Citizen-journalism hype

Vin Crosbie says he’s heard enough about citizen journalism — or at least about the fantastical claims that are sometimes made for it:

It’s hard enough to find a professional journalist who can sit through 52 weeks of zoning board hearings and write intelligently about that, nonetheless finding an amateur who doesn’t have a vested interest or axe to grind and who can sit through and objectively write about those hearings….

[D]on’t get me wrong. I think that technologies via which readers can comment, help report, eyewitness, tip off, and otherwise supplement, amplify, or redirect newspaper coverage are absolutely needed. These are tools that every news organization should begin using (oops, I should have used the politically correct phrase: ‘begin sharing’) with people. I applaud BlufftonToday.com and other well conceived applications of this. And I support my friends who are helping to teach citizen journalism to the few citizens who do want to report.

But citizen journalism is a supplement, not a panacea. Citizen journalism itself isn’t going to reverse the declines in news readership, listernership, and viewership. Not by a longshot.

I agree. Citizen journalism is well worth trying, and could definitely be part of the mix that one day revives the news business. But there is nothing that brings more value to the table than reporting by professional journalists. It’s expensive, and there are no shortcuts.

Anti-Semitism in Portland

The Boston Herald’s Laura Crimaldi reports that the Portland Press Herald published an ad placed by a credit union that’s straight out of the early Nazi era. And this from a newspaper that’s still red-faced over an ad for a sermon by a Baptist minister titled “The only way to destroy the Jewish race.”

Not only did Press Herald publisher Charles Cochrane decline to speak with Crimaldi last night, but there doesn’t seem to be anything on the paper’s Web site by way of apology today, either.

No word on when the Press Herald intends to begin serializing “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Update: An alert Media Nation reader found this. Here’s how it begins:

Leaders of Southern Maine’s Jewish community, executives at the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram and the creators of a newspaper advertisement criticized as anti-Semitic met this morning at the paper’s Portland headquarters and issued a joint statement about the controversy.

The statement said that the ad in Wednesday’s newspaper developed by PeoplesChoice Credit Union and a Freeport marketing firm was not intentionally anti-Semitic but it’s [sic] portrayal of a bearded “Fee Bandit” eager to collect fees from bank customers “perpetuates a negative stereotype that has been used to defame Jews for centuries.”

Not to parse this too finely, folks, but the reason the ad was “criticized as anti-Semitic” was because it was, well, anti-Semitic.

The taxman cometh

Media Nation, Sept. 20:

Is [Deval] Patrick a tax-and-spend liberal? That’s not my impression. But the notion that he and the Democratic-controlled Legislature might go on a spending spree and then have to find a way to pay for it is not unreasonable.

The Boston Phoenix, Sept. 21:

You [Patrick] need to make it clear that you won’t raise taxes. You need to take the pledge.

Media Nation, Nov. 8:

His [Patrick’s] repeated assertion that he has “no plan to raise taxes” is a classic example of keeping your options open.

Joan Vennochi, the Boston Globe, Jan. 11:

Patrick attributes the hedging [on property-tax relief and 1,000 new police officers] to tighter than expected budget considerations. However, the fiscal writing was on the wall, not to mention the front page of this newspaper, long before he won election last November.

“The budget right now is very precariously balanced,” Noah Berger, executive director of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, a liberal think tank, warned in an article published on Sept. 16. “Any proposal to cut taxes or increase spending should acknowledge that they’ll likely require other tradeoffs.”

The Boston Globe, Feb. 16:

Two senior Patrick officials said that the administration is looking seriously at a wide range of corporate tax changes to help close what is now projected to be a $1.3 billion budget gap for the coming fiscal year, which begins July 1. One of the officials said that the tax changes could raise between $350 million and $400 million annually.

The Boston Globe, Feb. 16:

Governor Deval Patrick’s plan to help cities and towns ran into immediate resistance in the Legislature yesterday, with the House speaker characterizing portions of it as “absolutely” tantamount to raising taxes and cautioning that it would not benefit all communities equally.

The Boston Herald, Feb. 16:

It’s difficult to grasp how new local taxes could possibly translate into local tax relief. The most we can say about Gov. Deval Patrick’s package of municipal reforms released yesterday is that we won’t be shocked when property taxes don’t exactly plummet next year.

Kerry Healey must be wishing she’d actually run for governor instead of doing whatever the heck it was she thought she was doing last fall.

The Dixie Chicks and Clear Channel

The Boston Globe editorial page today runs a curious correction: “An editorial Tuesday misidentified the radio chain that pulled the Dixie Chicks from its country stations’ playlists in 2003. It was Cumulus Media, not Clear Channel Communications.” The editorial is linked from the correction.

Well, now. The way the Globe first had it is certainly the way I remember it. What happened?

To begin with, you will not be surprised to learn that Clear Channel itself loudly pats itself on the back for not doing what a lot of us think it did. Here’s what the corporate Web site says in part:

MYTH: Clear Channel radio stations banned air-play of the Dixie Chicks after political comments.

FACT: The radio company that banned the Dixie Chicks was Cumulus Media, not Clear Channel. That company also hosted the CD-smashing ceremony outside its Atlanta, Ga. headquarters, during which bulldozers crushed the group’s CDs. Simon Renshaw, the Dixie Chicks’ manager, told the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee in July that Clear Channel Communications did not ban the group’s music and had received a “bad rap.”

According to the blog Facing South, published by the Institute for Southern Studies, Cumulus‘ behavior was indeed more outrageous than Clear Channel’s — so much so that U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., once warned the company that its actions were turning it into a symbol of everything that’s wrong with media consolidation.

Still, it’s not as though Clear Channel stations never banned the Dixie Chicks. In March 2003, two Clear Channel stations in Jacksonville, Fla., dropped the Chicks following Natalie Maines’ “we’re ashamed” remarks about President Bush at a concert in London. So did the Clear Channel station in San Antonio, Texas, where the company is headquartered. And that’s just based on my quick Googling this morning.

Clear Channel also organized pro-war, anti-Dixie Chicks rallies across the country, featuring the loathsome Glenn Beck. And this Wikipedia entry strikes me as a pretty balanced summation of the charges against the company:

There is speculation that Clear Channel … may have directed their stations to [ban the Dixie Chicks], but the company states this was solely the work of local station managers, DJs, and angry fans. Some critics of Clear Channel, including the editors of Rock and Rap Confidential, say otherwise, claiming that Clear Channel executives, in a bid to gain support for various policies they were pushing in Washington, instigated the boycott among its country music stations to send a message to other musicians that criticizing President George Bush’s administration could hurt their careers through reduced airplay, etc.

It looks to me as though the original Globe editorial was true but not accurate. The correction is accurate but not true. Will the third time be the charm?

A doze of Finneran

Sounds like Tom Finneran’s new morning show on WRKO Radio (AM 680) is off to a somnolent start. Media Nation confesses to having missed yesterday’s debut and to having no time to listen this morning, but here are a couple of early reviews. First, the Phoenix’s Adam Reilly:

[J]ust before 9, a guy called up and said, basically, I never thought I’d be calling in to Tom Finneran, but here I am, and I like the discussion you’re having about Iraq. Finneran responded with a long soliloquy: We’re all entitled to an epiphany moment, I spent 26 years in the Massachusetts legislature, I was the most conservative Democrat ever, blah blah blah. Then he tried to bring the caller into the conversation — but he’d hung up.

Next up is Michael Levenson of the Globe:

“Speaker DiMasi and I are going to challenge you and the lieutenant governor to a pleasant, social, recreational round of golf,” Finneran told [Gov. Deval] Patrick. “There’ll be no press coverage. We’ll have a lot of fun.”

As his producer waved frantically from a glass booth, yelling for Finneran to ask about DSS, Finneran appeared not to notice. Instead, he urged Patrick not to be afraid to take trade missions.

“You are the very best salesman we have,” Finneran told Patrick. “And if the press gives you a hard time, you know you’ve got comfort and protection over here.”

I’m sorry, but that’s just gruesome.

You will not be surprised to learn that Brian Maloney, of Save WRKO, is unimpressed.

Finneran’s predecessor, Scott Allen Miller, maintains his silence. Scotto, to his credit, has taken the high road, even though WRKO’s corporate owner, Entercom, has not come through with the new gig that had been hinted at in the press.

Finally, the Herald keeps its fangs uncharacteristically sheathed, as Jessica Heslam weighs in with a balanced, pro-and-con piece.

Citizen journalism on the air

A small television station in Santa Rosa, Calif., has eliminated most of its news staff and will replace its evening newscasts with contributions from citizen journalists. The station, KFTY-TV, is owned by Clear Channel. Thus, this has all the makings of a profit-driven fiasco — a perversion of the promise of citizen journalism.

But you know what? Clear Channel’s bottom-line-driven motivation aside, this might prove worthwhile. As the ironically named station executive Steve Spendlove is quoted as saying, “There will be a loss in local coverage, I’m not going to lie to you. But there are a lot of other places to get most of that information.”

It’s hard to tell from this Wikipedia entry how well-served the Santa Rosa area is. But assuming that residents still have two or three local newscasts from which to choose, having another outlet doing something completely different strikes me as something well worth trying.

Here is another story on the Santa Rosa situation. And here is the KFTY Web site.

Counting on Anna Nicole

Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times writes that the death of Anna Nicole Smith may be among the first celebrity stories to land on the front pages of quality newspapers in large measure because of Internet traffic. Rutten explains:

Throughout the afternoon Thursday, editors across the country watched the number of “hits” recorded for online items about Smith’s death. These days, it’s the rare newspaper whose meeting to discuss the content of the next day’s edition doesn’t include a recitation of the most popular stories on the paper’s website. It’s a safe bet that those numbers helped shove Anna Nicole Smith onto a lot of front pages.

What makes this of more than passing interest is that serious American journalism is in the process of transforming itself into a new, hybrid news medium that combines traditional print and broadcast with a more purposefully articulated online presence. One of the latter’s most seductive attributes is its ability to gauge readers’ appetites for a particular story on a minute-to-minute basis. What you get is something like the familiar television ratings — though constantly updated, if you choose to treat them that way.

As someone who believes in the more interactive, “news as a conversation” model espoused by Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen and others, I’m troubled by Rutten’s observation. This isn’t good, is it? And I say that as someone who believes Smith’s death probably deserved to be on page one — just not as a result of Web numbers.

Then again, this isn’t the inevitable consequence of greater interactivity — it’s less than that. As Rutten notes, this is a matter of editors emulating their television counterparts and following the ratings. And let’s not forget, though TV executives may know how to win any given night by going downscale, news audiences overall have been shrinking for more than 20 years. What feels good right now isn’t necessarily what succeeds in the long run.

Newspaper editors — the good ones, anyway — have traditionally aspired to something better. Unfortunately, being able to measure reader interest is going to make it harder to resist the urge to pander. (Thanks to Media Nation reader R.P. for alerting me to Rutten’s column.)

Stomach-churning details

The Boston Herald’s page-one stunner today is uncorroborated, but it’s on the record — and revolting. Jessica Van Sack’s interview with James McGonnell and Kelly Williams about Michael Riley, charged with murdering his 4-year-old daughter, Rebecca, with prescription medication, is stomach-churning. (McGonnell is Riley’s brother-in-law; Williams is McGonnell’s fiancée.)

As for Department of Social Services commissioner Harry Spence’s yet-again defense of his agency (Globe story here; Herald story here), my head tells me that he might be right, but my heart tells me that we’ve heard enough excuses over the years. Sorry, Mr. Spence, but Gov. Deval Patrick ought to personally escort you from the building by the end of today.