Media – Page 255 – Media Nation

Obama, one year later

The Guardian has put together a package of commentary on the first anniversary of President Obama’s election. Mine is here.

Should “anal retentive” be hyphenated?

Two weeks ago today, the Twitter feed Fake AP Stylebook was launched upon an unsuspecting planet.

Journalists who had long labored under the tyranny of the Associated Press Stylebook know that they’re supposed to use 1950s-style postal abbreviations for states, spell out the numbers one through nine and abbreviate street when it’s an address (17 Smith St.) but not a place (Smith Street).

Until now, though, we couldn’t be quite sure why the word Bible is always capitalized. It is, the Fakesters solemnly explain, a matter of pragmatism: “You don’t want to get letters from those people.”

Over the weekend I reached out to the Fakesters. Callie Kimball at Wired.com makes it sound like unearthing their identities was a journalistic coup worthy of Woodward and Bernstein, but I just asked them, and they told me. The founders, Mark Hale, 31, and Ken Lowery, 28, may soon have a book deal. If they are not the first to parlay Twitter into fame and fortune, they may well be the quickest.

The Fake AP Stylebook is also the subject of my column in the Guardian this week. It should go up later today tomorrow; I’ll link to it once it’s live.

The following e-mail transcript has been lightly edited, including (gasp) for AP style. Turns out I know it better than they do.

Media Nation: Who are you?

Mark: I’m co-creator Mark Hale, an Indiana native living in Louisville, Ky., with my fiancée and our menagerie of pets. I’ve left college twice, the first time from a Japanese studies program. The second time I left from a journalism program that included an internship as editor of the school paper, which is what led me to the simple joy of the real AP Stylebook. My interest in journalism coincided nicely with the weblog boom of the early 2000s, and I began commenting on comic-book-related sites and eventually started my own. Ken and I met through comments on our weblogs and have been acquaintances since. We’ve been in near-constant contact the last two years or so.

Ken: I’m Ken Lowery, a copy editor for the United Methodist Reporter, based in Dallas. I’m also a freelance movie critic and have wanted to be a journalist since I was a kid.

The rest of our team (whom we call our Bureau Chiefs) are made up of journalists, bloggers, cartoonists, graphic designers, a couple English professors, a professional librarian, a lawyer and others. We’re a diverse group, but we all like to write and we’re all big huge nerds.

MN: How did you come up with the idea of doing the Fake AP Stylebook?

Mark: Ken and I were chatting two weeks ago, and he showed me the feed for the real AP Stylebook on Twitter. With the proliferation of “fake” accounts, labeled and otherwise, I remarked to him, “I can’t tell if I’m sad or relieved that this isn’t a joke feed.” Ken got hit by a lightning bolt, he wrote a post about how television shows are denoted and I wrote one about Dr Pepper, each on our own feeds. Then he decided we should start it on its own feed, and off we went.

MN: Have you heard from people at the Associated Press? What have they told you?

Ken: We’ve spotted a few AP writers in our “response” feed, and they’re fans. We were also approached early in the feed’s life by a curious AP reporter who wanted to do a story, but that ultimately didn’t go anywhere.

Naturally, if and when the book becomes a reality, we’ll be changing up the title.

MN: You’ve been at this less than two weeks, and by Sunday you already had nearly 34,000 followers on Twitter. Are you surprised at the way this has taken off, or was world domination part of your plan from the beginning?

Mark: Tuesday, Nov. 4, will be the first day of our third week.

“Surprised” is pretty mild. We had no plans other than making each other laugh at first, and then dragging our friends into it so they could make us laugh, too. Given the talent of the people involved, I’m not surprised people like it; I’m just surprised there are so many. The number of followers is nearing the population of my small Indiana hometown.

MN: Not to get political on you, but is wingnut one word or two? Or should it be hyphenated?

Mark: Typically, no hyphen. Capitalize when referring to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure Wingnut.

MN: What’s next?

Mark: We and the Bureau Chiefs are currently pulling together a sample chapter as part of a book proposal. We’ve been approached by three agents, and have finally signed on with one.

We hope to work in a good deal of the Twitter material, but so far we seem to be cranking out original material at a good clip. Other than that, we’re going to continue trying to make people laugh for free on the Internet. That’s where the real money is these days, after all.

The Globe’s ancien regime makes a comeback

I have no particular insight into Boston Globe publisher Steven Ainsley’s retirement announcement, or why senior vice president Christopher Mayer was chosen as his replacement. But I do think Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix gets at two important possible reasons.

First, Mayer, despite being just 47, is a holdover from the Taylor regime. That might prove reassuring to the jittery Globe newsroom, especially given that a group led by former Globe executive Stephen Taylor recently fell short in its attempt to buy the paper back from the New York Times Co.

Second, Mayer is described in Beth Healy’s Globe story as “an architect” of the recent dramatic price increase, which, despite plummeting circulation, reportedly led to an 18.4 percent rise in circulation revenue at the Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette during the third quarter.

More than anything, I’m reminded of editor Matt Storin’s retirement in the summer of 2001. Earlier in the year, Storin presided over what had been up to that time the most wrenching downsizing in the paper’s history. By sticking around until after all the blood had been spilled, Storin gave Marty Baron a chance to start with a clean slate.

Though we don’t know whether Ainsley’s retirement is voluntary, it strikes me that he performed the same role during this year’s labor-management war that Storin did in 2001.

Finally, Ainsley showed a sense of humor, though I suspect it was inadvertent. According to Healy’s story, Ainsley “is interested in nonprofit work.” Insert cymbal crash.

Ralph Ranalli has further thoughts at Beat the Press. At the Boston Herald, Jessica Heslam and Christine McConville note that Ainsley made $1.9 million last year. A good job at a good wage, for sure.

Tweeting from City Hall

Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub has some big-time fun with the Boston Herald’s story on city employees who use Facebook and Twitter during work hours. Gaffin reproduces a photo of the Herald reporters who wrote the story, Jessica Heslam and Dave Wedge, from — yes — Heslam’s Facebook account.

“What are they using them for?” asks Gaffin. “What are they hiding? Ooh, insinuation is fun!”

Kidding aside, you have to admit that there’s an appearance problem with the way some city employees are using social media. Heslam and Wedge focus on Amy Derjue, a former Boston Magazine blogger who was hired earlier this year to serve as City Council president Mike Ross’ $39,000-a-year spokeswoman.

Derjue is something of a young-woman-about-town, and I follow her on both Facebook and Twitter. (If you page through her 340 Facebook friends, you’ll see a wide array of local media and political folks, including Gaffin, me — and Wedge.) Some of her posts make me cringe, and Heslam and Wedge dutifully provide some cringe-worthy examples. But I’ve never heard anyone suggest she wasn’t smart, hard-working and energetic. For what it’s worth, she has complained to me on behalf of her boss, which suggests dedication to her job.

More to the point, most of us — and you can be sure Derjue falls into this category — are never fully off work. If we’re expected to tend to business when we’re off-duty, then we have to be allowed some fun during the formal workday as well. And, as Gaffin writes, “Why, it takes sheer seconds to post something to Facebook or Twitter.”

An aside that may help illustrate my point. Yesterday John Robinson, editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., tweeted that he was being yelled at by a “legislator who resigned in disgrace.” When I responded at how impressed I was with his multi-tasking, he replied, “Yes, tweeting while yelling. What else am I supposed to do? Listen?” This was not a private conversation — it was seen by all 1,196 of Robinson’s followers and all 2,019 of mine. Welcome to 2009.

Ross tells the Herald that he hired Derjue in part for her social-networking expertise. And, indeed, Ross has a pretty lively Twitter feed and Facebook account. For Derjue to post to her personal sites while working on her boss’ would, as Gaffin says, take “sheer seconds.” You can question her judgment, but her social-media activities are not evidence of dereliction.

Derjue seems to have partly disabled her Facebook account (I could be wrong; Facebook mystifies and annoys me), and she hasn’t posted to Twitter since last night. No doubt she’s licking her wounds at the moment. I’m interested to see how she’ll respond.

A double whammy for the newspaper business

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that the long-predicted newspaper-circulation death spiral now under way wouldn’t be such a big deal if online advertisers weren’t fleeing newspaper Web sites as well.

On a cheerier note, Jonathan Knee writes in Barron’s that recession and crushing debt are masking the fundamental soundness of many newspapers — especially monopoly papers with a circulation of 100,000 or less.

A terrifying story about the newspaper business

There’s an absolutely terrifying story about the newspaper business making the rounds today, and it’s not the one about print circulation falling another 10.6 percent. That’s hardly a surprise, given the continued rush to online — pushed along by papers like the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald raising the price of their print editions.

No, the truly ugly news is a story in the New York Times by Stephanie Clifford, who reports that companies increasingly see newspaper Web sites as a place for premium, special-event advertising, but not for everyday ads. For the latter, they use online networks, which cost a fraction of what newspapers charge.

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Globe’s daily circulation fell 18.4 percent, and now stands at 264,105. On Sunday, it’s fallen by 16.9 percent, to 418,529. In its heyday, the Globe’s Monday-through-Saturday circulation was more than 500,000, and on Sundays it was north of 800,000.

The Monday-through-Saturday Herald stands at 138,260, down 17.5 percent. The circulation of the Sunday Herald dropped 5 percent, to 95,635.

If you had told me five years ago what the print circulation of the Globe and the Herald would be today, I’d like to think I would have been entirely unsurprised. On the other hand, I know I would have been shocked that advertising revenues had not followed from print to online.

If the eventual end of the recession doesn’t provide some relief to the beleaguered newspaper business, you really have to wonder how this will all end.

Even George Will is appalled by Cheney

Thought you might enjoy George Will’s response on “This Week” when George Stephanopoulos asked him about Dick Cheney’s accusation that President Obama, by taking his time before deciding on a strategy in Afghanistan, is “dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger.” Here’s how Will began:

A bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. For a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point. We have much more to fear in this town from hasty than from slow government action.

Good stuff, although a few caveats are in order. First, though Will is a conservative, he’s not a neoconservative, and he’s been notably less enthusiastic about foreign adverturism over the years than his neobrethren. Second, he came out against the war in Afghanistan weeks ago. Third, Will has never been much taken with the Bush clan or its minions.

But still. With the war-mongering Laura Ingraham fulminating on the same set today (and when is she going to enlist?), it was heartening to hear a sane conservative call out Cheney’s posturing for what it is.

The New York Times’ non-profit partners

What should we think about a partnership the New York Times has announced with a Chicago non-profit news organization that will supply two pages of news each week for the Times’ new Chicago edition?

On the one hand, the Times, a for-profit enterprise, is using material from a non-profit in order to take business away from two other for-profit enterprises, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. (Earlier, a similar arrangement was announced for a San Francisco edition of the Times.)

I’m a huge fan of non-profit journalism, but this strikes me as raising the specter of unfair competition. The non-profit, after all, enjoys certain tax advantages not available to a for-profit.

On the other hand, no one objects when for-profit newspapers run material from non-profit news organizations such as the Christian Science Monitor. My gut tells me this is different, but I can’t explain why.

We’re all debating whether for-profit newspapers can or should take the non-profit route. At least in a small way, the Times is now doing exactly that through the back door.