Tag: New York Times

The New York Times’ non-profit partners

What should we think about a partnership the New York Times has announced with a Chicago non-profit news organization that will supply two pages of news each week for the Times’ new Chicago edition?

On the one hand, the Times, a for-profit enterprise, is using material from a non-profit in order to take business away from two other for-profit enterprises, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. (Earlier, a similar arrangement was announced for a San Francisco edition of the Times.)

I’m a huge fan of non-profit journalism, but this strikes me as raising the specter of unfair competition. The non-profit, after all, enjoys certain tax advantages not available to a for-profit.

On the other hand, no one objects when for-profit newspapers run material from non-profit news organizations such as the Christian Science Monitor. My gut tells me this is different, but I can’t explain why.

We’re all debating whether for-profit newspapers can or should take the non-profit route. At least in a small way, the Times is now doing exactly that through the back door.

A landmark in database reporting

Times_map_20090914
The Times' Google map of Massachusetts water facilities

Every editor in the United States today should be poring over the database that the New York Times assembled — and put online — to accompany its horrifying story on the disastrous state of our public water supplies.

Good as the Times story is, the paper’s decision to go open source with its data is what really makes this stand out. Searchable and state and by zip code, you can look up water facilities and their inspection records in recent years. If I were an editor, I’d want to make sure I got to the bottom of every one of those inspection reports before a citizen journalist could beat me to it.

In the Times story, by Charles Duhigg, we learn about the family of Jennifer Hall-Massey. She, her husband and their two boys live near Charleston, W. Va., where coal companies have so polluted the water supply that people’s teeth are wearing away and simple exposure causes painful skin rashes. Hall-Massey blames a number of deaths and illnesses on the water supply as well.

My former Phoenix colleague Kristen Lombardi has done some groundbreaking reporting on coal and the environment for the Center for Public Integrity. Highly recommended.

Water is one of the great untold stories in environmental journalism. I spent a good part of the 1980s covering the Woburn toxic-waste case, made famous in Jonathan Harr’s book “A Civil Action” and a subsequent movie.

Unfortunately, the families whose children suffered from leukemia and other health problems were not able to prove their case, and ended up reaching an unsatisfying settlement with one of the suspected polluters, W.R. Grace.

Because of Woburn and Love Canal, water was a big story in the late 1970s and ’80s. It’s time for it to take its rightful place again. The Times’ package should be just the beginning. Fortunately, it has provided the tools necessary for every news organization to find out what’s happening locally.

The folly of casino gambling

There’s a terrific front-page story in today’s New York Times on the sagging fortunes of the casino-gambling industry. Ian Urbina reports that casinos may well be reaching the saturation point, as more and more are chasing the same number of customers.

In New Jersey, legislators have repealed no-smoking regulations in order to entice gamblers. In Illinois, there’s actually a proposal to keep gamblers liquored up with free drinks so they’ll keep blowing their money.

Urbina writes:

“When budgets get tight, expanding gambling always looks to lawmakers like the perfect quick-fix solution,” said John Kindt, a professor of business and legal policy at the University of Illinois who studies the impact of state-sponsored gambling. “But in the end, it so often proves to be neither quick nor a fix.”

Crime jumps 10 percent in areas with casinos, personal bankruptcies soar 18 percent to 42 percent and the number of new gambling addicts doubles, Mr. Kindt said. Predicted state revenue often falls short and plans frequently get tripped up by legal fights or popular opposition, he said.

With Gov. Deval Patrick, House Speaker Robert DeLeo and Senate president Therese “Ka-ching!” Murray expected to make a renewed push for expanded gambling this fall, the Times story is as timely as it is important.

Crime, bankruptcies, addiction — is this what our state leaders want?

The future of investigative reporting?

propublica_20090831If you looked closely, you may have noticed that the cover story of the New York Times Magazine yesterday — a long, harrowing examination of accusations that the staff of a New Orleans hospital euthanized several patients following Hurricane Katrina — was a collaboration with ProPublica, a non-profit investigative-reporting foundation.

According to Zachary Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab, the 13,000-word story may have cost as much as $400,000 (perhaps a bit of an exaggeration) to produce — a huge chunk for the Times, but in this case the paper spent nothing: a grant from the Kaiser Foundation paid for much of the reporting. It’s the sort of alternative funding model that may help to ensure the future of investigative journalism.

The story, by ProPublica’s Sheri Fink, is available not only on the Times’ Web site, but also at ProPublica.org. And starting Sept. 29, anyone can run it for free as long as proper attribution is provided.

Fink’s investigation centers on Dr. Anna Pou, a cancer specialist who may have killed several patients who, in her judgment, were near the end of their lives and could not be rescued. As with much good investigative reporting, the story is inconclusive, yet absolutely riveting in describing the despair that had settled over Memorial Medical Center — sweltering, without power and all but abandoned.

Implicit is that regardless of Pou’s actions, the real blame should be laid at the feet of incompetent government officials who abandoned New Orleans to its fate for days on end.

The Times’ missing corrections

The New York Times today is loaded with corrections, including a dread “Editor’s Note.” None of them appear in Times Reader, the paper’s paid downloadable edition optimized for laptop reading.

This problem goes back months. I’ve posted about it on Twitter, and was told by a Times staffer that she was sure someone was on it. Well, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Times doesn’t take Times Reader all that seriously. Too bad.

Democracy and the Senate (III)

Not a bad idea: the New York Times, in disparaging Ted Kennedy’s proposal that an interim senator be appointed who’d serve during the five months before a special election could be held, suggests instead that the special election be moved up.

Although I don’t have a problem with Kennedy’s idea, the Times’ solution sounds pretty good, too. Instead of five months, why not six weeks?

Payback time for Couric

“CBS Evening News” anchor Katie Couric rips New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley for her error-riddled tribute to Walter Cronkite. As the Huffington Post observes, Couric must have enjoyed herself, as Stanley has been one of her tormenters. (Thanks to WBUR’s Steve Brown.)

Stanley’s butchery led me to make an error in my Guardian piece this week, as I relied her piece in asserting that Cronkite did not overcome NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report” in the ratings until Chet Huntley retired, in 1970. We’re supposed to run a correction, but it hasn’t been posted yet.