Media Nation

I just finished four days of orientation at Northeastern, so my apologies in advance for passing this one off. My receiver: Mark Jurkowitz, who, if you haven’t seen his Media Log yet, has some excellent links following up the racial implications of Katrina coverage. The essential link is to the emotional comments of photographer Chris Graythen.

Romenesko has got a few links up on a simmering controversy over the devastation in New Orleans. When hungry people grab food from abandoned grocery stores, are they responding rationally to unusual circumstances? Or are they looting?

Incredibly, this Boing Boing item suggests that the difference in at least one case may depend on whether the person is white or black: a white couple is described as “finding” food, whereas a black man had apparently grabbed his goodie bag by “looting” a store. As you will see, the two pictures are remarkably alike.

Yes, we’re talking about two different news agencies, and as the item itself notes, we have no way of knowing whether there were circumstances that might justify such labeling. But it’s hard to disagree with Romenesko letter-writer Christina Pazzanese, who says, “Perhaps these photos will stimulate a media ‘gut check’ as we race to tell the stories of the thousands who lost their lives and livelihoods.”

Last night I was watching CNN when I saw some folks – I don’t remember their race – described as “looters.” They were walking out of an abandoned grocery store with what appeared to be food and other essentials. (And yes, I realize there is real looting going on, too, but that’s not what I’m talking about.) What’s happening in New Orleans is horrible, and is likely to get worse. Editors need to stop and think about how they describe people who find themselves in a desperate situation.

ThinkSecret.com, one of the Apple rumor sites being sued by Steve Jobs, has some fun with the New York Times’ story today on Apple’s supposedly imminent announcement of an iPod-capable cell phone. To wit:

THINKSECRET: The phone, the Times said, will allow users to “listen to the songs, presumably through headphones,” as opposed to listening to them through salami sandwiches, as originally presumed.

By the way, I’ve rediscovered Aaron Swartz’s New York Times Link Generator, which allows bloggers to create Times links that won’t expire. For some reason I had misplaced it. So if you don’t read this post for a couple of weeks, the link to the Times story should still work.

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.