Torontoist's Metrocide series did some digging on murder and crime stats in Toronto to get to the bottom of whether T.O. is a "safe" city or not. Must read through (and should have posted it last week).
Today, they call out the Toronto Sun for another of its horrible headlines and come up with a fear mongering checklist.
The comments are a good read... mostly.
Fox affiliate KVVU in Las Vegas has started putting McDonalds iced coffee cups on the news desk during the morning show.
The arrangement does raise questions about potential conflicts between the intended message and news content. The ad agency that arranged the promotion said the coffee cups would most likely be whisked away if KVVU chooses to report a negative story about McDonald’s.
“If there were a story going up, let’s say, God forbid, about a McDonald’s food illness outbreak or something negative about McDonald’s, I would expect that the station would absolutely give us the opportunity to pull our product off set,” said Brent Williams, account supervisor at Karsh/Hagan, the advertising agency that arranged the deal between McDonald’s and KVVU.
Seriously. What the bloody fuck are they thinking?
Here's one reaction to what will either be a huge embarrassment in a few months, or the next big battle with the "old guard" over who "owns" what.
Info is free. Journalists are supposed to disseminate info because so few others will. Anything else is just business. Journalism isn't supposed to be just business. It's supposed to be a pillar of society.
Edit (6 PM): Just found this fully AP compliant story at BoingBoing Gadgets.
Zainab Zakari has penned This article is 1,689 words long for the New York Review of Magazines, reporting on the various theories concerning how long articles should be online. Mentions various studies on attention spans and anecdotal evidence of why 1,000 words is an arbitrary and incorrect benchmark.
"Weisberg chose 1,000 words arbitrarily, but he and Nielsen are echoing the prevailing wisdom that, on the web, shorter is always better. If you don’t keep it short, you’ll lose the reader’s attention—and once a reader is bored, all it takes is one mouse click to kill an article.
Are these assumptions justified? Based on my personal experience, an informal survey of the literature in the field and conversations with various social psychologists and social scientists, I believe they are not."
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)
Rogue Columnist - I should investigate this gent's writings more, but here's a link from BoingBoing to his post on what's really wrong with the modern newspaper's business model: its ad sales mentality.
Threat Level - "Afghan Student Sentenced to Death After Downloading Report." Reporters Without Borders has a statement on the situation here.
As of today, the Atlantic has torn the locks off of its online archive and magazine content.
Let the gorging begin.
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.
It's been ages since I filed anything away here. My media research has slowed to a crawl thanks to busy days at work and a desire to NOT stare at computers when I get home.
Here's a great essay by John Hockenberry called You Don't Understand Our Audience: What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC.
Hockenberry is a former Dateline reporter and takes a strip out of television news with a well-written view of its audienceness.
A Simpsons episode comes to mind. Remember when Uncle Herb was complaining that his engineers were telling car buyers what they wanted instead of listening to them? Get the sense that this is what modern news reporting is doing? Instead of reporting, its tailoring information based on demographics.
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.
C-SPAN issued a take-down notice to Nancy Pelosi (see details in this BoingBoing posting), and Carl Malamud has something to say about that.
He takes C-SPAN to task on its dubious use of the term "non-profit" and its perceived failure to acknowledge its place in the American media business landscape. Basically, they got upset at Nancy Pelosi for using their "copyrighted" material.
Lots of angles on this one. Is C-SPAN obligated or allowed to protect its assets in this way? Does being non-profit mean we must value its product differently? How would this situation work in Canada?
On a personal note, I respect Malamud's conviction on this issue. He was so sure that using C-SPAN video should fall under fair use, he bought some of their taped material, "ripped more than one minute of video from the disc, and used it for the creation of a news and satirical commentary of compelling public interest and then posted the resulting work at the Internet Archive. I did not ask C-SPAN for a license and I assert fair use of this material."
So he did what he thought was right and was unafraid to tell the big boys about it.
You can find his work here at archive.org. Gotta respect a man who puts his money where his mouth is.
Edit: A related story about C-SPAN freeing up its footage.
Advancing its longstanding mission of bringing government closer to the people, C-SPAN announced today two major initiatives designed to greatly expand citizen access to its online video of federal government activities, such as congressional hearings, agency briefings, and White House events. These actions are intended to meet the growing demand for video about the federal government and Congress, in an age of explosive growth of video file sharers, bloggers, and online 'citizen journalists.' The policy change is effective immediately.
· C-SPAN is introducing a liberalized copyright policy for current, future, and past coverage of any official events sponsored by Congress and any federal agency-- about half of all programming offered on the C-SPAN television networks--which will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution.
· In addition, C-SPAN also announced plans to significantly build out its capitolhearings.org website as a one-stop resource for Congressionally-produced webcasts of House and Senate committee and subcommittee hearings.
According to this story posted on Media in Canada from February 14, the World Association of Newspapers says newspapers aren't the doomed relics they're being portrayed as.
Refuting widespread speculation that conventional newspapers are doomed to extinction, the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers released a report yesterday arguing that global newspaper circulation has risen 9.95% over the past five years, and 2.36% over the past year.
In Canada, combined average daily circulation of paid and free newspapers increased from 5,566,000 in 2001 to 6,352,000 in 2005. Overall circulation in North America showed a five-year increase of 0.7% percent. While the number of titles declined 0.84% over the past five years, there was a 1.21% spike in new titles over the last 12 months.
This is only tangentially related to news media, but it's important enough that I want to remember it later.
Nicole Cohen (current editor of Shameless Magazine and all around cool friend of mine) wrote an intriguing post on Shameless' blog.
It concerns Facebook and our willing participation in new advertising schemes.
More chilling, however, is her link to this presentation on the connection betweenFacebook and the U.S. government... which could mean nothing, but could mean a lot. I haven't unpacked it all in my brain yet.
Thanks to Aaron J., who sent in a link to this Reuters story about Belgium vs. Google.
If this is a boxing match (which these kinds of debacles often are), Belgium won this round.
Lede:
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A Belgian court ruled on Tuesday that Google may not reproduce extracts from a variety of Belgian newspapers, imperilling one of the web search leader's most popular services if other courts follow suit.
