In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual “State of the News Media” report, though valuable, doesn’t really capture what’s going on at the grassroots, where hyperlocal projects like the New Haven Independent and The Batavian are reinventing journalism every day.
Category: Media
Bill Dedman’s “investigative slideshow”
The Absurd Intellectual calls Bill Dedman’s latest effort “an investigative slideshow.” Dedman, an investigative reporter for MSNBC.com, has posted a story consisting of 47 slides and some 2,700 words on Huguette Clark, the reclusive, 103-year-old daughter of the scandal-plagued Montana mining magnate and U.S. senator William Andrews Clark.
Can you tell a complicated story using nothing but pictures and captions? Yes, says Dedman, though, in an interview with Poynter, he admits that some “complexity” is lost. Nevertheless, it has been a hit with readers. Dedman tells Poynter:
The page views so far are 78 million. There are 47 slides, so that’s the equivalent of more than 1.6 million people reading every slide. Not that it works that way, of course; some people dipped in and out. In all, 2.2 million unique users (computers) went to the slide show.
Dedman also describes what he sees as the difference between a good slideshow and a bad one: “I’m not a fan of slide shows that are created just to generate page views. If you have 10 reasons the Red Sox are going to be better this year, just tell me the 10 reasons; don’t make me click through 10 slides to find out. The readers know they’re being manipulated.”
Mapping potholes with help from readers
Boston.com is using SeeClickFix to produce a pothole map for Greater Boston. The New York Times recently reported on SeeClickFix, which is based in New Haven. Simple technology plus community interaction — what more do you want?
Wrong on reconciliation
ABC News’ Jake Tapper today did not challenge U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham as Graham railed against the notion that Senate Democrats might use reconciliation to get around a Republican filibuster and pass health-care reform.
Yet it is a simple fact that reconciliation will not be used to pass the measure. It is a logical impossibility.
As we know, both branches of Congress have already approved near-universal health-care bills. Sometime this week, the House is expected to vote on whether to pass the Senate version. If it’s approved, the bill will go to President Obama’s desk for his signature, and it will become law. No further action will be needed.
If reconciliation is used, it will only be to give the Senate a chance to tweak the law so that it is more to the liking of House Democrats. But keep in mind that if the effort fails, the Senate bill will still be the law of the land.
Making GateHouse execs look like pikers
Check out some of these numbers at the New York Times Co., courtesy of the Boston Herald:
- About $6 million in total compensation each for chairman Arthur Sulzberger (up more than 150 percent over 2008) and president Janet Robinson (up 32 percent).
- About $2 million for former Boston Globe publisher Steven Ainsley.
Just for the heck of it, let’s assume Sulzberger and Robinson, in deference to their company’s problems, had decided to get by with a paltry $1 million apiece in 2009. Ainsley, too. That’s $11 million — or 55 percent of the $20 million in union givebacks the company extracted from the Globe’s unions. We are talking about three people.
No question the Globe needed to downsize and reinvest in new technologies. No question it couldn’t support nearly as many staff members as it had once employed.
But the bonuses show, in case there was any doubt, that the cuts in pay and benefits was, for management, a war of choice, not of necessity.
A curiously sourced story
The New York Times fronts an article by Peter Baker on the ugly departure of White House social secretary Desirée Rogers. Go ahead and call it a classic “Who cares?” story, but I’m shallow enough to admit it’s the only one I’ve read in the Times so far today.
What really hit me, though, was this:
And while she [Rogers] is unwilling to discuss her story publicly, several associates shared her account in the belief that her side has been lost in the swirl of hearings, backbiting and paparazzilike coverage.
Go ahead and read the story. I have no doubt that Baker did, indeed, interview “several associates.” But it also seems crystal-clear that Rogers sat down with Baker and gave him an extensive interview, all of it premised on an agreement that she would not be quoted either by name or on a not-for-attribution basis. I believe that’s called “deep background” — not that there’s any agreement on what the term means.
The whole point to such an exercise is to provide Rogers with plausible deniability, and I don’t think Baker did that. Of course, assuming Baker stuck to their agreement, that’s Rogers’ problem, not his. Still, from an ethical point of view it’s at least worth chewing over.
A final caveat: I am, of course, guessing at what happened. It’s possible that Baker got Rogers’ side solely on the basis of interviews with her friends, and that she herself refused to speak with him. But that’s not how it looks from here.
White House photo by Joyce Boghosian. More information at Wikimedia Commons.
Hard times continue at CNHI
The pain keeps on coming at CNHI, a Birmingham, Ala.-based newspaper chain that owns four Massachusetts dailies: the Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, the Daily News of Newburyport, the Salem News and the Gloucester Daily Times.
On the heels of a holiday furlough several months ago, Yvette Northcutt, the company’s vice president of human resources, is now telling employees they must take five unpaid days off between April 1 and June 30.
CNHI, as you may know, exists mainly to provide Alabama schoolteachers with a comfortable retirement. Those of us who live on the North Shore or the Merrimack Valley can ponder that the next time we wonder why an important local event didn’t get covered.
The full text of Northcutt’s memo follows:
We have chosen to implement reduced work schedules for hourly employees and reduced work schedules and pay reductions for salaried employees in the second quarter of 2010. The details are described below:
- We will implement a reduced work schedule for hourly employees during the second quarter of 2010. All hourly employees must take five days off without pay between April 1, 2010 and June 30, 2010. It is expected that no work will be done during this time. This applies to full and part-time employees. Part-time employees’ work schedules will be reduced on a prorated basis. These days must be taken during the second quarter, and regular vacation, personal and sick days may not be substituted for these unpaid days.
- A reduced schedule will also be implemented for salaried employees during the second quarter with a corresponding reduction in pay. Salaried employees already affected by the first-quarter pay reduction will simply see their current base salary roll forward. The second-quarter pay reduction will be applied over all pay dates occurring during the second quarter. In turn, salaried employees must take five days off between April 1, 2010 and June 30, 2010. Under this plan, the days off will not reduce the employees’ existing allotment of regular vacation, personal and sick days. Regular vacation, personal and sick days may not be substituted for these additional days off.
- We are asking our unions to voluntarily agree to similar arrangements for the employees they represent. If our unions agree, this will help us avoid future layoffs.
- In order to ensure staffing needs are met, these off days must be planned and approved in advance. Please submit the attached Request for Second Quarter Days Off form to your manager by March 15, 2010.
Thank you again for your hard work, dedication and support. Please contact Human Resources if you have any questions.
More on the Claire O’Brien case
Media Nation has received a copy of an internal memo sent to GateHouse Media publishers by company executives with regard to the odd case of Claire O’Brien, the Kansas reporter who was fired in the midst of a dispute over confidential sources (earlier coverage). The text of the memo is as follows:
DATE: March 10, 2010
TO: GateHouse Publishers
FROM: Polly Grunfeld Sack
Brad Dennison
Gloria Fletcher
Stephen WadeRE: Recent Developments at the Dodge City Daily Globe
As many of you know, Dodge City, Kansas reporter Claire O’Brien is no longer with GateHouse. Since leaving the company, Ms. O’Brien has made some accusations to the media that we strongly deny. They simply are not accurate. She has also made some gross misstatements of fact.
As a company we respect our employees’ privacy rights and are bound to confidentiality with personnel matters. Out of respect for the law and Ms. O’Brien’s privacy, we have chosen not to comment publicly in the press. It is not the proper forum in which to deal with personnel issues. Nor can we, in a memo such as this, address each such erroneous statement.
But we can assure you, without violating any privacy or confidentiality concerns, that GateHouse Media vigorously stood behind Ms. O’Brien during the recent, highly publicized court case, all at our cost and expense.
Recent developments are absolutely not related to any part of that legal battle.
Undercover in Yemen
There’s a fascinating story in GlobalPost today about a Vermont native named Theo Padnos, who moved to Yemen, pretended to have converted to Islam, and studied among radical Muslims for some period of time. Padnos explains:
I wanted to know about the Quran. I wanted to know about spiritual experience in Islam. I wanted to travel across the nation. I wanted to do all the things that the converts wanted to do. I just did not believe in the god and the prophet and all that stuff.
Among Padnos’ fellow students was Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, formerly Carlos Bledsoe, who later killed a soldier and wounded another at a U.S. military recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark., last June.
To be sure, Padnos’ tale is an unlikely one. So I was especially impressed with the efforts GlobalPost and reporter David Case undertook to verify it.
Connecticut newspapers in Mark Twain’s court
Last week I had a chance to attend the premiere of “On Deadline: Is Time Running Out for the Press?”, a documentary about the near-death and uncertain rescue of the Bristol Press and the New Britain Herald, both in Connecticut.
The papers were owned by the Journal Register Co., which, as it was entering bankruptcy in late 2008, threatened to shut them down if a buyer couldn’t be found. (The company, whose largest Connecticut paper is the New Haven Register, exited bankruptcy in August 2009.) The papers were saved by Michael Schroeder, a veteran newspaper executive who, among other things, was a top executive at BostonNOW, a free tabloid that until its demise competed with Metro Boston.
The future of the Press and the Herald is by no means certain; Schroeder made that clear in both the film and in a subsequent panel discussion. But at least the papers have a path forward. The film itself, by John and Rosemary Keogh O’Neill, was enjoyable and worth seeing if you ever get a chance, though I found the drama over the papers’ fate more compelling than the overly nostalgic views of the newspaper business that were expressed by the principals. (Here is the trailer.)
In a delicious irony, the film made its debut at the Mark Twain House, in Hartford, a shrine to a great writer who, among other things, nearly went bankrupt because of his own involvement with the newspaper business. In the 1880s Samuel Clemens sank a fortune into the Paige Compositor, which he believed would make him a very wealthy man, given that it was 60 percent faster than the Linotype machine. The Paige, though, was prone to breakdowns, and it never caught on.
Technology has always been an issue in the newspaper business. It was the rise of cheap, high-speed presses in the 1830s that created the daily newspaper business as we know it. And, of course, it’s technology that is now rapidly ushering us into the post-newspaper age.