Media Nation

Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote a column over the weekend in which, among other things, she reported that the print folks are upset about a blog written for washingtonpost.com by Dan Froomkin.

The Post’s national politics editor, John Harris, is among those concerned about having a blogger who is perceived as a liberal Bush-basher writing an online column labeled “White House Briefing,” as though he were a Post political reporter. It strikes me as a legitimate concern, and Howell was right to propose that the column get a new name.

I’m not going to link to everything. Jay Rosen’s got it all, as well as thoughtful Q&As with Harris, washingtonpost.com executive editor Jim Brady and Froomkin himself. It’s well worth reading. Keep in mind that no one, including Harris, is proposing to get rid of Froomkin’s blog.

But I do want to say something about the ubiquitous blogging champion Jeff Jarvis, whose hyperkinetic presence is much sought-after by cable news programmers, and who is thought to be something of an expert on the emerging world of online journalism. If you do your homework and read the material Rosen assembled first, I guarantee you will be startled by this from Jarvis’ blog, Buzz Machine:

Deborah Howell … writes an ombudsman column for the Washington Post that illustrates, in its quotes from editors at the paper, the kind of clueless, destructive, and snobbish territoriality between print and online that is killing newspapers….

What a terrible insult and slap at a colleague who writes a very good, respected, and journalistic column for online. What a slap from a newsroom snot. [That would be the aforementioned John Harris.] But that is what newsrooms are like….

[T]he audience has clearly shown its support for the online Post over the printed one; the only reason online is not as successful is because advertisers are even more behind than newspaper editors. And the audience has clearly shown Froomkin their support. Perhaps the paper should be doing more of what he does. Did you ever think of that, o, vaunted newspaper editors?

This is just self-serving bloviation over what’s really a minor matter: trying to make sure that a highly opinionated blogger who writes for washingtonpost.com isn’t confused with Post reporters who are trying to cover the White House in a fair and neutral manner.

Rosen advances the conversation and adds to our understanding of what’s going on inside the Post newsroom. Jarvis subtracts from it. Then again, Jarvis’ only goal seems to be calling attention to himself.

End-of-semester deadlines prevent me from immediately reading Ken Auletta’s big piece on New York Times Co. chairman (and Times publisher) Arthur Sulzberger Jr. But Mark Jurkowitz has some highlights. Mark’s take on Auletta’s take: “[E]ven in his mid-50’s, Sulzberger is too unseasoned and undisciplined for the role.”

Following the Judith Miller meltdown, speculation was rampant (if unfounded) that Sulzberger might be pressured into giving up one of his jobs — most likely the publisher’s position. The buzz died down. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Auletta’s piece starts it up all over again.

Kaus thinks that despite the missteps of the past several years, the family isn’t quite ready to give up on not-so-young Arthur: “A cool-headed outsider perspective suggests that at least one more anti-Pinch tidbit or scandal will be required for the Class B shareholders to end their family nightmare. Or at least start a new chapter.”

Brian Ballou has a terrific story in today’s Boston Herald on Snoop Dogg‘s mother, Beverly Broadus Green, who is flying here to speak out against violence at a Dorchester middle school tomorrow.

Green tells Ballou: “Don’t look at me for what he’s done, look at me as Beverly. When you raise your children, they go out and do things. I don’t like it and he knows I don’t like it, but that’s what pays the bills.”

Today’s Globe has a great column by former Atlantic Monthly editor Robert Manning on the death of the Atlantic — or at least the death of the Atlantic as We Know It, as the venerable monthly prepares to move to Washington.

Manning makes a valuable point, arguing that the Atlantic’s outside-the-Beltway location was one of the things that made it a vital source of unconventional wisdom, as it was during the Vietnam War. He writes:

I realized that Boston was a far better site from which to take the measure of the sectors to which The Atlantic Monthly was devoted — literature, science, art, and politics — than was Washington. That is why I am disturbed that the magazine is leaving the city on the hill for the city on the Potomac.

Now fiction-free and increasingly neocon in outlook, the Atlantic is severing its last ties to the past: Cullen Murphy, the gifted managing editor, will not make the move. The Atlantic may survive and even thrive. But now it’s just another Washington magazine. Don’t be fooled by the nameplate.

The year would not be complete without Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby’s telling us that, yes, he’s still in favor of the death penalty. What makes today’s column special is that he presumes to teach religion to the Catholic bishops. It comes right after the sentence in which he writes, “I wouldn’t presume to teach religion to a bishop.”

Part one of Jacoby’s two-parter is here.

When Jonathan Alter of Newsweek reviewed Mary Mapes’ book for the New York Times Book Review on Nov. 20, he opened with a devastating reminder: that the Boston Globe had exploded the credibility of her chief source, Bill Burkett, months before she relied on him in producing the “60 Minutes” story on George W. Bush’s National Guard service. That story, of course, ended her career.

Today Walter V. Robinson, editor of the Globe’s Spotlight Team and the lead reporter on several stories about Bush’s military service (or lack thereof) dating back to 2000, weighs in with his own review of Mapes’ book, which is titled “Truth and Duty: The Press, the President and the Privilege of Power.” Robinson recalls that Globe reporter Michael Rezendes, in February 2004, cast serious doubt on “Burkett’s bizarre eyewitness account of how embarrassing documents in Bush’s military records were destroyed in 1997.”

The Rezendes account is still online. In it, he reports that George O. Conn, “a key witness to some of the events described by Burkett has told the Globe that the central elements of his story are false.” As Robinson suggests, it is unimaginable that Mapes didn’t take this more seriously before she rushed her unproven, unprovable allegations onto the air.

As we all know, the avalanche that would eventually destroy Mapes’ career was begun with a few pebbles tossed by conservative bloggers, who charged that the memos on which CBS relied — purportedly typed up in the early 1970s — were almost certainly produced on a computer and printer of recent vintage, using Microsoft Word’s default settings. Mapes has some choice words for the bloggers — and Robinson has some choice words for her. Robinson writes:

Mapes’s opinion of the bloggers is venomous: “A digital lynch mob at work,” she calls them. “With political blogging,” she explains, “there is very little gate-keeping, very little vetting of information before it goes out into the ether. For many of the more amateurish sites, the operators don’t seem to want any fact-checking.” And on and on.

How, one has to wonder, can Mapes be so deaf to the irony in her attack? It was her own amateurish, unvetted reporting that gave the bloggers all the ammunition they needed.

By contrast, Robinson is respectful of anchor Dan Rather — too much so, in my view. If Rather had not been so overworked, Robinson writes, he probably would have asked for the clips — and would have seen Rezendes’ report, which would have “likely halted the broadcast.”

Perhaps. But what of Rather’s over-the-top defense of Mapes, and his statement to the outside commission that investigated the story that he regretted having issued an apology? What about the fact that the National Guard story tracks so closely with another phony-documents story in which Rather was involved in the 1970s?

Mapes may deserve most of the blame. But as Christiane Amanpour said when Peter Arnett tried to duck responsibility for CNN’s Tailwind fiasco, even though he had anchored the flawed report and had allowed his byline to be published atop the Time magazine version of the story, “I object to this new image of correspondent as nincompoop.”

Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald has posted an alternate take on his paper’s prospects. In a letter to Romenesko, he writes:

I work at a newspaper that underwent severe staffing cuts six months ago. The situation forced managers to make difficult and painful choices, and some talented people went out the door. It was predicted to be the death of our news operation and beginning of the end of the Boston Herald. We’ve heard that many times before, so it was hardly worth paying attention to.

In fact, our news operation experienced a rebirth.

Read the whole thing here.

Dan Primack’s latest:

First, it has been reconfirmed that the sale is for the entire company, which includes The Boston Herald, over 100 community papers in Eastern Massachusetts and a sweet piece of Boston real estate. Second, Wachovia [the firm that’s managing the sale] received over 10 first-round bids last Thursday from both strategic and private equity players, of which a handful will be invited back into Round 2. Third, Heritage Partners [which owns Quincy’s Patriot Ledger and Brockton’s Enterprise] is looking more like a seller than a buyer. If it is ultimately involved in this deal, expect it to package its Enterprise NewsMedia LLC platform along with Herald Media for a buyer looking for significant regional expansion. Finally, the whole thing should be wrapped up by the end of Q1 2006.

Very interesting. If this all plays out — and, granted, it sounds more complicated than the Red Sox’ attempt to move Edgar Renteria — it sounds like a big media company could move in and take charge not only of the Herald and its associated 100-plus community papers, but also of the Ledger and the Enterprise.

Two aspects of this are particularly worth watching:

1. Primack’s reporting would seem to suggest that Herald Media’s principal owner, Pat Purcell, is not looking just to replace the venture capitalists who want out, but to sell his entire company. Anything’s possible, of course, but it looks like the end of the Purcell era looms. Unless —

2. Whoever buys Herald Media is so smitten with Purcell’s newspaper-management skills that the new owners decide to keep Purcell on. But I wonder. By aggressively taking the Herald downscale over the past few years, it strikes me that Purcell blew the best opportunity he had to reinvent his flagship and turn it into something that would be more attractive to advertisers — not to mention readers.

There are reasons that the Encyclopedia Britannica has been around for 237 years. One of them, obviously, is that its editors do not allow anyone to post anything and claim it’s authoritative. An example of that would be the Wikipedia.

It’s easy to see why the Wikipedia had become a darling among Internet users. It’s well-designed, free and comprehensive. It also taps into the notion — a dubious one, in my estimation — that the “wisdom of the crowd” is superior to that of professional editors. (When did the “madness of the mob” become the “wisdom of the crowd,” anyway? When they got computers?)

Right now the Wikipedia is under siege as the result of two scandals. The better-known involves former Robert Kennedy aide John Siegenthaler, who wrote an op-ed piece for USA Today last week about how he’d been falsely cast as a conspirator in both Kennedy assassinations — and that this horrifying error was not removed for months.

But there’s more. It seems that Adam Curry, the former MTV veejay who helped launch podcasting, has been caught messing around with the Wikipedia entry on that subject, possibly to aggrandize his own role. Curry tells CNET’s News.com that his motives were pure, and whines that he’s now been cast as “the asshole of the week.”

Back to Siegenthaler. According to this News.com piece, the Wikipedia may have some responsibility for the slime job, but it’s probably not liable. The reason is that a provision of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 exempts Internet service providers from legal liability for anything posted on their sites.

As News.com notes, publishers — even exclusively online publishers such as Salon — may be successfully sued for libel by those who are able to demonstrate that they were defamed with false information, and that the publisher acted with some degree of fault. But ISPs were given a get-out-of-court card in the 1996 law on the theory that it would be impossible to monitor the thousands, even millions, of posts from their users.

News.com quotes Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as saying that the guiding case in this area is Zeran v. America Online, 1997 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (not the Third Circuit, as News.com claims). Kenneth Zeran was the victim of a malicious AOL subscriber who posted messages in which, claiming to be Zeran, he offered T-shirts for sale that mocked victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. The court ruled that the 1996 law clearly exempted AOL from any liability.

Now, I don’t want to go toe to toe with a lawyer. Logically, though, the Wikipedia strikes me as being more of a publishing venture like Salon than an ISP like America Online or EarthLink. The Wikipedia’s model of allowing anyone to contribute content doesn’t strike me as somehow magically transforming it into an ISP.

But those are questions for lawyers and judges to decide. Either way, the Wikipedia’s honeymoon is over.

My Northeastern colleague Bill Kirtz attended the Nieman Narrative Journalism conference this past weekend. Among the speakers: new-journalism giant Tom Wolfe and former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll.

The predominant theme was that old-fashioned story-telling may be an effective way to keep readers — yet the resources it takes may be more than today’s corporate owners are willing to spend.

Here is Kirtz’s report.