Media Nation

I’m perplexed by Sydney Schanberg’s latest in the Village Voice, lamenting a future in which the Internet has supplanted newspapers. “[T]he puzzlement,” he asks, “is where will the new digital providers of information get their fresh news?” And though Schanberg swears his intent is not to slam the bloggers, be aware that you will find the obligatory reference to pajamas.

I assume — I hope — that the “new digital providers of information” will be newspapers, transformed and perhaps revitalized by their move to an all-digital or almost-all-digital incarnation. Of course, the biggest ongoing story in journalism right now is who’s going to pay the bills. But that’s what we’re all trying to figure out.

Schanberg concludes with a laundry list of important stories broken in recent weeks by the Old Media, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, National Journal, the Washington Post, The Nation and Rolling Stone.

Uh, Mr. Schanberg — did you have the print versions of every one of those publications? Or did you read some of them on, you know, the Internet?

Dan Primack, writing for PE Week Wire, says Pat Purcell is now actively soliciting bids for the Boston Herald and Community Newspaper Co., which comprises about 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts. (“PE” stands for “private equity.”) First-round bids are due today, according to the item. Primack writes:

What exactly is for sale? Is it just the private equity consortium’s minority stake? Is it just the community papers? Is it also The Boston Herald itself?

The answer is that Wachovia [the financial firm that’s helping Purcell broker the deal] is seeking bids for the entirety of Herald Media Inc., and that it hasn’t been too receptive to partial proposals. Why? Because, on a cash-flow basis, the community newspapers are the jewel while the Boston Herald is the millstone. As I’ve discussed previously, community papers continue to outshine most big city dailies because (A) They often has exclusive news-you-can-use content (school lunch menus, pee-wee football scores, church events, etc.) and (B) Their classifieds have not been cannibalized too much by Monster, Craigslist, etc. This dichotomy is particularly striking in the case of Herald Media, where the big-city daily is a secondary read that doesn’t have much home delivery distribution outside the city limits. It also has been hurt by a free tabloid partially owned by The Boston Globe (thus lessening the Herald’s number of subway/bus readers).

To reiterate, bids are due today. Expect offers anywhere from 9x-12x cash-flow, and a new Herald Media owner by springtime.

Among the possible buyers, according to Primack: Enterprise NewsMedia, which owns the Patriot Ledger of Quincy and the Enterprise of Brockton. Kind of ironic, given that Purcell had long wanted to buy those papers himself.

Nearly seven years ago the Atlantic Monthly published a terrifying cover story by the scientist William H. Calvin titled “The Great Climate Flip-Flop.”

Calvin’s thesis, simply put, was that global warming could disrupt the northward flow of the Gulf Stream and thus, paradoxically, kick off a new ice age in Northern Europe — which is, after all, at approximately the same latitude as Labrador.

Now a new scientific study, reported in the journal Nature, finds that it may already be happening, according to this New York Times story.

Here’s an excerpt from the Nature press release:

Failures of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation system are thought to have been responsible for abrupt and extreme climate changes during the ice age that lasted from 110,000 to 23,000 years ago. More recently, a fictional shutdown of the Gulf Stream inspired the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster The Day after Tomorrow.

The climate shifts depicted in the movie, in which New York is engulfed by an instant ice age, are mere fancy. But scientists are worried about the real changes measured in the North Atlantic. Both salinity and water density, which influence the transport of warm waters, have previously been found to be decreasing.

Global warming is often thought to be a gradual process. But, as Calvin noted in the Atlantic, the effects of it could come in catastrophic waves, as tipping points are reached and then breached. This isn’t alarmism — it’s realism.

There may be more to say in the coming days about the U.S. military’s secret advertorial campaign in Iraq, a story that was broken yesterday by the Los Angeles Times.

For now, though, kudos to NPR’s new Pentagon correspondent, John Hendren, who scored an interview with David Halberstam, the author of a classic history of American involvement in Vietnam, “The Best and the Brightest.”

Halberstam: “The only people they fool are themselves. And then they begin to believe it, and then they begin to believe in the Potemkin village. And so it’s stupid. It doesn’t work, and it’s dangerous in the sense that it corrupts those who are trying to corrupt others.”

You can listen to Hendren’s piece here.

Mickey Kaus has some worthwhile thoughts on what’s wrong with TimesSelect. No, information doesn’t want to be free. But it does want to be available.

The New York Times finally publishes a toughly worded editorial about reports that white phosphorus used by U.S. forces against insurgents in Fallujah last year wound up injuring and killing civilians as well. An excerpt:

Now the use of a ghastly weapon called white phosphorus has raised questions about how careful the military has been in avoiding civilian casualties. It has also further tarnished America’s credibility on international treaties and the rules of warfare.

White phosphorus, which dates to World War II, should have been banned generations ago. Packed into an artillery shell, it explodes over a battlefield in a white glare that can illuminate an enemy’s positions. It also rains balls of flaming chemicals, which cling to anything they touch and burn until their oxygen supply is cut off. They can burn for hours inside a human body.

The United States restricted the use of incendiaries like white phosphorus after Vietnam, and in 1983, an international convention banned its use against civilians. In fact, one of the many crimes ascribed to Saddam Hussein was dropping white phosphorus on Kurdish rebels and civilians in 1991.

Among other things, the editorial is invaluable for its implicit challenge to the news side to start investigating this story.

The Globe reports that Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy has asked that the financially ailing Herald’s assets be frozen in order to protect the $2.1 million libel judgment he won against the paper earlier this year.

The Herald does not cover the story — at least not in its online edition — and avoids taking any cheap shots against Murphy in this article about the judge’s decision yesterday to boost former UMass president William Bulger’s pension. Interestingly, the story is co-bylined by Dave Wedge, the principal target of Murphy’s libel suit. (The Globe covers the Bulger story here.)

The Herald’s reporting on Murphy was not exactly a model of good journalism. In fact, it was the opposite, pockmarked as it was with inaccuracies and dubiously sourced accusations. But free-press advocates ought to be concerned that a sitting judge can have some influence over the Herald’s future — and possibly its very survival — because of reporting that amounted to criticism of how he performed his public duties. That, more than anything, is what the First Amendment was designed to protect.

Boston Magazine hasn’t updated its “Thank God We’re a Two-Newspaper Town” feature since last July. But Media Nation is here to pick up the slack. From today’s papers:

In one of the harshest punishments it has ever handed down, the state Commission on Judicial Conduct suspended a Plymouth County judge yesterday for a year without pay for sexually harassing two female court workers. The commission also fined him $50,000 and barred him from ever sitting in any court in the county. — Boston Globe

The one-year slap-on-the-wrist suspension that will allow “love judge” Robert F. Murray to return to the bench after sexually harassing female underlings would never pass muster in the private sector, experts say. — Boston Herald

They report, you decide.

The Los Angeles Times today fronts an excellent in-depth story on claims that U.S. forces injured and killed civilians with the flesh-burning substance white phosphorus during its assault on Fallujah last year.

Reporters John Daniszewski and Mark Mazzetti write: “In the 1990s, in fact, the U.S. condemned Iraqi President Saddam Hussein for allegedly using ‘white phosphorus chemical weapons’ against Kurdish rebels and residents of Irbil and Dohuk.” So much for U.S. denials that phosphorus is a chemical weapon.

And there is this:

Abdul Qadir Sadi, an Iraqi from Fallouja in his 30s, said doctors had told him that two of his family members were killed by white phosphorus.

“They had a lot of serious skin burns,” Sadi said. “The doctor at the hospital told us that they must have been hit by these chemicals. They were being treated by the doctor, but after a while, these burned places started to dissolve.”

“We have registered the documents and exhibits of everything that happened,” said Mohammed Tariq, a human rights worker in Fallouja. “We informed the Iraqi Red Crescent, the International Red Cross and [other] international organizations, but our efforts were in vain.”

The L.A. Times dutifully reports Pentagon denials that civilians in Fallujah were targeted. But I can’t imagine that anyone to the right of Ramsey Clark thinks that’s what happened. The issue remains whether U.S. forces attacked insurgents with white phosphorus even though they knew — or should have known — that civilians were in close proximity. Since the Pentagon has already admitted to the former, it’s hardly a great leap of logic to arrive at the latter.

Making up the name of a fake Web site in order to write a cute headline, only to find out later that it’s a real site — it’s a mistake that’s so ’90s. But here we are in 2005, and the New York Times’ “Practical Traveler” column today is accompanied by the headline “Wishyouwerehere.com: Blogs From the Road.”

Yes, as you might have imagined, there is a real Wishyouwerehere.com, a forwarding site that takes you to the online home of a British company called FremantleMedia, “one of the largest international creators and producers of programme brands in the world, with leading prime time drama, serial drama, entertainment and factual entertainment programming in around 43 territories, including the UK, the US, Germany, Australia, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia, Latin America and Asia.”

According to this “whois” search, the domain name wishyouwerehere.com was registered in London in 1997 by the aforementioned FremantleMedia.

Someone at the Times needs to get a clue.