By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
John Edwards’ presidential campaign is reportedly using intimidation and threats to get a student-produced news report removed from YouTube. As a public service, Media Nation presents the report here:
As you will see, the story — by a University of North Carolina student named Carla Babb — is a fair and neutral piece of journalism on Edwards’ decision to place his state headquarters in an affluent area of Chapel Hill.
Edwards should apologize for the actions of his overzealous aides.
One of the great non- controversies in Boston sports is on the plate this morning, as Nick Cafardo of the Boston Globe considers what the Red Sox ought to do now that Curt Schilling’s contract is expiring.
The answer, which I can’t imagine anyone would disagree with, is this: If he’ll take a one-year deal, then yes, of course. It is, as Cafardo says, a “no-brainer.” More than one year? Well … maybe.
Tim Wakefield may be on the verge of retiring. That would leave Beckett and Matsuzaka as the number-one and -two guys, and Lester and Buchholz at the back of the rotation. I want Schilling at number three. Don’t you?
Especially after last night.
Schilling photo (cc) by benostrander. Some rights reserved.
I should have mentioned this earlier, but I’ll be spending the day at “New Media and the Marketplace of Ideas,” a conference at Boston University sponsored by BU’s College of Communication and School of Law, WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) and the law firm of Prince, Lobel, Glovsky & Tye.
The keynote speaker will be the Daily Kos‘ Markos Moulitsas Zúniga.
Here is the schedule for the day. I’m hosting a breakout session on blogging at 3:45 p.m.
My latest for the Guardian analyzes Roy Peter Clark’s recent Poynter.org commentary, in which Clark said journalists have a “duty” to read the print editions of newspapers. The link to Clark’s original column is broken, but you can read it here.
Update: Clark responds. And the link to his column has now been fixed.
The Boston Herald’s Casey Ross reports that pro-casino legislators are trying to steer Gov. Deval Patrick’s three-casino proposal away from the Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies, whose House chairman, Rep. Dan Bosley, D-North Adams, opposes casinos.
Ross writes that casino supporters wonder if Bosley can be “objective,” and he quotes Rep. John Quinn, D-New Bedford:
If we want a fair and open hearing, I’m not sure [Bosley’s] committee is the one that can provide it. I have tremendous respect for the chairman, but this is an issue that impacts the entire commonwealth, and we ought to treat it appropriately.
It seems not to have occurred to Quinn — or maybe it has — that the reason Bosley is such a staunch opponent of casinos is that he’s studied the issue more closely and for a longer time than anyone else in the Legislature.
Bosley understands that casino gambling is bad news, and he’s got the data to back it up. That doesn’t make him non-objective; it makes him right.
My latest for CommonWealth Magazine takes a look at the disconnect between young people and the news. Among the folks I interviewed was veteran television journalist Judy Woodruff, now with PBS. Earlier this year Woodruff hosted an hour-long report called “Generation Next,” which examined the lives of people between the ages of 16 and 25. Here’s part of what she told me:
Much of the news young people see is not presented in a way that’s relevant to them. It’s presented in a way that makes sense to people who are older, who know what Medicaid Part B is, or who know what the Kyoto Accord is, or McCain-Feingold. There’s a lot of jargon in the news, and there’s an adult framing of the news, if you will….
I think we need to put ourselves in their shoes. I’m not at all saying we should dumb stories down, because young people today are smart. They’re better educated than any generation that preceded them. But we need to find out what they’re interested in and address the news to them. They’re young. They’re not at a stage in their lives where they own property and are home by 6 or 6:30 at night.
My bottom line: News organizations need to move more quickly in embracing technologies such as interactivity, sharing and social networking. But young people have an obligation to start paying attention to the world around them, too.
If you read the article, you’ll come across a note on how difficult it is to measure the number of people who visit a Web site. The specific example I cite is BostonHerald.com, whose internal numbers show more than three times as many visitors as those counted by Nielsen/NetRatings — a disparity that is not at all unusual.
On Sunday, the New York Times ran an article that explains all, sort of. The most startling assertion, given how important the Web is to the future of the faltering news business, is this: “[T]he growth of online advertising is being stunted, industry executives say, because nobody can get the basic visitor counts straight.” Wow.
Pardon the link to a press release, but this bears watching. Reuters journalists have been trying out a Nokia smartphone that lets them write stories, shoot video and still photos, and record audio, and then edit everything and upload it right from the field. I first took note of this trend last December, when it was written up in the Online Journalism Review. Now it’s becoming a reality.
Reuters has put together a site showing off the work of their “mojos,” or mobile journalists. Check out “Robots R Us,” and note the high-quality video and sound. It’s easy to imagine watching this on your own smartphone.
The mojo tool of choice at Reuters is the Nokia N95. With a list price of $699, it’s not cheap — unless the alternative is to outfit a journalist with a laptop and a video/still camera. Compared to that, it’s ridiculously inexpensive.
The press release says that the N95 “provides everything journalists need to file and publish stories from even the most remote regions of the world.” Well, OK. But I suspect such tools are mainly going to be a boon for community journalism, as both professionals and amateurs seek to add more multimedia to their sites.
This just in: No sooner had I posted this than a blog item from the Guardian showed up in my inbox. The writer, Jemima Kiss, goes into quite a bit more detail than the press release does.
I’m scratching my head over this, from a Boston Globe review by Brion O’Connor about two new Patriots books:
[H]e has an irritating habit of repeating pet clichés, including “mortgaging the future,” “in over his head,” and “slow slide toward mediocrity,” as well as setting up quotes — a gaffe usually corrected in Journalism 101.
Setting up quotes is bad? This Google search suggests the contrary. The very first hit is for a document called “The Art and Craft of Setting Up Quotes.”
I advise my students to tell the reader a little something about new interview subjects and what they’re going to say before quoting them, which is what I take “setting up quotes” to mean. O’Connor is a longtime journalist, and I’m guessing that what he means is different from what I mean.
Anyway, any insight would be appreciated.
Your blood must run ice-cold if you don’t feel for Coco Crisp, losing his job in the middle of the post-season. So of all the many highlights from last night’s game, I thought the best — well, OK, tied with Pedroia’s home run, and just barely ahead of Papelbon’s shutting down the Indians in the eighth — was Crisp’s running into the wall to grab the final out.
And what about Daisuke? The Sox can’t make it through the Series with just two starters, and it looks as though Matsuzaka has rediscovered enough of his talent at least to keep the game close. Just in time.
I was sitting in my car last night, trying to get a signal from a campsite near Mount Monadnock, when J.D. Drew finally worked off the first $1 million of his $70 million contract. Absolutely incredible. At that point, I took a radio into my tent and listened to the wavering ESPN play-by-play on an AM station in New York.
I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew it was the fifth inning, and the Sox were ahead, 10-1. I turned it off and went to sleep. I still don’t know who the heroes were, other than Drew and Curt Schilling. As soon as I post this item, I’m going to find out.
Today I helped lead a group of eight Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts to the top of Monadnock (elevation: 3,165 feet). It was a perfect day, made all the more so because we knew the Sox would be playing a Game Seven tonight.