Learn to be a Journalist Kit

Spotlight

“Spotlight” is “the year’s least relaxing film,” according to Anthony Lane. The movie about the investigation into the Catholic Church's sexual-abuse scandal has been nominated for a best picture Golden Globe. The Saddest Scoop in Boston “Spotlight” is a commanding portrait of how a team of journalists uncovered a scandal in the Catholic Church. NYER.CM|BY ANTHONY LANE

Why do so many Americans believe Donald Trump's “Muslims Cheering 9/11” lie?

 / CORY DOCTOROW / 12:12 AM TUE DEC 1, 2015 Why do so many Americans believe Donald Trump's “Muslims Cheering 9/11” lie?  Matt Taibbi, in typical blazing form in the Rolling Stone, asks how it can be that millions of Americans believe Donald Trump's fairy-tale about Muslims cheering after 9/11 when it just didn't happen. There are many related questions, like how can so many people believe the (ahem) trumped-up stories about Planned Parenthood selling baby-parts, or the nonsense about how "92 percent of the jobs lost under Obama belonged to women." Taibbi says that investor-driven media, which no longer even plays lip-service to the idea of informing the public, is partly to blame -- but so is the public for demanding it. Though I will read Taibbi all day long, I don't entirely agree with his point here. There's a lot to be angry at in today's media landscape, but I don't know that it's uniquely sensationalistic or that the public is uniquely badly informed. There have been long stretches in US history when newspapers were nakedly partisan (in Canada, there's still a newspaper called the Whig Standard, and in the UK, one major daily's name trumpets the fact that it isn't affiliated with a party, because this is still noteworthy in the age of the "Torygraph"). For centuries, the media have served to sell colonialism, racism, and sexism, from their editorial pages and from their investigative columns. But the new bad news isn't exactly the same as the old bad news, and it is worrisome, and it makes us worse, and so I'm thankful to Taibbi for writing about it: What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism. The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it's just that the Fox version is a little kinkier. When you make the news into this kind of consumer business, pretty soon audiences lose the ability to distinguish between what they think they're doing, informing themselves, and what they're actually doing, shopping. And who shops for products he or she doesn't want? That's why the consumer news business was always destined to hit this kind of impasse. You can get by for a long time by carefully selecting the facts you know your audiences will like, and calling that news. But eventually there will be a truth that displeases your customers. What do you do then? America Is Too Dumb for TV News [Matt Taibbi/Rolling Stone] (via Kottke)

Journalists: Send Us the Most Useless Opposition Research You Have

Journalists: Send Us the Most Useless Opposition Research You Have 15,3048 Jordan Sargent Filed to: ELECTION 201611/20/15 1:10pm Journalists: Send Us the Most Useless Opposition Research You Have In the course of a political campaign, reporters will often be leaked what is called opposition research—dirt, or potential dirt, compiled by campaign staffs (or affiliated nonprofits) to use against their opponents. Oppo research can be useful to journalists. Maybe a campaign has uncovered the existence of a rumor too salacious for the candidate herself to touch, leaving its secret dissemination to a reporter as their only recourse. Well, we don’t want that stuff. (Okay, we do, but not for this. Please email tips@gawker.com with your good oppo research.) What we want is the other stuff. The frequently useless, absurd, and pathetic oppo research that campaigns desperately leak in their lowest moments. You know, something like “Jeb Bush dropped some gravy on the floor of a VFW in Iowa and DIDN’T clean it up.” If you are a campaign reporter who has been fed oppo research so dumb that all you can do is laugh about it over drinks at a musty New Hampshire Marriott, we want to publish it. Nothing is too stupid! You can email me at jordan@gawker.com. We will keep you anonymous. [image of The Insider via YouTube] Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com. 8250Reply Jordan Sargent’s Discussions All replies cuntybaws Jordan Sargent 11/20/15 1:22pm In all seriousness, and with no offense intended, I feel this kind of thing should be done by the politically connected Gawker guys in dive bars and pool halls, rather than asking us. If you’re serious about a new political slant and want to give the (accurate) impression you’re well connected, and all ... 81 Reply17 replies rvbee cuntybaws 11/20/15 1:41pm “pool halls” lol 12 Reply cuntybaws rvbee 11/20/15 1:42pm I was going to suggest a speakeasy but thought that might be over-egging the pudding.

John Stackhouse, former Globe and Mail editor, on mass digital disruption 'Is serious journalism still possible?' asks Stackhouse in his new book By The Early Edition, CBC News Posted: Nov 09, 2015 7:00 PM PT Last Updated: Nov 09, 2015 7:00 PM PT (The Lavin Agency) Former Globe and Mail editor John Stackhouse talks about news in digital era 7:13 Newspapers in the digital age Newspapers in the digital age 10:13 John Stackhouse: Canada needs traditional media in digital era Can Adele save the music industry, or just slow its demise? Disney invests $200M in Vice as it launches new TV channel Why Canadians are spending more on wireless and internet services Former Globe and Mail editor John Stackhouse probes the future of serious journalism in the digital era in his new book Mass Disruption: Thirty Years on the Front Lines of a Media Revolution. He sat down with CBC's Stephen Quinn on The Early Edition to talk about how newspapers can survive in a world where smartphones rule. When you took over at the Globe in 2009, the Apple 3GS had just come out. Why do you think news leaders failed to see what was coming? I don't think it was just in the news business. We all knew the smartphone was incredibly popular and powerful, but no sector I think knew how pervasive it was going to become and how we live today with it attached to us and how it dominates our lives. Was it denial? As often happens with technology, you see it coming and you think it is a small wave, and you don't realize it is a tidal wave that is going to splash over you. We spend six hours a day on digital media, half of that's on our phone — three hours a day on our phones. That is a gross underestimate. I came across a new study in the U.S. from a consulting firm Activate, that estimates we spend 11 hours on media, on our phones. That includes e-mail, twitter, chat. The human life has changed profoundly in a decade because of the phone. We all know what that has done to newspapers financially. What has it done to the essence of what newspapers are? Newspaper used to bring communities together. I am not nostalgic for that. I look at the great power that had in society — and not always good — but we organized ourselves as communities and as a country around, to some degree, around newspapers and what they published. We as readers organized our day around the daily newspaper and evening newscast and that is long gone.Now we are getting more information — that's good — and sharing more information — that's good too — but not doing it in a very organized fashion. We've been sort of shattered into millions of atoms, as the news out there is. The influence of that on democracy is significant and something we need to come to grips with. I logged onto Facebook this morning. Someone had put up a video of a dog chasing its owner with a hose, spraying water on the owner. You will likely see that, if it's new, on television news at some point today. The funnies have always been part of the media, even the great serious newspapers of 50 years ago had the funny pages. When I was delivering papers as a kid — 40, 45 years ago — I often found the best way to get people to pay their bills was to withhold the comics or TV guide. That got their attention. Even then, it was apparent what drove interests; popular and profound were always a good mix in media. What we have lost is the ability to ensure that the profound — what is important in our society — is as prevalent as presumably a great video of the dog you saw. Where is the place for serious journalism? How come New York Times, Guardian can pull it off online, but others do not do as well? We are seeing an emergence of global news power houses. Where the great challenge and crisis is, is at the local level. How do local news media ensure their viability? Advertisers have to come to the table and figure out how they can contribute more to what media are doing. Journalists have to come to grips with the economic model. Owners of local and national media have to understand this is going to be a 10-year project to get this right. Is local media not in a unique position? One of the great challenges is to get people to pay for it. I am a strong advocate for a free and publicly-funded CBC, but there needs to be locally privately-owned media, that people will pay for. Publishers and editors need to make it compelling enough to go out to readers to say you have to pay a buck a week, or whatever it is, to start to put some money on the table for this thing we call journalism You suggest in the book, that the disruption is not over. What happens when the iPhone 7 comes out? The great challenge of disruption is it's never over. This is the forever war. Media, journalists, owners, advertisers are going to continue to have to reinvent what they are doing, year after year, season after season. Somehow newspapers will find a business model that allows them to survive? The great news is that serious news has never been so popular, despite all the videos we are seeing. When important things happen — we saw this in the last federal election — people are consuming serious news from what we would agree are serious outlets. That to me is very encouraging that there is huge demand out there. We just have to get the pricing right. This interview was condensed and edited. To hear the full interview, click the audio labelled: Former Globe and Mail editor John Stackhouse talks about news in digital era

Confessions of a Paywall Journalist

Features-From the Washington Weekly November/December 2015 Confessions of a Paywall Journalist Thanks to a booming trade press, lobbyists and other insiders know what’s happening in government. The rest of the country, not so much. By John Heltman Back in 2009, I had a job with a Washington, D.C.-based newsletter called Water Policy Report. It wasn’t exactly a household name, but I was covering Congress, the federal courts, and the Environmental Protection Agency—a definite step up from the greased-pig-catching contests and crime-blotter stories I had chased at a community newspaper on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, my first job out of college. One of my responsibilities at the newsletter was to check the Federal Register—the official portal that government agencies use to inform the public about regulatory actions. In December of that year I noticed an item that said that the Environmental Protection Agency had decided that existing pollution controls for offshore oil-drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico were adequate, and that there wasn’t enough pollution coming from those platforms to warrant further review or action. Curious about that finding, I called Richard Charter, an environmentalist, oil-drilling expert, and senior fellow at the Ocean Foundation to ask him what he thought. Charter told me that the use of a general permit to cover discharges over a broad area like the Gulf of Mexico is ridiculous, and, more specifically, that there were ways in which the EPA went about reissuing the old permit that might not be totally legal under the National Environmental Policy Act. But the more important issue, Charter said, was the hopeless inadequacy of the government’s oversight of offshore oil drilling. Federal oversight agencies had been documenting shortcomings and conflicts of interest at the Minerals Management Service for years, he said, and in 2003 the House Energy and Commerce Committee heard testimony outlining the ways in which response agencies and drilling companies were unprepared to handle a blowout if it got out of hand. The dangers were not hypothetical, Charter said. The Montara blowout in Western Australia had just that August spilled more than one million gallons of oil into the Timor Sea and took seventy-four days to cap. Closer to home, if not in more recent memory, was the Ixtoc blowout in 1979, which spilled more than three million barrels into the Gulf of Mexico and took almost a year to cap. I thanked Charter for his time and wrote my story about the EPA permit, ignoring the broader issue of oil platforms or their environmental risks. Five months later, BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded forty miles off the coast of Louisiana, killing eleven people and setting off the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history. By any measure, Deepwater Horizon was the most important environmental catastrophe of the decade, and it illustrated deep and profound shortcomings in the U.S. regulatory approach to offshore drilling. And when it happened, I knew that I had been handed a credible lead and had blown it. But I couldn’t have followed that lead even if I had wanted to. Offshore drilling safety was tangential, at best, to the core issues covered by the newsletter I was writing for. The law firms and companies that subscribed to us paid thousands of dollars each for a subscription, and they paid that much because we helped them stay abreast of every bit of policy minutia that came out of the government in order to identify threats to their existing investments and potential new investments, or to keep their current clients informed and attract new clients. They paid for the story I wrote, not the story I missed. On some level, I thought that if what Charter was telling me was that big a deal, it would already have been reported in the New York Times, or on 60 Minutes, or—more likely—in one of the regional newspapers like the Houston Chronicle or the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which report on areas where offshore oil drilling is a big part of the local economy and readers have a keener-than-average interest in the possibility of catastrophic oil accidents. I probably would have been right had it been twenty years earlier. But by 2009, newspapers in general, and the big regional papers especially, were in the midst of a colossal wave of downsizing brought about by the collapse of their business model. With internet outlets like Craigslist siphoning away their classified ads, newspapers could no longer afford to subsidize their large D.C. bureaus, with teams of reporters covering Congress and the agencies and writing stories about the intersection of government policy and issues important to their readers back home. According to a 2009 study by the Pew Research Center, the number of newspapers with bureaus in Washington fell by more than half from the mid-1980s to 2008. The number of newspaper reporters accredited to cover Congress fell by 30 percent between 1997 and 2009. The Center is currently working on research to update those numbers. Political reporting, however, has not declined at all—quite the contrary. Campaigns, scandals, and fights within and between the parties are covered today with an alacrity that borders on obsession. Growing partisanship and divided government have made the stakes of each day’s political news seem immense, as anyone can see by watching the endless flow of scooplets from Politico and Talking Points Memo, or who watch hour after hour of commentary on FOX News or MSNBC. But while political news is everywhere, coverage of the day-to-day inner workings of government—the slow, steady development of policy in Congress, in the administration, and in the independent regulatory agencies, and how those policies are implemented—has become increasingly scarce in the media that average citizens historically have relied upon. The opposite, however, is true of the “paywall press”—that is, high-subscription, insider-oriented news organizations like the one I worked for in 2009 and the ones I have worked for since. This sector of the Fourth Estate is booming, and its coverage of government has never been more robust. Trade outlets are steadily adding to their staffs in Washington. New entrants like Bloomberg Government and Politico Pro are experimenting with newer and faster ways to get their coverage to consumers. Long-standing trade publications are merging or being bought up for unbelievable prices. The audiences for these publications are lobbyists, corporate executives, Hill staffers, Wall Street traders, think tank researchers, contractors, regulators, advocacy group and trade association policy wonks, and other insiders who have a professional interest in up-to-the-second news on the policy issues and whose institutions can afford subscription prices that run thousands of dollars per year. That’s not to say that trade journalists are shills for corporate interests. They are typically smart, energetic professionals with the same ethical standards and passion for digging as their mainstream colleagues. Indeed, with the mainstream press’s shrinking attention to government, trade reporters are often the only ones regularly covering important federal beats. But because of the nature of its business model, the trade press encourages its reporters to pursue the stories its elite readers most want, not necessarily the stories the public most needs—as I saw in my own experience covering offshore drilling. The rise of the paywall press and the decline of mainstream media coverage of government aren’t causally connected. But the two trends coincide with a palpable populist outrage, in which average Americans are suspicious of how their tax dollars are being spent and observe Washington insiders operate at ever-greater levels of power and secrecy. The irony is that policy journalism in Washington is thriving. It’s just not being written for you, and you’re probably never going to read it. A Senate gallery reporting credential is the gateway to reporting in Washington. Officially, a Senate press pass allows reporters to wander unaccompanied throughout the Capitol complex. Unofficially, it serves as an official press credential at conferences, agencies, and events around town. It is the solid-gold bona fide that separates the bearer from the public. In pursuing this story, I analyzed the Congressional Directory from the 101st Congress (1989-1991) through the 113th Congress (2013-2015), counted how many reporters were listed in each bureau, and categorized each bureau as either a newspaper, newswire, trade publication, foreign bureau, or online publication. What I found was that there are roughly the same number of accredited reporters in Washington today as there were twenty-five years ago, but that more of them are working for trade publications and fewer are working for newspapers and newswires. The division between the Senate’s two press galleries—the Senate Daily Press Gallery, traditionally home only to daily newspapers, and the Senate Periodical Press Gallery, traditionally home to everything else, especially the trade press—has also been breaking down. More trade publications are sprouting up in the Daily Gallery, while trades in the Periodical Gallery are consolidating into fewer publications with larger staffs. While that consolidation is most pronounced among the trades, it is true among all publications in both Galleries—the number of outlets in the Daily Gallery shrank by roughly a fifth (411 in 2013 versus 515 in 1989) and the number of outlets in the Periodical Gallery shrank by roughly a third (224 total outlets in 1989 compared to 160 in 2013). These numbers don’t tell the entire story, however. Trade publications and outlets have increasingly been targeted for high-dollar acquisitions and expansions, while mainstream news outlets are being bought out of pity and for fractions of what they used to be worth. One of the highest-profile acquisitions came in 2011 when Bloomberg—already a behemoth in the business intelligence sphere—bought longtime employee-owned trade outlet the Bureau of National Affairs. BNA, as it is known, went for $990 million. More recently, McGraw Hill Financial—which owns Platts, an energy trade outlet that has been active in Washington for decades—announced its bid to buy SNL Financial, a financial and business intelligence trade outlet that has in recent years expanded its footprint in energy and climate reporting. McGraw Hill agreed to buy SNL for $2.23 billion in cash. Contrast that with the recent sales and acquisitions of more household names in journalism. The Washington Post was sold to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2013 for $250 million. The Boston Globe sold in 2013 for $70 million. The international education firm Pearson sold its 50 percent stake in the Economist for $731 million, valuing the 172-year-old institution at around $1.4 billion. Even the New York Times’s market capitalization is about $2 billion. This demonstrates that the market is convinced of the business case for trade journalism and its potential for growth, and that it is not similarly assured of the future of newspapers. Trade reporting has been in Washington almost as long as professional reporters have. The first reporters to cover Congress in the new capital city in the early 1800s were mostly working for local D.C. publications, but by the 1820s newspapers around the nation began sending dedicated correspondents to cover the federal government. Many of those early reporters also moonlighted for foreign newspapers and sent specialized dispatches to Boston shipping interests and southern planters who were eager to learn more about the national tariff for business reasons because the existing coverage was inadequate, acting as a kind of first-generation trade press. There were also specialized trade publications in the nineteenth century, including American Banker (where I now work), which was founded in 1835, and the Journal of Commerce, which ran its own ad hoc postal service to get news to Washington in the 1830s. But the scene really grew as government programs and spending exploded after World War II. The demand for specialized coverage over a variety of new topics—environmental policy, health care, defense, education, transportation, and more—drove the steady growth of the trade press, which gradually came to take over the Senate Periodical Gallery. “For years it was five or six newsmagazines that dominated that room,” the retired Senate historian Don Ritchie said. “All of a sudden it became dozens of trade publications.” For much of the twentieth century, trade publications worked alongside newspapers with Washington bureaus, the latter providing coverage of federal agencies and congressional committees that affected whatever local industries might be prevalent in each paper’s city or state—energy and shipping issues in New Orleans, for example, agricultural issues in Iowa, mining concerns in Nevada, the space program in Houston, and so on. Indeed, one of the most successful trade publications, Congressional Quarterly (known today as CQ Roll Call after merging with that highly profitable insider newspaper), was founded in 1945 by the owners of the St. Petersburg Times as a way for reporters from local papers in D.C. to keep track of the complex goings-on of Congress. But in the late twentieth century, just as newspapers were beginning to lose their foothold, the trades were entering into a new era of ascendance and consolidation. One of the big reasons for the trade paper explosion is the massive increase in lobbying over the past few decades. In 1975, according to David C. Johnston’s book Free Lunch, Washington lobbyists together made less than $100 million a year in fees. Thirty years later, they were raking in $2.5 billion, a growth rate ten times faster than the economy as a whole. Opensecrets.org, a website operated by the Center for Responsive Politics that tracks lobbying spending, estimated the size of the lobbying market at $3.24 billion last year, and that’s not counting the money many of the largest industry trade groups spent on advertising and public relations consultation. It’s not just lobbyists who are willing to pay for that insider info. The amount of money spent on federal contracting more than doubled in less than a decade, from $206 billion in fiscal year 2000 to $537 billion in 2011. Another big customer base—one more squarely in the targets of populist outrage—is Wall Street trading. The sector’s growth in the 1990s and 2000s meant that there was a considerably bigger pool of potential readers willing to pay for reporting on the latest information on, say, regulatory filings by the Federal Communications Commission—intelligence that might enable them to make smarter trades on communication company stocks. At the same time, the amount of primary information available online has exploded. The Federal Register, Congressional Record, all bills offered in Congress, and every proposed rule and comment are available online. Almost all congressional hearings are live-streamed on the committee websites, on CSPAN, or on both. Even press conferences with the White House and the State Department are available online. Everyday Americans might not know or care to look this stuff up, but for trade reporters—or all reporters, for that matter—the pool of source material from which stories can be drawn has broadened and deepened immensely. With an almost unlimited amount of source material to draw on, a rapidly growing set of potential elite readers, and fewer competitors in the form of newspapers and newswires, it’s no surprise that the paywall press would blow up while newspapers faltered. “It’s just simple economics, it makes total sense,” says Nicholas Lemann, dean emeritus at the Columbia Journalism School. As demand for well-reported insider news has grown, new players have entered the market. One is Bloomberg Government, a subsidiary of Bloomberg LP, the media giant founded by Michael Bloomberg and best known for providing market data to Wall Street traders via proprietary terminals. Bloomberg Government, or BGOV, was established in 2011 to provide subscribers—lobbyists, contractors, and investors—with the kind of fine-grained data and analytics about government that Bloomberg’s other operations provide about companies and markets. The company also has free web products, like Bloomberg News and Bloomberg/Businessweek, with reporters in D.C. All told, Bloomberg has increased its news operations from seven correspondents in 1991—when it first applied for accreditation in the Senate Daily Press Gallery—to 193 in 2013, not including the additional 185 employees of Bloomberg BNA. The same year, 2011, that Bloomberg entered the D.C. trade market with BGOV, another new player emerged: Politico Pro. The subscription-only arm of the upstart political news outlet Politico, Politico Pro has grown to twelve separate verticals—including technology, agriculture, and energy—and to eighty-one dedicated reporters and editors in just under five years. Each vertical offers three kinds of products: a morning news tip sheet modeled after the Politico reporter Mike Allen’s hugely popular Playbook; short and quick dispatches of news throughout the day, called “Whiteboards”; and occasional lengthier, more in-depth pieces. Politico Pro has quickly become a major source of revenue for the company, which projected in a 2013 memo that subscriptions would account for nearly half of the company’s revenue by 2016. What Bloomberg and Politico have facilitated, to a large degree, is the efficient delivery of targeted news, and have sold that efficiency for a premium. But the news itself—and this is true of the majority of trade reporting, regardless of venue—would not excite the average reader. It is, in a word, boring. The stories tend to be about modest turns of the screws of government that would be of interest only to specialized audiences: a subcommittee chairman’s announcement of an upcoming vote on a tax provision affecting depreciation schedules for paper mill equipment; what a proposed tweak in an EPA regulation might mean for asphalt futures. The former Washington Post reporter Jeffrey Birnbaum, who now heads the public relations division of the lobbying firm BRG Group, is an avid reader of Politico Pro. He describes its coverage as “not just inside baseball, but inside the baseball.” A viable and growing market for such minutia exists because trade advocates and lobbyists are expected to know everything—and I mean everything—that is going on in Washington that affects their world. Several sources I spoke with admitted that they read Politico Pro’s morning updates before they get out of bed in the morning (I am also guilty of this). “These lobbyists live in constant fear of being caught flat-footed not knowing something,” said one editor at Politico Pro, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “They want to know before everyone else. They need to know before their morning call with their client.” By sheer numbers, this is the growth sector in Washington coverage today—hyper-granular coverage consumed mostly by business interests and their handlers. But the trade press also breaks news stories of broader importance before the mainstream press. In 2011, American Banker published a leaked copy of the Volcker Rule, a controversial provision in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that bars banks from making trades simply to benefit the bank, rather than its customers. Other mainstream outlets jumped on the story and passed on the leaked document, with varying levels of attribution (some didn’t cite at all, others cited the origin of the leak in the bottom of their stories). In November 2009, Stephen Colbert did a bit on his news-comedy show about business lobbies pushing back against rules barring child labor, citing as his source a story from Inside U.S. Trade, an international trade-focused newsletter published by Inside Washington Publishers (parent of my former publication, Water Policy Report). Last December the nationally syndicated public radio show This American Life did a segment about a company cutting its CEO’s pay that was based on a story published by the investment trade newsletter Institutional Investor. Trades are not entirely passive in their ability to reach a more mainstream audience. Most have public-facing websites they can use to publicize stories that originate with their subscription services that are broadly newsworthy or enterprising. For instance, the Politico Pro reporter Jon Prior reported a story on Politico’s main site in September outlining how some of the nation’s largest banks and mortgage lenders are continuing to accept payments for mortgages that they later filed for foreclosure—violating the terms of a $25 billion settlement with the Justice Department—and getting away with it because of lax government oversight. Unfortunately, some of the best trade reporting is never seen by the public. In 2013, for instance, Bloomberg Government published an astute analysis of an emerging conservative legal argument against the Affordable Care Act, months before the mainstream press took note. The story predicted that the case would go all the way to the Supreme Court. But because the analysis stayed behind the BGOV paywall, it never became part of the broader Washington conversation about Obamacare, and public advocates of the law were unprepared when the case was, in fact, taken up by the Court. Ironically, as the trade press has gotten bigger and better resourced, its inclination to do longer, deeper enterprise journalism appears to be declining. That’s largely because readers of paywall journalism—like readers everywhere—are being deluged with news. “The information overload is very difficult to cope with,” says a K Street lobbyist who subscribes to dozens of trade and mainstream publications. “It used to be you’d get your information periodically, from Newsweek, etc. Now it’s instantaneous, a rush.” To help their customers cope, trade outlets are delivering their products in shorter and shorter form. When BGOV first came on the scene, it was putting out long, data-rich reports on key policy issues. But when internal metrics showed that most customers weren’t reading the longer stories, says one former BGOV editor, the reports were reduced in size to six pages, then to one, with a couple of charts and a paragraph or two of text. Not all readers were pleased with the slimming down. “I actually used to like Bloomberg Government,” says a D.C.-based reporter for a mainstream magazine that subscribes to the service. “They had teams of quants writing plain-English white papers about issues.” But in general, concedes the former BGOV editor, the shorter-form content is “what the market wants.” The same market pressures are being felt elsewhere. An editor at Politico Pro reports that the longer-enterprise pieces he and his team produce (and are most proud of) are the least read, while the shortest products, like the morning news summaries, are far more popular. In a concession to the market demand, National Journal, the insider publication founded in 1969 that is now part of the Atlantic Media Group, announced in July that it is ending its much-admired long-form print publication and moving editorial staff and resources to its “higher velocity” digital publications. But it has also promised to bring greater analytic depth to its digital offerings. “People are fearful of missing out, so they do want the nuggets,” copresident and publisher Poppy MacDonald told me, but they are also “looking for somebody to really put some context around it and help them understand that fire hose of information.” The pressure of competition has also led paywall outlets to create business lines that serve almost as consultancies to their corporate and lobbyist customers. National Journal, for instance, earns much of its revenue from “membership” services that include specially produced D.C. reporting tailored to the needs of an individual corporation, trade association, or lobbying firm. “Break down the latest developments on the Hill for your C-suite and Board—and demonstrate your D.C. team’s ROI,” reads the Membership Services page on National Journal’s website under the heading “Corporate Government Relations Teams.” Similarly, Bloomberg Government sales reps have been hawking new data analytics designed to help lobbying firms expand their business—showing, for example, which competing lobbying shops have recently lost which corporate contracts. National Journal, Politico, and other trade outlets, along with many mainstream publications like the Washington Post, also do a lucrative business in sponsored conferences, where lobbyists and corporate clients pay big money to rub elbows with government policymakers and their staffs. Even with all its eyebrow-raising revenue schemes, an ascendant trade press is preferable to the only probable alternative, which is no press coverage at all (an increasingly common situation in many state capitals). And from my own experience and interviews I did for this story, I can say with confidence that trade press reporters are not brainwashed by the industries they cover or blind to the public responsibilities they have to find the truth and report it. No one I spoke to thought that a trade reporter held a distinct disadvantage over any other mainstream reporter to run down a great story and to have it make its way into the public consciousness. But the fact remains that on a day-to-day basis more and more information is flowing to Washington’s elite while less trickles out to the American public. And while trades vie zealously for a larger slice of that Washington Insider market, publications that appeal to a wider audience are either struggling to keep their lights on or leaving traditional reporting about government behind altogether. I don’t want to be overly sentimental about the demise of newspapers, but they did at least make an effort to inform the public about the goings-on within public institutions. Through an accident of history, there was a unique period in the twentieth century when advertisers subsidized news gathering by D.C.-based reporters, who in turn gave readers back home information and insight about what their congressional delegations were doing—good and bad—and how federal policies were affecting the issues and industries most important to them. Advertising—formerly the cornerstone of news funding—hasn’t gone away, of course, and it still pays for much of the mainstream coverage of government that exists. But it doesn’t buy what it used to, so mainstream newspapers and magazines are trying to rework their business models to stay afloat. The Wall Street Journal was among the first to put up a paywall for its stories on the web, and the New York Times reportedly now earns about half of its revenues through paid digital subscriptions, while still allowing free access to twenty stories per month. Other outlets like Slate are toying with so-called “freemium” models, where paid subscribers have access to certain content that nonsubscribers do not. And many publications have begun to bring in significant revenues via advertorials and other “sponsored content.” Reporting about government hasn’t entirely disappeared from the mainstream press, either. Big national papers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal still do a decent, and occasionally excellent, job. Some newer digital publications have also stepped in to fill part of the reporting void. BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Slate, and Salon all have Senate Press Gallery credentials. And thanks to the internet, this reporting is available to anyone anywhere in the country or the world. But journalists at big national papers and newer digital sites tend to write for national audiences. What has not emerged is a class of news outlets that customize their coverage to the needs and interests of local readers the way the old bureau system used to. Gathering news costs money, and that money has to come from somewhere. If there is sufficient demand for information, someone will gather it, as the rise of the trade press has demonstrated. The problem is that despite the struggle and innovation that has been taking place in the news media since the internet disrupted its business model, no one has come up with a profitable way to provide information about government to average Americans in ways they care about. That vacuum provides an opening for outlets that peddle in the kind of bias, treachery, and quackery that we have always been afraid of. Conspiracy theory blogs, pseudoscience sites, white supremacy forums, and all manner of senseless bullshit are trading at face value because, for many, there’s no credible alternative. I don’t mean to overstate my case— deepening ideological rifts in America are not the fault of declining newspaper revenues. But misleading or conspiratorial ideas about government activities can spread more easily when the public lacks credible information to counter it. And instead of solving that problem, the market is directing more and more journalistic resources and talent toward figuring out how to keep insiders better informed and at a greater convenience. Columbia’s Nicholas Lemann suggests that with for-profit solutions failing to materialize, some nonprofit media—ProPublica, the Washington Monthly—and semipublic news outlets like National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System have gone part of the way toward filling that informational gap. But he proposes a more aggressive, if unpopular solution: directly subsidizing news gathering with government funds. Lemann cites a 2009 Columbia Journalism School report by the former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. and the Columbia Journalism School professor Michael Schudson that laid out the case for how a government-subsidized news enterprise could work. News outlets—either established newspapers or startups or blogs—could compete for government contracts to provide local news for a specified period of time, much the way arts funding is distributed. But the journalism profession and the public would almost never accept that kind of arrangement, Lemann said. “American journalists are so libertarian, that what I just proposed is considered insane. A research university gets a third of its funding from the U.S. government to conduct scientific research. According to the theory of my fellow journalists, that shouldn’t work. But it works pretty damn well.” Richard Charter, the environmentalist who tipped me off to the lax regulations in offshore drilling just before Deepwater Horizon, said that for all the attention that disaster received, he feels that the public is no more protected from the risk of a well blowout today than they were when we first spoke in 2009. The Minerals Management Service was disbanded in 2011 and its duties split between two new agencies. A handful of safety rules, based on voluntary best practices already observed within the industry, were adopted. But the public seems to have moved on. “Information is power, and how that information is framed and how that is transmitted—but more importantly, how that information is gathered and organized by the media—that chain of events influences public policy,” Charter said. “If public policy fails—and I consider the Deepwater Horizon blowout to be an obvious failure of public policy—then the consequences can be very great.” I told him I still felt a little guilty about not following up on his lead back then, and I wanted him to let me off the hook. “Deepwater Horizon is not your fault,” he said. “There was not really a place for it in your publication.” John Heltman is a reporter for American Banker. print4 Comm

The 9 sentences that matter in the New York Times’s new mission statement

The Fix The 9 sentences that matter in the New York Times’s new mission statement By Chris Cillizza October 8 On Wednesday, the New York Times released an 11-page memo entitled "Our Path Forward" that was co-authored by 10 of the company's biggest bigwigs.  It's half chest-pounding braggadocio and half mission statement about how the Times plans to adjust — and prosper — in this new digital age of journalism. I imagine the writing process went something like this: It's worth reading (or at least skimming) in full. But just in case you don't have the time or inclination to do that, well, I did it for you. Below are the nine sentences —in the order they appear in the mission statement — that are worth paying attention to. 1. "Our first two million subscribers — including our more than one million newspaper subscribers — grew up with The New York Times spread out over their kitchen tables. The next million must be fought for and won over with The Times on their phones." Mobile is the future of news consumption. According to a 2015 Reuters study, two-thirds of all people with smartphones are now using them to consume news on a weekly basis. And the trend line on mobile as compared to desktop or tablet is striking. This chart comes from that same Reuters report:  And, according to the Pew State of the News Media study published earlier this year, 39 of the 50 top digital news sites get more traffic from mobile than from desktop. 2. "We must also help guide readers through a world awash in information and choices and make it easier for them to make decisions that enable them to live active and ambitious lives." This seems to me to be a really nice distillation of the mission of journalism in the digital age. When I first started writing The Fix — 10 years ago this fall! — I described myself as a tour guide wading through the swamps of politics. I think that's an even more relevant description today since the last decade has seen exponential growth in the pace and volume of news in a given day, hour or even minute. The goal of journalism amid that swirl is to pluck the things out that we think people would be interested and to explain why — and to be flexible enough to occasionally make changes to our calculus of what people want or need based on what they are telling us they want or need. 3. "We must carefully guard the excellence of our journalism while showing a willingness to change much of what we do and how we do it." If the last sentence laid out what journalism should be moving forward, this one highlights how hard it is going to be to get there. Read between the lines of this sentence, and you get something like: "We need to keep doing the sort of journalism we have made our brand on while, simultaneously, changing it all." That's an oversimplification, of course. But it's important to note that the hope that creating good content — "good" in this case meaning of value to people and the way they live their lives and look at the world — will lead to a sustainable business model is just a hope at this point. There's no business model out there for a media company to make a profit unless that media company is invested heavily in native advertising. (More on this later.) 4. "We are shifting from a pure broadcast model to develop one-to-one relationships with readers that tailor the way they experience our content, while still retaining our unique editorial judgment in setting the day’s agenda." This speaks to the importance of online community building to the future of journalism. I wrote a bunch about this Wednesday in a piece about the potential for journalists using annotation, but the key takeaway is:  Reporters need to think of themselves as not an island unto themselves but as the leader of a long line of people when thinking about and executing stories. Journalism is increasingly becoming a collaborative effort between engaged readers and reporters willing to listen — a semipermeable barrier in which discussion and disagreement is not only encouraged but begun early enough in the process that it influences the final product. No longer are we as journalists decreeing the news to the masses from the mountaintop. Instead we are down with the masses, trying to figure out what exactly is going on at the mountaintop. 5. "In less than two years, [T Brand Studios] has become one of the fastest growing parts of our business, producing work for more than 50 marketers across nearly 100 campaigns." Native advertising — essentially having companies pay for the Times (or the Post or BuzzFeed or Vice) to lend its know-how and brand credibility to an ad campaign — is the largest area of growth for all media companies. "T Brand Studios" is the Times's native unit and, as the memo notes, will be expanding into a full-blown ad agency in the near future. Spending on native ads will near $8 billion in 2015, according to calculations made by Business Insider, and could reach $21 billion by 2018.  Native advertising is not, of course, "big J" Journalism. But it is the way — or one of the major ways — that media companies can make real money at the moment and at least take a run at profitability. As a result, every media company that is paying any attention is growing its native advertising unit. That will strike fear in the hearts of many traditionalists. But if native ads can allow people like me to keep doing what I am doing, I say more power to them — as long as I don't need to be involved with the writing or production of it. 6. "We have created a print-focused desk in the newsroom to assemble the newspaper at the end of each day." I am old enough to remember when things were totally reversed: There were a handful of "web people" who were tasked with managing the Web site while the bulk of the staff was aimed entirely at the print newspaper. The recognition inherent in this sentence is that we are all digital journalists now — whether we all like that description or not. The print newspaper is a legacy product that will remain the go-to medium by which an older generation of people consume the news and a certain segment of advertisers try to reach audience. But there's no debate that the future of journalism is online and, more specifically, on mobile. The future of the newspaper — at least as I see it — is a sort of compendium of the best journalism done online by a news outlet in a given day.  The challenge, of course, is that some of the best journalism done by a news outlet online during a given day — GIFs, interactive charts etc. — isn't portable to a print product. 7. "Instead of blindly chasing page views, we must thoughtfully build an audience of loyalists." My guess is that this is a shot at The Post, which has made considerable page view and unique visitor gains since Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the company and began pouring his personal resources into it. Regardless, I think it creates a too-facile choice between getting lots of people to read your content and building up a committed community of readers that you can then sell a bunch of other products too. The reality of the modern mediascape is that it's a both/and proposition. There's no question that as subscription models become the rule on every major media site, cultivating loyalists willing to not only pay for content on a monthly basis but also spend money on other products — a book of Times recipes, for instance — is of huge value. It is also true, however, that simply deepening loyalists' association with a media brand isn't enough. You have to grow audience too — and hope that in doing so you convert some of those new arrivals into loyalists. The Times acknowledges that in its mission statement — that it must double its number of engaged readers by 2020.  To do that, you first need to simply find more readers and then turn them into engaged readers. 8. "Our goal — indeed, our responsibility — is to prove there is a business model for the kind of ambitious, original, high-quality journalism that is essential for an informed society." This is obviously more aspirational than evidence-based at the moment. But nonetheless, it rightly captures the sentiment of all of us in journalism today. What we know is that the old print model — heavily dependent on classified advertising — isn't working anymore. What we don't know is whether there is a sustainable business model that can replace it. To date, no one has found one — unless you consider native advertising the future of journalism, which I don't. The Times, The Post and everyone else is wishing and hoping that the sort of journalism we all got into the profession to do can survive and thrive in the new world of consumption. But it's very much an open question at the moment.  Chris Cillizza writes “The Fix,” a politics blog for the Washington Post. He also covers the White House.

Proof Read Those Headlines!

Man Kills Self Before Shooting Wife and Daughter This one I caught in the SGV Tribune the other day and called the Editorial Room and asked who wrote this. It took two or three readings before the editor realized that what he was reading was impossible!!! They put in a correction the next day. I just couldn't help but send this along. Too funny. Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says No,do you really think so? ------------------------------------------------------- Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers Now that's taking things a bit far! ----------------------------------------------------------- Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over What a guy! --------------------------------------------------------------- Miners Refuse to Work after Death No-good-for-nothing' lazy so-and-so's! ------------------------------------------------------ J u venile Court to Try Shooting Defendant See if that works any better than a fair trial! ---------------------------------------------------------- War Dims Hope for Peace I can see where it might have that effect! ---------------------------------------------------------------- If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile Ya think?! ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures Who would have thought! ---------------------------------------------------------------- Enfield ( London ) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide They may be on to something! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges You mean there's something stronger than duct tape? ---------------------------------------------------------- Man Struck By Lightning: Faces Battery Charge He probably IS the battery charge! ---------------------------------------------- New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group Weren't they fat enough?! ----------------------------------------------- Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft That's what he gets for eating those beans! ---------------- --------------------------------- Kids Make Nutritious Snacks Do they taste like chicken? **************************************** Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half Chainsaw Massacre all over again! *************************************************** Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors Boy, are they tall! ******************************************* And the winner is.... Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead Did I read that right? ***************************************************

Four Futures

journalism-2025-4-options “The Shire” or “Darwin’s Game”? Here are 4 visions of what journalism might look like in 2025 A new Dutch report lays out four extreme scenarios of what the news media could look like in 10 years. You’ll find something to like or fear in each one. By Madeline Welsh @madelinebwelsh June 19, 2015, 9 a.m. 595 384 The future of journalism will come down in one of four ways. At least, that’s what a new report What’s New(s): Scenarios for the Future of Journalism, released by the Dutch Journalism Fund this week purports. And while the study looks specifically at the future of media in the Netherlands, the visions they describe are easily transferable to wherever you live. The study comes as Dutch news outlets are facing a reckoning. Many of its largest media companies, including NRC, Mediagroep Limburg, and Wegener, have been sold, and the country’s daily newspapers are going through a period of declining subscription numbers and contracting staffs. But the Netherlands has also been home to an unusually high number of startups and new projects, including Blendle, De Correspondent, NRC Q, and Dichtbij. journalism-2025-netherlands The report, which will be presented to the Dutch parliament, identifies four possible futures for 2025. There’s “The Wisdom of the Crowd,” a world where journalistic startups have crushed traditional industry and the sharing economy prevails. Journalistic enterprises are bootstrapped and rely on crowdfunding, while a healthy skepticism by the public of major media interlopers like Apple and Facebook is maintained. By contrast, there’s “A Handful of Apples,” where giant technology companies — see the aforementioned Apple and Facebook — have set the agenda. News is highly personalized, but that’s due to the fact that all the chains and distribution platforms have been tightly contracted into the webs of these huge new powers. In this dystopian future, the traditional news industry has not survived and is now ruled by tech. For the locally minded or tech-averse, the future promised by “The Shire” will seem appealing. Though traditional institutions have still not survived in this scenario, they’ve been replaced by local and regional publications that are civically inclined. On thematically driven community sites, both citizen journalists and professional reporters find an audience. Finally, the fourth vision, “Darwin’s Game,” is well, darwinian — media organizations must adapt or perish. The narrowing mechanism is, rather unexpectedly, transparency. In “Darwin’s Game,” the news-consuming public has come to have exacting standards for the quality of their journalism, and wants journalists to show their work. To survive in this world, traditional media should expect to evolve in how they see their audience. Those that don’t should not expect to survive. To go about defining these scenarios, the Dutch Journalism Fund took an unorthodox approach. Using a method pioneered by energy-company Shell, the fund gathered 150 journalists, editors, freelancers, businessmen, scientists, and technologists for a series of conferences, meetings, and interviews. Over the course of the meetings, stakeholders whittled down big picture questions to 70 or so themes of concern to the journalism industry, which they then decided were “certain” or “uncertain” to continue. This eventually broke down to two key uncertainties — are news readers looking for radical or reluctant change, and how accepting of technology will we be in the future. The possibilities: reluctant vs. radical, and do-it-yourself, vs. do-it-for me, are meant to reflect the tensions at work in the world of Dutch journalism. The combination of the two critical uncertainties creates four fictitious worlds in 2025, located at extreme points of the matrix. These worlds reflect the current hopes and fears of Dutch journalism, in particular the tension between professional and public journalism, the uncertain future of Dutch media corporations and titles, the role of hardware and software in the production and dissemination of news, and the way in which quality journalism will be funded in 2025. As for which scenario is most likely, the report’s authors believe all are equally plausible at this point. Consider this your notice.

The following article is referring to the American press specifically but it does have relevance to the state of the world press: 10 Compelling Reasons You Can Never Trust The Mainstream Media September 10, 2013 by Sophie McAdam Powered by Translate A poll in 2012 showed that trust in the mainstream media is increasing, which should worry all of us who value truth, integrity and press freedom. However, a recently released analysis by PunditFact revealed that out of every statement made by a Fox News host or guest, over half of them were completely false. What’s more, only 8% percent could even be considered “completely true.” But for anyone who regularly tunes into the conservative news show, such revelation is nothing new. PunditFact only confirmed what many have been aware of for a while now: Fox News lies – like, a lot. But keep in mind it’s not just Fox that tends to weave more tales than truth… Why? Here are 10 disturbing things everyone needs to know about the global media giants who control our supply of information, wielding immense power over the people- and even over the government. 1. Mainstream media exists solely to make profit What´s the purpose of the mainstream media? Saying that the press exists to inform, educate or entertain is like saying Apple corporation´s primary function is to make technology which will enrich our lives. Actually, the mass media industry is the same as any other in a capitalist society: it exists to make profit. Medialens, a British campaigning site which critiques mainstream (or corporate) journalism, quoted business journalist Marjorie Kelly as saying that all corporations, including those dealing with media, exist only to maximize returns to their shareholders. This is, she said, ´the law of the land…universally accepted as a kind of divine, unchallengeable truth´. Without pleasing shareholders and a board of directors, mass media enterprises simply would not exist. And once you understand this, you´ll never watch the news in the same way again. 2. Advertisers dictate content So how does the pursuit of profit affect the news we consume? Media corporations make the vast majority (typically around 75%) of their profit from advertising, meaning it´s advertisers themselves that dictate content- not journalists, and certainly not consumers. Imagine you are editor of a successful newspaper or TV channel with high circulation or viewing figures. You attract revenue from big brands and multinational corporations such as BP, Monsanto and UAE airlines. How could you then tackle important topics such as climate change, GM food or disastrous oil spills in a way that is both honest to your audience and favorable to your clients? The simple answer is you can´t. This might explain why Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times- sponsored by Goldman Sachs- is so keen to defend the crooked corporation. Andrew Marr, a political correspondent for the BBC, sums up the dilemma in his autobiography: ´The biggest question is whether advertising limits and reshapes the news agenda. It does, of course. It’s hard to make the sums add up when you are kicking the people who write the cheques.´ Enough said… 3. Billionaire tycoons & media monopolies threaten real journalism The monopolization of the press (fewer individuals or organizations controlling increasing shares of the mass media) is growing year by year, and this is a grave danger to press ethics and diversity. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch´s neo-liberal personal politics are reflected in his 175 newspapers and endorsed by pundits (see Fox news) on the 123 TV channels he owns in the USA alone. Anyone who isn´t worried by this one man´s view of the world being consumed by millions of people across the globe- from the USA to the UK, New Zealand to Asia, Europe to Australia- isn´t thinking hard enough about the consequences. It´s a grotesquely all-encompassing monopoly, leaving no doubt that Murdoch is one of the most powerful men in the world. But as the News International phone hacking scandal showed, he´s certainly not the most honorable or ethical. Neither is Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB spy and politician who bought British newspaper The Independent in 2010. With Lebedev´s fingers in so many pies (the billionaire oligarch is into everything from investment banking to airlines), can we really expect news coverage from this once well-respected publication to continue in the same vein? Obviously not: the paper had always carried a banner on its front page declaring itself ´free from party political bias, free from proprietorial influence´, but interestingly this was dropped in September 2011. 4. Corporate press is in bed with the government Aside from the obvious, one of the most disturbing facts to emerge from Murdoch´s News International phone hacking scandal (background information here ) was the exposure of shady connections between top government officials and press tycoons. During the scandal, and throughout the subsequent Leveson inquiry into British press ethics (or lack of them), we learned of secret meetings, threats by Murdoch to politicians who didn´t do as he wanted, and that Prime Minister David Cameron has a very close friendship with The Sun´s then editor-in-chief (and CEO of News International) Rebekah Brooks. How can journalists do their job of holding politicians to account when they are vacationing together or rubbing shoulders at private dinner parties? Clearly, they don´t intend to. But the support works both ways- Cameron´s government tried to help Murdoch´s son win a bid for BSkyB, while bizarrely, warmongering ex Prime Minister Tony Blair is godfather to Murdoch´s daughter Grace. As well as ensuring an overwhelming bias in news coverage and election campaigns, flooding newspapers with cheap and easy articles from unquestioned government sources, and gagging writers from criticizing those in power, these secret connections also account for much of the corporate media´s incessant peddling of the patriotism lie– especially in the lead-up to attacks on other countries. Here´s an interesting analysis of The New York Times´s coverage of the current Syria situation for example, demonstrating how corporate journalists are failing to reflect public feeling on the issue of a full-scale attack on Assad by the US and its allies. 5. Important stories are overshadowed by trivia You could be forgiven for assuming that the most interesting part of Edward Snowden´s status as a whistleblower was his plane ride from Hong Kong to Russia, or his lengthy stint waiting in Moscow airport for someone- anyone– to offer him asylum. Because with the exception of The Guardian who published the leaks (read them in full here), the media has generally preferred not to focus on Snowden´s damning revelations about freedom and tyranny, but rather on banal trivia – his personality and background, whether his girlfriend misses him, whether he is actually a Chinese spy, and ahhh, didn´t he remind us all of Where´s Waldo as he flitted across the globe as a wanted fugitive? The same could be said of Bradley Manning´s gender re-assignment, which conveniently overshadowed the enormous injustice of his sentence. And what of Julian Assange? His profile on the globally-respected BBC is dedicated almost entirely to a subtle smearing of character, rather than detailing Wikileaks´s profound impact on our view of the world. In every case, the principal stories are forgotten as our attention, lost in a sea of trivia, is expertly diverted from the real issues at hand: those which invariably, the government wants us to forget. 6. Mainstream media doesn´t ask questions ´Check your sources, check your facts´ are golden rules in journalism 101, but you wouldn´t guess that from reading the mainstream press or watching corporate TV channels. At the time of writing, Obama is beating the war drums over Syria. Following accusations by the US and Britain that Assad was responsible for a nerve gas attack on his own civilians last month, most mainstream newspapers- like the afore-mentioned New York Times– have failed to demand evidence or call for restraint on a full-scale attack. But there are several good reasons why journalists should question the official story. Firstly, British right-wing newspaper The Daily Mail actually ran a news piece back in January this year, publishing leaked emails from a British arms company showing the US was planning a false flag chemical attack on Syria´s civilians. They would then blame it on Assad to gain public support for a subsequent full-scale invasion. The article was hastily deleted but a cached version still exists. Other recent evidence lends support to the unthinkable. It has emerged that the chemicals used to make the nerve gas were indeed shipped from Britain, and German intelligence insists Assad was not responsible for the chemical attack. Meanwhile, a hacktivist has come forward with alleged evidence of US intelligence agencies´ involvement in the massacre (download it for yourself here ), with a growing body of evidence suggesting this vile plot was hatched by Western powers. Never overlook the corporate media´s ties to big business and big government before accepting what you are told- because if journalism is dead, you have a right and a duty to ask your own questions. 7. Corporate journalists hate real journalists Michael Grunwald, senior national correspondent of Time, tweeted that he ´can´t wait to write a defense of the drone that takes out Julian Assange.´ Salon writer David Sirota rightly points out the irony of this: ´Here we have a reporter expressing excitement at the prospect of the government executing the publisher of information that became the basis for some of the most important journalism in the last decade.´ Sirota goes on to note various examples of what he calls the ´Journalists against Journalism club´, and gives several examples of how The Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald has been attacked by the corporate press for publishing Snowden´s leaks. The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin called for Greenwald’s arrest, while NBC’s David Gregory´s declared that Greenwald has ´aided and abetted Snowden´. As for the question of whether journalists can indeed be outspoken, Sirota accurately notes that it all depends on whether their opinions serve or challenge the status quo, and goes on to list the hypocrisy of Greenwald´s critics in depth: ´Grunwald has saber-rattling opinions that proudly support the government’s drone strikes and surveillance. Sorkin’s opinions promote Wall Street’s interests. (The Washington Post´s David) Broder had opinions that supported, among other things, the government’s corporate-serving “free” trade agenda. (The Washington Post´s Bob) Woodward has opinions backing an ever-bigger Pentagon budget that enriches defense contractors. (The Atlantic´s Jeffrey) Goldberg promotes the Military-Industrial Complex’s generally pro-war opinions. (The New York Times´s Thomas) Friedman is all of them combined, promoting both “free” trade and “suck on this” militarism. Because these voices loyally promote the unstated assumptions that serve the power structure and that dominate American politics, all of their particular opinions aren’t even typically portrayed as opinions; they are usually portrayed as noncontroversial objectivity.´ 8. Bad news sells, good news is censored, and celebrity gossip trumps important issues It´s sad but true: bad news really does sell more newspapers. But why? Are we really so pessimistic? Do we relish the suffering of others? Are we secretly glad that something terrible happened to someone else, not us? Reading the corporate press as an alien visiting Earth you might assume so. Generally, news coverage is sensationalist and depressing as hell, with so many pages dedicated to murder, rape and pedophilia and yet none to the billions of good deeds and amazingly inspirational movements taking place every minute of every day all over the planet. But the reasons we consume bad news are perfectly logical. In times of harmony and peace, people simply don´t feel the need to educate themselves as much as they do in times of crises. That´s good news for anyone beginning to despair that humans are apathetic, hateful and dumb, and it could even be argued that this sobering and simple fact is a great incentive for the mass media industry to do something worthwhile. They could start offering the positive and hopeful angle for a change. They could use dark periods of increased public interest to convey a message of peace and justice. They could reflect humanity´s desire for solutions and our urgent concerns for the environment. They could act as the voice of a global population who has had enough of violence and lies to campaign for transparency, equality, freedom, truth, and real democracy. Would that sell newspapers? I think so. They could even hold a few politicians to account on behalf of the people, wouldn´t that be something? But for the foreseeable future, it´s likely the corporate press will just distract our attention with another picture of Rhianna´s butt, another rumor about Justin Bieber´s coke habit, or another article about Kim Kardashian (who is she again?) wearing perspex heels with swollen ankles while pregnant. Who cares about the missing $21 trillion, what was she thinking? 9. Whoever controls language controls the population Have you read George Orwell´s classic novel 1984 yet? It´s become a clichéd reference in today´s dystopia, that´s true, but with good reason. There are many- too many- parallels between Orwell´s dark imaginary future and our current reality, but one important part of his vision concerned language. Orwell coined the word ´Newspeak´ to describe a simplistic version of the English language with the aim of limiting free thought on issues that would challenge the status quo (creativity, peace, and individualism for example). The concept of Newspeak includes what Orwell called ´DoubleThink´- how language is made ambiguous or even inverted to convey the opposite of what is true. In his book, the Ministry of War is known as the Ministry of Love, for example, while the Ministry of Truth deals with propaganda and entertainment. Sound familiar yet? Another book that delves into this topic deeper is Unspeak, a must-read for anyone interested in language and power and specifically how words are distorted for political ends. Terms such as ´peace keeping missiles´, ´extremists´ and ´no-fly zones´, weapons being referred to as ´assets´, or misleading business euphemisms such as ´downsizing´ for redundancy and ´sunset´ for termination- these, and hundreds of other examples, demonstrate how powerful language can be. In a world of growing corporate media monopolization, those who wield this power can manipulate words and therefore public reaction, to encourage compliance, uphold the status quo, or provoke fear. 10. Freedom of the press no longer exists The only press that is currently free (at least for now) is the independent publication with no corporate advertisers, board of directors, shareholders or CEOs. Details of how the state has redefined journalism are noted here and are mentioned in #7, but the best recent example would be the government´s treatment of The Guardian over its publication of the Snowden leaks. As a side note, it´s possible this paper plays us as well as any other- The Guardian Media Group isn´t small fry, after all. But on the other hand- bearing in mind points 1 to 9- why should we find it hard to believe that after the NSA files were published, editor Alan Rusbridge was told by the powers that be ´you´ve had your fun, now return the files´, that government officials stormed his newsroom and smashed up hard drives, or that Greenwald´s partner David Miranda was detained for 9 hours in a London airport under the Terrorism Act as he delivered documents related to the columnist´s story? Journalism, Alan Rusbridge lamented, ´may be facing a kind of existential threat.´ As CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather wrote: ‘We have few princes and earls today, but we surely have their modern-day equivalents in the very wealthy who seek to manage the news, make unsavory facts disappear and elect representatives who are in service to their own economic and social agenda… The “free press” is no longer a check on power. It has instead become part of the power apparatus itself.’ This article (10 Compelling Reasons You Can Never Trust The Mainstream Media) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com. Read More: http://www.trueactivist.com/10-disturbing-facts-about-the-mainstream-media/

Digital Journalism: ow Good Is It?

SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT. From the New York Times Review of Books Digital Journalism: How Good Is It? Michael Massing June 4, 2015 Issue On the evening of Saturday, February 28, about one hundred people gathered in a conference room at CUNY’s Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies in midtown Manhattan to salute Steven Greenhouse on the occasion of his retirement from The New York Times. For thirty-one years, Greenhouse had worked at the paper, the last nineteen of them covering labor. In December, he had taken a buyout—part of a cost-cutting campaign aimed at eliminating one hundred positions from the newsroom—and the tribute to him was one of a series of doleful farewells held to mark the exodus of so many veteran reporters. Not all was gloom, however. After the announcement of Greenhouse’s departure, the Times had come under intense pressure to fill the labor beat, and in mid-February it announced that it would, with Noam Scheiber, a longtime editor and writer at The New Republic, who had left in the upheaval at that publication. More generally, the labor advocates present at the gathering expressed satisfaction at how the coverage of labor has rebounded as the interest in inequality has surged. Among the journalists present, however, there was no such cheer. “No one can feel secure,” said one Times reporter who had survived the cut. Her comment captured the climate of fear and insecurity that has gripped traditional news organizations in the digital era. “Disruption” is the catch-all phrase. Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst interviewed by NPR at the time of the shake-up at The New Republic, said that “what you’ve got is an old brand, a venerable brand…that is roiled by digital disruption the same way The New York Times is, Time Inc. is, NBC, ABC, NPR, BBC, you name it.” And, he said, “We’re really just at the beginning of that process. It’s creative disruption, as we would call it in Silicon Valley, but it can be pretty ugly in the short term.” That digital technology is disrupting the business of journalism is beyond dispute. What’s striking is how little attention has been paid to the impact that technology has had on the actual practice of journalism. The distinctive properties of the Internet—speed, immediacy, interactivity, boundless capacity, global reach—provide tremendous new opportunities for the gathering and presentation of news and information. Yet amid all the coverage of start-ups and IPOs, investments and acquisitions, little attempt has been made to evaluate the quality of Web-based journalism, despite its ever-growing influence. To try to fill that gap, I set off on a grand (though necessarily selective) tour of journalistic websites. How creative and innovative has digital journalism been? How much impact has it had? 1. As The Huffington Post marks its tenth anniversary in May, it has much to celebrate. The once-scrappy start-up now has an editorial staff of about five hundred in its New York headquarters and another forty in its Washington office, plus thirteen international editions stretching from Brazil to Japan, with more on the way. Its American edition has fifty distinct sections, and HuffPost Live offers a daily video stream of news clips, political commentary, and celebrity interviews. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, The Huffington Post is the most-visited digital-native news site, with 100 million unique visitors a month, and Arianna Huffington herself has more than 1.85 million followers on Twitter.  Clara Molden/Telegraph/Camera Press/Redux Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of The Huffington Post, talking about the baby boom generation at the Hay Festival, Hay-on-Wye, Wales, June 2014 For all that, The Huffington Post is undergoing an identity crisis. One of its initial core innovations—using content from elsewhere—has become so dominant as to nearly choke the site. A recent in-house survey found that nearly one in every seven items posted on it comes from the Associated Press, with which it has a contract. Many other items come from Reuters, with which it also has a contract, and The New York Times and The Washington Post, with which it does not. Of course, The Huffington Post features plenty of original content, including a never-ending procession of (unpaid) opinion pieces as well as vigorous coverage of trade, lobbying, civil liberties, labor, and media. In January, the site ran a 21,000-word story about deficiencies in the treatment of drug addiction in Kentucky, and a new section called “What’s Working” highlights efforts by individuals and communities to address social problems. But even this material often seems swamped by the ever-rising tide of gossip, celebrity, titillation, and headlines of the “Rachel McAdams Doesn’t Look Like This Anymore” variety. There are sections dedicated to Healthy Living, Horoscopes, Dr. Phil, GPS for the Soul, Good News, and The Third Metric—a yardstick of success beyond the first two metrics (money and power) to include well-being, wisdom, wonder, and making a difference in the world. Since being introduced by Arianna Huffington in the spring of 2013, The Third Metric has become an essential part of the Huffington Post brand, with Huffington calling herself a “sleep evangelist” and promoting the restorative power of pajamas. The calls for rest and relaxation seem all the more jarring in light of the frantic, carnival-like atmosphere of The Huffington Post itself. When I mentioned the site in conversations with colleagues, most responded with dismissive scorn. The Huffingtonians themselves seem to sense this. In a memo sent to her staff at the end of last year, Arianna Huffington said that the site plans to end its relationship with the AP and build its own in-house news service, while “doubling down on original reporting and bringing together a new investigative team.” To head that team, The Huffington Post hired three former staff members of The New Republic—editors Greg Veis and Rachel Morris and writer Jonathan Cohn—to help “bring long-form journalism to a new audience.” The Huffington Post has been down this road before. In 2009, it set up a nonprofit Investigative Fund with a staff of eleven and a budget of nearly $2 million, and to run the unit it hired Lawrence Roberts, chief investigations editor at The Washington Post. But the long, careful projects undertaken by the fund proved an awkward fit with the site’s fast-tempo, click-hungry newsroom. Within a year, Roberts was gone, and in October 2010 the fund was folded into the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative outfit. In 2011, The Huffington Post, after being purchased by AOL for $315 million, accelerated a hiring spree that was already underway aimed at luring many big-name print-based writers and editors with generous contracts to help improve the quality of its journalism; from the Times alone came Peter Goodman, Tim O’Brien, Tom Zeller, and Lisa Belkin. The experiment went bust; most of those hires have long since departed. In a parting memo, Goodman (who had served as executive business editor) wrote of “a widespread sense” at his team “that the HuffPost is no longer fully committed to original reporting; that in a system governed largely by metrics, deep reporting and quality writing weigh in as a lack of productivity.” (He’s now editor in chief of the International Business Times, an online news publication.) Huffington Post editors claim that these print-based imports proved a poor fit in an all-digital operation. Perhaps so, but the AOL deal seems to have been a Faustian bargain for the organization; in return for a huge pot of cash, it came under relentless pressure to turn a profit. The only way to do that was by increasing ad revenues, which in turn meant drawing more readers. That explains the site’s perpetual motion, nonstop expansion, and proliferation of sections. In its early years, The Huffington Post seemed on its way to defining a new type of digital journalism. Ten years on, it seems stuck in place, struggling to recapture the innovative spirit that had once defined it. The same seems true of the first generation of digital news sites in general. After an initial burst of daring and creativity, they have entered a middle-aged lethargy. Take Talking Points Memo. When it began, in 2000, as a blog by Josh Marshall, it offered an outsider’s take on inside Washington, with much profitable burrowing into documents and records. In 2002, Marshall called attention to Trent Lott’s racist-tinged comments about Strom Thurmond, thus helping to precipitate Lott’s resignation as Senate majority leader. As TPM’s readership grew, Marshall attracted advertisers, which allowed him to hire staff. Tips from readers offered information about what was going on around the country and, drawing on them, Marshall in 2007 broke the story about the Bush administration’s partisan- inspired firing of US attorneys.* Eight years later, TPM offers roughly the same mix of blogging, aggregation (reworking content from elsewhere), news, and opinion that it did back then. The site (which is supported by a mix of ads and $50 annual subscriptions for access to extra features) does run regular “longform” pieces; a recent one offered a revealing look at the International House of Prayer, a charismatic Christian movement with ties to the Republican right. But TPM’s primary mission remains the minute parsing of national politics. When President Obama ad-libbed his zinger at the Republicans during his 2015 State of the Union address, for instance—Republicans applauded him for saying, “I have no more campaigns to run,” and he shot back, “I know, because I won both of them”—the site analyzed it from every which way. But everybody’s doing that these days, and what once seemed distinctive now seems just another voice in the instant-analysis-and-commentary crowd. Accordingly, TPM has had a hard time reproducing the kind of splash it had once made. Then there’s the smart-opinion-with-some-reporting-mixed-in set, led by Slate, Salon, and The Daily Beast. Here you can find edge, cheek, confession, and contrarianism, all served up in crisp, thousand-word packages. “Why Staples’ Terrible Sales Might Be a Godsend for the Company,” went a recent Slate headline, with the counterintuitive dash that has been its trademark since its launch in 1996. (Slate’s contrariness has become so renowned that there’s a hashtag, #slatepitch, that parodies it. Sample: “Manischewitz Gefilte Fish Is Actually Kind of Delicious.”) These sites, which all seem to blend into one another, rarely break news or cause a commotion. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, I was hoping to see one of them grab hold of the event and provide a forum for the many pressing questions raised—free speech versus hate speech, anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism, the state of religious tolerance and religious fanaticism in Europe. Most of all, I hoped to hear from a range of voices that extended beyond the usual American commentators to include some Muslim ones, who, with their distinctive backgrounds and experiences, could add a different dimension to the discussion. The Internet is an ideal vehicle for mixing things up in this way, yet none of the sites seemed to have the inclination—or inspiration—to take advantage. No one better illustrates the travails of the pioneering digital generation than Andrew Sullivan. When he began blogging in 2000, his highly confessional Tory-Catholic-gay-libertarian stream of consciousness seemed fresh and original, and it inspired many others to try their hand at this exciting new form. For years, Sullivan relied on institutional backing, parking his blog (called The Dish) first at Time, then at The Atlantic, then at The Daily Beast. Encouraged by the amount of attention and traffic he was receiving, he decided in 2013 to strike out on his own.  Paul Harris/Getty Images Matt Drudge of The Drudge Report, Hollywood, May 1998 In a rousing declaration, he announced that he was forswearing all advertising. Given the revenue that advertising can provide, he wrote, this was a difficult decision, but he felt that ads were not only distracting but also “created incentives for pageviews over quality content.” Getting readers to pay a small amount for content seemed “the only truly solid future for online journalism,” and in this way he hoped “to forge a path other smaller blogs and sites can follow.” This bold experiment in digital independence was closely watched in the journalistic world. The subscription price was set at $19.99 a year for unrestricted access to the site. The initial results were encouraging, with more than 30,000 signing up in the first year (and some chipping in more), for a total take of just under the $900,000 that Sullivan said he needed to support him and his staff. But feeding the beast on a daily basis proved too taxing, and in late January, Sullivan, citing fatigue and health concerns, announced he was calling it quits. The demise of The Dish was widely seen as the end of the era of the blogger. As Dylan Byers, a media reporter for Politico, observed in 2014: The appeal of “the blog,” in Sullivan’s heyday, was that if you were smart enough or provocative enough, you could cover whatever you wanted. The truth is, people want breaking news from well-sourced reporters or smart analysis from experts who know what they’re talking about. Sensibility is cheap. Today, many who once blogged now compress their thoughts into Twitter’s 140 characters. Others have headed in the opposite direction and converted their observations into well-crafted pieces of reporting and analysis as exemplified by the columns posted at newyorker.com and the mini-essays featured on this publication’s NYRblog. Nonetheless, there are many thousands of knowledgeable people blogging in their areas of expertise. Paul Krugman, for one, has saluted the contributions of the “econoblogs” that constantly check and assess work in the field. “As far as real, insightful, useful discussion of matters economic is concerned,” he has written, “this is actually a golden age.” When I checked some of those blogs, however, I found that most of the discussion on them is quite specialized. More generally, blogs have become niche-ified. Gone are the days when a Michigan-based scholar like Juan Cole could single-handedly challenge the Bush administration’s narrative on Iraq or the blogging collective Firedoglake could gain national attention for “liveblogging” the Scooter Libby trial. Sullivan himself, in explaining his decision to shut down The Dish, acknowledged his own frustrations with blogging. “Although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing,” he wrote, “I yearn for other, older forms.” He wanted to “have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged,” and to “write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me.” It’s strange that Sullivan did not convert his blog into this type of podium, with more regular contributors, reporting, and analysis. Over the years, he did publish other writers on his site and featured some longer pieces, but in the end The Dish remained essentially one man’s riffs. Even on the business side, his experiment seemed oblivious to the current realities of the Internet, where most publishers recognize the need for multiple sources of revenue and even nonprofit sites avidly seek advertisers trying to reach their particular audience. For all of the boldness of Sullivan’s experiment, he ultimately seemed unable to adapt. 2. One member of the pioneering digital generation who has thrived despite stubbornly refusing to change is Matt Drudge. The Drudge Report today looks just as drab and skeletal as it did when it went online in 1996, and it continues to deal almost exclusively in aggregation. Yet it remains highly influential, with three quarters of a billion pageviews a month. To cite just one example, the attention that Drudge (along with National Review) lavished on the virtually unknown Ben Sasse helped propel him to victory in the 2014 Republican primary for senator in Nebraska and then in the general election itself. According to Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post, the 2016 presidential race is shaping up as one in which Drudge “will have as much—and, likely, more—influence than he has ever had before.” His power derives, in part, from the angry popular appeal of the conservative online world in general. It includes The Daily Caller (a forty-person staff led by Tucker Carlson), RedState (Erick Erickson), TheBlaze (Glenn Beck), Breitbart, and The Washington Free Beacon, along with the websites of The Weekly Standard, National Review, and Fox News. This alternative information universe is driven by a continuing sense of rage at being shut out by the “lamestream media” (in Sarah Palin’s phrase). Neil Patel, the publisher of The Daily Caller (and a former top policy adviser to Dick Cheney), says that the site (which relies mainly on advertising) has taken advantage of the “massive audience” of “disgruntled conservatives” out there who distrust traditional news outlets: “That drives us, for sure.” In March, Tucker Carlson removed a column that one of his bloggers, Mickey Kaus (a pioneer of the form), had posted that was critical of Fox News. Kaus resigned, and Carlson later acknowledged that he would not allow The Daily Caller to run anything critical of Fox (where he’s also an anchor). Such enforced conformity has enabled these sites to pursue their paramount mission: delegitimizing the Obama presidency and obstructing Hillary Clinton’s chances of succeeding him. In my tour of digital sites, I did find one pioneer that has evolved: Politico. Like many outside-the-Beltway readers, I initially considered it too beholden to Washington conventions to feel much need to read it regularly. I was also put off by its incessant boasting about its “fast metabolism,” which it liked to contrast with the sluggish Washington Post. In the last few years, however, Politico has become more and more like the Post—in a good way. It now has a 160-person editorial staff covering not just horse races and insider baseball but also public policy, national news, and foreign policy. In 2011, it launched Politico Pro, a subscription-based news service with more than one hundred journalists assigned to a dozen policy areas, from agriculture and defense to health care and transportation. (A single subscription can run more than $3,000. The revenue thus generated is complemented by events to which admission is charged and by ads that run both on its website and in a print edition published daily when Congress is in session.) Politico offers thorough day-to-day coverage of lobbying, campaign finance, and legislative affairs. It also now has an online magazine with a daily mix of reports, analysis, and opinion—some of it quite hard-hitting. One piece, for instance, described the “hell” to which then Florida Governor Jeb Bush subjected Michael Schiavo—the husband of Terri Schiavo, who was in a persistent vegetative state—with Schiavo wanting her feeding tube removed and Bush ordering it reinserted; the story was cast as a cautionary tale of “what Jeb Bush can do with executive power.” Politico Magazine was created in November 2013 by Susan Glasser, a former editor at The Washington Post and Foreign Policy, and it was considered such a success that last September she was named Politico’s editor in chief. Meanwhile, the site has continued to expand. “We are pouring millions into adding deep-dive, original reporting to the arsenal,” Jim VandeHei, Politico’s co-founder and CEO, recently informed his staff. “We not only want to be the dominant publication covering politics and policy in Washington—we want to be the dominant media player in this space nationally AND globally.” This year, Politico is introducing or expanding state operations in New York, New Jersey, and Florida—part of a “cascading series” aimed at finding “a template for saving coverage of state government.” In April, Politico (together with Axel Springer) rolled out a new European edition based in Brussels, and by the end of the year it expects to have more reporters and editors covering European politics and policy than any other organization on that continent. The growth has not come without pain. In 2014, about a quarter of its staff left—an extraordinary level of turnover that reflects the burnout caused by the grueling pace in the Politico newsroom as well as the effort to convert it into a more in-depth operation. (A request for comment from Politico went unanswered.) In plugging those holes, Politico has snapped up so many state and local reporters that there have been complaints about poaching. In March, it scored a coup by showing that Congressman Aaron Schock of Illinois had inflated the mileage on his car to pad his expense accounts, leading to his resignation. Yet that feat was also a measure of Politico’s limitations. Catching a congressman fiddling with his finances lies squarely in the tradition of American scoop-making. With its fine-grained approach to Washington politics and its emphasis on being first, Politico rarely mounts sustained investigations into more systemic problems, like the way corporations have captured think tanks, or the hold that AIPAC and other lobbies have on Mideast policy, or the array of conservative groups working to kill a nuclear deal with Iran. The Internet, with its capacity for offering regular posts and updates and for chronicling links and collaborations, would seem ideally suited to exploring such matters and exposing the hidden wellsprings of power in Washington. Heading down that path, however, would require a radical rethinking of how to use the Web. Recently, Politico formed a new money-and-politics investigative team; will it be able to make the leap? A similar question could be asked of ProPublica. Since being launched in 2008, this site (which is supported almost entirely by philanthropic contributions) has established itself as the premier investigative Web-based unit. It has tackled such worthy subjects as the environmental hazards of fracking and the lax oversight of nurses, the erosion of workers’ comp and mismanagement at the Red Cross. For an investigation into financial ties between medical institutions and drug companies, ProPublica compiled a list of payments those companies made to doctors and from it built a searchable database that patients could use to look up their own physicians. ProPublica has been a leader in such creative uses of data—a boom area on the Internet. Yet it could, I think, do far more. Imagine, for instance, if ProPublica set up a database documenting the links between money, power, and ideas in America and beyond. One could enter the name of a mogul—say, hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, or BlackRock CEO Laurence Fink, or Carlyle Group cofounder David Rubenstein—and find out at once the assets he controls, the boards he sits on, the philanthropies he supports, the politicians he contributes to, the lawyers and lobbies that represent him. Clicking on each link would take one to a new page showing all the pertinent information about the company, board, or philanthropy in question. Proceeding through the labyrinth could help lay bare the composition, shape, and reach of the global oligarchy—the one percent of the one percent. That data could in turn provide the basis for countless follow-up investigations by not only ProPublica but also other journalists as well as activists and scholars. To its credit, ProPublica has done much good work on the flow of political “dark money” and on Wall Street’s cooptation of federal regulators, but overall the organization seems too wed to a traditional newspaper-based approach, with its separate, siloed investigations, to try something so radical. As a result, it has not had the type of disruptive impact one might expect from an organization with an annual budget of nearly $13 million. And so it goes for the first generation of digital sites as a whole. They helped lead journalism out of the kingdom of traditional print and broadcasting into the liberating land of the Internet, only to become stranded. Meanwhile, a new generation of high-profile ventures has emerged. Have they made it to the promised land of true digital innovation? To find out, I set off on the second leg of my tour, beginning with a visit to the most-talked-about site of them all, BuzzFeed. —This is the first of three articles. Recent publications on journalism’s past, present, and future Beyond News: The Future of Journalism
by Mitchell Stephens
Columbia University Press, 232 pp., $30.00 Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
New Press, 299 pp., $18.95 (paper) Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World
edited by Anya Schiffrin
New Press, 309 pp., $19.95 (paper) Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age
by George Brock
KoganPage, 242 pp., $24.95 (paper) Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present
by C.W. Anderson, Emily Bell, and Clay Shirky
A Report by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, December 3, 2014, available at towcenter.org Rethinking Journalism: Trust and Participation in a Transformed News Landscape
edited by Chris Peters and Marcel Broersma
Routledge, 252 pp., $44.95 (paper) Saving Community Journalism: The Path to Profitability
by Penelope Muse Abernathy
University of North Carolina Press, 254 pp., $27.50 The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism
by Dean Starkman
Columbia University Press, 362 pp., $18.95 (paper)