Market testing pre-print stories

CP reports:

Reporters at the Chicago Tribune newspaper say they believe the marketing department solicited subscribers' opinions in recent weeks on stories before they were published, a practice they said raises ethical questions, as well as legal and competitive issues.

An email signed by 55 reporters and editors, sent Wednesday to editor Gerould Kern and managing editor Jane Hirt, questions why the newspaper was conducting the surveys and what stories were used. They also wanted to know which readers were surveyed and whether any story had been altered as a result of reader comment.

Mixed feelings about the new Toro mag

Christopher Shulgan has posted his feelings on the online rebirth of Toro with a tale that will make freelancers' cringe and rant.

"I think it was in December 2006 that I finally got frustrated with Finkle and started swearing at him on the telephone over a pair of invoices that were going on three months overdue. I had an excuse -- Christmas was coming up, the invoices totaled around $8,000 and my wife wasn't going to get any presents if those invoices didn't come in.

The thing was, it wasn't Finkle's fault -- he had done his best to get me the money and finally just gave me Bratty's office phone number. I started bugging Bratty with incessant voice-mails explaining the situation, and at the very last minute before Christmas vacation -- I think on the 22nd of December -- I drove out to the west side of Toronto and met Bratty at a Starbuck's near his house, where he handed me the cheque. What got me was Bratty's manner. He tossed off some random comment to the effect of, he hoped I was grateful that he was going out of his way to pay me. This was an invoice that was at least three months overdue. And what gets me to this day, and what is probably the reason for my current venting, is that I didn't call him on that asshole comment."

I attended the relaunch party last night. It wasn't "happening" as of the time I left. It certainly wasn't a magazine or a journalists' gathering. I wonder if it's because of what Shulgan describes in his post?

Links for April 22, 2008

NYTimes - Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand.

Flickr post (via BoingBoing) - Radio for back up, an illustration of what's happening in the UK regarding public photography. Changing laws, could set a global precedent in our ongoing war on terror. Must investigate topic further.

Ad Age- Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Resigns... for later reference.

British paper to buy news from talent agency

Via Boingboing and Kotaku comes this job posting for someone to... well, I'll just copy it here.

"Did computer games make you turn to a life of crime?
Magazines / newspapers : Did computer games make you turn to a life of crime?
Listing no. 63806 - All regions, UK
A national newspaper wants your story and will pay hundreds of pounds to the right person.

Write a few lines about how computer games turned you to crime and if it's something we like, we'll call you straight back.

Payment details: paid role

Created: 27 March 2008
Applications accepted for at least another month
Application criteria: Males & Females aged 0 to 60 from UK"

Is this standard practice for finding sources over there? I mean, TALENT AGENCIES? It kinda smacks of fabrication. Hell, there's no "kinda" about it. This website also advertises TV and radio writing gigs. It's pathetic.

Given that many media outlets (both in Europe and here) seem to have an agenda against videogames and their satanic, baby-eating makers, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

As Joel Johnson posted, I hope someone managed to plant a whopper in the press, track the story outwards, and then reveal its all a lie. Normally I'd hate to see that happen, but if a paper is going to a TALENT AGENCY (is there a bigger form of caps lock?), I say all bets are off. You get what's coming to you.

Links, February 14, 2008

Happy Valentines Day. My gift to you: two links from DB Scott.

Canadian Media Guild - alleges that the Ottawa Citizen's new freelance contract tries to without "moral rights" from freelancers. For reference, an (extreme) example: if you write an article/editorial defending free speech and the paper tries to sell the work to a book on defending Naziism, you can without your work citing moral rights over its content.

Ezra Levant - The former editor of Conservative magazine The Western Standard is suing Syed Soharwardy to recoup expenses incurred in defending himself from a complaint to the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

Zell swears at employee... in public and on camera

If I may editorialize a moment, the following link gives you the palest of overviews concerning the bonfire that burns at the centre of the journalism world right now (specifically newspaper journalism).

A: We need money to keep the paper going.
B: But the means to make money takes away from the paper's integrity.

Two sides, equally frustrated with obstacles the other side doesn't really appreciate.

And then Sam Zell* swears at him employee, which is where my editorial bonfire analogy will stop because I'm really more appalled that he'd treat an employee that way (as opposed to what it may say about management in this debate). To his credit, it appears he apologized.

Sam Zell tells a photog "fuck you."

* - "Salty billionaire Sam Zell has long been known for his foul mouth and abrasive demeanor, rough edges that helped the real estate magnate build a reputation as a feisty and iconoclastic investor. But Zell's bluntness backfired at a Jan. 31 meeting of Orlando Sentinel staff after Zell said "fuck you" to a journalist who twice questioned him about softening news coverage." (Gawker, Feb 4, 2008)

Thank you Elizabeth Baker Keffer

As of today, the Atlantic has torn the locks off of its online archive and magazine content.

Let the gorging begin.

Wire creator David Simon on the decline of print

A well-written first hand account of what it's like to work at a paper in North America. I (and Esquire) give you David Simon, creator of The Wire (which, incidentally, is the best television show ever produced in a kind of plain, epic way... but I digress) and former writer for The Baltimore Sun.

The excerpt I link to is a great read. I guess I'll have to pick up the March issue to get it all.

It took me a long moment to regroup.

“John,” I said finally, “if I was the editor of a major metropolitan daily and I had to retract three stories by the same reporter, I would remember it until the day I fucking died.”

I’m not prescient. At that moment, I can’t yet fathom all the still-to-come Tribune Company cost cutting at The Sun, the Kafkaesque reductions in staffing, the slow-motion demolition of the Washington bureau, the shuttering of the foreign bureaus.

And I am still as clueless as the captains of the newspaper industry when it comes to the Internet, still mistaking the Web as advertising for the product when, in fact, it is the product. I don’t yet envision the steep declines in circulation, the indifference of young readers to newsprint, the departure of display advertising to department-store consolidation and classified space to Craigslist.

Admittedly, I can’t even grasp all of the true and subtle costs of impact journalism and prize hunger. I don’t yet see it as a zero-sum game in which a serious newspaper would cover less and less of its city -- eliminating such fundamental responsibilities as a poverty beat, a labor beat, a courthouse beat in a city where rust-belt unemployment and crime devour whole neighborhoods -- and favor instead a handful of special select projects designed to catch the admiring gaze of a prize committee.

Edit Jan 17 - After returning to Understanding Crime after... well, after months and months, I've found the New Yorker profile of David Simon here.

A small fakt-checking refference

This link to DB Scott's blog has a number of interesting links about fact-checking. Glad to see that Cynthia Brouse has finally published her fact-checking text. I interviewed her once for an article I wrote on the subject for Masthead.

Also note the links to discussions on the future of fact-checking (which my article happened to be about).

Anna Politkovskaya

Found on BoingBoing:

Jasmina Tešanović shares with Boing Boing this essay about her friend Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist in Russia who was murdered last year. Photo of Ms. Politkovskaya courtesy Novaya Gazeta, via Wikipedia.

Who knows how this will be edited and changed over time. I'm posting the current version (August 23, 2007, 2:40 pm) here in this post. The words below are that of the original author, Jasmina Tešanović.

- - - - - - - - - -
08-23-2007 | Jasmina Tešanović
- - - - - - - - - -

Seventh of October 2006:

Accompanied by a nervous dog named Van Gogh, Anna Politkovskaya returns to her three room flat, on the seventh floor with a single bag of groceries (she will have to return downstairs for the second bag).

Inside the elevator, five gunshots. The killer drops his gun and walks out of the building. A 14 year old, Nina, is the first to see Anna dead on the elevator floor. Nina screams and runs up to the seventh floor on foot. An elderly woman from the eighth floor calls the elevator to her own floor, then calls the police. Then the old woman hurries off to buy her own groceries because all the shops will be closing at 4PM.

Anna Stepanovna Mazepa Politkovskaya ( her ex husbands name), mother of a 28 year old son and a 26 year old daughter... murdered in Moscow.

The long-expected news shocks no one, even as it hurries around the world. Repeated attempts had been made on her life, and success, was only a matter of time.

What did this tiny, unpretentious woman do to merit this? She was a journalist from LG, a magazine founded in 1993 by Mihail Gorbachev, as an attempt at Russian full democracy through truth and openness.

She was always close to death while wandering in the lethal war zones of Chechnia, alone, in the dark, to get the story from the other side...

Once she was kidnapped by the Russian military, who staged her fake execution, much as they had done to Dostoyevski some centuries earlier. The military commented after that they would have preferred an authentic execution...

Arrested, she was kept in a hole of solitary confinement for four days without food, water, light, even buttons, for fear that her buttons might be microphones.

During her attempt to reach Rostov and mediate in the Beslan school terrorist kidnappings, she was poisoned.

Anna wrote about the dirty wars in Chechnia, on terror attacks and the political instrumentalization of terror by the Russian government, of the aftermath of terror, on numerous abuses of civil human rights, of the double crimes inflicted on victims, the crimes of the terrorists and the crimes of the state.

It is incredible how the biggest opposer to Putin and his virile masculine Russian model (just as Yeltsin was before him) should be this minute fragile creature who did not smoke, drink, or enjoy any bursts of adrenalin. And yet only a hit-man could silence her.

She hated the misery and felony of Russian official power, but she despised the Chechnian militant heroism and its historical cult. While reporting on the impotent war-games convulsing the region, she tries to create a new line of understanding, a language for survivors and grieving mothers. The missing red thread of the missing peace. Her motto: I live my life and I write what I see.

She used to say in her low key, matter of fact voice:

Sometimes one has to pay with one's own life for one's own words. She found no swaggering male glamour in being a war correspondent: for her, war was about dirt, stench, confinement, thirst, hunger, hatred, grief.

My texts are written for the future. They bear witness to the new victims of the new Chechnia war.

That is why I write all the facts I can.

Maybe some day, there will be a war tribunal for the many criminal deeds in Chechnia , and Anna's life and death will be a part of that.

What are those tales and facts she is talking about in her work? The letters of a Chechnian father whose son was abducted and killed, to Putin and Kofi Anan. These are the questions of the father:

- who insulted, tortured my son and according to what law?

- what was he guilty of?

- why is there no enquiry about it and no criminal charges?

One mother of a dead Russian soldier refused to bury him (she kept it under her window sill for 15 days) while demanding an official report of his death. Thus the authorities were forced to do it, and other Russian mothers followed her example to find the truth. Breaking the general rule: You have your son's body, shut up, you should be grateful.

Instead of saying: thank you for my dead son, they asked: Why, for what noble cause?

The case of a young Chechnian woman who disappeared preemptively, accused by the Russian authorities as a potential kamikaze. And her mother asking both sides: why? Sometime I think that I am put here in the middle in order to see if I can survive all of them, says the mother, reflecting Anna's own standpoint as a reporter.

The episode at the gala dinner when Kadyrov (the pro-Russian Chechnian who suppressed the rebels) made Chechian girls, winners of a beauty contest, dance and collect money from the floor where the heroes threw it: Kadyrov the peacemaker.

Anna was lonely. Why write books that cannot be published in Russia and are not understood in the West?

Just before she died she said: My life is so hard, but most of time humiliating. At age of 47 I have a sign on my forehead that I am rejected by society, and I don’t have the strength to fight it any more. Not to mention the joys of my work - the poisoning, arrests, threats... phone calls to my editors because of the texts of the crazy woman from Moscow... living this way is terrible. I need more comprehension.. But the most important thing is to be allowed to do my work, to tell what I see...

Anna is not here to see and write anymore: but she belongs to a long history of women' activism, pacifism and the creation of an alternative, invisible history.

Her description of Malika -- the girl who took the lead against the Russian tanks which invaded a Chechen village, killed alone (2002) while nobody from her lot had the courage to follow her cry "You cowards"… a voice like Jean of Arc, like Antigone.

She discusses boldly of the instrumentalization of the female kamikaze bombers and their desperate ideology: take me with you, I too want to avenge myself... the new fake heroines are women manipulated, like a fashion-show with explosive waist-belts. At last, through getting killed 'for her people,' a woman in Chechnia can become a martyr saint -- escaping her historical role as traditional mother, cook, housewife, nurse.

Such true life stories against all constructed patriotism and patriarchal nationalism... that makes Anna an international pacifist thinker.

The whole world is afraid of nuclear proliferation while instead I am afraid of hate: nobody can predict the paths revenge will take. The children from our camps will never forgive the children who grew up in cosy homes. The refugees need understanding and solidarity, not gifts of cash or the hypocrisy of those who fast to "share the suffering" and yet secretly nibble cheese in the closet.

"I live my life and I write what I see:" anywhere on the planet, we can retrace Anna's steps, and we owe her that.

- - - - - - - - - -

To Save Themselves, US Newspapers Put Readers to Work

Wired reports on a pro-am-model paper in Cincinnati.

Callinan — and all the other top editors who received shoes that week — got the point: The nation's largest newspaper chain was in deep trouble, and the editors had better get ready to run fast. Callinan had been ready for seven years.

The Musalman

Wired reports on handwritten newspaper in India. Photographs are here.

Comment on Blatchford

The afore-posted Toronto Life blog focusing on the Conrad Black trial
has an interesting topping its page today. It
concerns The Globe and Mail's coverage through the always- controversial Christie Blatchford.

He then asked me if I’d read Christie’s column. I said I hadn’t. He then read me the last line of the column. Speaking of Conrad Black, Blatchford asks (rhetorically, one suspects), “Is it a criminal offence to be so visibly entitled?” The satirist then suggested that I read the rest of the column and imagine that instead of a description of corporate greed,Blatchford had appended her question to an article about a guy who walks into a Mac’s, points a loaded gun at the owner, spews abuse at him, then steals his money. (Which also happens to be the analogy trotted out by the prosecution in its opening remarks.)

I'm not going to hunt for Blatchford's article as The Globe locks such content behind a paywall.

Must find ink-on-paper version later in library... if such things still
exist when I get around to properly researching this thing.

News use study isn't news, by Antonia Zerbisias

A look at a study that shows people who get news from a variety of sources tend to be more politically involved.

It's hardly surprising that, as a Statistics Canada study released yesterday reveals, Canadians' level of political engagement is related to their news usage.

The more news they consume, the more they are involved "in non-voting political activities such as attending public meetings; searching for information on a political issue; volunteering for a political party; expressing their views by contacting a newspaper or politician; signing a petition; or participating in a march or demonstration."

Life's death

D.B. Scott has reported on Life magazine's latest demise. It will exist as an online photo vault.

Editor & Publisher was his source material.

Publish and be damned (on Tom Bower)

A version of this article about biographer Tom Bower from the Guardian appeared in today's Globe and Mail. It outlines the characteristics of Bower's aggressive style and the response he gets from his subjects/targets. Bower's style is herein called "anti-hagiography."

Bower had indicated that he would not be interviewed for this article, but he ended up telephoning anyway. On balance, he said, he'd rather articles like this one not appear (an obvious hazard is that his enemies, such as Black, might be hungry for anything negative they could find). He added, however, that he welcomed publicity for his books, and he defended himself against charges of premeditated hostility. "Believe me, I don't approach any of these people from a negative point of view," he said. "I'm interested in the use of money to buy influence, and in those people who have the ambition to try to determine the fate of mankind. I find it fascinating - have done ever since childhood, reading books on Bismarck and Disraeli. I've witnessed power, and it's just fascinating." The evidence of lying and corruption, he said, "is always there. It's always there. It's fascinating how these characters just ignore the truth".

Blackmail journalism on the rise in China

An article by Edward Cody appearing in the March 18, 2007 edition of The Toronto Star.

At 9 p.m. in a dark Shenzhen parking lot, Dr. Bai Xiuyu handed over a plain envelope in what was supposed to be a discreet blackmail payment to a local reporter in this southern Chinese city.

The money in the envelope – 15,000 yuan, about $2,000 (all figures U.S.) – was to be paid to three reporters who'd threatened to go public with a story saying her health clinic was providing services it was not certified to perform, including abortions."

Fake Reagan tear on Time's new cover

Time magazine has undergone a redesign and its first new cover (apparently out tomorrow, March 16, 2007), has a tearful Ronald Reagan on the cover beside the coverline "How the right went wrong."

To quote the blog Radar Online (Radar magazine's web entity):

Is Time hoping a little controversy will draw attention to its redesign? The first new-look issue, on newsstands tomorrow, features what appears to be a photo of Ronald Reagan with a fat tear sliding down his cheek, illustrating the cover story, "How the Right Went Wrong." A somewhat cryptic credit in small type on the (revamped!) table of contents describes the image this way: "Photograph by David Hume Kennerly. Tear by Tim O'Brien." Nowhere does it specifically state that the cover is a photo illustration—in other words, that it's Photoshopped.

Typically, when you put a 'shopped photo in or on a publication, you give a "photo illustration" credit to the relevant people, and usually do so next to the photo (although cover credits usually sit inside the first few pages or on the Masthead). Note to self: check next issue, see where the credit is run and if it's as bad as they make it out to be.

Edit (March 16): An interview with the Reagan tear's creator.

The Trial of Conrad Black

Semi-serious, semi-silly (much like the trial is bound to be), Toronto Life has built a new website/blog that will track the day-to-day of Conrad's circus down south. It has a running counter of his Lordship's legals costs and something called "Style Watch" that has me intrigued.

The site launches in the wake of the dummy site set up by Frank magazine called SupportLordBlack.com. It got media attention after Frank outed itself and published letters of thanks from the naive Lord Black, thank the site's organizers for their help.

The State of the News Media, from journalism.org

This report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (a.k.a. journalism.org) looks hefty, so I'll shelve it for the time being (the blog allows me to procrastinate so well).

Instead I'll go directly to MediaShift's summation (found courtesy of BoingBoing.net).

The pace of change has accelerated.

In the last year, the trends reshaping journalism didn’t just quicken, they seemed to be nearing a pivot point.

On Madison Avenue, talk has turned to whether the business model that has financed the news for more than a century — product advertising — still fits the way people consume media.

With audiences splintering across ever more platforms, nearly every metric for measuring audience is now under challenge as either flawed or obsolete — from circulation in print, to ratings in TV, to page views and unique visitors online.

Every media sector except for two is now losing popularity. Even the number of people who go online for news — or anything else — has stopped growing. Only the ethnic press is up.