Media Nation

Take a look at how the Boston Globe’s series on the Massachusetts General Hospital ICU plays out online. The series, by writer Scott Allen and photographer Michele McDonald, delves deep into the training of an ICU nurse, Julia Zelixon, a Russian-Jewish immigrant. The online version has more photos (plus they look better), an interview with McDonald and Allen, a slide show narrated by Allen, and sound clips from Zelixon and her mentor, M.J. Pender.

An impressive effort, but also a fascinating take on what newspapers need to do if they want to survive.

I’ll keep this post short. After all, I wouldn’t want to exceed Metro Boston’s word count.

In the Phoenix, Mark Jurkowitz has a hilarious account of what happened when he set out to do what he had envisioned as a positive feature on Metro’s growing readership among young people and commuters.

In the Herald, Jay Fitzgerald reports on a new study that suggests the Metro business model isn’t working out particularly well. That’s of crucial interest to the Herald, since the New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, acquired 49 percent of the local Metro earlier this year.

No, not the buzz. Not this time.

I have a problem with the iTunes Music Store. It’s possible that it’s my fault, although what I’m about to describe is simple enough that I find it hard to believe I’m doing anything wrong. I may be a fool about some things, but this is pretty much a foolproof process. Or at least I thought it was.

I’ve been a happy iPod user for more than two years, ever since Mrs. Media Nation got me a 15 GB third-generation model for Father’s Day. The vast majority of the music on my iPod consists of my CDs, which I ripped to iTunes on my iBook. (The “i”s have it.) I don’t do anything fancy — I use the default setting, which is AAC compression at 128 kbps, the same compression that the iTunes Music Store uses.

My ripped CDs sound great on the iPod. I know the compression is supposed to degrade the sound quality slightly, but my 49-year-old ears certainly can’t tell.

Yet when I have used the iTunes Music Store, I’ve had mixed results. Some albums sound fine. Others don’t. Two examples: Miles Davis’ “Get Up With It,” supposedly remastered from the original 1975 release, and John Prine’s latest, “Fair and Square.” Parts of “Get Up With It” sound OK; others are fuzzy and distorted, as though it had been recorded on an analogue system with the volume set too high.

I own the vinyl version of “Get Up With It,” and though I haven’t done a direct comparison, I certainly listened to it enough when I was younger that I should have remembered the distortion. And, no, I’m not talking about John McLaughlin playing guitar with the distortion turned up. This is more elemental, embedded in the track.

With “Fair and Square,” the distortion is in the vocals. The problem is similar: it sounds as though someone set the volume too high when the recording was originally made. When Prine duets with a female singer on “Long Monday,” the effect is especially awful. (Overall, the sound seems a bit muddy, too.)

In my iTunes software, the Sound Enhancer bar is in the middle, but it’s not clicked on; that means I’ve got Sound Enhancer turned off, right?

Why am I telling you all this?

An unselfish reason: In the past, I’ve found that readers really seem to respond to tech posts. It’s a continuing obsession for a lot of us, and — really — how much media and politics can we take?

A selfish reason: I’d like some advice!

If you haven’t seen it yet, here is the link to former Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson’s blistering op-ed piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. Here is what he says about what he describes as the “cabal” led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

WILKERSON: Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and “guardians of the turf.”

But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.

Last Friday, I participated in a panel on blogging and podcasting at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. One of the other participants, Christopher Lydon (link now fixed), was beside himself that Wilkerson’s speech before the New America Foundation earlier that week hadn’t gotten much coverage.

Lydon’s complaint was right on the mark. But sometimes stories disappear, and sometimes they seem to disappear, only to gain strength once people in the mainstream media start to recognize their importance. (The Valerie Plame investigation would be a good example of that.)

Wilkerson’s critique could fall into the latter category.

It’s obviously up to Condé Nast whether or not to make all New Yorker content freely available on the Web. But it borders on the abusive not to at least set up a password-protected system for those of us who subscribe to the print edition. The Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic don’t seem to have any problem doing that.

This is especially frustrating when the New Yorker has some hot content – as it does this week, in the form of Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with Brent Scowcroft, the Bush I national-security adviser turned Bush II Cheney-basher.

Uh, Mr. Newhouse, sir, it’s Wednesday, and my mail-carrier still hasn’t delivered this week’s issue. Could I at least read it online? Please?

Mark Jurkowitz, whom I replaced as the Boston Phoenix’s media columnist in 1994 — and who, in turn, replaced me when I left the Phoenix earlier this year — explains why he thought the Phoenix was a better outlet for his work than the Boston Globe. An excerpt:

JURKOWITZ: Everybody’s got a theory about how to fix the slumping newspaper business, which has the feel of a dying Rust Belt industry these days. First and foremost, print journalism has to remain reliable. But I believe it also needs to evolve to provide readers with more attititude and personality, a little more spit and vinegar and a little less perfunctory “he said, she said.” In the end, I figured that much of good media writing, like good sports writing, is about argument — starting arguments, making arguments, and occasionally even ending arguments. The alternative press is simply more conducive to arguing.

Among other things, Jurkowitz’s take on the importance of the alternative press is why you should be worried about this week’s news that the Phoenix-based New Times chain plans to merge with the Village Voice and its assorted weeklies. Tim Redmond of the San Francisco Bay Chronicle has a good analysis explaining why this merger should not pass antitrust muster.

The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies is tracking coverage of this disturbing, long-predicted development.

After I posted a link I’d found to Maureen Dowd’s tough column on Judith Miller yesterday, I was told that the progressive Web site TruthOut.org continues to post the full text of New York Times columns – the left-leaning ones, anyway.

Sure enough: Check out the right-hand column, headlined “Op-Editorials.” So much for TimesSelect. At the bottom of each piece is this: “In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.”

But that’s only part of the fair-use provision of copyright law. Generally speaking, you just can’t post entire articles, as the Free Republic discovered a few years ago. It seems significant that CommonDreams.org, whose mission is similar to TruthOut’s, has stopped carrying Times columns.

Still, until someone at the Times complains, it looks like TruthOut is a good place for bloggers seeking links to liberal Times columnists.

So what about Brooks and Tierney?

Discerning Media Nation readers know that I am not an admirer of Joseph Wilson, the Bush administration critic married to former undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. I think the incomparable Bob Somerby has been dispositive on the man he calls “the Honest Ambassador.” Here is a good starting point.

Nevertheless, Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard pushed matters too far yesterday in talking about Wilson’s mission to Niger, to which Wilson had been dispatched to learn whether Saddam Hussein had sought uranium. In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Hayes said:

HAYES: We have to remember, Joe Wilson came back, and when he went public, first anonymously then later with his name attached, claims that he had debunked forgeries that suggested an Iraq-Niger uranium deal, the chronology doesn’t work. Wilson was in Niger in February of 2002. The U.S. government came into possession of those forgeries in October of 2002. He could not have done what he said he had done. So if you’re in the White House at the time, why would you not say, “Gosh, who is this guy? Why is he saying these things that we know aren’t true? And how do we fix this?”

Gosh, is that what Wilson said? That he “had debunked forgeries that suggested an Iraq-Niger uranium deal”? In fact, Hayes didn’t even come close. Here is the full text of the famous Wilson op-ed piece that appeared in the New York Times on July 6, 2003. Wilson deals with the forgery claim in three parenthetical sentences. Don’t blink, or you might miss it.

WILSON: As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors – they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government – and were probably forged. And then there’s the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.

Wilson wasn’t claiming to have debunked anything with respect to forged documents – he was merely citing news accounts that he saw long after he’d come home from his mission.

Sadly, host Tim Russert failed to correct Hayes.

The view from the summit of Mt. Washington this afternoon:

The Herald business editor and the Phoenix media critic go at it. Read it here.