Nice guys finish first

Paul Levy, president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is one of the Boston area’s great managers and leaders of the past generation. So I’m not surprised — as Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen reports — that he earned a standing ovation when he suggested that high-paid people at the hospital sacrifice in order to save low-paid jobs.

On and on the NewsTrust J-hunt goes

But it all ends tomorrow! Today’s five six picks:

Here, once again, is NewsTrust’s journalism topic page. Please consider taking part.

The M-word makes an ugly appearance

It’s hard to believe, after all these years, that the word “midget” would pop up in a front-page story in today’s New York Times. David Segal writes:

After the Depression, Congress formed what became known as the Pecora Commission, which grilled top financiers. But the point was mostly to embarrass them, and the upshot was to set the stage for stricter regulations. The most indelible image of the commission’s hearings was a photo of J. P. Morgan Jr. with a midget who had been plopped in his lap by an opportunistic publicist.

The American Heritage Dictionary makes it clear that the M-word is “offensive.” In my book, “Little People,” I trace the history of this unfortunate word, possibly coined in the 1860s by Harriet Beecher Stowe and inextricably tied up in the idea of putting someone on public display.

NewsTrust: The J-hunt continues

Five more stories on journalism for your perusal:

If you’d like to join in the fun, sign up for NewsTrust and visit the journalism topic page.

Five more for NewsTrust’s journalism hunt

Here are five more pieces about journalism that I’ve posted to NewsTrust.

Again, I invite you to register with NewsTrust, review stories and submit some that you find as well.

Time is not predicting the Globe’s demise

First of all, let’s dispense with the fiction that Time magazine is predicting the Boston Globe may go out of business or cease publishing its print edition sometime this year. Universal Hub and Jessica Heslam wrongly attribute the prediction to Time. Bostonist almost gets it right, but is unclear enough that readers might still think this is coming from Time.

In fact, the source of this rather startling prediction is Douglas McIntyre, a blogger for 24/7 Wall Street — not exactly the ghost of Henry Luce. Time just happens to run the feed on its Web site. (Here’s a look at the site’s syndication service.) I’ve interviewed McIntyre. He’s a smart, knowledgeable guy, but it’s fair to say that he likes to be a provocateur.

You will notice, too, that McIntyre repeats that bit about the Globe’s being worth only $20 million. In fact, as the Boston Business Journal reported recently, a more logical number is a shade under $200 million — far short of the $1.1 billion that the New York Times Co. paid for it (in 1993 dollars, no less), but a lot more than $20 million. I know of no one who ever thought the $20 million figure was credible.

The Globe is struggling mightily, but its Web site, Boston.com, attracts more than 5 million unique visitors a month, and its paid print circulation — about 325,000 on weekdays and 500,000 on Sundays — is, though far short of the glory days, plenty enough to attract a decent amount of advertising if we weren’t in the midst of a brutal recession.

So can we please get real?

A visit with CT News Junkie editor Christine Stuart

Find more videos like this on Wired Journalists

I spent last Wednesday with Christine Stuart, the editor of CT News Junkie, which covers Connecticut politics. Stuart, who’s based at the Statehouse in Hartford, posts two to four times a day, often covering hearings on important but secondary stories that the mainstream media ignore.

CT News Junkie is a media partner with the New Haven Independent, one of the more interesting experiments in non-profit, Web-based community journalism. Projects such as these are crucial as we seek to grope our way forward through the economic crisis that has befallen the news business. (CT News Junkie is technically a for-profit company, but Stuart is looking into ways of taking it non-profit.)

I visited Stuart as part of a long-range project. But while I was there, I shot some video and put together a six-minute documentary. I hope you’ll take a few moments and have a look.

Some technical notes. After spending about an hour trying to edit my video with iMovie ’08, I gave up and used iMovie 6 instead. The lack of precision for coordinating audio and B-roll with iMovie ’08 is a source of constant frustration, and I’ve finally given up. I can’t believe I subjected my students to it last semester. Maybe iMovie ’09 will be a better solution.

I also was unable to post the result to YouTube, even though the format (MP4), the length (well under 10 minutes) and the file size (under 100 MB) all meet YouTube’s guidlines. Vimeo didn’t work, either. I finally posted it successfully to Wired Journalists, which uses the Ning platform designed by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen.

If anyone out there has some thoughts as to why this proved to be YouTube-unfriendly, please drop me a line or post a comment. I’d still like to get this up on YouTube.