The story about the Tony Blair memo which was broken by the London Times days ago (I posted this about the story on Monday, May 9 and I found it through RawStory which referenced the letter from 88 members of Congress to the President that was dated May 5) but CNN is just getting around to posting it here on May 11 at 7:36 p.m (2336 GMT).

The story was broken by the London Times on May 1!  That’s a ten day lag, and CNN added no original reporting to their story.  When I think of all the possible explanations for this I can only come up with these (followed by reaction):

• They didn’t feel the story was newsworthy — And the Runaway Bride was?
• They needed time to fact-check — 10 days?  Who’s doing the checking, a tortoise?
• They wanted to flesh out the story — Where’s the beef?

The headline for this story appeared as the first item in "More News" on CNN’s home page; the second headline was "Culkin: Jackson ‘never’ molested me."

Adios CNN.

***Update***
As of 12:50 a.m. on May 12 I can’t find any mention of this story on the New York Times site, USA Today’s site or the Washington Post site. Maybe I’m tired and not looking in the right places, but I can’t even find a sentence in their politics section. 

Is this really not a story?  Written proof that the Prime Minister of Great Britain and his team stated that the US and Britain had to "create" the conditions to justify a war. This isn’t a story?

Let’s look at it his way: President Bush’s best international buddy, his staunchest ally, is essentially admitting to conspiring with the President’s team to "create" conditions to sell the war to the American and British public (not to mention Parliament, Congress and the UN).  Then 88 (89?) members of congress sent a letter to the President asking him to explain his position.  In their letter they highlight these points from the leaked document reported by the London Times:

• Prime Minister Tony Blair chaired a July 2002 meeting, at which he discussed military
  options, having already committed himself to supporting President Bush’s plans for
  invading Iraq.
• British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw acknowledged that the case for war was “thin” as
  “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that
  of Libya, North Korea, or Iran.”
• A separate secret briefing for the meeting said that Britain and America had to “create”
  conditions to justify a war.
• A British official “reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible
  shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But
  the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Which leads the members of Congress to ask these very relevant questions:

• Do you or anyone in your Administration dispute the accuracy of the leaked document?
• Did you or anyone in your Administration obtain Britain’s commitment to invade prior to this time? Were arrangements being made, including the recruitment of allies, before you sought
  Congressional authorization go to war?
• Was there an effort to create an ultimatum about weapons inspectors in order to help with
  the justification for the war as the minutes indicate?
• At what point in time did you and Prime Minister Blair first agree it was necessary to
  invade Iraq?
• Was there a coordinated effort with the U.S. intelligence community and/or British
  officials to “fix” the intelligence and facts around the policy as the leaked document
  states?

Granted all of these members of Congress have political motivations for asking these questions, but I ask again, "How is this not a story worthy of at least ‘National’ page or ‘Washington’ page coverage in the major media outlets?"

CNN isn’t the only "negligible" source in this case.

Lots is being written these days about the newspaper industry.  As I’ve mentioned before I’m very impressed with what the Greensboro News & Record is doing with blogs, posting "Letters to the Editor" online and allowing comments (talk about free entertainment), opening their "pages" to the masses, etc.  So when their editor posts something on his blog about the newspaper business I read it, and then start thinking about it.

So after lots of thinking, starting and then deleting lots of posts about it, and finally just deciding I don’t know what I think about it, here’s what I’ve finally come up with about the newspaper business:

1. We have to stop thinking of it as the "newspaper" business.  In this day and age almost all newspapers are part of a larger media company, and as such the newspapers are really a piece of a media portfolio.
2. "Newspaper" is not synonymous "journalism."  One component of newspapers is journalism, but a newspaper is really a delivery vehicle for some journalistic pieces, some editorial pieces and (increasingly less) advertising.
3. Not all employees of newspaper (media) companies have the same goals. Journalists want one thing, ad reps another, and publishers something else.  What they have in common is that they want to stay in business, but they have a hard time agreeing on how to do that.
4. Newspaper publishers, or at least their parent companies, need not worry about declining circulation in and of itself.  They simply need to take whatever strategic direction allows them to wield the same influence in the community that the newspapers have traditionally enjoyed.  In fact I’m sure they would love to trade the capital expense that is the printing press for a bank of ever cheaper servers.
5. Journalists shouldn’t care one iota if the newspaper itself survives.  What they need to worry about is retaining their influence as the interpreter, the fact checker, the "trusted source."  They need to realize that they are just like every other professional out there: their name and reputation means everything.  They’ve been losing ground on the "trusted" front, but we still count on journalists to interpret the big stories for us, and we still need their investigative skills and inherent skepticism (at least the good ones).
6. To make sure that they don’t lose any more ground in the respectability arena journalists must effectively distance themselves from the columnists and entertainers (Coulter, Will, Cohen) and educate the average consumer on the difference between journalists and the rest.
7. Journalists also need to train themselves to utilize the new media that is out there to tell their stories better and more effectively.  They need to understand that while the written word is still their most powerful and effective medium, in the future it will be necessary to augment the written word with audio, video, graphics and probably as-yet-unconceived tool.
8. The news media industry is going to start resembling the movie industry.  By that I mean that instead of the traditional corporate structure where there’s an HQ with publishers, editors, reporters, photographers and graphics people housed together and augmented with a stable of freelancers there will essentially be an HQ with managers.  Managers will then pull together their product using a pool of professionals on an as needed basis.
   And the pool of professionals will increasingly be working with raw materials supplied by the public, the "citizen journalists" that everyone talks about. (I’ll detail some of my imagined scenarios in a later post).
9. Editors, writers, photographers, graphics folks (i.e. ‘the talent’) will need to be very entrepreneurial to survive.  (Dana Blankenhorn has been saying this for a while).  But those that do survive will thrive because they will no longer be beholden to one employer; they can hire themselves out to the highest bidder.  **Editors might actually be the managers that I mention in point 7.**
10. The news media companies will enjoy ever higher profits.  While they’ve lost significant ad revenue to Google and Yahoo! they still have the opportunity to dominate local advertising.  I think they’ll figure it out and will do exactly that.

Okay, enough for now.  That’s as far as my thinking has gone.

For those of us who want to be a journalist, but maybe don’t want to do the J-school thing, the Online Journalism Review has launched some wikis to help us self-teach.

The wikis are here:

• Main information page
• Ethics tutorial
• Reporting tutorial
• Writing tutorial

Now go out and conquer.

Remember in the movie "A Christmas Story" when Ralphie gets his secret decoder ring from his favorite radio show (I think it was the Green Hornet), excitedly runs to the bathroom and decodes the message only to find out that it says "Drink More Ovaltine"? 

That’s what first came to mind when I read this article about network TV shows using websites to further hook fans to the show.  But after reading the article I’m kind of impressed by their creativity. Here’s a bit about what the editors of NBC’s crime drama Crossing Jordan are doing:

The network has found a way to keep super-fans like Washburn engaged
with the crime drama: an online diary created by the show’s writers
that asks viewers to help the character Nigel Townsend of the Boston
medical examiner’s office solve the murders.

It’s a drama that
mostly plays out on the Web. Nigel will mention the unsolved murders
occasionally on the air and drop clues for cyber-sleuths, but he will
solve the case only at Nigelblog.com — with the help of Washburn and
other fans.

"It’s not enough to just watch the show," said
Washburn, 47, who works on the case from her Houston home when not
tending to her ailing mother. She’s among 13,000 fans of "Crossing
Jordan" who visited the site within eight days after Nigel mentioned it
in conversation with another character during the Feb. 13 episode.

I wish I had a crystal ball and could tell you what TV will look like in 10 or 20 years.  I don’t, but I can make a prediction that our various home entertainment vehicles are going to consolidate and morph into one big blob.

My hope is my TV and PC will be replaced by a centralized piece of hardware (server?) that feeds various high-quality screens (dumb terminal?) that are networked wirelessly.  My hardware will be linked to my info-entertainment feeds by high speed connections, and my content will be served by networks/publishers on a program-by-program (item-by-item?) basis.

In such a world the creative folks like those working on Crossing Jordan will win. Here’s to hoping.

Just read on MicroPersuasion that USA Today has RSS feeds for classifieds.  When I checked out the RSS page I thought of a few things:

1. The RSS page does a great job of explaining to the average reader what RSS is all about.  It is also well organized by topic so readers don’t have to search for the feeds they are interested in.
2. I wonder how many people sign up for advertising feeds?  My first instinct is that no one would volunteer to be inundated with more ads, but when you stop and think about it, it’s not advertising that bugs us so much as it is inappropriate advertising.
   I’m interested in seeing ads for products or services that I want to use.  Selling sporting goods?  I want to hear about it.  Feminine hygiene, i.e. "Got that not so fresh feeling"?  Forget about it.
3. How are they selling the feeds?  Are they bundled with regular ad sales, or are they sold separately?  Can they measure results?  If so, how?

If this works I think it’s going to have a huge impact on the publishing industry, just as search advertising has had a huge impact over the last couple of years.  Should be interesting.