Breaking: Newspaper declares journalists unnecessary

So I was reading the newly-redesigned Corvallis Gazette-Times website earlier today (though I agree with the Eugene Weekly – the word “Corvallis” is conspicuously absent from the new header), when I saw a link to a “news story” about riparian zone recovery.

I put news in quotes because I noticed when I opened the story that it was bylined “OSU News and Communications,” which means it is a press release.  Presumably, since they didn’t both to retype it and/or add or subtract or give it a GT byline, it’s an unedited PR. My reaction was something like “well, that’s crap.  They should not be running unedited PRs,” and to an extent, I still think that’s true.  However, I also acknowledge the shrinking number of journalists and the pressure to produce that places on the remainder, especially at the G-T.  And besides, I’d rather know that it’s a PR than not.

And on top of that, there is a good argument to be made for running PRs, especially on the web, on the grounds that it increases access to information, which is the point of a newspaper, right?

So having thought it about it a bit, I put up a bit on Twitter expressing my surprise that the GT would label an unedited PR with an OSU News and Communications byline.  You can see that, and rest of the conversation, below.

(click for larger, clearer version)

I mean, in some ways I agree (see my suggestion about a special website section – certainly I like the idea of a newspaper website hosting more information, not less), but I also think the page structure does not make that at all clear – the single byline that attributes to “OSU News and Communications” does not make it clear that it’s a PR, and it’s really small anyway.  Come on – many readers don’t know the difference between a column, op/ed, letter, and news story; you can’t tell me they are byline- and PR-savvy.  And I think folding the PRs in with the news stories, in the same format and in the same online sections, obscures the source.  AP stuff, for example, does not look the same or appear in the same section.

Also, if it’s not that important, then what’s the point of journalists?  Ostensibly, journalists serve a valuable function by ferreting out the news and adding multiple points of view and relevant context.  PRs are not designed with that in mind; they are single-sourced with a clear agenda, i.e. they are not good journalism.  As a reader, I want to trust that when I see Matt Neznanski’s or Bennett Hall’s or Nancy Raskauskas’ byline I know they’ve written a good story and aren’t shilling for the subject of the story. (Just to be clear, I think all three of the people I named are excellent reporters.  This is a structural problem, not an individual one.)

Given the financial and other constraints placed on journalism these days, and the terrible, terrible quality of journalism from most of the national media, don’t give me another reason to be skeptical of newspapers.  Make it clear that a PR is different than a story.

Also, on a local level, OSU is an 800-lb. gorilla (parallels to the DC establishment and national media relationship, perhaps?).  They generate a lot of the news that goes into the GT, and that means, despite the general goodness of the people involved (on both sides), the coverage of OSU in the GT is going to be, in the long run, favorable.  Throw in the fact that – again despite the people involved – OSU and the GT have very different institutional goals, and, well, I hope you can see why I think PRs need to be very clearly labeled as being PRs, both in general and when coming from OSU.  A PR and a news story written from the ground up by a trained journalist may look the same, but have different priorities and goals, and as such, readers should be able to tell them apart.

And the GT should not be so quick to dismiss this as not mattering.  I know I trust them a little less having received such a cavalier response.

*Yes, I realize the title of the post is a bit hyperbolic.  If you don’t know by now, I might be guilty of hyperbole on occasion.

Mock Congress… or, half of it, anyway

Interesting story in the GT; kudos to the people who participated.

Although it was billed as a “mock” Congress, the issues facing students from Cheldelin Middle School on Tuesday and today are real and hard-hitting — gay rights, abortion, gun ownership, funding education, book censorship, the national energy policy and the possible legalization of marijuana — to name a few.

The third annual event continues today at LaSells Stewart Center at Oregon State University for more than 200 eighth-grade students.

The one thing I noticed about the story, however, is that every participant mentioned by name had a male name or was identified as male.  Should I assume there were no female participants?  Unlikely, given the photo, though if it is the case that there were very few female participants, why was that not mentioned in the story (since that in and of itself would be news)?  Instead, my guess is that the reporter simply didn’t talk to any female participants. Boo.

Local newspaper comment threads – a suggestion

Rhetorical question:  Why don’t I seem to have as much free time as I used to?  Anyway…..

Recently, I’ve had a few discussions about comment threads and having comments on newspaper websites in general.  Said discussions were prompted, in part, by both the GT story on the Sako case and by a typically ignorant and banal editorial that ran in the DH (no link).  Let me see if I can reproduce the gist here.

1.  The local Lee papers currently have automated comment moderation system.  This means that no one manually reviews the comments that are left on the MVV site or news stories unless someone complains, meaning comments that get past the moderation system but are clearly not cool get posted and may stay posted for some time.

2.  The comment threads on many of the news stories at the GT, DH, and LE are dominated by the same few (maybe few dozen, at most) people.  These folks also happen to be, for lack of a better term, haters – that is, they attack anyone and each other over relatively minor things, make plenty of factual errors, and engage in ad hominem attacks quite frequently.  The overall result is that most of the comment threads on most of the stories (and especially editorials and letters to the editor) are really unpleasant.  The Sako case story thread is a great example.

3.  I believe that to build a good commenter base – commentariat – takes conscious decisions, time and effort on the part of whoever is hosting the website.  Someone has to step in and model the desired behavior the hosting organization wants to see, and not be afraid to play bad cop when necessary.

4.  No one at Lee is doing that.  I don’t blame the local staff; it takes a lot of time and training they, to the best of my knowledge, have not been granted.  But the fact remains that the comment threads hosted by their newspapers are crap threads, and they will stay that way until someone comes along and makes a conscious effort to change them.

And unfortunately, ignoring the threads and the commenters is not an option.  Whether people like it or not, those commenters reflect on the newspapers.  If the local Lee newspaper websites are going to bother with allowing comments, they need to be doing it right, not doing it because everyone else is.  That suggests a lack of understanding at the corporate level (and possibly the local) about what allowing comments means and what it requires.

5. Again, this is not to blame the local staff.  I know the overall number of Lee reporters in the valley has been steadily shrinking in the last several years, and they’ve had a fair amount of work added to their jobs – blogs, videos, the MVV site, etc.  But ignoring it won’t make the problem go away.

6.  So what’s the solution?  Given the relative lack of money in the newspaper industry right now, I doubt that simply hiring a bunch of new staff is an option =)  However, a friend of mine suggested something that seems painfully obvious in retrospect.  Interns!  Specifically, social media/web coordinator interns.

I could be wrong about this, but hear me out:  The economy’s not good.  College students are more likely to intern for free (or at very low levels of pay) right now, and, if done right, this would allow both the students massively valuable and meaningful experience right away (and be one hell of a resume item) and the newspapers to bring people on board who, frankly, probably know more about the web than most of the newspaper staff – meaning the staff could learn from the interns; professional development at minimal cost to the newspapers.  It would also be, of course, free person-hours dedicated to web work.  I’m thinking Twitter, RSS feeds, video and audio incorporation (at least on the tech end), comment/forum moderation and participation, strict web development, etc.

OSU doesn’t have a full J-school, but UO does, and OSU does have a New Media Communications department.  So:  What am I missing?  Is this a crap idea, or is it worth pursuing?

One last note:  Do I think interns should be paid?  Absolutely!  But I’m not that naive, either.

[GT] Whaaa?

I think this one is filed under ‘things that make me uneasy’:

We think that Sen. Benjamin Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland, had his heart in the right place when he proposed March 24 that struggling newspapers be allowed to operate as nonprofits, the way that public broadcasting does.

….

But community newspapers are different. In smaller cities, we remain the primary community touchstone for gathering and publishing news.

….

So why not go nonprofit, if it means providing advertisers and readers with a tax write-off to buy ads or subscribe?

We think today’s editorial cartoon answers that question well.

Nonprofit status would muffle or silence newspapers’ editorial voice and add in layers of regulatory control that we cannot begin to predict, going in.

I’m going to let go the seemingly-odd timing and tone of this editorial and focus on the only real reason offered against going to nonprofit status.  Well, three reasons:

1. “Nonprofit status would muffle or silence newspapers’ editorial voice…” Without details, this makes no sense.  The obvious counter-example is the BBC in England.  Another might be – as a commenter to the editorial notes – NPR here in the US.  Charitably, there is simply information missing from the editorial that would bolster the claim and possibly rebut the examples I’ve provided. Uncharitably, this is just wrong.

2. “…add in layers of regulatory control…” Really?  Again, the lack of evidence for the claim is a bit frustrating.  Presented this thinly, I am tempted to ask – by pure desire to snark – why additional layers of regulatory control would be a bad thing.   However, in my eternal quest for charity, I will assume the editorial writer actually knows what they are talking about and simply decided not to share the information that would make this claim sensible.  However, I am tempted to question even that, since both private and public businesses are already subject to a vareity of regulatory controls.     Let’s be clear: Cardin was talking about as an alternative to failure, so if the implicit claim here is that it’s unnecessary for the GT to become a nonprofit because it’s not failing as a for-private, then there’s no problem. So complaining about regulatory control in the face of a newspaper folding seems a bit shortsighted to me.  The editorial does not claim, for example, that newsgathering or non-opinion journalism* will suffer.

3.  “…add in layers of regulatory control that we cannot begin to predict, going in.” Emphasized because I think this is a slightly separate reason than the previous one.  Frankly, this is just silly.  Again, the context of a failing newspaper – and agreeing that journalism (if not newspapers) are important – “we can’t do it because we don’t know what will happen” is all kinds of wrong.  I’m going to go with lacking vision and courage for starters.  Also suicidal.  What, like no one in history has ever embarked on a project having no idea of how it was going to work out?  Newspapers in particular are way past being able to shoot down ideas because they are unknown and scary.  That’s not a fun place to be, but it’s true.

None of this is to say that the editorial is wrong about the idealized importance of community newspapers.  However, as this Howard Owens piece (sent to me from within the bowels of the GT building, even!) makes clear, the idea that a newspaper is necessarily a community touchstone is a fallacy.  Certainly – and I like the GT, I really do – the GT is not, for many, a community touchstone in any meaningful way.  It’s trying, yes.  But too many people I know don’t care about the GT because they don’t see it as relevant to their lives.  Owens has an answer as to why.

Finally, the more I re-read the editorial, the more a thought percolated to the forefront of my brain.  If the editorial is claiming that nonprofit status would stifle their editorial voice (and again, I am open to the possibility that this is true, though I have seen no evidence), then how does the current structure not stifle their editorial voice when it comes to, oh, I don’t know, ADVERTISING?

Or better yet, Oregon State University.  When’s the last time you saw a story critical of OSU in the GT?

I’ve read quite a bit of stuff in the blogosphere about the future – or lack thereof – of newspapers.  In that world, this editorial was better written three or even five years ago.  Now it just sounds petulant and privileged.  I can almost see the heels digging in.

*nonexistent, I know

Two links on journalism

Journalism in the era of open:

Interestingly this is precisely what many blogs – alone or as part of an emergent network – already do. They take large complex stories, break them down and, by linking back and forth to one another, create a collective analysis that slowly allows the mystery to be decoded.

I can’t say I think this is where journalism is going, but it is something I want to be true.  Also, it reminds me of Kiln People.

And Howard Owens on journalism and the local:

But to make this approach work, it’s going to take people — including many of today’s trained journalists — to rethink everything they’ve learned about community journalism as practiced over the past half century or so. Merely promoting the “hyperlocal” fad isn’t going to get the job done. We need to bring back locals, and bring back the direct connection and involvement in the community by the people covering the community. This isn’t the detachment taught in J-schools. It’s participatory and social. But it will work. It must.

ht/ MN for the Owens link.  I’ve occasionally referred to the hypoerlocal and meant what Owens is calling localism.  Frankly, I think Owens is right.  What makes the news relevant is not really up to journalists; it’s up to the community.  Newspapers, at one point (and I’ll admit I used to mock the running of what I used to think was banal news like “Person X is in town visiting their relatives” all the time: I now think this was a mistake) used to focus on a very specific geographic area.  I think it’s time to bring back that focus – and yes, this has something to do with my recently being in Chicago and seeing how strong the neighborhoods there remain despite the lack of physical boundaries.

Meaning, and the development of meaning, is a fascinating thing.

[GT] Journalism Fail

From the GT’s letters section today:

Article on astronaut missed larger context of OSU engineering event

We would like to point out an oversight in the Feb. 24 article about astronaut Don Pettit’s speech at the 10th annual Willamette Valley Engineer’s Week Banquet. The banquet is organized yearly by the Willamette Valley Section of the Society of Women Engineers (WVS-SWE).

…

We are further disappointed that the article did not even mention the Society of Women Engineers.

That seemed very unlikely, so I pulled up the original article.  Sure enough, no mention of anything but Pettit – and it reads like retyped press release, anyway.

Like I said, journalism fail.  Basic journalism fail.

“Ten things every journalist should know in 2009”

I’m going to post this all over the place, because I think it’s amazing.  For example:

8. Multimedia for multimedia’s sake rarely works, and is often embarrassing. If you are going to do it, either do it well enough so it works as a standalone item or do it to complement your written coverage – for example, add a link to the full sound file of your interview with someone in your article, or a link to the video of someone’s entire speech at an event. The latter will enhance the transparency of your journalism too. Great tips and resources here and some useful tips on doing video on a budget.

For god’s sake, if you are a journalist, read this.  It should be part of the basic practices of your news organization by June.

Unhealthy Web Habits: Thursday, November 13th, 2008

Digby on how the CIA is likely to pressure Obama to not crack down on the torture that’s somehow still legal.

There’s been a lot – a lot – of talk over the future of Senator Joseph Lieberman’s role in the Democratic Party, given that he campaigned for McCain and said some really stupid, nasty stuff about Obama.  Many, many Dem Senators have come out in his favor.  What’s surprising is that Obama has too.  This is one move I just don’t get.

Mark Schmitt over at TAP grades the various theories regarding just what the election would turn on.  Unsurprisingly, Nate Silver at 538 comes out on top.

Ezra Klein at TAP shows us a good example of assuming your opponents think like you:  In 2000, Karl Rove talked about the Bush administration and how they could use policy to shape the electorate in favor of Republicans (who cares about actually governing?).  Now, many Republican pundits seem to be assuming Democrats will do just that.  Frankly, I don’t think even the Dems are that evil.  They might hit on it by accident – voters tend to reward success – but I doubt the Dems have the sheer ability to govern solely to win elections the way Rove did.

Bloomberg News has filed a lawsuit asking that the federal government be forced to identify the recipients of more than $2 trillion in additional loans that have been made as part of the bailout effort in the past few months.  I guess the Treasury really has been privatized.

This NYT article has some decent speculation on how Bush might avoid having to testify in front of a very angry Democratic Congress.  (Oh, it looks like a Dem Congress will be getting no help from Obama.)

Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money makes the undoubtedly controversial – and absolutely correct – point that the biggest problem with drugs is that they’re… illegal.

One new rumor is that Tom Vilsack will be Obama’s Ag Secretary.  As Vilsack comes from a corn state, this is a terrible idea.  Why?  Because it will be nearly impossible to end the insane subsidies in place for corn and other midwestern-grown foods.  Watch King Corn if you have no idea what I am talking about.

The Yes Men strike again – this time with 1.2 million copies of a fake version of the NYT that declares the Iraq War over (among other things).  Be sure to check out the video – the response of the NYT guy to the words “Judith Miller” is hilarious.  More here; the fake paper’s website is here.

National Geographic runs its Best Wild Animal Photos of 2008.  Some All of these are incredible.

Superobamaworld. Just check it out.

The only link that gets a proper excerpt:  Naomi Klein on the bailout.

This raises an interesting point: Has the Treasury partially nationalized the private banks, as we have been told? Or is it the other way around? Is it Treasury that has been partially privatized by Wall Street, its massive rescue plan now entirely in the hands of a private bank it is directly subsidizing?

After reading the article, I think it’s the latter.  Neoliberalism is still very much alive and well.

Via BB, one of those ‘oh, come on‘ moments.  This one involves Chevron.

Another working model of a flying car.  Cool.

The Onion compares Windows 7 with Apple’s Snow Leopard.

And now, some really good stuff:  Courtesy of the GT’s Matt Neznanski – whose work I can’t praise highly enough – Michale Rosenblum with a f***ing awesome talk on the past and future of newspapers.  This is perhaps the closest thing I have heard to a solution.  There are two parts:

WaPo Ombudsperson misses the point rather significantly

Deborah Howell – who doesn’t exactly have a stellar reputation as the ombudsperson for the Washington Post – kept track of her paper’s coverage of McCain and Obama.  Here is what she found:

Our survey results are comparable to figures for the national news media from a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It found that from June 9, when Clinton dropped out of the race, until Nov. 2, 66 percent of the campaign stories were about Obama compared with 53 percent for McCain; some stories featured both. The project also calculated that in that time, 57 percent of the stories were about the horse race and 13 percent were about issues.

Counting from June 4, Obama was in 311 Post photos and McCain in 282. Obama led in most categories. Obama led 133 to 121 in pictures more than three columns wide, 178 to 161 in smaller pictures, and 164 to 133 in color photos. In black and white photos, the nominees were about even, with McCain at 149 and Obama at 147. On Page 1, they were even at 26 each.

Here’s the thing.  What Howell just illustrated was not media bias, but media exposure or media coverage.  She conflates the two, assuming that more coverage = a bias in favor of a candidate.  This is clearly not true, and I only need one example to prove it:  Sarah Palin.

I’ve said before (a comment left on this Jennifer Moody post being one example) that what I think was going on was not a conscious bias in favor of one candidate or the other, but something else, a structural reason.  Howell even starts to get at that something else, but then glosses right by it:

Reporters, photographers and editors found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic. Journalists love the new; McCain, 25 years older than Obama, was already well known and had more scars from his longer career in politics.

It’s right there – journalists found Obama more appealing not because he was a Democrat, but because he was new and different. Yes, that’s quite the criticism of journalists – they mobbed the shiny thing (also, note how much coverage Palin is still getting, even compared to Biden, who was on the winning ticket) – but it’s very, very different than a biased based on a preference for one party or another.

One last thing:

The count was lopsided, with 1,295 horse-race stories and 594 issues stories. The Post was deficient in stories that reported more than the two candidates trading jabs…

Yup.  Changing those numbers might help more than almost anything else.

Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen also addresses this issue:

Apparently, the ombudsman wants “balance” — in this case, relatively similar numbers — regardless of merit. Howell’s goal isn’t to see the paper provide insightful analysis of political events; the goal is to provide equal analysis of the events.

But what if one of the candidates is wrong more than the other? Or runs a sleazier campaign? Or makes more mistakes/gaffes? Or broadcasts more dishonest ads? Or offers policy proposals that stand up poorly to scrutiny? Is the goal of the newspaper to cover the campaign as it happens in reality, or to cover the campaign with forced balance, regardless of merit?

It’s a version of Corddry’s Law:  What if reality actually has a bias?  I think Benen’s got a good point here, one that only reinforces my argument that this is a structural problem, not a preferred-party candidate problem.

Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher adds one good point to the analysis of Howell’s piece:

Can the media be faulted if one candidate is committing the major share of gaffes or (in this age of fact-check sites) making the most inaccurate statements in speeches and in ads? Is it “bias” to recognize that? Or to vet a candidate for vice president who (we now know) had not been vetted by anyone else?

Exactly.  Let’s put this another way:  There are all kinds of reasons one candidate would get more or less coverage than another.  A discrepancy in the amount of coverage – especially given the horse-race lean of the WaPo’s existing coverage – could be explained by a lot of things other than candidate preference.

[Hering] Compare and contrast: two commentary pieces in this weekend’s local papers

Hering:

Here’s some of the pointless speculation you expect from the press

…

All of this says only that some people in the writing and broadcasting games have too much time on their hands.

Compare that to the GT’s Theresa Novak:

Most of Clackamas County’s 2,000 employees (60 percent) last week began working four 10-hour shifts. The county’s offices will be closed Friday and open Monday through Thursday from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.

…

What makes Clackamas County’s move newsworthy is that it is the state’s largest government agency to switch to 4/10s to accomplish work that has traditionally taken place during regular business hours.

But I’m hoping the 4/10 work model spreads.

In a time of shrinking newspaper profits, one would think newspapers would be scrambling to make sure what they actually spend money on printing has some semblance of quality.  One of the two pieces above does – Novak addresses a somewhat local issue and provides supporting arguments and evidence for her claim.  The other – Hering’s – has no clear argument, no evidence for any of the claims made in it, and adds nothing new to the overall conversation.

Hering even gets that what he is doing in the piece is banal and pointless – note how he points it out twice in the first part of his commentary – but he does it anyway.  Why bother, then? Moreover, why subject his readers to such irrelevance?  Why ask both Lee and newspaper readers to spend time and money on something so… useless?

For what’s clearly not going to be the last time, This. Is. Not. Good. Journalism.

Today’s poll on the DH website:

This is a good example of a bad poll question.  The wording is leading.  There are lots of better ways to word the question.  Here are two examples:

“Was the media biased towards any candidate in particular during the presidential campaign?”

“Which candidate did the media treat the best during the campaign? The worst?” etc…

I am going to assume that no one at the DH intends to ask if the media was biased in favor of McCain during the campaign.  I’d be rather surprised if that question goes up next.

A journalist who was trying to be at least neutral, if not objective, would have asked a neutral question.  Asking this particular question – and wording it this way – implies that there was a bias toward Obama, and will therefore skew the results; this is Social Science 101 stuff.  Of course, since the respondents are self-selected, the results are rather irrelevant anyway, from a social science point of view.  I could post a poll and give it to everyone who reads this blog; are the results meaningfully representative in any way?  No, they are not.  At most, they are the collective opinion of those people who read my blog AND choose to take the poll.  The same is true of the DH – the first filter is who reads the paper (clearly not everyone, and they have no way of knowing if those who do are representative of the population as a whole); the second is who takes the poll (which is again a self-selected, non-representative group).  The result is that insofar as polling or surveys go, the results don’t carry any weight.

Look, such polls are fun to do, and we can laugh and be amused by the results, and they undoubtedly are designed to make the website interactive and dynamic and blah blah blah welcome to 2002.  But they’re not newsworthy – they are not representative of any given population, don’t control for demographics, and often aren’t worded in anything resembling a neutral manner.

I just noticed the same poll is on the GT website.  I’d personally prefer it if they stopped doing them entirely, but the DH and GT should at least make it clear that the polls are for entertainment only (or at least acknowledge near each and every poll that the results should not be taken seriously), and stop running the results as a news blurb.  And fergawd’s sake, they should never, ever write an editorial based on the poll results.

…just noticed it’s now on the LE website as well.  Aaah!

Oregon ballot measures according to Oregon newspapers

Courtesy of Loaded Orygun:

I think 57 is terrible, but other than that, I tend to agree.  In fact, it appears that I agree with the GT’s recommendations. How about that….

P.S.  This is post #1003!  Somehow I missed post #1000…. oh well.

One hell of a piece on the future of newspapers

From Alan Mutter over at Reflections of a Newsosaur:

The bitter irony for the newspaper industry is that the desperate reductions in staffing and newshole are compromising dangerously the quality of the products that built each of its valuable franchises. The compromises, which typically dismay most loyal and discerning newspaper readers, are likely to speed the declines in circulation and sales that are the root cause of industry’s faltering profitability.

Thus, publishers are caught in a vicious, downward spiral with no easy way out.

But, wait, it gets worse.

Read the whole thing – it’s not terribly long.  And I’d love to get a reaction from anyone out there who works in journalism.  Nothing Mutter is saying is really new to me (except the figures he provides on the obscene profit margins of newspapers), but, like everyone else, he doesn’t end with a clear picture of what needs to happen in the future.  That’s one question that I’ve yet to see a good answer to.