Category Archives: Media

Why We Will Always Need Some Semblance of the Media

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Today I read an opinion piece from David Broder called "Trillion-Dollar Gimmick" (syndicated in my Winston-Salem Journal from the Washington Post) that reminded me why I think we will always have some iteration of what we now call MSN or mainstream media.

In his piece Broder highlights a little bookkeeping fun that the Bush Administration is having to the tune of about a trillion dollars.  Definitely go to the piece to read the details, but my point here is that while I was reading Broder’s piece it occured to me that without him I might not have ever heard about this.  I’m sure there’s a blogger out there somewhere who has covered this whole deal, but I doubt I would have found him or her.  Heck, maybe Broder even picked this up from a blogger, but the point is that most people wouldn’t hear about it without the exposure in the MSM. (To be honest most people still won’t hear or care about it, but that’s a whole other matter within our society).

Even if I did find this information from some anonymous blogger I wouldn’t know whether or not to trust the information.  On the other hand I know that there are several reason to trust Broder’s info:

  • If he’s wrong he risks his reputation, and his career, so he’s likely to have vetted it. In other words he has money in the game.
  • The Post has a lot to lose if Broder’s wrong.  Sure they have a liberal slant and this is an opinion piece, but they don’t want to look stupid because it’s bad for business. In other words they have money in the game.
  • If Broder and the Post are wrong then they’ll be called on it because tens of thousand of people read him/it and they’ll catch hell from some readers in the know.  Look what’s happened to CBS and The New York Times lately.

I definitely think that there’s an information revolution going on, you know the whole "citizen journalism" thing, but what is developing is an eco-system that will always need some semblance of the MSM to keep it in balance.

Oh, and please go read the Broder piece and let me know what you think.  Personally I think it’s par for the course with the Bushies.

Has Hell Frozen Over? or The Journal Has a Blogger!

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Move over Greensboro News & Record, it looks like the Winston-Salem Journal is finally entering the fray with an in-house blog that is set to launch next week.

The Journal’s managing editor Ken Otterbourg is going to be the paper’s guinea pig, and I’m glad to see it.  I hope he does as well as his counterpart in Greensboro has done and I’m looking forward to his efforts.  I really hope that the blog has comments and an RSS feed, because if it doesn’t the whole exercise will be a glorious waste of time.  In the Q&A with Ken (since it’s online I feel comfortable using his first name although we’ve never met) he says that readers will be able to ask questions, but that could be done by email so I’m not assuming anything.  I’m sure, though, that if Joe has anything to say about it they will have comments and feeds aplenty.

In the Q&A Ken also mentions that the paper will be launching more blogs in the near future.  Maybe hell is freezing as we speak.

Welcome to the sphere Ken and good work Joe.

Blogging Has Changed Everything; I Voluntarily Read a Poem

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Poetry is something I suffered through in college, which is frightening when you consider that I was an English Lit major.  Really the only poetry class I remember attending regularly was a comparative literature class (Wordsworth and some dead white English dude) being taught by a really hot, brunette 26-year-old professor.  Even then I only made it to mid-terms before I began skipping class in earnest. Other than that I remember nada…zilch.

Since college I’ve intermittently tried to read some poetry just to see if my tastes in literature have changed since then (they haven’t) only to discover that poetry still bores me silly.  I’m probably just not smart enough to get it, but for whatever reason I just can’t do it.

Well, today bookofjoe had a poem by Kenneth Koch that I both "got" and enjoyed.  You can read it here, and I can actually say I recommend it.  Will the wonders of blogging ever cease?

New Literary Genre: BioFiction

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There’s a best-selling book out there called "A Million Little Pieces" and it’s a best-seller primarily because Oprah featured it in her book club.  I haven’t read the thing, and in a second I’ll explain why I’m glad I didn’t.

The Smoking Gun (TSG) wanted to put up a mug shot of the book’s author, James Frey, because the book is all about how the author survived addiction, alcoholism and a life of crime.  When they had difficulty finding any evidence of the life of crime that this guy supposedly survived they started to dig and the result is a long expose that pretty much shows that Frey has invented a new genre that I’ll call BioFiction.

This guy Frey is a mid-30s white guy who grew up in an upper middle class home and had what I’d call a relatively common alcohol and drug experience in his high school and college days.  In fact he seems remarkably like most of the guys I knew in college.  Now he’s taken those experiences and grossly embelished them to create a story he could sell; in fact he first submitted the book as fiction but had to "revise" it to a biographical account to get it published.  And now he’s a millionaire.

I won’t go into all the details since you can read the TSG piece for that, but I will say that based on the book excerpts in the expose I’m very glad I didn’t bother to read it.  Actually, a book being featured in the Oprah club is a good way to guarantee that I won’t read it.  Oprah’s scheduled a follow up appearance for this guy, and he’s already published a follow up and apparently is working on the film version with some leading lights in Hollywood.  I wonder if Oprah is going to cancel the follow up after reading the expose and it will be interesting to see if his pending book/movie deals go down the toilet.

Have to Give the Journal Some Props

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In the past I’ve given the Winston-Salem Journal a hard time about their online initiatives and I’ve also compared them unfavorably with the Greensboro News & Record so I feel a need to give them some props when I find something positive about their online work.

Newslink, a compilation of news sites, ranks the Journal is the third highest ranking newspaper website in North Carolina and number 85 in the US.  The News & Record is fourth in the state and 105 in the US. The two highest papers in NC are the Charlotte Observer (#20 in the US) and the Raleigh News & Observer (#43 US).  FYI, the top 5 newspaper sites in the US are:

  1. The Washington Post
  2. Los Angeles Times
  3. The New York Times
  4. Miami Herald
  5. USA Today

Even though this is not an internet-wide sample I still felt I needed to give the Journal some love. FYI, here’s how Newslink describes their rankings:

Local news sites in the United States
are ranked by the total number of times each is accessed via NewsLink by human
users of NewsLink’s publication lists. Results from the 1,000 most-accessed newspaper,
television station and radio station sites are tabulated weekly, typically on Fridays.
When sites are categorized by type, the listing employs the same listings
criteria as are used in creating NewsLink’s lists.

The ranking makes no attempt to measure the total audience served by any  site —
a number very difficult, if not impossible, to measure with any
certainty. What it does attempt to measure is the market share
currently going to each site from among a diverse audience of web users
who probably are not already habitual users of those sites. In other
words, it is more a measure of current, sponteneous interest and
potential growth among new users than it is an absolute measure of
traffic.

A strong site would doubtlessly have a core of habitual
readers who would simply go directly to the site rather than "find" it
through other links. This list measures how many people seek out sites
that have not already been bookmarked or memorized. This is an
important factor since one-time use of a site has about a 45 percent
market share while habitual site use has only a 13 percent market
share, according to other research.

With about half a million unique individual users monthly
and upwards of a quarter of a million links off our site weekly, the
NewsLink audience whose behavior is tracked by this ranking is composed
largely of non-journalists, including a large number of new-to-the-web
users. The audience does tend to be overly representative of people one
might call "opinion leaders" — politicians, executives, professionals, non-journalism educators, media relations people and the like.

If It Works in DC, Why Not Baghdad?

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According to this story in the Seattle Times the US military is paying to place pro-American stories in Baghdad newspapers. From the article:

While the articles are basically truthful, they present only one
side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the
U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews
indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such
articles — with headlines such as "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite
Terrorism" — since the effort began this year.

The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S.
military. The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington, D.C.,
firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the stories.

Upon reading the article my first thought was of Voice of America, and wondered how this was different.  Then it occured to me that VOA is openly acknowledged propoganda while this is, well, sneaky.  My second thought was that the guys and gals in the Pentagon have started to borrow ideas from the Department of Education and having witnessed first hand the goings-on at that not-so-esteemed federal agency I find that prospect horrifying. My third thought was that these military folks must be priming themselves for jobs at the New York Times or the Washington Post.

<Insert sarcasm> Of course there are smaller concerns like the building of trust with the Iraqi people and establishing a democratic government in Iraq. I’m sure that this story will cause the average Iraqi to be even more trusting of their new leaders in Baghdad, I mean after all it’s written in black and white.  Now they can go to bed comforted by the fact that they are being openly and fairly governed by their new government, and it’s all being checked by an active and diligent Fourth Estate. <End sarcasm>

If the military wants evidence that this might not be the brightest idea all they have to do is look at the level of trust we have here in the US in our 230-year-old-basically-stable democracy to see how little effect government propaganda combined with a colluding, ass-kissing media have on the average person’s perception of the government.  Sheesh.

I’m Confused. Is it Because I Read the Newspaper?

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As usual I began my day by reading the local newspaper, The Winston-Salem Journal.  I think the Journal compares well with other small-city newspapers and I actually enjoy being able to read the entire paper over a cup (or six) of coffee.  But as I read the business section today I became confused.  My problem began with an AP story that had the headline "Looking Jollier" (ed. note: they use a different headline for the online version of the story) and details the rising consumer confidence index.  As part of the story they have this sentence:

Meanwhile, the Commerce Department said that sales of new single-family homes rose by 13 percent last month, the biggest one-month gain in more than 12 years.

Great news that new home sales are increasing right?  Well, yesterday there was another AP story on the front page of the business section with the headline "Sales of Existing Houses Go Down."  "Okay," I tell myself, "so sales of new homes are soaring while sales of existing homes are tanking.  But wasn’t there something else in yesterday’s article about future building?"  So I pulled up the old article and found this:

The weakness in existing home sales followed an earlier report that construction of new homes and apartments fell by 5.6 percent in October, the biggest setback in seven months.  Applications for new building permits, a good sign of future activity, fell by 6.7 percent, the biggest decline in six years.

Hmmm.  What does it all mean.  To make it even more interesting, or confusing depending on how you look at it, there’s another item in today’s paper that says that the sales of existing homes in the local region rose two percent in October, which means that the local market did better than the nationwide market. 

So what am I to think?  Obviously there’s a mixed economic picture, but since I’m not an economist I’m not sure exactly what it all means.  I could hope for the newspaper to provide me some guidance, but they are only spitting out data, not providing context or guidance.  In all fairness to the paper this is simply one story of many that they can cover, and Lord knows they’re stretched thin by their current business problems.  But maybe they have their current business problems because of stories like these.

It has become abundantly clear to anyone who hasn’t lived in a cave the past 10 years that information (news) is a commodity.  Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can spew data to the world, but what takes time and talent is providing background, a sense of scope and most importantly perspective.  Is it because most people equate perspective with opinion that the folks in the news business shy away from injecting their own thoughts or analysis into stories?  If so I think that’s a flawed assumption that leads to a product of limited or no value.

Let’s be clear: straight opinion belongs on the op-ed page.  But editors and reporters can create value by giving us the news and then providing some perspective without crossing the line into opinion.  Some newspaper pieces identified with the tag "Analysis" that we see in the paper on an infrequent basis are a good start, but they are too few and far between.  What we need is for each story to be "framed."

Most stories in most papers are simply regurgitations of what happened, when it happened and to whom it happened.  Rarely do newspapers frame the story for us, give us an idea where it fits in the larger picture.  It’s this framing, this perspective, that would give a story depth and value.

For an example look at the two stories I highlighted.  Instead of simply reciting this economic data give me an overview of the data and then put it in perspective and make it relevant to my life.  For instance, does it mean that while the national housing picture is indicative of a slowdown the local housing market is actually on the rise?  Tell me why that is.  Tell me that it’s probably because the local economy has been hammered for the last five years while the rest of the country has been on a great economic ride.  Tell me if we’ll see more construction jobs here, if local housing inventory is shrinking, if the value of my house is probably going to continue to rise. 

In short tell me what it means, because if you don’t I probably won’t continue to subscribe and I know for damn sure that the kids coming of age now will have no time for you.  But just like me today’s young adults need someone to help them understand what all this information means, and if you could tell them they would pay for it.

As things stand I’m still confused.

Inside the Mind of a Blogger

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There’s an item on PressThink written by the woman who writes/runs H20town, a blog for and about Watertown, MA.  It’s an interesting look at the motivations and rewards for someone who’s not a professional journalist but provides hyperlocal coverage of her town’s business anyway.  She brings up some great points about how people like herself aren’t necessarily motivated in the same way that industry "pros" are, and she also asks some good questions about the future of the news business.

“Why the Fuss About Torturing People Who Want Us Dead”

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WhythefussI’m not asking the question, but since we have Fox News I don’t have to now do I?

I don’t know, maybe the fuss has something to do with that little get-together they have in Europe where they eat croutons and discuss how to treat soldiers and civilians in a time of war and other stuff.  You know, it’s called the Munich Meeting or the Bern Bash or something like that.  No, wait, I’ve got it.  It’s the Geneva Conventions.  Yeah, that’s it.

Wadda you mean it’s not an actual convention in Geneva?  You mean there aren’t any booth babes, or little giveaways or raffles for an iPod? I’m so confused.

Via Wonkette.com, found via Fark.com.

If I Was a Business Editor

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Since I have a job and don’t have time right now to do the research I’d like to, I had this fantasy today about stories I’d assign reporters at the Winston-Salem Journal if I was their editor.  Here’s my short list:

  • Look at how many companies have gotten incentives to locate their companies in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County over the last four or five years, figure out how much those incentives totaled, how many jobs they created and the direct benefit to the city/county’s coffers.  I know there are indirect benefits tied to it, but I’d tell them to focus on the hard numbers (there are after all some indirect costs associated with businesses too).  Maybe come up with a nice cost-per-job number and an annual-revenue-per-job number.  Avoid drawing an "incentives are evil" conclusion, just pull together as much quantifiable data as possible and provide some perspective, then let people draw their own conclusion. 
  • Figure out how many companies in the city/county have dropped or decreased employee health coverage.  Look into what that means for city/county agencies and institutions that deal with health issues.
  • In the most recent issue of Wired magazine they do a story on the rising "megalopolis’" in the US, and identify 10 regions where these things will grow.  The I-85 corridor between Raleigh and Atlanta is identified as one of these, and the rising bio-tech industry is projected to be the main economic engine for the region.  What does this mean for W-S and its nascent bio-tech industry?  What’s the impact of the recent announcement about the Kannapolis development?

I figure that could keep them busy for a while.  I just wish I had the time to do it myself.