Month: January 2007

It depends on what “devout” means

David Kravitz of Blue Mass Group thinks the media may be wrong in describing Mitt Romney as a “devout” Mormon. In a commentary on Jacob Weisberg’s recent Mormon-bashing piece in Slate, Kravitz writes:

Although Romney is routinely described by others as a “devout Mormon,” I could not find (via a couple of Google searches) an instance where he has described himself that way. So, is that description of him truth, or truthiness? Like everything else about what Mitt Romney actually believes, it’s hard to tell.

Oh, David. Try a Google search for “Mitt Romney” and “bishop.” Here are a few examples for you:

  • The Boston Phoenix: “A former venture capitalist and Mormon bishop, Romney unsuccessfully challenged Ted Kennedy in a 1994 Senate campaign and then rescued the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah — the Vatican of Mormonism — from certain disaster before being elected governor here.”
  • Associated Press: “Romney was a bishop — the Mormon equivalent of a pastor — in the early 1980s and served as president of a collection of Boston area churches in the late 80s and early 90s.”
  • Reuters: “A devout Mormon and former bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Romney — the son of former Michigan Gov. George Romney — has several advantages, political analysts say.“

Question: Is it possible be a non-devout bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Answer: It’s hard to imagine.

I’m not saying I agree with Weisberg that Romney’s religion should disqualify him from the presidency. But Kravitz shouldn’t kid himself about Romney’s beliefs, any more than he should have kidded himself about the trustworthiness of the Massachusetts Legislature in the recent same-sex-marriage debate.

Conversation versus competition

One of the more interesting news-of-the-future experiments taking place right now is at the Gannett newspaper chain. As Wired reported last November, Gannett’s 90-plus papers, which include the ubiquitous but unloved USA Today, have embraced the conversational model of news, encouraging readers to become citizen journalists by contributing stories and by lending a hand in certain types of investigations.

Trouble is, Gannett, with its lust for high profit margins, is not necessarily the ideal avatar of journalistic innovation. A recent Washington Post article portrayed online mobile journalists — “mojos” — at Gannett’s News-Press of Fort Myers, Fla., as little more than cheap content providers working for an editor who gets antsy if no one has posted anything in the last 15 minutes.

Now comes Lisa Williams of Placeblogger, who reports that, in Muncie, Ind., Gannett wants to play the game but is refusing to abide by the rules.

Let me back up for a moment. Within the news media, as in many businesses, there are two ways of dealing with competition: you ignore it or you denigrate it. Thus the Herald does not recommend stories in the Globe, Channel 5 does not tell you to turn to Channel 4 for more details and WRKO Radio (AM 680) does not suggest that you switch to Paul Sullivan on WBZ (AM 1030) in order to get away from the loathsome Michael Savage.

In the news-is-a-conversation model, though, you’re supposed to link to anyone and everyone. The idea is that competition is an outmoded concept, and the more content you can bring together, the better it is for everyone: bigger audience, richer conversation and maybe, someday, more money. (Someone, after all, has to pay for all this stuff, even if finances are usually left out of the equation.)

Gannett, according to Williams, is trying to have it both ways — embracing the new conversational model while sticking with the old competition model. The citizen-journalism site of Gannett’s Star Press of Muncie does not allow linking to the Muncie Free Press, an independent Web site. The guy who runs the Free Press says he’s been told the only way his site will get a mention in the Star-Press is if he buys an ad.

Williams writes:

Refusing to link to local blogs that aren’t hosted by the paper cuts off a newspaper-based community from valuable sources of new readers — and it means that while the paper may stay the paper of record for their community, they’ll never be the website of record for their community.

One of the fundamental things to understand about the net is that it’s possible to grow the pie — linking to people doesn’t mean you have fewer readers; in the long run it may mean that you have more.

Now, I’m not going to pull a Jeff Jarvis and start ranting that the Star Press folks are a bunch of clueless slugs who don’t get it. I understand the instinct. To the Star Press, the Free Press is competition. Why help it out?

Still, I think that if Gannett is going to try the news-is-a-conversation model, it ought to go all the way. As it stands, Gannett is trying to open itself up and wall itself off at the same time. Company officials want readers to contribute content, yet they won’t allow anyone to call attention to other content. They want to take, but they won’t give back. That’s repugnant, in my view.

Granted, Gannett officials can’t lose sight of its dual missions, which are to report the news and to make money. But given that they’ve made a bet-the-company gamble on experimentation, they might as well see it through. If it’s not working, they can always adjust later on.

Correction confusion

A correction uncorrected — or technically accurate? You make the call. Check out these excerpts from the New York Times concerning Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s reaction to President Bush’s plan to send more American troops to Iraq.

News story, Jan. 12:

The Iraqi leader, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, failed to appear at a news conference and avoided any public comment. He left the government’s response to an official spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, who gave what amounted to a backhanded approval of the troop increase and emphasized that Iraqis, not Americans, would set the future course in the war.

Correction, Jan. 13:

An article yesterday about the Iraqi government’s response to plans by President Bush to deploy additional troops referred incorrectly to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s absence from the government’s news conference. Mr. Maliki was never scheduled to speak; it was not that he “failed to appear.”

Editorial, Jan. 14:

Now, with Mr. Bush unwilling or unable to persuade Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to take the minimum steps necessary to justify any deeper American commitment, we recognize that even that has become unrealistic. Mr. Maliki gave the latest White House plan an even chillier reception than it received in the United States Congress, boycotting a Thursday news conference in Baghdad announcing it. He apparently would have preferred to see American forces sent to fight Sunni insurgents in western Anbar Province, leaving Baghdad as a free-fire zone for his Shiite militia partners.

It looks to me as though the Times editorial backs off the previous day’s correction and re-embraces the first account, in which it was reported that Maliki “failed to appear.” I don’t think you can “boycott” an event at which you were never scheduled to appear. So no, I’d say the editorial is not technically accurate, at least if the correction is, you know, correct.

Which raises a question: Does the Sunday editorial page go to bed so early that a correction published in Saturday’s paper can’t be taken into account? And even if that’s true, shouldn’t the Web version of the editorial have been updated?

More: Media Nation has been reliably informed that (1) the Sunday editorial page ships on Friday afternoon and (2) corrections generally don’t appear on the Web before they’ve been published in the print edition. So there you go.

Why journalism matters

Tom Stites, whose speech at last July’s Media Giraffe conference I linked to here, is back with an essay called “Needed: More Excellence in Journalism.” It’s an extension of his speech — a meditation on the fate of public-service journalism, especially for audiences not served by elite news organizations such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Well worth reading.

More cutbacks at the Globe

The Herald’s Messenger Blog reports that the Globe is eliminating 19 editorial jobs, 17 on the news side and two on the opinion pages. The cuts are part of an overall plan by the New York Times Co. to get rid of 125 positions at the Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

Globe editor Marty Baron, who’s out of town, says he’ll explain the impact in person next week. He writes in a memo to the troops:

Here is how Editorial will be affected: We are aiming for a reduction of 19 staff positions in Editorial, including 17 on the news side and two on the opinion pages. Some current openings also will be frozen. In addition, we anticipate achieving cost savings through newshole and other expense reductions, which I will detail as soon as possible in coming weeks.

This is bad news, obviously, but it’s not surprising. As I’ve said a number of times before, the Globe in a few years will be mostly local, mostly online and a lot smaller than it is today. This is just another painful step toward that uncertain future.

Finneran begins again

So it’s official. Former Massachusetts House Speaker Tom Finneran, barely a week after pleading guilty to federal obstruction-of-justice charges, is the new morning drive-time host at WRKO Radio (AM 680). But why?

Finneran used to do a lot of fill-in work at WBZ (AM 1030), especially when the legendary David Brudnoy was alive. He struck me as OK as a substitute, but not someone I’d want to listen to every day. He talked too much, throwing out a blizzard of verbiage when a few words would do, and wasn’t particularly funny, either. (Unlike legislators, Mr. Speaker, listeners don’t have to laugh at your jokes.) In fact, he was pretty much like the way he came off at today’s news conference, which you can watch here.

Nor do I think Finneran is much of a marquee name, although Entercom honchos Julie Kahn and Jason Wolfe obviously believe otherwise.

In his press conference, Finneran did sound as though he wants to try something a little more newsy and elevated than WRKO is used to. (Of course, he’ll be doing it without a news department.) Presumably we won’t have to snore through Finneran’s complaining about how mad he gets when the ATM makes him choose between English and Spanish — an actual Todd Feinburg topic yesterday. So I wish Finneran well.

Scott Allen Miller, the man he’ll be replacing, will stay at the helm until the Finneran show makes its debut on Feb. 12. This is unheard-of in radio, but Wolfe said at the news conference that Miller is being considered for another Entercom job outside of Boston. So Miller will be a good boy.

Miller’s not a bad guy (disclosure: I yakked with him on his show a few times, and once did a morning as his substitute co-host), but I don’t think he ever figured out the Boston market. He really could have used a piece of advice I once heard from Brudnoy: In talk radio, the callers are far dumber than the listeners. The trick is to find a way to deal with the callers without alienating the listeners. Unfortunately, Miller’s show all too often sounds like he thinks the callers are his listeners. By this point, maybe they are.

Save WRKO is apoplectic.

Bush in a Flash

I was out during President Bush’s speech last night, so the first thing I did when I got home was to start looking for the video on the Internet. So kudos to New England Cable News, which had posted it in easy-to-load Flash video. Even CSPAN.org couldn’t beat that.

As for the substance, I have to confess that Bush’s words came across as recycled boilerplate to such an extent that it was hard to pay attention. Besides, most of the details had been leaked out in the preceding days. But I found the lead of this Sheryl Gay Stolberg analysis in the New York Times to be suitably horrifying:

By stepping up the American military presence in Iraq, President Bush is not only inviting an epic clash with the Democrats who run Capitol Hill. He is ignoring the results of the November elections, rejecting the central thrust of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and flouting the advice of some of his own generals, as well as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq.

Unless you believe that Bush knows more than all of the aforementioned people (including the voters who rejected his policies last November), then you should be as horrified as I am.

“Local Hero” for homeland security

Gov. Deval Patrick has appointed Juliette Kayyem as the state’s homeland security adviser. Here’s a short profile I wrote about Kayyem for a “Local Heroes” roundup that appeared in the Boston Phoenix on Nov. 21, 2001.

How smart is Kayyem? Check out this excerpt from the Phoenix profile:

If Kayyem could give the administration one piece of advice, it would be to drop the “war” metaphor. With September 11 behind us, the pursuit of Al Qaeda well under way, and the anthrax attacks now believed to be the work of a domestic Unabomber type, the worst of it may already be over — yet the use of the word “war” justifies anti-liberty policies that serve no purpose in rooting out terrorism.

“It skews the debate too far to the right in a way that I think will have very bad long-term consequences for America,” she says. “We’ve put this entire structure in place for a war that is essentially over. A lot of what [then-attorney general John] Ashcroft has gotten through is stuff they’ve been trying to get through for a long time. Fifty or 100 years from now, what’s been done during the past two months may still be around.”

Too bad she’s not President Bush’s homeland security adviser instead of Patrick’s.