutely kicking our collective asses and we don't have enough people who understand it to teach kids about it.

The essay's right about the forces at work, but what's amazing to me — and The Messenger is obviously the most ridiculous example of this — is how many people with lots of money at big media companies have just totally failed to understand the realities. Advertising is gone as a primary revenue stream for news/media companies. But these guys still think they're gonna get rich selling ads.

Subscription and/or nonprofit models are the obvious ways to go. They both have their challenges, but there are a lot of people doing good work with both of them right now. Will just have to see how well they can sustain themselves. I'm less pessimistic about journalism than I was five years ago, because I think there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. But for sure it's unstable, and I'm happy not to be working for legacy media companies still trying to retrofit their old models.

More and more, I feel like a medieval peasant. The rulers are gonna do what they're gonna do, and the people in charge of telling us about that are mostly cheering them on (in a "can't argue with success!" sort of way), so fuck "the news." I'd rather spend my money on music, books and movies, and if I'm "uninformed," so be it. I don't feel like I'm missing much.

― Tahuti Watches L&O:SVU Reruns Without His Ape (unperson), Saturday, 10 February 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Most people in the medieval era couldn't read or write. Which is what I get from your posts

The essay's right about the forces at work, but what's amazing to me — and The Messenger is obviously the most ridiculous example of this — is how many people with lots of money at big media companies have just totally failed to understand the realities. Advertising is gone as a primary revenue stream for news/media companies.

And when a much-ballyhooed site like The Messenger collapses the crash sounds louder -- it becomes another warning sign, another "there, you see? Media IS collapsing!"

xp I suspect that primary and secondary school teaching is going to mostly be a volunteer force in 20 years and work on an equivalent of the original Sunday School system in 30.

please consider teaching! media literacy is absolutely kicking our collective asses and we don't have enough people who understand it to teach kids about it

Teaching media literacy would have to be a stealth operation, because with the enshrinement of standard tests driving the entire curriculum these days there's not much space for anything else in a school day.

I disagree. It’s pretty easy to align lessons on media literacy with the common core. You are assessing their ability to make inferences and comprehend nonfiction texts.

treesh, I know you're a smart and experienced enough teacher to control your own lessons in depth and make your teaching materials work for you rather than the other way around, but that is a high level and a difficult attainment. For a less experienced or committed teacher, the fact that most contemporary media are not consumed as nonfiction texts places a large constraint on their effectively teaching media literacy. Even more so, if the classroom materials are imposed rather than discretionary.

Anyway, I acknowledge your greater expertise on this, so if you think my perspective is insufficiently grounded, I'll accept your conclusions.

Nice to see that Chicago's longtime alt-weekly is now an actual weekly again:
https://chicagoreader.com/columns-opinion/staff-notes/weekly-newspaper/

Good editorial.

yeah. stirring stuff!