And so they meet again

It’s Howard Cooper versus the Boston Herald, round two.

Cooper, you may recall, is the Boston lawyer who represented then-judge Ernest Murphy in his libel suit against the Herald, which had portrayed him as someone who had “heartlessly” demeaned a teenage rape victim. Murphy won a $2 million-plus verdict against the Herald in 2005. I don’t think Murphy was libeled, but Cooper was able to convince a jury otherwise. Here is more than you’ll ever want to know about that case.

Now Cooper is suing the Herald on behalf of Tom Scholz of the band Boston, claiming that Inside Track reporters Gayle Fee and Laura Raposa fabricated quotes attributed to Micki Delp, ex-wife of Boston lead singer Brad Delp, as well as from unnamed “insiders,” to make it appear that Delp had blamed Scholz for her husband’s suicide.

Courthouse News Service has a detailed account of the suit, though there’s a mistake in the lede — Delp committed suicide in 2007, not 1997. The story is accompanied by a copy of the complaint (pdf). I have not had a chance to do more than skim it, so I’m staying away from any detailed analysis. I do see that Cooper cites Boston magazine’s 2006 story “Gals Gone Wild,” by John Gonzalez, as example of what Cooper calls Fee and Raposa’s “unprofessional, irresponsible and reckless tactics and methods.” For good measure, Cooper calls them “so-called ‘reporters.'”

The Herald has not yet filed a response. Herald spokeswoman Gwen Gage tells the Boston Globe, “We’re aware of the complaint and we will review it. Beyond that, we have no further comment.”

In 2006 Mark Jurkowitz wrote an in-depth profile of Cooper for the Boston Phoenix (via Romenesko). The headline: “The media’s worst nightmare?” At One Herald Square, the answer to that question would be a decided “yes.”

Acknowledging a first-rate photojournalist

On Jan. 13 I posted an item on citizen journalists who were on the ground in Haiti following the devastating earthquake there. I put up some links. And I included a harrowing photo of a woman being rescued. I don’t remember where I found the picture, but it was surely from one of several sites I looked at that were uploading work from citizen journalists. I do know that I was ultimately led to the public TwitPic account of the photographer, Daniel Morel.

Yesterday I heard from Morel’s lawyer, Barbara Hoffman, who’s based in New York. It turns out that Morel is a professional photojournalist. She asked that I remove Morel’s photograph and explain what happened. “Mr. Morel’s iconic images were used world wide without his authorization knowingly by news media,” she wrote to me in an e-mail. “He was  never a citizen journalist, and used twitter, given the tragic circumstances to  offer the work for license.”

I’m happy to set the record straight. According to an interview in the New York Times’ online Lens section, Morel is a veteran photojournalist who was born in Haiti in 1951. A longtime photographer for the Associated Press, he is currently a contributor to Corbis Images. Morel told the Times:

I don’t take pictures like other photographers. I don’t take pictures as art. Maybe I put like 15 percent of art in my picture and the rest is history, is documentary. Because if you put too much art, you play with history. You cannot deform history. You have to show it the way it is. You have to show it the way it is.

Morel is a fine photographer and journalist. I recommend the interview and the accompanying slideshow. And here is a story — with a photo of Morel — about an exhibition called “Haiti Eyes” that he presented in New York in 2005.

The future of journalism will be local

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.

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.”

Surfs pounds Gloucester coast

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
I headed up to Gloucester this afternoon with my trusty Canon PowerShot SD890 IS to see what the nor’easter was doing along the coast. My first stop was a protected beach. There was so little wind that people were walking in the sand, including a woman and her dog.

Then I turned the corner, and entered a different world. On the rocky coast facing the ocean there were gale-force winds, high waves and surf pounding the shore. Above is my test of flickrSLiDR (hey, I don’t come up with the names), and below, a short video.

I’m glad it wasn’t snow.

More: I should have mentioned that I used the stabilization feature in iMovie ’09 for the first time and was really impressed. I was getting blown all over the place, but in the video it just seems like I’m drifting a bit. I’d also be curious to know whether you like the embedded slideshow or find it distracting — would you rather click and jump to Flickr?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MidATGhkGpc&w=480&h=385]

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.

More from Editor & Publisher.

A curiously sourced story

Desirée Rogers, in White House kitchen, is to Michelle Obama's immediate right.

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.