Nieman is a leading journalism education and research foundation, as well as a center for mid-career journalists looking to recharge their batteries. (Note: I am an occasional contributor to its journal, Nieman Reports.) Lipinski instantly becomes one of the most important media thinkers in Boston.
Lipinski brings three decades of journalism experience to her new post. Prior to joining the University of Chicago in 2008, where she is credited with major contributions to the discourse around the future of the city, arts programs in the community, and collaborations with local public schools, she served as editor of the Chicago Tribune for more than seven years. Under her stewardship, the Tribune became known as a leader in public service journalism, publishing stories with both investigative depth and literary detail, including a multiyear reporting effort that helped bring about a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois. Under her leadership, the Tribune won Pulitzers for international, explanatory, investigative, feature, and editorial writing. The paper also significantly expanded its portfolio of print and digital offerings.
Lipinski was a Nieman Fellow in 1990, so she knows her way around Harvard Square — although, if she’s like the rest of us, she’ll find it considerably less interesting than it was the last time she was here.
The Boston Globe has won its first Pulitzer in three years. Sebastian Smee, the paper’s visual-arts critic, takes home the prize for criticism. Here is the story the Globe ran when Smee was hired in 2008. Here are links to his reviews.
Another winner with local ties is Ellen Barry of the New York Times, who shares the award for international reporting with her colleague Clifford Levy. Barry worked at both the Boston Phoenix and the Globe before moving to the Times.
The big surprise: no winner in breaking-news reporting.
Oh, my Godwin. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, onetime scourge of left-wingers who compared George W. Bush to Hitler, now proudly reminds us that he once compared liberal tax-and-spenders to Hitler and Ivan the Terrible.
As WGBH is one of my employers, I offer without comment a story by the Boston Globe’s Johnny Diaz on the radio rivalry between public stations WBUR (90.9 FM) and WGBH (89.7 FM).
Carl Crawford actually has nothing to do with this blog post.
Don’t be a pr1ck. Carl Crawford is not dealing drugs in the dugout.
Those are two of the examples cited in the Boston Globe’s online-comments policy, a copy of which was obtained by Media Nation earlier today. In the first instance, people charged with deleting offensive comments are warned to be on guard for spellings of forbidden words that won’t get picked up by an automatic filter — in this case, changing the i to a 1 in prick.
In the second instance, “it’s fine for a user to say that Carl Crawford is a detriment to the team, but he/she shouldn’t say that he’s dealing drugs in the dugout.”
The policy was released along with an announcement that the job of tracking down and killing offensive comments has been outsourced to a company in Winnipeg. According to the memo from Teresa Hanafin, director of user engagement for Boston.com, and Bennie DiNardo, the Globe’s deputy managing editor for multimedia, the company — ICUC — currently moderates comments for the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com and for Gannett.
Other fun excerpts from the Globe’s online-comments policy:
“As a rule, we permanently disable comments on all stories about people who have experienced a personal tragedy, as well as all obituaries.”
“We also temporarily disable comments overnight for stories about immigration, religion, and religious figures. Commenting on these stories should be enabled at 7 a.m., and the stories should be given extra attention throughout the day so that we can move quickly if the comments degenerate.”
“Obscene text and profanities are not allowed. Remove comments that have harsh profanities, but it’s OK to leave those that are less offensive: ‘jerk,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘crap,’ ‘idiot,’ etc.”
It’s a jungle out there!
It’s good to see Boston.com taking online comments more seriously than it has in the past. But for genuine user engagement, the site should either screen comments before they’re posted, require real names or both.
To read the Globe’s complete online-comments policy, click here. To read my two favorite posts about comments, click here (Howard Owens on why real names should be required) and here (the New Haven Independent’s comments policy). The complete text of Hanafin and DiNardo’s memo is below.
Hi folks,
As many of you know, for more than a year now our copy editing staffs in all departments have shared a very important duty for Boston.com: monitoring the abuse reports that our users file when they find inappropriate comments on articles or in our forums. Helped by the Metro Desk coops on weekends and Boston.com interns in the early morning hours, these copy editors, led by Steve Morgan, have kept vigil on the comments for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. Their work has been incredibly valuable.
But it also was work that we asked them to do in addition to their regular job duties. We’re happy to announce that we’re now employing a company that specializes in moderation to take over the abuse report monitoring.
The company, ICUC, is based in Winnipeg. It moderates comments for Gannett papers and SFGate.com as well as corporate clients, and receives high marks from all. They began their monitoring at 8 a.m. yesterday, and will watch our abuse reports 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They guarantee that they will deal with an abuse report within 20 minutes of its filing.
We have sent them our moderating policy (attached below) and have added specific examples of tone and language that we will not tolerate. Our producers and editors retain control over whether or not to enable comments for particular stories. In addition, there is a dirty word filter in our comments provider’s admin tool that always is a joy to edit.
During this initial startup period, they will be growing accustomed to the standards and folkways of Boston.com and the Globe. But if you notice anything amiss — perhaps a nasty comment that you reported didn’t get blocked — please don’t hesitate to notify either of us.
We’re very happy that we can take this burden off our copy editors and have this experienced company on board.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIsFcydDbkw?rel=0&w=480&h=390]
It’s Mark Zuckerberg’s world. The rest of us are just visiting. So it makes sense that SeeClickFix has developed a Facebook app. SeeClickFix, based in New Haven, combines mapping and social media so that citizens, government officials and the local press can identify and solve neighborhood problems ranging from potholes to prostitution.
I installed the app a little while ago, and — believe me — I don’t install Facebook apps lightly. (I’ll probably delete it later, especially if it starts sending me messages.) It looks like the entire SeeClickFix experience has been ported over to the Facebook environment. Users can report problems and pinpoint them on a Google map, thus alerting government officials and the news media. I am far from being the world’s biggest Facebook fan, but it’s a smart move, given how much time people spend there.
SeeClickFix has media partners around the world. The New Haven Independent, a non-profit community website, features the SeeClickFix RSS feed for New Haven on its home page. Boston.com’s pothole map is powered by SeeClickFix.
Last May, I interviewed SeeClickFix co-founder and chief executive Ben Berkowitz at his New Haven office. The video of that interview is above. I also profiled SeeClickFix for the Guardian.
In what I’m sure will be a surprise to no one, Greater Media has announced that WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) talk-show host Jay Severin has been fired. Boston Globe story here; Boston Herald story here.
Severin was suspended last week, apparently for making some pretty loathsome remarks about sex with interns. Standard fare for the hatemongering Severin, but his $1 million salary and his plummeting ratings made getting rid of him an easy call.
Meanwhile, Globe columnist Scot Lehigh proves that Severin lied about him recently regarding Lehigh’s reporting that Severin had lied about having received a Pulitzer. Fun piece (“lying about lying,” Lehigh calls it), though the only folks who thought Severin was telling the truth about Lehigh were the most hopeless of his sycophants. Which means they won’t be convinced now, either.
Severin has already been scrubbed from the WTKK website. Jay who? We don’t know anyone named Jay.
Was Media Nation the first to predict that Severin wouldn’t be back? You tell me.
And just think: Severin’s departure comes on the same day that we learn fading Fox phenom Glenn Beck will be leaving his daily show later this year. Beck is supposedly going to work on unspecified projects for Fox.
I’m disappointed that editors at the Boston Globe decided they needed to balance Jeff Jacoby’s column on Richard Goldstone’s remarkable mea culpa regarding Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war with a piece arguing, in essence, that Goldstone didn’t really mean it.
Goldstone, a South African judge and diplomat, headed a U.N. investigation into the Gaza war several years ago, and concluded that Israel had committed war crimes against the civilian population. The so-called Goldstone Report has been a cudgel wielded by Israel’s enemies ever since.
So it was (or, rather, should have been) big news when the Washington Post published an op-ed by Goldstone last Friday in which he says that he and his fellow investigators were way too hard on Israel and not nearly hard enough on Hamas. And he credits Israel for investigating the report’s findings while criticizing Hamas for doing nothing. Goldstone writes:
Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel. That comparatively few Israelis have been killed by the unlawful rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in no way minimizes the criminality. The U.N. Human Rights Council should condemn these heinous acts in the strongest terms.
Other than a brief Associated Press story that ran on Monday, today is the first time the Globe has addressed Goldstone’s turnaround. Jacoby characterizes the original Goldstone Report — hyperbolically, though not without cause — as a “blood libel,” and writes, “The Goldstone report did incalculable damage to Israel’s good name. Breathlessly hyped in the media, it accelerated the already frenzied international campaign to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state.”
The importance of Goldstone’s turnaround can’t be exaggerated. Yet running along with Jacoby’s column today is a piece by Nimer Sultany, described as “a civil rights lawyer in Israel and a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School,” accusing Goldstone of giving in to pressure from fellow Jews and of making another Israeli incursion into Gaza more likely.
“The lingering question,” Sultany writes, “is whether Goldstone can look hundreds of Palestinian civilian victims in the eye and say he stood up for them in the face of severe Israeli and American criticism.”
Goldstone’s turnaround, of course, is not above questioning. As Sultany suggests, there have been reports that Goldstone had been ostracized by the South African Jewish community — although be sure to check out the correction at the bottom of this New York Times story. (The Times also reportedly rejected Goldstone’s op-ed before he shopped it to the Post, though Ben Smith of Politico says otherwise.)
Nevertheless, what Goldstone is saying now hasn’t received nearly enough attention from the media in general or from the Globe specifically. By running Sultany’s rebuttal on the same page as Jacoby’s column, the Globe opens itself up to criticism by those who have long believed the Globe is guilty of anti-Israeli bias.
My big disappointment of the week — of the year? — is that I will be missing the National Conference for Media Reform that’s being held in Boston this weekend. Originally I was supposed to moderate a panel, and I had hoped to hang out pretty much all weekend. But some important personal commitments arose that were beyond my control, and there you have it.
But enough about me. This should be a great event, featuring dozens of programs and top-flight speakers who will be of interest to anyone who cares about the future of journalism. The conference is being presented by the media-reform group Free Press, whose work I respect enormously.
If you are able to get over to the World Trade Center, I urge you to do so.
[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/htsdgrCLXQI]
Friend of Media Nation Donna Halper (soon to be Dr. Halper) recently spoke about her new book, “Boston Radio: 1920-2010,” on Quincy cable television.
If you’re in the Quincy area, be advised that Halper will be speaking Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the main branch of the Thomas Crane Public Library. I’d get over there if I were you. (Disclosure: I get a mention in the book.)
Hoping to see Dr. Halper at a North Shore bookstore sometime in the near future.
