Finneran embraces the dark side — again

You would have thought that WRKO Radio (AM 680) talk-show host Tom Finneran had learned from his last go-round. Less than three months ago, Finneran was lambasted for signing up to be a lobbyist for the state troopers union. He quickly backed off.

Now, though, Finneran, a former Massachusetts House speaker, has officially registered as a lobbyist, according to the Herald’s Jessica Heslam, and has taken on the Liquor Liability Joint Underwriting Association of Massachusetts as a client. If that sounds a little too obscure to worry about, just consider that Finneran’s new best friends will be very interested whenever there’s talk of new laws regarding underage drinking, drunken driving, liability insurance and the like. According to the organization’s Web site:

LLJUA is a liquor liability insurer of last-resort. To be eligible for coverage from LLJUA, the business owner has to be turned down for coverage in the voluntary market. LLJUA’s liquor liability insurance is available for owners of taverns, hotels, restaurants, social clubs, package stores, caterers and other businesses that sell alcoholic beverages.

So, let’s see. A man staggers out of a bar, wraps his car around a telephone pole and is seriously injured. His family sues the bar, claiming the bartender should have known he was drunk and refused to serve him. Finneran the talk-show host rails against the suit, claiming that the driver should take responsibility for his actions and that tort reform is needed to prevent such frivolous lawsuits. And Finneran the lobbyist pockets another check from the organization that stands to benefit from such “reform.” Got it.

My Northeastern colleague Steve Burgard is rightly appalled (I’m thinking of renaming this blog “Husky Nation”), telling the Globe’s Carolyn Johnson, “For a serious news organization, it would be unthinkable.” Hosting a talk show may not be journalism, but it’s an activity with many resemblances to journalism. Finneran doesn’t owe his tiny band of listeners much, but he does owe them his independence.

You’d like to think that when Finneran’s expressing his opinion in his tortured, rococo syntax that his opinion isn’t bought and paid for. But it is. He should be gone. And perhaps he will be — the Herald account suggests that WRKO management is none too happy about this.

More: The Outraged Liberal has further thoughts.

Photo (cc) by Brosner, and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

The Clintons and Colombia

Hillary Clinton got rid of demoted her chief strategist, Mark Penn, after it was revealed that Penn was working for a free-trade agreement with Colombia that Clinton opposed. But the larger issue, I argue in my latest for the Guardian, is the Clintons’ longstanding ties to Colombian president Álvaro Uribe and their indifference toward his miserable human-rights record.

Pulitzer notes

A few observations on this year’s Pulitzer Prizes.

1. Mark Feeney’s victory in criticism is one of those developments that’s surprising but deserved. Feeney stands for low-key substance, and it’s nice to see that the Pulitzer judges recognized that. It’s also encouraging that the Globe has kept its Pulitzer string alive while it goes through another wave of downsizing. Editor Marty Baron is groping toward how to define excellence in a very different era. Greats arts coverage is one answer to that challenge.

The Globe’s Beth Daley, who was a finalist, also deserves credit for explaining the effects of global warming in human terms.

2. It’s too bad that Concord Monitor photographer Preston Gannaway won the Pulitzer for feature photography just as she’s leaving for the Rocky Mountain News. Nevertheless, the prize helps enhance the Monitor’s reputation as among the best papers of its size in the country.

Gannaway documented the death of a young mother with cancer, presented in a multimedia production here.

3. Congratulations to my Northeastern colleage Bill Kirtz and his wife, Carol. Their son, Jake Hooker, won the Pulitzer for investigative reporting along with his New York Times colleague Walter Bogdanich for their exposés of the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. Kirtz and I go way, way back — he was my instructor in the 1970s. I wish as much had rubbed off on me as it did on Jake.

4. It’s hard to think of anyone more deserving of a Pulitzer than Bob Dylan, one of the great artists of the past half-century. But I always worry when I hear an announcement like that. Is he sick? Do the Pulitzer judges know something we don’t? Nah. He’s just looking for Alicia Keys.

Re-editing the agenda with NewsTrust

For the past week students in my Web journalism class have been immersing themselves in NewsTrust, a social- networking site that bills itself as “Your guide to good journalism.”

Last Wednesday Rory O’Connor, NewsTrust’s editorial director, led us in a presentation and workshop, highlights of which you can see in the embedded video below. Since then, we’ve been posting and rating stories related to the global economy, which was NewsTrust’s featured topic.

NewsTrust’s strength is also its weakness. Unlike Digg, which simply allows you to vote on whether you like or don’t like a story, NewsTrust asks users to rate stories on a wide range of criteria, including whether you think the news organization is reliable, how well sourced the story is, whether it’s fair and whether the story offers enough context.

In all, there are 12 different criteria, each of them demanding a rating of one to five stars. Though you may leave any particular criterion blank if you choose, that’s still a lot — and you haven’t even gotten to writing a comment, adding tags and filling in several other forms. That’s quite a bit of work.

Still, the idea is a good one. It’s a way for ordinary readers — well, ordinary readers who happen to be news junkies — to re-edit the news, to judge for themselves what are the best and most important stories rather than relying on the editors of the New York Times, the BBC or what have you. Some readers who don’t want to submit or even rate stories may be intrigued by the idea of tapping into the wisdom of the NewsTrust community to find news they might otherwise never see.

According to O’Connor, testing has showed that journalists and non-journalists give stories similar ratings, which suggests that the NewsTrust system, though cumbersome, actually works. Perhaps the biggest drawback at the moment is the NewsTrust demographic, which O’Connor compares to the PBS audience: well-educated, aging and very liberal. Lack of ideological balance could hinder NewsTrust from becoming the well-respected guide to which its founders aspire. They understand the problem and are hoping to come up with some solutions.

Another interesting feature is that users themselves are rated in terms of how transparent they are about their backgrounds, how often they submit and rate stories and what other users think of their ratings. This, as well as community judgments about the reliability of different news sources, all gets figured into the algorithm that comes up with a score for any given story.

According to my students’ blogs, NewsTrust could be improved if it were less text-heavy and loaded more quickly.

As more people begin to use NewsTrust, its ratings should become more useful. I’ve submitted and reviewed several stories and felt like I was shouting into the wind, as no one else rated them. I do think it would be interesting if there were some way of knowing how many other people had at least read the story.

Social networking is the hottest trend in media today. By trying to combine social networking with serious journalism, the founders of NewsTrust have hit upon one of the more promising experiments in online journalism.

The Colombian primary

My old Boston Phoenix colleague Al Giordano reports in the Narco News Bulletin that Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe, a right-wing despot with a deplorable human-rights record, is deeply worried about the possibility that Barack Obama will become president. Giordano writes:

[T]he Clinton organization has a long history of backing — politically and economically — the Colombian far right, its narco-politicians and paramilitary death squads, of whom Uribe is supreme leader. In 2000, then-US president Bill Clinton went on Colombian national TV to announce “Plan Colombia,” the multi-billion dollar US military intervention that keeps Uribe and his repressive regime in power to this day.

According to Giordano’s report, Uribe’s human-rights record is so bad that it recently attracted the attention of Human Rights Watch and a number of other religious and humanitarian organizations. Last year, Giordano notes, Al Gore decided not to attend an environmental meeting in Miami because he didn’t want to share the stage with Uribe, who has been linked to right-wing death squads.

The Clintons, on the other hand, have continued to be ardent supporters of Uribe, with the former president accepting an award from the Colombian government last year.

The Uribe matter has made it into the mainstream media, with the Associated Press running a story on Thursday. But the AP emphasizes Uribe’s displeasure over Obama’s opposition to a U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement — never mentioning, as Giordano observes, that Hillary Clinton has said she opposes the agreement as well.

This is an important story that almost certainly won’t get the attention it deserves.

More: Ben Smith of the Politico reports that the Colombian government no longer requires the services of Clinton strategist Mark Penn.

Saturday morning roundup

If I were Ernie Roberts, the great Globe sports columnist, I’d tell you what I had for breakfast this Saturday morning. I’m not, so herewith a few observations about this and that.

Deval Patrick’s corporate benefactors. The drip-drip-drip over Gov. Patrick’s book proposal has been more a source of amusement than a cause for genuine concern. Today’s Globe story, in which we learn that he takes credit for the 10,000 people who turned out for a Barack Obama rally on the Common, is a hoot.

But yesterday’s Globe story properly noted a real problem — Patrick’s reliance on corporations, some of which will have business before the state, to buy books by the truckload in order to hand out to employees and clients. The impression you get is of a governor so convinced of his own rectitude that he believes he’s above the rules mere mortals have to follow.

Judge Murphy’s future on the bench. A Globe editorial today urges the state Supreme Judicial Court to suspend Judge Ernest Murphy, who was may be fined earlier this week for his bizarre and threatening letters to Herald publisher Pat Purcell after Murphy won a $2.1 million libel case against the Herald. [Correction: The Commission on Judicial Conduct has recommended that Murphy be censured, suspended for 30 days and fined $25,000.]

I assume the Globe means without pay. As a Herald editorial noted on Wednesday, Murphy has been out on paid leave since sometime last year, collecting his salary of nearly $130,000. It’s hard to think of a public official who has profited so handsomely from media criticism of his performance — which, no matter how imperfectly it may have been executed, is supposed to receive the highest possible protection from the First Amendment.

Helping the fans by gouging them. The Herald goes B-I-G today with the fact that the Red Sox are auctioning off Green Monster tickets to the highest bidder, with some seats going for more than $500.

The best quote is from Ron Bumgarner, the Sox’ vice president of ticketing: “We feel it’s our civic responsibility to keep tickets affordable for fans, and at the end of the day, this helps keep other ticket prices down.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Newspaper-killing chain faces death. The Journal Register Co., known within the business as the cheapest chain on earth, is sinking in a sea of debt and is in danger of being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange. The Journal Register’s best-known paper is the New Haven Register, but it also used to own the Taunton Gazette and the Fall River Herald News, now held by GateHouse Media. It also used to own the Woonsocket Call, where I was a co-op student in the mid-1970s.

Cape Cod Today publisher Walter Brooks sent out a blast e-mail with the news, which he titled “Every tear remained unjerked in its little ducts.” No kidding.

Repairing the Web’s broken meter

There is no bigger issue facing the news business today than how to make the Web pay. And there is no bigger obstacle to solving that problem than figuring out how many people are visiting, how long they’re sticking around and the like.

As I found out last year when I was reporting a story on young news consumers for CommonWealth Magazine, the internal numbers compiled by Web sites like Boston.com and BostonHerald.com can be as much as three times higher than the numbers reported by Nielsen/NetRatings, the source of the leading apples-to-apples statistics used by advertisers.

The dilemma: Nielsen says it’s more accurate to ask people which sites they’ve visited than to look at a given site’s statistics, because an enormous percentage of those statistics are based on automated hits from search engines. News-business folks respond that Nielsen greatly undercounts the number of people who log on from work and from overseas.

Now, according to this article by David Cohn in the Columbia Journalism Review, help may be on the way. The Media Rating Council, a nonprofit group that helped standardize television and radio ratings nearly 50 years ago, has turned its attention to the Internet in an attempt to figure out all the metrics that should be of value to advertisers: how many people, how many different people, how many pages they’re calling up and how much time they’re spending with a given site.

These problems are far more difficult to solve than you might imagine. As Cohn points out, increasing numbers of privacy-minded people are setting their browsers to eliminate cookies every time they quit. The result: they’ll be counted as “unique users,” rather than return users, whenever they visit a particular Web site.

And if someone leaves a Web page on her screen while she goes on a 10-mile bike ride, how is that supposed to be measured?

The news business thrived on the lack of knowledge over whether any given subscriber would pore through the paper that day or toss it in the recycling bin unopened. Online, advertisers demand to know a lot more than that. So far, it’s proved impossible to answer their questions. Maybe that will change soon.