The following New York Times article is a good over view of some of the things that news organizations have to deal with in the present turmoil and crisis in the newsroom.  One of the problems, as always, is that we can easily find out what people want to read.  The bigger problem is what they need to know, but don't find interesting.  The challenge for writers and editors is to find ways to present 'need to know' information in a way that the consumer of news will absorb.  Another question is 'are opinions, ideas, facts, products in the consumer sense of the word?

By JEREMY W. PETERS

Published: September 5, 2010

In most businesses, not knowing how well a particular product is performing would be almost unthinkable. But newspapers have always been a peculiar business, one that has stubbornly, proudly clung to a sense that focusing too much on the bottom line can lead nowhere good.

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Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

The Washington Post newsroom displays traffic data. Raju Narisetti, a managing editor, said it helped to decide where to cut staff.

Now, because of technology that can pinpoint what people online are viewing and commenting on, how much time they spend with an article and even how much money an article makes in advertising revenue, newspapers can make more scientific decisions about allocating their ever scarcer resources.
Such data has never been available with such specificity and timeliness. The reader surveys that newspapers relied on for decades took months to produce, often leaving editors with stale data.
Looking to the public for insight on how to cover a topic is never comfortable for newsrooms, which have the deeply held belief that readers come to a newspaper not only for its information but also for its editorial judgment. But many newsrooms now seem to be re-examining that idea and embracing, albeit cautiously, a more democratic approach to serving up the news, particularly online.
“How can you say you don’t care what your customers think?” asked Alan Murray, who oversees online news at The Wall Street Journal. “We care a lot about what our readers think. But our readers also care a lot about our editorial judgment. So we’re always trying to balance the two.”
Editors at The Journal, like those at other large newspapers, follow the Web traffic metrics closely. The paper’s top editors begin their morning news meetings with a rundown of data points, including the most popular search terms on WSJ.com, which articles are generating the most traffic and what posts are generating buzz on Twitter.
At The Washington Post, a television screen with an array of data — the number of unique visitors to washingtonpost.com, how many articles those visitors view and where on the Web those visitors came from — is on display for the entire newsroom. A red or green marker designates each data point, indicating whether the Web site’s goal for the month on that particular metric has been met. About 120 people in The Post’s newsroom get an e-mail each day laying out how the Web site performed in the closely watched metrics — 46 in all.
Rather than corrupt news judgment by causing editors to pander to the most base reader interests, the availability of this technology so far seems to be leading to more surgical decisions about how to cover a topic so it becomes more appealing to an online audience.
The Post, which provided extensive coverage of the recent elections in Britain online and in its print editions, found that online readers were not particularly interested in the topic. One of the five most viewed items on The Post’s Web site in the last year, in fact, was not a political project at all but a piece on Crocs, the popular foam footwear. Editors attributed that to Yahoo, which linked to the article.
But that did not translate into more Croc coverage. And coverage of the British elections was not scaled back.
Raju Narisetti, The Post’s managing editor overseeing online operations, said he saw reader metrics as a tool to help him better determine how to use online resources.
“We ask, ‘What can we do online to make it more attractive?” ’ Mr. Narisetti said. “Can we do podcasts? Can we do a photo gallery? Can we do any kind of user-generated content?”
He said the data has proved highly useful in today’s world of shrinking newsroom budgets. Mr. Narisetti said that when he had to reduce his staff last year, he looked at what kind of content was not performing well with readers. He discovered that long-form video had a low audience, so he reduced that department by a couple of people.
At The Journal, editors use traffic data to inform decisions on how articles should be presented on WSJ.com. “We look at the data, and if things are getting a lot of hits, they’ll get better play and longer play on the home page,” said Mr. Murray. Conversely, articles getting low audiences will be moved down more quickly if there is no compelling news reason to keep them prominent.
But Mr. Murray explained that the data was not always used as a blunt tool. In the case of a rather dry business development last month involving the Potash Corporation, the Canadian fertilizer maker, Journal editors decided to prominently display articles on the subject despite very low traffic numbers.
“We didn’t put it there because it was going to be a big traffic getter. We put it there because it’s big important news in the business world,” Mr. Murray said.
The New York Times does not use Web metrics to determine how articles are presented, but it does use them to make strategic decisions about its online report, said Bill Keller, the executive editor. “We don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play,” he said, “because we believe readers come to us for our judgment, not the judgment of the crowd. We’re not ‘American Idol.’ ”
Mr. Keller added that the paper would, for example, use the data to determine which blogs to expand, eliminate or tweak.
As newspaper Web sites use technology to learn more about readers’ habits, they are also developing new ways to persuade readers to tell them more about what they want. The Los Angeles Times features what it calls a “personality quiz” for readers on its Web site. The feature adds a spin to the personalization options that Web sites have offered for the last few years with a 17-question test that asks readers things like “What does success mean to you?” and has them pick from 12 photos. A few options include images of a wedding, a gleaming sports car and a man embracing a peasant child.
At the end of the quiz, readers are assigned a personality type like “dynamo,” who, as the quiz explains, is someone “always seeking new adventures that broaden your horizons and take you out of your comfort zone.” A customized news feed then appears each time a reader visits the Web site from the same computer.
“It helps me understand the readers in a way that I can’t with just the metrics,” said Sean Gallagher, managing editor for online operations at The Los Angeles Times, explaining that he now pairs sports articles with food articles because surveys have shown a correlation.
As the technology advances and allows papers to look more deeply at performance metrics, newsrooms may find that there is just some data they would rather not know.
At a recent meeting with the top online editors of The Los Angeles Times, a consulting group that helps media companies enhance profits from their Web sites pitched new software that it said could change the industry. The newsroom would be able to know how much money — down to the penny — each of its articles online was making when readers clicked on ads.
“I could see a business case for it,” said Mr. Gallagher, who hastened to add, “I don’t agree with that business case.”
Software developers acknowledge that the questions can be difficult as newspapers try to reinvent their business models. But they say the dialogue is ultimately constructive.
“By having this data and making it available, we’re spurring the conversations to take place,” said Tim Ruder, chief revenue officer for Perfect Market, the company that developed the tracking software for ad clicks. “And it’s especially healthy to have those conversations in the context of experience and not in an abstract way.”

A version of this article appeared in print on September 6, 2010, on page B1 of the New York edition.

This is from a military report written for the British Government on what to expect in the future:
Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre which drew up the report, describes the assessments as "probability-based, rather than predictive".
The 90-page report comments on widely discussed issues such as the growing economic importance of India and China, the militarisation of space, and even what it calls "declining news quality" with the rise of "internet-enabled, citizen-journalists" and pressure to release stories "at the expense of facts".

REMEMBER THAT NEXT WED. THE 30TH WE HAVE THE ASAHI SHIMBUN TOUR AT ONE O'CLOCK AND WE MEET OUT FRONT OF THEIR MAIN OFFICE AT 12:45. HOPE TO SEE YOU ALL THERE. NO CLASS IN THE AFTERNOON. YOU SHOULD BE WORKING ON YOUR VIDEO REPORT AS THE EDITING DOES TAKE SOME TIME. CLARK

Take a look and think about this from the New York Times, and we will talk about it next class:
Power Grows for Striking Chinese Workers
By DAVID BARBOZA and HIROKO TABUCHI
As companies bow to pressure in China for higher wages
and better working conditions, the cost of doing business
there will probably rise.

Well cybercats the story for this week is a future story. What will happen tomorrow or next month or year. eq. What's the weather going to be like tomorrow. Will the economy improve next year? What will be the features of fall fashion?
Also I'd like you to take a look at this web magazine which is often one of the best sources for exposed heavy spin: From: Center for Media and Democracy

Another alternative to the paper press from the New York Times:
THE MEDIA EQUATION
Imagine YouTube for Traders
By DAVID CARR
Thomson Reuters's new product, Reuters Insider, is a
service that captures myriad streams of information
produced by the company's reporters and partners.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/business/media/10carr.html?th&emc=th

I encourage you to look more closely at the previous post and check out the URL from the item here, which gives you pictures and more info:We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of U.S.
military commanders and reached the level of near obsession.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?th&emc=th

The dangers of Power Point:
"It's dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable."
- ARMY BRIG. GEN. H. R. McMASTER, on the growing use of PowerPoint presentations among
military commanders.

Just a little up date:
Reporters Without Borders names press 'predators'

(AP) – 6 hours ago

PARIS — Media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders on Monday put Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao on its annual list of press freedom "predators."

The Paris-based group says its list is made up of "40 politicians, government officials, religious leaders, militias and criminal organizations that cannot stand the press, treat it as an enemy and directly attack journalists."

Newcomers to the annual list, released on World Press Freedom Day, include Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, Taliban overlord Mullah Omar and Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.

Targeting China's Hu, the group said he has enlisted China's police and propaganda departments "to prevent any free press emerging." It also says he refuses to release activists, bloggers and journalists detained during the 2008 Beijing Games.

Of Putin, Reporters Without Borders says: "Control is the key word for this former KGB officer: control of the state, control of the economic and political forces, control of geopolitical strategic interests and control of the media."

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told The Associated Press: "Their opinion is a mistake. The mistake can be put down to bias against Putin, or a lack of correct information."

Rwandan President Paul Kagame also appears: Reporters Without Borders says he "denigrates journalists" and that authorities "constantly harass" two Rwandan newspapers and prosecute their editors.

Others on the list include Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

Separately on Monday, three Algerian journalists were detained by police as they tried to organize a demonstration demanding the opening of the audiovisual sector to private radio and TV stations. One of them, Adlene Meddi, confirmed that they had been held and released.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Bonus question for you for the next class. Write out on a paper with your name on it the answer to: what is the 5th estate? and for more points why is it important?

Last weeks story was supposed to be a local one from the campus or surrounding area. The next assignment is to write an obituary. You imagine How,When,Where a famous person dies and write that up as the first paragraph. Then using factual information a few paragraphs about why the person was famous and then a last imaginary paragraph with the burial details, time and place of ceremony. Due at noon on the 11th of May.

This is good reporting and a resource for further reporting:


April 1, 2010
CONTACT: Conor Kenny 202-277-6427 or ckenny@conorkenny.net
Mary Bottari at 608-345-6806
CMD RELEASES NEW WALL STREET BAILOUT TOTAL
$4.6 TRILLION IN FEDERAL FUNDS DISBURSED
New Tally Focuses on Expansive Role of Federal Reserve

Today, the Real Economy Project of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released an assessment of the total cost to taxpayers of the Wall Street bailout. CMD concludes that multiple federal agencies have disbursed $4.6 trillion dollars in supporting the financial sector since the meltdown in 2007-2008. Of that, $2 trillion is still outstanding.

CMD's assessment demonstrates that the Federal Reserve has provided by far the bulk of the funding for the bailout in the form of loans amounting to $3.8 trillion. Little information has been disclosed about what collateral taxpayers have received in return for these loans. CMD also concludes that the bailout is far from over as the government has active programs authorized to cost up to $2.9 trillion and still has $2 trillion in outstanding investments and loans.

Learn more about the 35 programs included in our tally by visiting our Total Wall Street Bailout Cost Table, which contains links to pages on each bailout program with details including the current balance sheet for each program.

"While the Treasury Department is patting itself on the back for recouping Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds and allegedly making money off of its aid to Citigroup, our accounting shows that these programs were a relatively small portion of the federal funds that have gone out the door in support of the financial sector. Far more has been done to aid Wall Street through the back door of the Federal Reserve than through the front door of Congressional appropriations," said Mary Bottari, Director of CMD's Real Economy Project.

"The tally shows that more scrutiny needs to be given by policymakers and the media to the role of the Federal Reserve especially as the Fed has accounted for the vast majority of the bailout funds, yet provides far less disclosure and is far less directly accountable than the Treasury," said Conor Kenny, the researcher who collected the data on the bailout.

CMD has presented its work in a table that shows: funds disbursed, maximum funds that were at-risk at the height of the bailout, and actual funds still outstanding for each program. CMD is also making available a Financial Crisis Tracker, a widget for the table that can be downloaded to websites to get up-to-date numbers on the financial crisis and the bailout. The Wall Street Bailout table will be updated monthly and will be a tremendous resource for reporters and the public alike.

WALL STREET BAILOUT COST TABLE can be accessed here.

KEY FINDINGS can be accessed here.

FINANCIAL CRISIS TRACKER can be accessed here.

The Center for Media and Democracy is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, public interest organization located in Madison, Wisconsin.


Center for Media and Democracy
520 University Avenue, Suite 227
Madison, Wisconsin 53703-4929
Phone: 608-260-9713 | Fax: 608-260-9714
E-mail: editor@prwatch.org

What is happening here? The Headline does not seem to jive with the story:
Google Faces Fallout as China Reacts to Site Shift
By MIGUEL HELFT and MICHAEL WINES
Google's China operations came under pressure as some
content from its uncensored Hong Kong site was blocked.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/technology/24google.html?th&emc=th
E.U. Court Curbs Sales by Google of Brand Names as Keywords
By ERIC PFANNER
Published: March 23, 2010

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PARIS — The European Union’s highest court on Tuesday gave Google broad latitude to sell advertising linked to trademarks like Louis Vuitton on its search engine, a practice that angers companies, which fear a loss of control over their brand names.

Legal experts said, however, that the ruling stopped short of the definitive precedent that Google and brand owners alike had sought. Instead, it contained caveats that could result in a new flurry of lawsuits over the sale of “sponsored links” generated by Google searches, the main source of the company’s $23 billion in annual revenue.

In the ruling, the European Court of Justice, in Luxembourg, said Google should be allowed to auction off brand names to a variety of advertisers, not just the owners of the trademarks. Brand owners, led by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the French luxury goods company, argued that only they or authorized sites should be able to buy such trademarks.

Google already conducts such sales in the United States and some European countries, including Britain and Ireland. But elsewhere in Europe, including France, the practice has been restricted by the courts, which have favored the brand owners.

Google says that selling brand names as ad keywords to multiple bidders helps consumers because it allows them to find product reviews, sellers of second-hand goods and other information.

“Our guiding principle has always been that advertising should benefit users, and our aim is to ensure that ads are relevant and useful,” Google said.

But LVMH and two other companies whose cases were considered by the court — a matchmaking service and an online travel agency — argued that the sale of their brand names by Google misled consumers and aided operators of Web sites selling copies of well-known goods and services. So important did LVMH consider the case that it enlisted the support of the French government, which filed a brief in support of its case.

The ruling Tuesday was the highest-level decision on the issue. While Google had faced similar lawsuits in the United States, it settled some of them, and no clear precedents were established. In France, after several decisions in favor of LVMH, Google appealed to the highest French court, which in turn referred questions to the European court for clarification.

The top E.U. court said Google should not be held liable for trademark infringement if it removed ads promptly when brand owners complained about violations. But individual advertisers could be liable if ads generated by another company’s brand name were found to mislead consumers, the court said.

Advertisers “cannot, by using such keywords, arrange for Google to display ads which do not allow Internet users easily to establish from which undertaking the goods or services covered by the ad in question originate,” the court said.

Lawyers said this could strengthen brand owners’ hand in lawsuits against rivals that buy their brands as search terms.

“Advertisers using the service will now need to tread very carefully indeed,” said Mark Blair, a partner at Marks & Clerk Solicitors in London. “Today’s ruling may to an extent ring-fence Google from claims by brand owners, but it will not close the door on future litigation in this area.”

Several trademark lawsuits against users of Google’s search-ad system are already pending in Europe, including one involving the florists’ network Interflora, which sued the British retailer Marks & Spencer. That company had bought the Interflora keyword on Google as a way to promote its rival flower delivery service.

The E.U. court said Google, too, could be held liable if it were found to have encouraged trademark violations or counterfeiting.

For example, Google critics have complained about one of the company’s services, which suggests potential keywords to advertisers. LVMH said in its lawsuit that these included terms like “fake Louis Vuitton bags.”

This is what good journalism is about: Silk Parachute: Essays By John McPhee Farrar, Straus and Giroux 227 pp., $25
posted March 9, 2010 at 5:35 am EST

In dedicating his latest collection of essays, to his grandchildren, John McPhee perhaps inadvertently reminds readers of his longevity in American letters and his stature as a standard-bearer of a particular kind of literary journalism.
As a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1965, McPhee has come to define a New Yorker staple, what he calls in “Silk Parachute” the “long fact piece.” It’s typically an exhaustively researched, meticulously reported, and unapologetically lengthy article that lavishes fact upon fact, as a painter might build texture with successive layers of brush strokes, in an attempt to make an object of curiosity shimmer with fresh revelation.
McPhee’s chosen subjects often seem almost aggressively prosaic. He once wrote an entire book about oranges, and another one of his books is about shad fish. McPhee is also a longtime enthusiast of geology, a subject that doesn’t promise automatic commercial appeal.
Not everyone is a fan of McPhee’s work. Many years ago, fellow essayist Philip Lopate described it as a “scrupulously fair, sporting, impersonal fact-gathering style ... which reminds me of nothing so much as a colony of industrious termites capable of patiently reducing any subject matter to a sawdust of detail.”
What Lopate appeared to want in McPhee’s work was a more overtly personal point of view, and this is exactly what readers get in “Silk Parachute,” McPhee’s most personal book to date.
The book divides itself just about evenly between the longish reportage for which McPhee is most famous and smaller vignettes in which the first-person voice takes a starring role. The title essay is a small piece of memoir in which McPhee fondly remembers growing up with his mother. We have McPhee’s mother to thank for encouraging his love of observation, indulging his childhood wish to stand at La Guardia Field in freezing weather and watch the planes. “At LaGuardia,” McPhee recalls, “she accompanied me to the observation deck and stood there in the icy wind for at least an hour, maybe two, while I, spellbound, watched the DC-3’s coming in on final, their wings flapping in the gusts.”
During that excursion, McPhee’s mother bought him a toy parachute stuffed within a small, hinged ball. “Folded just so, the parachute never failed,” McPhee tells readers. “Always, it floated back to you – silkily, beautifully – to start over and float back again.”
The ideals evoked by that memory – beauty, balance, buoyancy – rest at the heart of McPhee’s writerly sensibility. They are well on display in “My Life List,” another deeply personal and wryly funny piece in which McPhee recounts some of the odd things he’s eaten on the road. The complete list cannot be duplicated here, but suffice it to say that bee spit, lion, porpoise, and puffin are included.
“My Life List” also offers an occasion for tongue-in-cheek portraits of McPhee’s fellow New Yorker writer Ian Frazier and the magazine’s legendary late editor William Shawn. Inspired by his long relationship with The New Yorker, “Silk Parachutes” features a good bit of shop talk, most notably in “Checkpoints,” in which McPhee chronicles the exacting and often hilarious lengths to which New Yorker fact-checkers will go to verify the accuracy of reporting. One such exercise involved phoning someone in London and dispatching him to Fitzroy Road to double-check that a blue ceramic plaque honoring William Butler Yeats was, in fact, blue and ceramic.
Another essay, “Season on the Chalk,” records a characteristic McPhee outing, using travelogue to explore the peculiar chalk geology “below the English Channel, under much of northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and – from Erith Reach to Gravesend – under fifteen miles of the Lower Thames.”
McPhee often proves an engaging travel writer, and he works hard to distill complex science for the layman. But geology being what it is, the subject matter requires the reader to at least meet McPhee halfway. Unless one shares McPhee’s passionate interest in the topic, sentences like this will be tough sledding: “At the Paleozoic-Mesozoic stratigraphic boundary, there is no known deposit of extraterrestrial platinum-group metals, nor is there any other form of evidence of an asteroid impact.”
“Rip Van Golfer,” another essay, takes us inside a golf tournament featuring Tiger Woods, who’s become a regular in the tabloids since McPhee wrote the piece. Woods’s personal travails, copiously followed in the blogosphere and on Twitter, point to a media culture in which McPhee’s tradition of journalism, so fastidious and fair-minded, seems suddenly old-fashioned.
How long the McPhee tradition will endure is anyone’s guess. But for now we have “Silk Parachute,” a testament to a kind of literary journalism that will, with any luck, have both its standards and at its standard-bearer around for years to come.
Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.

One of the assignments each year is a video news cast and I have asked you to try and be creative. Here is a comedy of what a bad news cast looks like. Good Luck.>http://www.break.com/index/how-to-report-the-news.html

Is this the future of newspapers? Would you like one? http://www.inhabitat.com/2010/01/18/lg-unveils-flexible-electronic-newspaper/?utm_source=Inhabitat+Weekly&utm_campaign=6458aad2c5-Inhabitat_Weekly_November_19th11_12_2009&utm_medium=email

This is a special feature section of the New York Times and is an example of the very best in present day photo journalism. Writing skill aren't always needed. Passion, sympathy, empathy are all great things for a journalist to have. Maybe essential.

January 8, 2010, 12:01 AM
Showcase: No Relief and Little Attention
By AMBER BENHAM

Sexual violence, civilian casualties, child soldiers, wounded refugees and malnutrition — there is no shortage of suffering in Congo.

And that is what engaged the attention of Cédric Gerbehaye, 32, who left journalism school with some basic photography skills, determined to pursue conflicts like the brutal fighting among militias and the Congolese army, which has been going on more than a decade with little interest from Western journalists.

He was selected in 2007 as one of 12 promising young photojournalists to participate in the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. The contest theme was fragility. He set out to show the human consequences of the failed peace process in eastern Congo. The nonprofit organization Aviation Sans Frontières, which offers humanitarian aid, allowed him to join flights — in a small Cessna — into rebel zones and camps for internally displaced persons in the provinces of Ituri and North Kivu. He spent two months photographing the people whose lives had been devastated, as well as rebels and soldiers — adults and children.

On two subsequent trips over the next year, Mr. Gerbehaye tagged along with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), traveling to hospitals and remote areas where displaced people, sick and wounded, sought help. The photos he took — many of them portraits — focus on victims rather than violence.

“I’m not looking for the combat,” he said. “I’m interested in trying to tell the story of the people.”

Mr. Gerbehaye worked with Doctors Without Borders to create a multimedia feature, “Condition: Critical, Voices From the War in Eastern Congo,” which combines his photos with video segments and audio interviews by staff members of the aid organization.

He considers himself a journalist first, then a photographer. He uses black-and-white film, rather than a digital card, to capture the grainy, imperfect reality around him.

As a young photojournalist, he was deeply affected by images of the Vietnam War and, more recently, of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He doesn’t consider himself a conflict photographer. He prefers the term “concerned photographer.” His work is focused on using images to bring issues that have been overlooked by the media — often violent conflicts — out into the open, “so that people cannot just hide.”

“If there is only a slight possibility that it has an impact, it’s my duty to do it,” Mr. Gerbehaye said. “So that people cannot say, ‘We didn’t know, we had no clue.’”
Other Lens posts have focused on the efforts of photographers to draw attention to the devastating conditions in Congo. “Behind the Scenes: Suffering Writ Large” (Oct. 19, 2009) concerned an exhibit at the United Nations showing victims of sexual violence. “Showcase: Uneasy Congo” (Sept. 1, 2009) highlighted the work of Dominic Nahr.

Please take a look at this report on what it means to be a photojournalist,now, in a war zone:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/it-was-all-started-by-a-mouse-part-1/?th&emc=th

Here is a real story about Japan. The foreign press is very interested in stories coming from Japan as they see it as cutting edge, or predicting the future of their own societies:For Some in Japan, Home Is a Tiny Plastic Bunk
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By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: January 1, 2010
TOKYO — For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels.

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Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
Atsushi Nakanishi has condensed his possessions to two suitcases, which he stores in lockers at the capsule hotel where he lives. More Photos »
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Jobless, and Living in a Bunk
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Times Topics: Japan
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Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
Atsushi Nakanishi is among the jobless living in a capsule hotel, renting a bunk with no door. More Photos >
“It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.”

When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.

Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.

Once-booming exporters laid off workers en masse in 2009 as the global economic crisis pushed down demand. Many of the newly unemployed, forced from their company-sponsored housing or unable to make rent, have become homeless.

The country’s woes have led the government to open emergency shelters over the New Year holiday in a nationwide drive to help the homeless. The Democratic Party, which swept to power in September, wants to avoid the fate of the previous pro-business government, which was caught off-guard when unemployed workers pitched tents near public offices last year to call attention to their plight.

“In this bitter-cold New Year’s season, the government intends to do all it can to help those who face hardship,” Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said in a video posted Dec. 26 on YouTube. “You are not alone.”

On Friday, he visited a Tokyo shelter housing 700 homeless people, telling reporters that “help can’t wait.”

Mr. Nakanishi considers himself relatively lucky. After working odd jobs on an Isuzu assembly line, at pachinko parlors and as a security guard, Mr. Nakanishi, 40, moved into the capsule hotel in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district in April to save on rent while he worked night shifts at a delivery company.

Mr. Nakanishi, who studied economics at a regional university, dreams of becoming a lawyer and pores over legal manuals during the day. But with no job since Christmas, he does not know how much longer he can afford a capsule bed.

The rent is surprisingly high for such a small space: 59,000 yen a month, or about $640, for an upper bunk. But with no upfront deposit or extra utility charges, and basic amenities like fresh linens and free use of a communal bath and sauna, the cost is far less than renting an apartment in Tokyo, Mr. Nakanishi says.

Still, it is a bleak world where deep sleep is rare. The capsules do not have doors, only screens that pull down. Every bump of the shoulder on the plastic walls, every muffled cough, echoes loudly through the rows.

Each capsule is furnished only with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks.

Most possessions, from shirts to shaving cream, must be kept in lockers. There is a common room with old couches, a dining area and rows of sinks. Cigarette smoke is everywhere, as are security cameras. But the hotel staff does its best to put guests at ease: “Welcome home,” employees say at the entrance.

“Our main clients used to be salarymen who were out drinking and missed the last train,” said Tetsuya Akasako, head manager at the hotel.

But about two years ago, the hotel started to notice that guests were staying weeks, then months, he said. This year, it introduced a reduced rent for dwellers of a month or longer; now, about 100 of the hotel’s 300 capsules are rented out by the month.

After requests from its long-term dwellers, the hotel received special government permission to let them register their capsules as their official abode; that made it easier to land job interviews.

At 2 a.m. on one recent December night, two young women watched the American television show “24” on a TV inside the sauna. One said she had traveled to Tokyo from her native Gunma, north of the city, to look for work. She intended to be a hostess at one of the capital’s cabaret clubs, where women engage in conversation with men for a fee.

The woman, 20, said she was hoping to land a job with a club that would put her up in an apartment. She declined to give her name because she did not want her family to know her whereabouts.

“It’s tough to live like this, but it won’t be for too long,” she said. “At least there are more jobs here than in Gunma.”

The government says about 15,800 people live on the streets in Japan, but aid groups put the figure much higher, with at least 10,000 in Tokyo alone. Those numbers do not count the city’s “hidden” homeless, like those who live in capsule hotels. There is also a floating population that sleeps overnight in the country’s many 24-hour Internet cafes and saunas.

The jobless rate, at 5.2 percent, is at a record high, and the number of households on welfare has risen sharply. The country’s 15.7 percent poverty rate is one of the highest among industrialized nations.

These statistics have helped shatter an image, held since the country’s rise as an industrial power in the 1970s, that Japan is a classless society.

“When the country enjoyed rapid economic growth, standards of living improved across the board and class differences were obscured,” said Prof. Hiroshi Ishida of the University of Tokyo. “With a stagnating economy, class is more visible again.”

The government has poured money into bolstering Japan’s social welfare system, promising cash payments to households with children and abolishing tuition fees at public high schools.

Still, Naoto Iwaya, 46, is on the verge of joining the hopeless. A former tuna fisherman, he has been living at another capsule hotel in Tokyo since August. He most recently worked on a landfill at the city’s Haneda Airport, but that job ended last month.

“I have looked and looked, but there are no jobs. Now my savings are almost gone,” Mr. Iwaya said, after checking into an emergency shelter in Tokyo. He will be allowed to stay until Monday.

After that, he said, “I don’t know where I can go.”
So, the rest of the world views this as Science Fiction, however it has been a reality here in Japan for a number of decades. What is the future going to show us? Write that story and I promise you it will be published and paid for in the New York Times. Send it to me first for editing.

Which of these three news items is the most important, and what has been missed here? What are the really important news items of this year 2010? I mean not just for you here in Japan but for everyone in the world?
- QUOTATION OF THE DAY -

"People are starting to see it like drunk driving, and that's the comparison we need to continue to make."
- STEVE FARLEY, an Arizona state representative from Tucson who in 2007
first proposed banning texting while driving.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/technology/02distracted.html?th&emc=th

..................

- WORLD --
Photographs: Between War and Peace
A fragile calm has settled in Darfur, Sudan's western region that has become synonymous with conflict.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/01/01/world/20100101DARFUR_index.html?th&emc=th

- OPINION -
The Thread: The Homeland Secretary's Job Security
Is 'the system worked' this White House's 'heckuva job, Brownie'?
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/the-homeland-secretarys-job-security/?th&emc=th

Here's an interesting take from Wired via Futurismic:
Homeopapes: journalism by machine
Paul Raven @ 29-12-2009
Here’s an interesting piece at Wired UK that picks up the “OMG journalism is dying” ball and runs with it in the direction of automated machine-to-machine and machine-to-person news aggregation:

NewsScope is a machine-readable news service designed for financial institutions that make their money from automated, event-driven, trading. Triggered by signals detected by algorithms within vast mountains of real-time data, trading of this kind now accounts for a significant proportion of turnover in the world’s financial centres.

Reuters’ algorithms parse news stories. Then they assign “sentiment scores” to words and phrases. The company argues that its systems are able to do this “faster and more consistently than human operators”.

Millisecond by millisecond, the aim is to calculate “prevailing sentiment” surrounding specific companies, sectors, indices and markets. Untouched by human hand, these measurements of sentiment feed into the pools of raw data that trigger trading strategies.

[...]

Here and there, interesting possibilities are emerging. Earlier this year, at Northwestern University in the US, a group of computer science and journalism students rigged up a programme called Stats Monkey that uses statistical data to generate news reports on baseball matches.

Stats Monkey relies upon two key metrics: Game Score (which allows a computer to figure out which team members are influencing the action most significantly) and Win Probability (which analyses the state of a game at any particular moment, and calculates which side is likely to win).

Combining the two, Stats Monkey identifies the players who change the course of games, alongside specific turning points in the action. The rest of the process involves on-the-fly assembly of templated “narrative arcs” to describe the action in a format recognisable as a news story.

The resulting news stories read surprisingly well. If we assume that the underlying data is accurate, there’s little to prevent newspapers from using similar techniques to report a wide range of sporting events.

So what is your opinion of this:
NBC criticized for 'chequebook journalism'
Last Updated: Tuesday, December 29, 2009 | 4:27 PM ET Comments22Recommend27
The Associated Press
David Goldman, top, followed by his Sean, waves as he boards a plane at the Galeao airport, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Dec. 24. (Silvia Izquierdo/Associated Press)
A professional journalists' group is condemning NBC News for chartering a plane that carried a New Jersey man involved in a custody battle home from Brazil with his son.

The New York-based Society of Professional Journalists is calling it "chequebook journalism" and said the arrangement damages the network's credibility.

David Goldman, who successfully fought the Brazilian family of his now-deceased ex-wife for custody of nine-year-old Sean, granted an interview to Meredith Vieira of NBC's Today show that aired Monday.

NBC said Goldman was booked for Today before the network invited him on the plane.

The network had already arranged for the plane to bring its own employees back to the U.S. for Christmas, NBC News spokeswoman Lauren Kapp said. If NBC hadn't brought the Goldmans home, one of its rivals would have, she said.

"We've covered this story exceptionally well," she said. "Their going on the plane did not affect our coverage of the story or getting them booked at all."

Viewers told of payment

NBC News told viewers it had paid for the Goldmans' trip home, she said. The network showed pictures of the Goldmans on the plane and Nightly News featured a brief interview by correspondent Jeff Rossen with David Goldman while both were on the plane.

The journalists' group said NBC was paying for access, even if it was only covering the cost of a trip by plane.

"Paying for access taints the credibility and neutrality of what you are doing," said Andy Schotz, chairman of the SPJ ethics committee. "There is now a motive for people to be helping you, to be telling you what you want to hear."

Most news organizations say they don't pay for interviews. But critics say the commonly used practice of paying to license photos or video from a subject matter or paying for someone's travel is a way of getting around the restriction.

CNN and ABC paid for cellphone pictures taken by Jasper Schuringa, the man who helped subdue an alleged terrorist who tried to take down a Detroit-bound plane. Both also interviewed Schuringa but denied any connection between the payments and the interviews.

© The Canadian Press, 2009

Here is the longest and perhaps the pathetically best summary so far of the news paper dilemma (read my bottom notes):

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and TIM ARANGO
Published: December 27, 2009
Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free.

Jason Reed/Reuters
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation charges for access to The Wall Street Journal and could do the same on Hulu.
Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close.

Newspapers, including this one, are weighing whether to ask online readers to pay for at least some of what they offer, as a handful of papers, like The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, already do. Indeed, in the next several weeks, industry executives and analysts expect some publications to take the plunge.

Rupert Murdoch, beyond charging for access to The Journal, has talked about forming a partnership with a single search engine, which would pay him for the rights to scour the news and entertainment programming produced by his company, the News Corporation, rather than letting all search engines crawl his sites. Also Hulu, which is owned partly by Mr. Murdoch’s company, is considering charging viewers to watch some of the TV shows it now streams free.

Magazine publishers, meanwhile, have banded together to try to create their own version of the iTunes store, aiming for a day when they can sell enhanced versions of what they have been giving away. And more and more media companies are planning to charge for apps on iPhones and other mobile devices, as well as on the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers.

Media companies of all stripes built their business models on the assumption that advertising would continue to pour into their coffers. But with advertising in a tailspin, they now must shrink, shut down or find some way to shift more of the cost burden to consumers — the same consumers who have so blissfully become accustomed to Web content that costs nothing.

So will future consumers look back on 2010 as the year they finally had to reach into their own pockets?

Industry experts have their doubts, saying that pay systems might work, but in limited ways and only for some sites. Publishers who sounded early this year as though they were raring to go have not yet taken the leap, and the executives who advocate change tend to range from vague to cautious in making any predictions about fundamentally changing the finances of their battered businesses.

But one thing clearly has shifted already, in a year rife with magazine closures and newspaper bankruptcies: conventional wisdom among media companies has swung hard from the belief that pay walls would only curb traffic and stifle ad revenue, to the view that media businesses need to try something new, because the current path appears to lead to extinction.

“Content providers see that the idea that everything has to be free, supported by ads, isn’t working well, and they’re trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, but only partially,” said Alan D. Mutter, a media consultant and blogger who has been an executive at digital media companies.

He went on: “So we’re looking at some sort of an inflection point, at least in attitude. But I haven’t seen much realistic, hard-headed thinking about how that’s going to happen, so I don’t know how much is really going to change.”

Ann S. Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, said, “A lot is going to change over the next two years.” But she conceded that it was very hard to predict the shape of that change, and she said that adding pay walls alone probably would not work.

Of course, it is the established media, with their legacy of high operating costs and outdated technology, that face this problem. Leaner, newer online competitors will continue to be free, avidly picking up the users lost by sites that begin to charge.

Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post, predicted that much of the talk of media’s mining the Web for new revenue would never become reality — and that if it did, free sites like hers would benefit. Some of the plans now being laid might work, she said, but many of them would just alienate the Internet users who click from one site to another, wherever links and their curiosity take them.

“I’m not minimizing the fact that there’s a need to experiment with multiple new business models,” she said. “I just don’t believe in ignoring the current realities.”

For more than a decade, media companies have hoped for a day when they could either control access to their products online or at least put a price on them that a mass market would bear. But that day has never come. What has changed is the level of threat they face, given the worst advertising downturn in memory.

Since the infancy of the Web, there have been predictions that by making information more plentiful and accessible, prices would be steadily driven down, with no bottom in sight. At first, it did not seem to matter: Internet advertising grew at a breakneck pace, and traditional media thrived even as the assumption of free content took root online.

But eventually, the rise of the Internet punished most media, starting with the music industry, in the form of file-sharing. That history offers an object lesson. Despite the success of iTunes and other pay services, illegal downloads remain common.

Print publications are suffering most now, but digital distribution has grown in importance for broadcast television. Nearly all of its content is now available free online, as broadcast media lose audience and advertising. Book publishers are also fighting the tide; Simon & Schuster said recently that it would delay the release of e-book versions of 35 big titles, like Karl Rove’s memoir and a Don DeLillo novel, fearing that the $9.99 digital versions would eat into sales of hardcover copies.

Cable television has been an exception, thriving on subscriber fees, but even there, executives fret that consumers are disentangling themselves from their cable boxes, free to pick and choose individual programs online and watch on their TVs. Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, has advanced a plan that he calls TV Everywhere, which would allow paying cable television subscribers to view shows online for no extra charge.

Similarly, Comcast started a service this month that gives subscribers to its broadband Internet and digital cable services access to its cable programming on the Web.

These efforts are not about wringing extra dollars from the Web but about preserving the current economics of the business.

“We’re saying, since those payments you have made have found their way to the networks and through distributors that give you the connection, that we want to have you be able to watch all those networks on broadband,” Mr. Bewkes said recently at an investor conference in New York.

A leading evangelist for the coming of a new era is Rupert Murdoch, who has said he envisions a not-too-distant day when all of the News Corporation’s news properties, including Fox News Channel, The Times of London and The New York Post, charge online. He and his executives have repeatedly criticized search engines and news aggregators, saying it was “theft” to profit from publishers’ work.

The News Corporation has been shopping around an online payment software system — so far without much success — in hopes of playing pied piper to other publishers, and it is a charter member of the group of magazine publishers that have banded together, in a consortium announced this month. And there have been talks about the possibility of Microsoft paying for the exclusive rights to have its Bing search engine direct users to News Corporation sites.

“Quality content is not free,” Mr. Murdoch wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 8, days after delivering a similar message at a Federal Trade Commission workshop. “In the future, good journalism will depend on the ability of a news organization to attract customers by providing news and information they are willing to pay for.”

People who have studied the problem argue that charging online would work only if consumers were offered a much-improved product with the convenience of access anywhere, on any digital device — the core idea behind the magazine consortium and its planned online store.

By that standard, much of the talk of wringing more money from Internet users rings hollow, said Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University and a prominent blogger on media subjects. “People who really think we have to charge or the industry is sunk would be more persuasive if they said at the same time we have to add more value than we’ve been adding,” he said.

And, most industry experts agree, entertainment will be easier to charge for than news. It may be hard to prevent free distribution of an episode of “The Office” or “NCIS,” but the product is unique, with no substitute being created by someone else.

A small number of publications already charge for Internet access, including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Newsday, Consumer Reports and The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. But they tend to be either specialty products or near-monopolies in local markets, and they generally do not charge enough to fundamentally alter their profit pictures.

But for most general-interest news, any paid site would be competing with alternative versions of the same articles, delivered by multiple free news sources.

“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs,” Mr. Mutter said. “They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.” (end story)
One thing not addressed here is the success of electronic versions of what used to be print. Many magazines such as Road & Track, Penthouse, Smithtonian, Photography, Field & Stream, Popular Mechanics and Popular Science to name a small few have a very successful e-version of their paper produce with enhanced electronic content, for example video and hyper links to advertisers sites and additional editorial content. Scientific American and Metropolis (an architectural magazine) have tried to run on a some what different standards then the most effective one which is Zinio and as a result their experience has been disappointing. Even the Zinio client can be frustrating as many publishers cannot seem to get their head or what ever around the idea of a digital and non physical product. I have a number of subscriptions were the company also sends me a paper copy of the magazine and after many appeals seems unable to stop or even find the paper subscription which I, very tiresomely, am still receiving. However that is only until renewal comes around and then those magazines don't get renewed. There is hope and life in publishing, the publishers just have to clue in.

Here from the New York Times: How Dangerous it is to be a journalist who is doing his job well:
Kyrgyz President Blamed in Homicide


By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: December 22, 2009
MOSCOW — A prominent opposition journalist in Kyrgyzstan, whose autocratic president has been courted by the United States as an ally for the war in Afghanistan, died on Tuesday after being thrown last week from a sixth-story window, his arms and legs bound with duct tape.

Related
Times Topics: Kyrgyzstan
The journalist, Gennadi Pavlyuk, was on a business trip in Almaty, the commercial capital of neighboring Kazakhstan, when he was attacked on Dec. 16, the authorities said. He was in a coma before dying of severe trauma on Tuesday. His colleagues said he was 40 years old, with a wife and son.

Opposition politicians in Kyrgyzstan blamed the Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, for the killing, saying that he was escalating his efforts to eliminate dissent in the country. Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman said the government had nothing to do with the attack on Mr. Pavlyuk.

Since taking power in 2005, Mr. Bakiyev has steadily tightened his grip on Kyrgyzstan, a poor former Soviet republic in the mountains of Central Asia, and in recent years, numerous opposition leaders and journalists have been attacked. Some have died, and rarely if ever has anyone been held accountable.

In just the last few weeks, a well-known political scientist, a former senior official and a journalist were severely beaten in Kyrgyzstan. They all attributed the attacks to the security services, according to local news media.

While human rights groups have assailed Mr. Bakiyev, the United States has largely focused on maintaining good relations with him in order to keep an important air base on the outskirts of Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, that supports NATO’s mission in Afghanistan.

Mr. Bakiyev announced in February that he would evict the United States from the base. After intensive lobbying by the Obama administration, he reversed course in June, in return for additional rent and other concessions.

In July, Mr. Bakiyev easily won another term as president in an election that international monitors said was marred by widespread fraud.

Investigators in Kazakhstan said Mr. Pavlyuk arrived in Almaty on Dec. 16 and checked into a hotel before leaving with an unidentified man. Two hours later, he was pushed out the sixth-floor window of a rented apartment in a residential building, landing on a first-floor canopy.

A roll of the duct tape that had been used to bind his hands and legs was found in the apartment.

Mr. Pavlyuk was the former chief editor of the Bishkek edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a major Russian tabloid newspaper based in Moscow.

Over the last year, he had become more politically active, working closely with Omurbek Tekebaev, a former speaker of the Kyrgyz Parliament who is a senior opposition leader.

To support Mr. Tekebaev’s party, Mr. Pavlyuk was planning a new opposition Web site.

Mr. Tekebaev said in a telephone interview that he had no doubt that the Kyrgyz government had ordered Mr. Pavlyuk killed because he had become more outspoken against the president. Mr. Tekebaev said the Kyrgyz security services often lured people to nearby countries and killed them.

“They do that to avoid suspicion. They do their activities outside of Kyrgyzstan,” Mr. Tekebaev said. “This is not the first time that this has happened abroad to a member of the opposition. We believe that this was a political killing directed at intimidating the news media. It is an attempt at frightening society.”

Almaz Turdumamatov, Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman, said he hoped that the police in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan would conduct a thorough inquiry and bring the culprits to justice.

“The murder of any person, whether a journalist or not, concerns us,” Mr. Turdumamatov said. “Who is responsible for this must be determined by the investigators.”

Asked about the opposition’s allegations that its supporters were being persecuted, he said: “It is unfortunate that this killing happened. But it is wrong to say that this was connected to any kind of political motivation.”

In an interview in July at the presidential residence, Mr. Bakiyev suggested that journalists who had been attacked might have been involved in shady dealings or were perhaps just unlucky.

“Sometimes, things happen by chance,” Mr. Bakiyev said. “For it to have been purposeful from a political point of view, that sort of politics doesn’t exist here.”

Daniil Kislov, chief editor of Ferghana.ru, a Web site based in Moscow that covers Central Asia, said Mr. Pavlyuk’s killing had shocked journalists in the region because it was so brazen, as if it were an organized crime hit.

Mr. Kislov said the killing reminded him of the slaying of another Kyrgyz journalist, Alisher Saipov, who contributed to Ferghana.ru and the Voice of America. Mr. Saipov was shot to death in 2007 while waiting for a taxi in a Kyrgyz city. No one has been arrested in the case.

“These killings are being done by people who are absolutely convinced that they will never be caught and never be punished,” Mr. Kislov said.

Mr. Pavlyuk was chief editor for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Bishkek in 2006 and 2007, said the newspaper’s current chief editor, Aleksandr Rogoza.

Mr. Rogoza said Mr. Pavlyuk had a lifelong affection for Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, which is famous for its beauty and is one of the largest mountain lakes in the world.

“He wrote a lot about the lake,” Mr. Rogoza said. “He built a house there, and he spent a lot of time there. He just loved that place.”

Here's a funny one on science journalism from Scientific American: December 18, 2009

The "Problem" with a Public Interest in Science
A humorous warning for the media coverage of science
By Steve Mirsky


In October a blog post circulated widely in the science journalism community. Larry Husten mused at CardioBrief.org about the potential benefits to society if only mainstream newspapers covered science with as much dedication as they cover baseball. Indeed, it might be wonderful. But as a big sports fan, I know that there could be unexpected consequences of heightened media interest in science. For example, imagine all-science talk radio:

“Aaaaand good afternoon, everybody, how are your vital signs today?! Mike and the Mad Scientist with you here on QED radio, simulcast on the Nobel TV Network! How are you, Michael?”

“Fine, Mad Sci, good, the new issues of Nature and Science are out, lots to discuss, including an update on the state of the Mars rovers. Spirit has a bum wheel and has been on the disabled list, but NASA has some tricks that might get it back in the field.”

“And they published the genome of the horse! I hope that comes in handy at the Belmont, Michael.”

“Don’t bet on it, Sci. Listen, they’ve had the human genome sequenced for, what, 10 years, 12 years they’ve had the human genome sequenced and they’re still giving you and me the same meds, not personalized meds, and they’ve had the genome sequenced for, what, 10 years, 12 years.”

“Good point, Michael, excellent point. Whaddya say, let’s go to the phones and hear what science fans out there have on their minds today. Morris from Rego Park, you’re on QED.”

“Hi, Sci, hi, Mike, first time long time.”

“What’s on your mind today, Morris?”

“I wanted to float a trade by you guys. How about Harvard trades Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky for Sean Carroll and a postdoc to be named later?”

“Which Sean Carroll ya talking about, Morris buddy? There’s the physicist Sean Carroll at Caltech, and there’s the evolutionary biologist Sean Carroll at Wisconsin–Madison, and you can’t just call up and float a trade like that without saying which Sean Carroll, can ya, Michael?!”

“That’s a problem, Sci, and then there’s a bigger problem—Noam Chomsky isn’t at Harvard, he’s at M.I.T. Chomsky’s at M.I.T. Pinker’s at Harvard. He used to be at M.I.T., Pinker, Pinker used to be at M.I.T., but now he’s at Harvard. Chomsky’s at M.I.T., he’s at M.I.T., so you can’t put the package together in the first place, because Chomsky’s at M.I.T.”

“There you have it, Mo, you gotta do a little more homework before you call in, a little more housework. Here we go, Jeremy from Manhattan.” (The Twilight Zone theme plays in the background, as it does whenever Jeremy calls in.) “Hello, Jeremy.”

“Evolution’s just a theory! Global warming’s a hoax!"

“And goodbye, Jeremy. Jeremy’s meniscus is touching the bottom of the graduated cylinder there. Short Hal from Queens on the line, what’s up, Short Hal?”

“Not much, Sci, how are your liver enzyme levels today?”

“You’re a wise guy, Short Hal. Short Hal’s a hepatologist in his spare time, what’s on your mind, Hal?”

“Well, Sci, I’m talking to my friend, and he says that grad students are doing all kind of performance-enhancing substances, stuff like Mountain Dew, double espressos. And I just don’t know if you can compare the results they’re getting with the stuff that the old-timers did without these kinds of enhancers.”

“Hal, this is Mike, listen, you think Heisenberg wasn’t on massive doses of caffeine? He did his best work, when, in his early 20s? You think he was sleeping more than, what, two hours a night, three hours a night? Don’t kid yourself, there was stuff they did back then, maybe not Mountain Dew, but they had ways to keep working all night. I’ll tell you what they didn’t have back then, they didn’t have competitors coming in from all over the world to their labs to compete with them. If anything, these kids today, they’re on average better. I’m not saying that the best ones are better than, say, your Einsteins or your Feynmans, but I’d say on average the average ones are better today than the average ones were back then, pound for pound.”

“Michael, time for the atomic clock update with Burgess Shale, right after this word from Beckman Instruments. If your analytical balance botches your breakthroughs, better buy a Beckman. We’ll be right back.” (The Nobel Network’s camera picks up Mike and Mad Sci browsing the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Physical Review Letters, while the Irving Berlin song He Ain’t Got Rhythm, starting at the lyric “With a problem scientific, he’s colossal and terrific,” plays them off ...)

Note: This story was originally printed with the title "Careful What You Wish For"

Is Journalism still worth while? Well here is one use and answer:



Press Release 09-239
Computer Science Via Interactive Journalism


An innovative project teaches students computer science skills by creating an online magazine


Students participating in the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers.
Credit and Larger Version

December 10, 2009
Do only computer scientists need an education in computer science? In today's innovation-driven economy, the answer is 'not anymore'.

Since the skills learned in computer science, like complex problem solving and analytical reasoning skills, are important for building a foundation for numerous careers including jobs in science and technology, as well as jobs in marketing, journalism and the creative arts, most people will need an education in computer science. Even though the United States is a leader in the field of computer science at the college level, most middle and high school students receive no exposure to computer science. One major obstacle to educating young students in computer science is finding a space for a computer science class in an already overburdened K-12 curriculum.

Ursula Wolz, researcher from the College of New Jersey, developed an innovative solution for providing students with an education in computer science with the support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Unlike traditional computer science courses where students learn computer science programming through a textbook, Wolz and her team decided to take advantage of how 21st century journalism is becoming more dependent on computer science. Wolz and her colleagues started a summer institute and an afterschool problem where students learned computer programming skills while developing an online magazine.

The summer institute not only exposed the students to computer science, but also attracted them to computer science through the interactive journalism, which showed the students that computer science skills are needed in a number of different professions to solve a diverse set of real world problems.

In their project, which is funded by the NSF's Broadening Participation in Computing program, Wolz and her colleagues designed an Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers (IJIMS). IJIMS is a partnership between The College of New Jersey and Fisher Middle School in Ewing, New Jersey. They recruited middle school teachers, mostly language arts teachers, for a one-week institute where they learned how to create an online magazine.

During the second week, the teachers were joined by rising 8th grade students and the teachers became mentors to the students. During the two weeks, the teachers and students learn how to use Scratch, a graphical, syntax free, computer programming language. Since coding in Scratch is done with graphical blocks that snap together, much like LEGO bricks or pieces of a puzzle, it is easy for computer programming novices like middle school teachers and students, to learn how to program interactive animations and videos.

During the summer institute, students researched, prepared interviews, videotaped, edited the interviews and developed Scratch projects to supplement their stories with animations or games. At the conclusion of the two weeks, the teachers and students had developed an online magazine.

There were 16 students in the first summer. By the second summer institute, the number of students had increased to 30. This strong interest in the project led the teachers and students to develop an afterschool program to run the online magazine during the academic year. The articles developed by the students for the online magazine concern a diverse set of issues. Articles span from interviews with the city mayor to articles discussing complex issues like the death penalty and animal rights.

Wolz and her team wanted to use the summer institute and afterschool program as a way to expose students to computer programming, teach them a graphical computer programming language, show them how computer programming is used outside of traditional computer science areas and to increase the students' confidence in their ability to use computing methods.

The researchers surveyed the students to see whether they had achieved their goals and discovered that they had been very successful. The survey found that students had changed their perception about computer programming.

After participating in the summer institute, the students no longer held several common beliefs about computer programmers, like computer programmers work by themselves or computer programmers are not creative. The survey also found that after participating in the summer institute, the students reported that there was a similar relationship between computer science and journalism.

Finally, the survey found that after participating in the summer institute, the students reported a significant increase in their competence in the area of computer science. At the end of the summer institute, there were a larger number of students saying that they could create a computer program as compared to the first day of the summer institute.

This unique project is a solid example of how to teach computer science skills and attract young students to computer science by using a non-traditional computer science field. By implementing a computer science curriculum outside of school hours, Wolz and her team found a solution to the problem of implementing a computer science curriculum without removing courses from the curriculum or increasing the curriculum load.

In addition, this project demonstrates how to teach the skills learned by computer science such as complex problem solving and analytic skills by using a non-traditional computer science problem. The researchers taught computer programming to students by using the real-world problem of how 21st century journalism is becoming more interactive. To work in this new interactive journalism field, a 21st century journalist will need the computer programming skills required to create animations and videos to accompany their stories.

-NSF-

Here is a roundup of the pro and cons of what we think of as journalism:
The Noisy and Prolonged Death of Journalism |
| from the fat-lady-in-the-wings dept. |
| posted by kdawson on Friday December 04, @08:57 (Google) |
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/12/04/1350252/The-Noisy-and-Prolonged-Death-of-Journalis|
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The war of words between the old and the new media is heating up some
more. [0]Eric Schmidt has an op-ed in Rupert Murdoch's WSJ (ironic, that)
explaining to newspapers how Google wants to, and is trying to, help
them. Kara Swisher's BoomTown column [1]translates and deconstructs
Schmidt's argument, hilariously. A few days back, the Washington Post's
Michael Gerson became the latest journo to [2]bemoan the death of
journalism at the hands of the Internet; and investigative blogger
[3]Radley Balko quickly called B.S. on Gerson's claim that (all?)
bloggers simply steal from (all?) hard-working, honest, ethical print
journalists.

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/12/04/1350252

Links:
0. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574569570797550520.html?mod=rss_Today's_Most_Popular
1. http://kara.allthingsd.com/20091203/boomtown-decodes-google-ceo-schmidts-shut-up-you-whiny-news-folk-op-ed-so-you-dont-have-to/
2. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/25/AR2009112503534_pf.html
3. http://www.theagitator.com/2009/11/30/dem-thievin-blogs/

The split and competition between print media and the internet continues:
In Chicago, Ex-Editor Fights Back
By RICHARD PREZ-PEA
Internet-based local news organizations are drawing
big-name journalists, including veterans of the established
news outlets they are competing with.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/business/media/23local.html?th&emc=th

Still doing some things right some of the time:


Press Release 09-229
Science Journalism Awards Announced


Winners of AAAS Kavli Awards include television and radio stories supported by NSF


Neil deGrasse Tyson examines an unpolished man-made diamond, fresh out of the grower.
Credit and Larger Version

November 19, 2009
A television feature about growing diamonds in the lab, and a radio story that dramatizes some strange coincidences in a discussion of randomness and probability won recognition earlier this month in the 2009 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards. Both programs were funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

"Diamond Factory" was produced by Julia Cort for WGBH's NOVA science NOW, and aired on public television stations in June. It features host Neil deGrasse Tyson showing how materials science offers the means to engineer diamonds with the strength and conductivity of the real thing. Along the way, Tyson variously adopts the persona of Indiana Jones and travels blindfolded to the diamond producers' top-secret location, where he learns that diamonds that can be customized in size and shape offer a valuable resource for future electronics, transportation and communications.

"Julia Cort is a master of expressing complicated ideas in a way that's easy to understand and compelling in following the story," said Paula Apsell, senior executive producer, NOVA, and director of the WGBH science unit. "The techniques she used are emblematic of the approach we take at NOVA scienceNOW, creating stories that are educational and entertaining and, critically, that appeal to families."

"A Very Lucky Wind" was produced by Jad Abumrad, Soren Wheeler and Robert Krulwich at WNYC's Radio Lab and also aired in June. It begins with the story of a girl in England, Laura Buxton, who sends a balloon into the air--but not before attaching a label that said, "Please send back to Laura Buxton." The balloon winds up touching down 140 miles away in the yard of a girl with the same name, of the same age, and sharing many other traits. The producers use this as a departure point for a spirited discussion of randomness versus fate, incorporating the perspectives of University of California, Berkeley statistician Deborah Nolan and Jay Koehler, professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.

Jad Abumrad said the show was inspired by questions about the true state of randomness.

"What is a miracle? What is the mathematical threshold for a miracle?" said Abumrad. "These were among our questions. And we learned that given enough time, strange things will happen."

The 2009 awards are the first to be given under a new endowment by The Kavli Foundation. In recognition of that endowment, the awards--first given in 1945--are now called the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards. The Foundation, based in Oxnard, California, is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

Independent panels of science journalists select the winners of the awards. The winners for each category will receive $3000 and a plaque at the 2010 AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego in February.

-NSF-

Well I hope that this will make some changes into how investigative journalism occurs in Japan: From The New York Times-
New Leaders in Japan Seek to End Cozy Ties to Press Clubs
By MARTIN FACKLER
The authorities are expanding access to journalists who
don't belong to cartel-like media groups that analysts
say have produced a relatively spineless press.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/world/asia/21japan.html?th&emc=th

I will again attempt to show you a video which tells of the training of a TV broadcast journalist. The actors are Michel Piffer and Robert Redford. I have reserved a small viewing room in the FLL lab of the 6th Floor of the Goucher Building and we will meet and have the class there.

For the next three classes we will be watching parts of the video Up Close & Personal starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. Why? It is a good introduction into how to enter into TV broadcast Journalism and it's a nice love story as well. We will be likely using a different classroom and I will leave a note of our regular classroom door with the the location. Hope to see you there.

Newspapers want readers' help with Web credibility
By Associated Press
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2009


ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Publishing online creates a new set of problems for newspapers. Some people ask to have stories "unpublished," while others leave nasty, unsigned comments on articles. Now some newspapers are appealing to their own readers for advice.

The readers are taking part in six "Online Journalism Credibility" projects that were sponsored by the Associated Press Managing Editors group and detailed Thursday at APME's conference in St. Louis.

The public's involvement suggests audiences care deeply about the credibility of newspapers, said Elaine Kramer, APME's project manager. And it shows "that newsrooms are on the right track when they try to make journalism much more of a two-way conversation with readers," she said.

Readers are still getting used to seeing stories about them and people they know get catalogued by search engines that don't forget anything. The Toronto Star's public editor, Kathy English, said she gets requests to take stories down about once a month. Even a former colleague once asked her to make some embarrassing news go away.

She surveyed newspaper practices and found many editors viewed "unpublishing" as censorship. When she wrote a column asking readers their thoughts on 10 such requests faced by various newspapers in recent months, the views of most respondents were in line with editors'.

The Knoxville News Sentinel held a community round table to explore troubling aspects of anonymous, racially charged Web comments that had been elicited by news coverage of a carjacking-rape-and-murder case. One community member described the comments as "toxic to the soul."

The News Sentinel ran video of the community session and put several readers' blog posts on its Web site. The newspaper is now more willing to strike abusive comments.

"There's not an easy answer," said Jack Lail, the newspaper's director of news innovation. "Some horrific comments do reflect readers in your community. The best we can do is set some kind of bar that communities are going to have to be above."

In Texas, The Victoria Advocate lets readers contribute blogs, comments, calendar items, photographs and even stories to the Web site. When the newspaper commissioned a study of 400 readers, gauging their trust of newsroom-generated content versus that submitted by readers, respondents appeared to value straight news much more than content with opinions, Editor Chris Cobler said.

For instance, at a town hall meeting on the subject this month, Cory Garcia of Victoria said he likes the idea of being able to blog online, but worries that civil discourse can become uncivil.

Now the newspaper is considering a disclaimer on reader blogs and might create a board of readers who would discuss Internet ethics.

"People still trust the news and get the difference," Cobler said. "The challenge is how to engage the community without chipping away at the newspaper's credibility."

As news organizations' revenue has dropped, they've felt more pressure to experiment with a type of advertising that is associated with a news story's subject matter and is placed alongside, or pops up when a cursor touches a key word in a story.

The Seattle Times tested 18 types of this so-called contextual advertising on its Web site. Then it used reader surveys and focus groups to determine whether placement of such ads affected the credibility of either the advertisers or the newspaper.

The results were mixed, but the exercise helped the newspaper "figure out where the land mines were," said Kathy Best, managing editor for digital news and innovation.

Readers didn't like an ad for jobs at Weyerhaeuser Co. that popped up as they read a story about the timber industry. They also disapproved of an ad for a land commissioner candidate that was next to an investigative story on landslides and the government's policy on clear-cutting forests. The readers said it hurt the credibility of both the candidate and the news story.

On the other hand, readers said they valued contextual advertising when it was local and useful.

In another of the APME projects, the Sioux City (Iowa) Journal asked readers how the newspaper could improve standards and accuracy in gathering and reporting news online. And the Salem (Mass.) News is soliciting input on how its involvement with social networking sites affects credibility.

The six projects will be posted on APME's Web site and are the subject of a webinar series beginning Nov. 5 through Poynter's News University.

"I think we'll learn more about how precious credibility is to readers as well as to journalists," Kramer said. "Credibility is our stock in trade. We better have it."

| Journalists Looking For Government Money |
| from the bizarro-world dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 31, @10:21 (The Media) |
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/31/137221/Journalists-Looking-For-Government-Money |
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We've been following the ongoing struggles of the print media, watching
as some publications have died off and others have held to outdated
principles and decried the influence of the internet. A side effect of
this has been many journalists put out of work and many others fearful
that informed reporting is on its way out as well. Now, an editorial in
the Washington Post calls for [0]a solution journalists would likely have
scoffed at only a few years ago: federal subsidies. Robert W. McChesney
and John Nichols write, "What to do? Bailing out media conglomerates
would be morally and politically absurd. These firms have run journalism
into the ground. If they cannot make it, let them go. Wait for 'pay-wall'
technologies, billionaire philanthropists or unimagined business models
to generate enough news to meet the immense demands of a self-governing
society? There is no evidence that such a panacea is on the horizon. This
leaves one place to look for a solution: the government." They hasten to
add, "Did we just call for state-run media? Quite the opposite."

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/10/31/137221

Links:
0. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/22/AR2009102203960.html
Collecting Headlines Funnier Than This


By ERIC KONIGSBERG
Published: November 2, 2009
Headlines in the satirical weekly newspaper The Onion tend to function both as punch line and setup, in that order. They are the heart of the paper, and not only the first thing anybody reads, but also, unlike headlines in real newspapers all over the world, the first things to be written. The staff devotes the first two days of every week to composing headlines, then assigns the articles that will run beneath them and provide a body of supporting jokes.

At the offices of The Onion in SoHo, headlines are conceived first, and then articles are assigned to flesh them out.
Todd Hanson, a story editor, started at The Onion 21 years ago.


Corner pen: Dummy, the office dog, has her own office cubicle.
It’s immediately apparent just flipping through “Our Front Pages: 21 Years of Greatness, Virtue, and Moral Rectitude From America’s Finest News Source,” the new, platter-size hardcover collection, appropriately enough, of front pages from The Onion, that the art of the fake headline has evolved. Early-era front-page type in the paper, founded in 1988 in Madison, Wis., had the clownish tone of a college-town humor rag: “Depressed? Try Liposuction on that Pesky Head.”

“You can see it took a little while before the paper was keyed in on the USA Today model,” said Joe Randazzo, the current editor of The Onion. (From 1998: “Inside: America Rates The Skin Colors. See Society, page 1D.”)

The paper relocated to New York in 2001, and that year, prompted partly by 9/11, the headlines took on what Mr. Randazzo called “more of a New York Times-Washington Post kind of tone — sober, important.” “We wait to chime in on a news event until after the news has chimed in,” he said. “The Onion’s charter is to be the last word, the newspaper of record. That’s a total conceit, of course, but we take it seriously, in the sense that we want to be the joke that’s making a joke about all the other jokes.”

A Tuesday in October found Mr. Randazzo and nine writers and editors gathered around a conference table in the SoHo offices of The Onion for a headline meeting. Each had a printout of 101 headline contenders, which had been submitted —mostly by one another, with some support staff and freelance contributors also allowed to pitch in — the day before.

“It’s a very specific, regimented format,” said Dan Guterman, the head writer. “You sort of learn the Onion language by rote. We spend hundreds of hours in the room deconstructing the jokes. I don’t think there’s anything comparable to the amount of material we generate and reject just to come up with the week’s headlines.”

This structured process, however, has an element of chaos, in that there is no such thing as speaking out of turn. Each person called out favorites by number, and most were rejected by consensus, or, as needed, by Mr. Randazzo.

This brain trust was all men — all 10 of them white, most in glasses, about half wearing T-shirts with something satirical printed on them, and at least 60 percent of them with facial hair. (“The dominant style” in the office of The Onion, the author Wells Tower wrote last year in The Washington Post Magazine, “is the unshaven, underexercised, Nazarene look of bookish people who probably suffered a steady program of jibes and wedgies in junior high school and carried pocketfuls of 20-sided dice.”)

The basis of some rejections was historical: “That reminds me too much of ‘Man Who Thought He’d Lost All Hope Loses Last Additional Bit of Hope He Didn’t Even Know He Still Had’ ” — a headline from 2000 — Todd Hanson, a story editor, said about “Man Surprised He Still Had Peg to Be Taken Down.”

Others failed to meet standards of sophistication. “That’s basically a man-boobs joke, a yucka-yucka joke,” Joe Garden, the features editor, said of “November Named Male Breast Awareness Month.” Or comic rigor: “It has a finality to it that threw me off,” Mr. Guterman said of a headline about a missing tub of yogurt.

Or structural soundness: Mr. Randazzo gently deemed one headline “inert,” and quickly moved the meeting along. Or decorum: “That joke in the wrong hands could be unspeakably offensive,” Mr. Randazzo told Seth Reiss, a staff writer, about a headline that, if it had the potential to be too offensive for The Onion, is not likely to be reproduced in this newspaper.

A headline stating that the Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman was revealed to be President Obama’s best friend from high school was an obvious no-go —it would be stale long before press time — but still engendered admiring debate.

“Are we sure we don’t want to do that just to show a bunch of pictures of him and Thorbjorn Jagland on the basketball team together?” Mr. Reiss asked.

“Thorbjorn Jagland’s a great name,” Mr. Hanson said.

“It’s so metal,” Mr. Garden said.

Headlines that made it often needed little discussion. “Cherokee Tribe Makes News As Fraction of Actress’s Bloodline” was a keeper from the start.

The meeting stretched from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. and included a short lunch break during which several writers were asked to brainstorm individually on a broad idea — the enduring war in Afghanistan — that was proving to be a challenge. In the end “U.S. Continues Quagmire-Building Effort in Afghanistan” won out over “Quick and Painless Overthrow of Taliban Enters Eighth Year” and “Afghanistan Rapidly Replacing Iraq as Replacement for Vietnam as Replacement for Quagmire.”

After that, Mr. Randazzo assigned articles to support the headlines according to a vaguely rotational system. Someone jokingly suggested, with a combination of affection and envy, calling in Megan Ganz, 25, a former staff member who left over the summer to become a writer for “Important Things With Demetri Martin” on Comedy Central: “Does she have enough to do?”

This is an old story at The Onion. Another whiz kid, Mike DiCenzo, departed recently when he was hired to write for “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.” Ellie Kemper, a frequent contributor, got a major acting role on “The Office” this season. Before them, several alumni from the paper’s days in Madison, Wis., found great success as writers and producers of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” “The Colbert Report” and “Futurama.”

The paper’s function as a farm league has a complicated legacy, and the few who remain from the early-era Onion see themselves as defenders of its ethos. “There used to be a certain bond everybody shared, like we were in a band,” said Mr. Hanson, 41, who started at the paper 21 years ago after he dropped out of college. (“I went to the University of Wisconsin from 1986 to 1986,” he said.) “Plenty of the original staff never did have a lot of ambition beyond making each other laugh. I don’t know, but there’s something just different about people who’ve come from real-world, minimum-wage jobs.”

The Onion, a free weekly that is also online at theonion.com, has a print circulation of 400,000. It claims 1.8 million followers on Twitter.

Mr. Garden, who began writing for The Onion in 1993, said he wrestled with the notion that staying at The Onion was akin to being left behind. “A lot of the editors who went to L.A. sort of figured out the system; meanwhile, I still don’t know the system,” he said. “I’ve never written a spec script. There’s this fear that because I’ve done this for so long, there’s nothing else I can do.”

Yet The Onion continues to feel like home. “It’s different now, but there’s still camaraderie,” he said. “I don’t feel alienated along age lines, I just feel alienated — but the way I always do.”

And this is why we have this class and why journalists are there:From the New York times-
- QUOTATION OF THE DAY -

"We still get most of our information from investigative journalists. If you can't protect sources, there is a lot of public corruption and private malfeasance that will go undetected and unpublished."
- SENATOR ARLEN SPECTER, Democrat of Pennsylvania, on a bill to provide greater
protections to reporters.

.and from Slashdot:
| Decline In US Newspaper Readership Accelerates |
| from the stop-the-presses dept. |
| posted by timothy on Wednesday October 28, @17:44 (The Media) |
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/28/2131236/Decline-In-US-Newspaper-Readership-Acceler|
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[0]Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that US [1]newspaper
circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across
the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through
September, compared with a year earlier. Online, newspapers are still a
success — but only in readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper
Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their
ink-on-paper cousins. 'Newspapers have [2]ceased to be a mass medium by
any stretch of the imagination,' says Alan D. Mutter, a former journalist
and cable television executive who now consults and writes a blog called
Reflections of a Newsosaur. According to Mutter only 13 percent of
Americans, or about 39 million, now buy a daily newspaper, down from 31
percent in 1940. 'Publishers who think their businesses are going to live
or die according to the number of bellybuttons they can deliver probably
will see their businesses die,' writes Mutter. 'The smart ones will get
busy on Plan B, assuming there is a Plan B and it's not already too
late.' Almost without exception, the papers that lost the least readers
or even gained readership are the nation's smallest daily newspapers
which [3]tend to focus almost all of their limited resources on highly
local news that is not covered by larger outside organizations and have a
lock on local ad markets."

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/10/28/2131236

Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR2009102603272.html
2. http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/10/newspapers-mass-less-mass-medium.html
3. http://www.leader-vindicator.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20382685&BRD=2758&PAG=461&dept_id=572980&rfi=6

We have talked about citizen journalist before and thought you might like to look at this example from the CBC:
Man who shot Dziekanski video gets journalism award
Paul Pritchard says he feels guilty he didn't help immigrant Tasered by RCMP
Last Updated: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 | 9:27 AM PT Comments154Recommend123
CBC News

Paul Pritchard, right, accompanied by his lawyer, Paul Pearson, held a press conference in November 2007 to demand police release his video.Paul Pritchard, right, accompanied by his lawyer, Paul Pearson, held a press conference in November 2007 to demand police release his video. (CBC)The man who used a digital camera to record the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport says he feels guilty he didn't try to help the Polish immigrant even though others honoured his actions Tuesday with a citizen-journalism award.

Dziekanski, 40, died Oct. 14, 2007, following several shocks from a Taser four RCMP officers used to subdue him after he caused a disturbance.

The incident might never have received much attention if Paul Pritchard had not decided to grab his digital camera and start recording the actions of the distraught Dziekanski before police arrived.

Dziekanski did not speak English and, after a long flight from Poland, had been left to wander for hours in the restricted zone of the arrivals area after being processed by immigration authorities while his mother waited for him in another part of the airport.

After the incident, Pritchard, who was on his way to his family's home in Victoria and had been waiting in the international arrivals lounge at the time, handed his video over to the RCMP to use in their investigation. The police promised it would be returned in 48 hours.

'I could have gone and talked to him.'— Paul Pritchard

But when the RCMP's public statements about the incident conflicted with what Pritchard and other witnesses said they saw, Pritchard demanded the RCMP return the video so that he could release it to the public.

When the police refused, saying releasing the video would compromise their investigation, Pritchard hired a lawyer, held a news conference and threatened to use legal action to get it back.

The release of the 10-minute video, which contradicted the police version of the incident, led to widespread public outrage around the world and diplomatic tensions between Canada and Poland. It also resulted in the deepest scrutiny of the RCMP in decades in the form of a special inquiry into the incident, led by retired British Columbia Appeal Court Justice Thomas R. Braidwood.
Citizen journalism award

On Tuesday evening in Toronto, Pritchard's work in documenting what happened and waging a legal battle against the RCMP for the release of his video was honoured by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

The organization gave Pritchard its first-ever award for citizen journalism, which recognizes the contributions of ordinary people in the field of journalism.

After the video was made public, Paul Pritchard said he wanted to step out of the media spotlight and find a job.After the video was made public, Paul Pritchard said he wanted to step out of the media spotlight and find a job. (CBC)But Pritchard is still questioning his role in what happened and the choices he made that night.

Two years after the incident, Pritchard told CBC News he still wonders what might have happened had he decided to talk to the distraught Polish immigrant rather than videotape him in distress.

"I don't consider myself a hero, and to be honest, I'm not completely happy with the fact that I did that," said Pritchard. "Maybe instead of grabbing a camera, I could have gone and talked to him.

"If I feel I did something wrong, or feel I didn't do enough, I think the effort I put in afterwards is enough for me to live with that … I did everything I possibly could do."

Pritchard did not testify at the Braidwood inquiry. Instead, he spent the past two years travelling abroad, deliberately avoiding coverage of the incident, he said.

When Pritchard released the video, he received a payment of several thousand dollars from three television networks: CBC, CTV and Global. At the time, Pritchard said he planned to use the money for medical care for his seriously ill father, who died four months later.
Video conflicted with police statements

The 10-minute Pritchard video, shot in three segments, showed a distraught Dziekanski in the airport arrivals lounge attempting to smash a computer and some furniture while several people attempted to communicate with him before police eventually arrive.

Four RCMP officers subdue Robert Dziekanski after stunning him with a Taser on Oct. 14, 2007, at the Vancouver airport.Four RCMP officers subdue Robert Dziekanski after stunning him with a Taser on Oct. 14, 2007, at the Vancouver airport. (Paul Pritchard) Before the video was released, the RCMP repeatedly said that there were only three RCMP officers involved in the incident and that the Taser was only deployed twice after Dziekanski attacked the officers.

But the video showed four RCMP officers rushed in and confronted Dziekanski, who backed up toward a counter. Dziekanski then faced the officers with what later turned out to be a stapler in one hand.

Immediately, there was a loud crack from a Taser, followed by Dziekanski screaming and convulsing as he stumbled and fell to the floor.

Another loud crack can be heard, as an officer appears to fire the Taser at Dziekanski again. Then, as the officers kneel on top of Dziekanski and handcuff him, he continues to scream and convulse on the floor.

One officer is heard to say, "Hit him again. Hit him again," and there is another loud cracking sound.

Evidence at the inquiry revealed the Taser was eventually fired five times at Dziekanski.

After he was subdued, the RCMP left him handcuffed on the floor, where he died before medical help arrived. The official cause of death was listed as "sudden death during restraint" in the coroner's post-mortem report.

A decision by B.C.'s criminal justice branch concluded that while the officers were involved in Dziekanski's death, there was not enough evidence to support laying criminal charges

The public inquiry into the incident is expected to release its report in the new year.

*