By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
I think I was traveling when the latest changes at the Boston Globe were announced. Anyway, metro reporter Donovan Slack is heading for the Globe’s Washington bureau to replace Susan Milligan, who’s taking a fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Jessica Heslam of the Boston Herald has the details, as well as memos from the Globe’s Washington bureau chief, Chris Rowland.
In my latest for the Guardian, I interview a community activist from New Haven who was recently smeared by Glenn Beck and other cogs in the right-wing noise machine.
The New York Times today fronts a heartbreaking story about a “99er” — a formerly successful businesswoman named Alexandra Jarrin who is on the verge of living in her car because her unemployment benefits have run out.
But there’s an undeveloped aside that the reporter, Michael Luo, and his editors shouldn’t have let slip. Near the end, Luo writes: “She says none of her three adult sons are in a position to help her.”
Let’s assume that if we knew why, we’d understand. By letting this loose thread dangle, though, the Times undermines the premise of the entire piece — that Jarrin is suffering solely because of Congress’ failure to extend unemployment benefits.
If the Times wants to pull at our heartstrings, then it ought to tell us why none of Jarrin’s three sons will provide their mother with a place to live.
Update: Sharp-eyed reader Isaac Benjamin notes that Luo has addressed the matter in the comments. I read the story in Times Reader, which does not include comments. And I hear that the Times still publishes a print edition. I hope the paper runs a clarification tomorrow.
I’m not sure if today’s New York Times story on plagiarism qualifies as one of Jack Shafer’s bogus trend stories. I’ve asked him, and I’m curious to see what he thinks.
But in six years of teaching, I have found the overwhelming majority of students are extremely careful about attribution. If anything, journalism students need help in figuring out when they don’t have to attribute background material.
In the one traditional academic course I teach, on media law, I have discovered that many students don’t know how to do citations properly. We had Turabian drilled into our heads in high school, but apparently those days are long gone. But few students have a problem in being clear, consistent and thorough with their citations, regardless of what self-taught method they use.
That’s not to say there aren’t problems. I’ve had a few students who cheated, and I ended up dealing with one before the university’s disciplinary board. There may also have been a few others who slipped something past me, though I doubt that it’s a regular occurrence. Plagiarism is generally not that hard to spot.
Overall, there’s an unattractive kids-these-days tone to the Times story, linking plagiarism to digital phenomena ranging from Wikipedia to downloading music and films. Hey, you! Get off of my lawn!
Not long after Tim Russert’s death, I realized that my aversion to George Stephanopoulos was not nearly as deep-seated as my aversion to David Gregory. So I switched from “Meet the Press” to “This Week” and haven’t looked back. Among other things, “This Week” regular George Will is a great entertainer, and where else other than the New York Times can you get a regular dose of Paul Krugman?
Stephanopoulos, of course, decamped for morning television months ago, never to be seen again — at least not by me. Today, at long last, marked the much-anticipated debut of his permanent replacement, former CNN foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour. I don’t think the occasion warrants a lot of analysis. But surely a little is in order. A few points.
1. I don’t watch “This Week”; rather, I listen to the podcast. So if there were any changes to the set, I wouldn’t know. For what it’s worth, I thought Amanpour, her guests and her panelists all sounded fine.
2. It was a good first week for Amanpour. She had two major gets, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. If Amanpour’s questions failed to elicit any major news, neither did she embarrass herself. In any event, with rare exceptions, top government officials are going to say what they’re going to say regardless of what they are asked.
3. Though “This Week” seemed pretty much the same as it always has, Amanpour did shake things up a bit, as Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid joined the roundtable from Spain. Over time, I’m hoping that Amanpour turns the entire format upside-down, eschewing political chit-chat for real substance. Perhaps this was one small step in that direction.
4. Jake Tapper deserves kudos for the way he handled “This Week” as a fill-in host the past several months. By taking a few chances (especially by embracing of New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen’s suggestion that he add fact-checking to the show), Tapper demonstrated that there’s still some life left in the old format.
If, for some reason, Amanpour doesn’t work out, or if ABC News decides to use her elsewhere, then Tapper would be a natural — and I think viewers would accept him far more readily than they would have before his stint as a substitute.
I’m heading to New Haven in a little while for another round of interviews. I’ll be back Friday night. I’m also taking advantage of a hiatus at “Beat the Press” to visit an old friend at the Providence Journal on Friday afternoon. So it should be a good trip. It’s not likely I’ll be blogging, but since I can approve comments via BlackBerry, go ahead and have at it.
It’s also time to dip my toe in the water regarding the book that I’m working on. It’s hardly top-secret, but at the same time I want to be discreet. Anyway: A couple of months ago I signed a contract with UMass Press to write a book about the New Haven Independent and the rise of non-profit community news sites. (Working title: “The Wired City.”) The idea is that low-cost, online projects can at least partly offset the decline of for-profit newspapers — a decline that is far more advanced in Connecticut than it is here in Greater Boston.
The Independent is one of a handful of non-profits that are doing real community journalism. Though not as well known as Voice of San Diego, MinnPost or the Texas Tribune, it is nevertheless a viable, growing news organization that employs four full-time journalists plus another two at a satellite site in the suburbs. The Independent not only covers the big stories in New Haven, but also regularly publishes articles about the minutia in New Haven’s neighborhoods that the dominant daily, the New Haven Register, can’t touch.
I figure my book will be about 60 percent to 80 percent about the Independent, with the rest focusing on changing business models for journalism as well as on some other sites worthy of note — including a couple of for-profits I’ve visited, the Batavian, in western New York, and Baristanet, in Montclair, N.J.
I’d like to do a little bit of crowdsourcing; at the same time, I want to avoid writing my book in public. I’d welcome any ideas for people I should interview (in New Haven and elsewhere) and books and articles I should read.
I’ll have more to say as my project progresses.
Today’s Boston Herald front is absolutely hilarious, as U.S. Sen. John Kerry scurries away from reporters who are trying to ask him about his tax-free, $7 million yacht. The Herald broke the story last Friday, but give Kerry credit: it is he who has figured out how to keep it alive.
Why did WikiLeaks work with traditional news organizations rather than go it alone in releasing the Afghanistan war logs?
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange learned from the way he handled the Apache helicopter video earlier this year that sometimes it’s better to be Daniel Ellsberg than Ben Bradlee. And that Stephen Colbert was right.
New Hampshire Republicans have hit upon a novel idea to help U.S. Senate candidate Kelly Ayotte: lock up a pollster hired by one of her opponents for the crime of engaging in political speech.
According to the New Hampshire Union Leader, the state GOP, chaired by Gov. John Sununu, has asked Attorney General Michael Delaney to investigate an allegation of push-polling by a pollster hired on behalf of Democratic congressional candidate Paul Hodes.
Push-polling is the practice of asking leading, negative questions of a rival candidate’s likely supporters. According to the Union Leader, respondents who identified themselves as leaning toward Ayotte were asked about her alleged inaction regarding a mortgage scandal that unfolded when she was New Hampshire’s attorney general and her deletion of e-mails when she stepped down from that office.
The Union Leader found that the calls were made on Hodes’ behalf by Mountain West Research, an Idaho-based polling firm hired, in turn, by Anzalone Liszt Research, a national outfit whose clients include Hodes. The Hodes campaign hasn’t exactly denied the allegation.
Now, as it happens, negative push-polling is illegal in New Hampshire unless the pollster identifies the candidate on whose behalf the call is being made and provides some other information as well. That means someone — an executive of one of the polling firms, or perhaps even Hodes himself — could be found to have broken the law.
It’s not clear what the maximum punishment could be. The Union Leader reports that the top penalty is a $1,000 civil fine. But an Associated Press story that appears in today’s Boston Globe reports that Associate Attorney General Richard Head says a violation could also carry with it a one-year prison term.
The law itself is an affront to freedom of speech, and so is the Republican Party’s attempt to use it to silence the opposition. Push-polling is a sleazy, underhanded campaign tactic — which means that it’s exactly the sort of political speech the First Amendment was designed to protect.
We await Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr’s take on all this.
Photo (cc) by Travis Warren and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
The U.S. State Department has finally granted Colombian journalist Hollman Morris a visa so that he can study at the Nieman Foundation, the Harvard Crimson reports. (Via Romenesko.)
Update: Dan Feder discovers that the Crimson has posted a correction, and that Morris doesn’t actually have his visa yet.
Update II: Boston.com is now reporting (late Tuesday morning) that Morris has officially been granted a visa.
