Media Nation

I’ll be attending orientation events for new faculty members at Northeastern this week. In fact, I’m on campus right now, posting this from a public computer. So expect little blogging this week.

I just turned on a Blogger feature called “word verification.” Now, if you want to leave a comment, you will be prompted to enter a sequence of characters – which, presumably, you will not be able to do if you’re a spammer buzzing through people’s blogs automatically. You will still be able to log in anonymously. So let’s hope it works.

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Dylan biopic, “No Direction Home.” The bad news: it’s all about the ’60s (again!), and the quotes you hear floating over the video sound like the usual clichés. (“There is an American collective unconscious, and Bobby somehow tapped into it.” Ugh.) The good news: Dylan seems fully awake in the interview snippets, and the concert footage of “Like a Rolling Stone” is a killer.

Don’t try watching this without broadband.

“I can’t believe I saw him die right in front of me” begins Boston Herald photographer John Wilcox’s story today about taking pictures of a man shooting up in the Boston Public Garden and then watching him keel over. It’s a stunning story – accompanied by an even more stunning online picture gallery. This is must-see journalism.

Given that this is the Herald, the inevitable comparisons will be made to last October, when the paper ran a graphic, color photo of Victoria Snelgrove’s bloody body outside Fenway Park. As I predicted, Herald publisher Pat Purcell later apologized.

Wilcox’s report, though, is nothing like that. The front-page photo, though dramatic, isn’t graphic. And though I don’t have today’s print edition and thus can’t see how it was played inside, every photo in the online gallery is newsworthy without being exploitative.

This was a self-inflicted public death, and it’s not a bad idea to show people as directly as possible what drugs can do. As Wilcox writes, “The men I photographed in the park yesterday didn’t look like back-alley junkies. They were clean and dressed like working people. One of them was wearing a roofing company shirt.” In other words, this could happen to someone you know.

After Matter: (Thanks for the phrase, Jay Rosen.) Adam Gaffin has a roundup of commentary on Universal Hub.

His thoughtful response to my critique is in the comments section, here. No disrespect to the other Steve, whose comments are also worth reading.

Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute has a piece in Editor & Publisher on how technology is being used to open up the editorial page. Every one of the ideas he mentions is worthwhile, from the Seattle Post & Intelligencer’s “virtual editorial board,” to blogs by editorial writers, to offloading worthwhile material onto the limitless space of the Web.

Still, I find the mentality expressed in this excerpt problematic:

OUTING: Editorial pages can open up to more voices by giving them space on the Web. If four people submit Op-Ed pieces on, say, a controversial local land-use plan, then all four can run. A logical approach in a print/online publishing environment is to choose the best for print publication and then refer to additional public Op-Ed essays online. Or, the print Op-Ed page can serve more as a table of contents to what’s published online, with abstracts of each of the four articles and Web addresses for the full articles.

It’s the same space issue with letters to the editor, of course. The online editorial page frees letter writers up from the old tyranny of editorial-page editors. For instance, at the Post-Intelligencer, the policy is that an individual can only have a letter published once every three months in the print edition. Yet for the letters areas of P-I Web site – and the same goes for submissions to the Virtual Editorial Board – a prolific letter writer can be published every day.

What this means is that in time, the editorial page of a printed newspaper becomes a highlights page for a much richer presentation of viewpoints and opinion on its respective online area. Interesting, thoughtful and lengthy conversations on important issues can be boiled down and summarized in print – a “Cliff’s Notes,” if you will, of the full issue discussion online. Online = depth. Print = a quick read.

What is the idea of a daily newspaper? To me, the idea is to present a coherent compilation of the news. In putting together that coherent picture, the editor’s most important job is deciding what to leave out. You want to help the reader who can only give you 15 minutes to navigate through a complicated news-scape, while at the same time providing depth to those who can spend an hour.

But even a newspaper’s most devoted readers need to know that there’s an end – that, at some point, intelligent editors have decided that enough is enough, and that any more would represent a diminishing rate of return. What Outing favors, by contrast, could easily turn into a situation in which the print newspaper declines in importance while the Web edition morphs into a bottomless pit.

The Web provides limitless space. But that doesn’t absolve editors of the responsibility to respect their readers’ very limited time.

He’s back, but he doesn’t know what happened. Stay tuned.

You can’t tell from the transcript, but during last night’s lengthy report on CNN’s “NewsNight with Aaron Brown” about Pat Robertson’s latest outrage – a televised call to assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez – the headline at the bottom of the screen read, “Hugo Who?”

Well, if the public doesn’t know who Chávez is, who’s responsible for that? Could it be, you know, the media?

This Wikipedia article on Chávez seems fair and balanced. If CNN’s not going to tell its viewers who Chávez is, perhaps it can suggest they read it rather than mocking them for their ignorance – ignorance for which CNN is partly to blame.

Just ask Bob Costas.

From the moment that he bought the Atlantic Monthly in 1999, David Bradley has perpetrated the notion that the venerable magazine had been getting by on little more than its reputation. Bradley does it again today in the New York Observer, explaining to my former Boston Phoenix colleague Tom Scocca how he and his first editor, the late Michael Kelly, saved the Atlantic.

SCOCCA: “This is the problem Michael and I used to fret about: What’s its purpose?” said Mr. Bradley. After “what Michael Kelly used to call a great 19th century,” Mr. Bradley said, The Atlantic through the decades had fallen behind a speeding-up news cycle. “It retreated in ambition,” Mr. Bradley said. “And it retreated from the news.”

Thus does Bradley continue to add insult to the terrible injury he inflicted earlier this year, when he announced that he was moving the century-and-a-half-old Boston landmark to Washington, merging operations with the National Journal, which he also owns. (Too bad Oliver Wendell Holmes didn’t name the magazine the Bostonian rather than the Atlantic.)

There’s no question that Kelly and his successor in job if not in title, Cullen Murphy (whose tenure at the Atlantic predated Bradley’s arrival by 15 years, and who’s leaving at the end of this year), did some good work. Thanks to Bradley’s deep pockets, they were able to bulk up the magazine with more newsworthy, timely articles and more big-name writers. But despite a slew of National Magazine Awards (choose “Atlantic Monthly” at “Magazine Title”) under both men, the magazine certainly hasn’t been perfect. I’m not a fan of the redesign Kelly oversaw, finding it more old-fashioned than the still-fresh design he threw out. Articles are longer and more bloated than ever; a piece I might take a gander on at 5,000 words turns into “sorry, no time” at 15,000 or 20,000 words. And then there is the traditionally liberal Atlantic’s increasingly neoconservative bent, a trend that can certainly be attributed to Kelly, and – according to Scocca’s article – perhaps to Bradley as well, given his youthful support for the Vietnam War.

As I think back over the years, the Atlantic articles I remember the most tend to be those published under Kelly’s predecessor, William Whitworth: Ellen Ruppel Shell’s horrifying report on mad-cow disease, published in 1998. William Calvin’s warning that even slight global warming could lead to a tipping point that would plunge Europe into another ice age, also published in 1998. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s “Dan Quayle Was Right,” from 1994, which helped transform the debate over the benefits of two-parent families. The Atlantic won nine National Magazine Awards during Whitworth’s tenure, including the big one, for general excellence, in 1993.

And if Whitworth’s Atlantic was not quite as on top of the news as Kelly’s and Murphy’s, it made up for that by being more consistently surprising. Certainly I never would have read a feature on the crisis in seminaries had it not arrived in my mailbox in 1990 (“The Hands That Would Shape Our Souls,” by Paul Wilkes).

Other than Bradley’s unforgivable decision to move the Atlantic out of Boston, his tenure has been a positive one. But can we please dispense with the fiction that the magazine had become irrelevant before Bradley swooped in to save it? It’s a different magazine from the one he bought from Mort Zuckerman – better in some ways, not so good in others. For Bradley to suggest otherwise is insulting to those of us who are longtime readers.

Danny Schechter’s weblog of progressive news from around the world has been hacked. If you go there now, you’ll see a message from the “Minus-Power Virus Coding Team.” Follow the link to irvirus.com at the bottom of the page, and you get something that looks to be in Arabic, with music.

A “whois” search reveals that the domain name “irvirus.com” is registered in Tehran, Iran. (So maybe the text is actually in Farsi rather than Arabic.) The contact is listed as arash {dot} hosseinian {at} gmail {dot} com. Frankly, I wouldn’t put much stock in this. Interesting if true, as they say – although the fact that the host is also based in Iran suggests that maybe this is for real.

Nothing about this yet on MediaChannel.org, the website that Schechter edits.