Let the sun shine

Thank you, Eric N., for introducing me to Jon Talton's Rogue Columnist. His rant on "What's really wrong with newspapers" treats the newspaper biz the way a real reporter would if he didn't already work for the newspaper biz. He follows the money.

I recommend the entire piece including -- maybe even especially -- those bits that bite the hand that feeds me personally. Talton's critique of the way shareholder's demands for ever-increasing profits have triumphed over the needs of readers and the demands of the craft are particularly apt when he applies them to the nation's largest newspaper chain.

That chain signs my paycheck, so let's refer to it here as "Grommett." Notice I said "signs my paycheck" and not, "I work for Grommett." That's not how the job works or what it requires. If you think of yourself as working for Grommett or for any other publisher then you're not going to do that job well. If you work for a newspaper, you work for the readers of that newspaper, and you serve them best by following the standards of the craft that exist independent of the particular policies or ideologies of any given publisher. Ideally, of course, there wouldn't be any conflict between working for the readers and working for your publisher, but the newspaper biz is far from ideal.

Talton highlights one of my particular pet peeves:

The simple creed of "get a great story and put it in the newspaper (or online)" went away. For example, experienced police reporters went away -- even though it's clear that well-done cop stories draw readers. In their place was a 21-year-old taking dictation from a police public-affairs announcement.

The police briefs are one of the most-read stories every day on our paper's Web site (almost rivaling the obits some days). Yet if you were to look at our site on Sunday or Monday morning, you'd find at most one or two items in that section. This is not because there is no crime on Saturday night. The criminals do not take weekends off, but the PIOs -- the official police public information officers -- do. So sometime this afternoon all those PIOs will return to their desks and send forth a volley of faxes and e-mails detailing the weekend's events and thus our Tuesday police briefs will be overflowing with "news" that is two or three days old.

Receiving all those faxes and e-mails and rewriting them as news items is similar to the grade-school exercise of writing research reports based on a single entry from the World Book Encyclopedia. Working the police beat for our paper* would be excellent preparation for becoming a White House correspondent. Wait for the official to give the official word. The official will tell you what the news is and you can write it down. But be sure to use proper spelling and grammar -- you're a professional journalist, after all.

Talton's critique is more diagnostic than prescriptive, so let me point somewhat in the direction of a cure: Let the sun shine. More transparency wouldn't be a magic bullet, but it would help serve readers and it would help readers serve newspapers by providing more specific, and therefore more constructive, feedback. (The most common form of reader feedback, currently, is not reading newspapers. In response to this, newspapers blindly try to win them back, often by doing more of what drove them away to begin with.)

Here's the sort of thing I have in mind: Blog the 4 o'clock budget meeting. You've likely seen such meetings portrayed on The Wire or Lou Grant or in All the President's Men. These are the big daily meetings -- usually around 4 p.m. for morning papers -- where all the section editors meet to share what they've got for the next day's paper and to figure out where it's all going to go and what's missing and how they're going to fill in the gaps. This is, in other words, the meeting at which newspapers decide what they think is really important.

The decisions made at such meetings shape what is and isn't deemed "news," and that in turn shapes our civic and national discourse. What goes on A1 and what gets left out? Britney or Baghdad? Lacey or the local school board? Chondra or Khandahar? Judy Miller's unsourced assertions or Walter Pincus' painstakingly detailed debunking? Such decisions are made based on news judgment, on more logistical questions (is there good art?), and on hunches -- sometimes accurate, sometimes baseless -- about what the small group of gathered editors thinks readers are looking for.

That decision-making process should be transparent. The public has a right to see their sausage being made. Letting them see behind the curtain might make them better appreciate and understand the choices facing and the choices made by newspapers everyday. At the very least, such transparency would foster the idea that newspapers are in the business of providing the public access to information rather than in the business of selectively standing between them and what they want and need to know.

The highlights and lowlights and sidelights of every newspaper's 4 o'clock budget meeting should be blogged.

The odds of this ever actually happening, anywhere, are huge. The valid reasons why this couldn't happen are nonexistent.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* I should note that we also have some excellent reporters who actually report while working our police beat -- leaving the building and everything. But this is not required, expected or commended by Grommett.

Comments

[Jay Lake]

Talton's essay points to the flaw at the heart of the conservative (and libertarian) rubric about market self-regulation. Market forces will take care of you if you happen to be an investment dollar. If you happen to be a human being, let alone a vague, undefined concept like "the public interest," you're pretty much on your own. This is especially clear in industries like newspaper, radio and healthcare, where community and individual needs often stand directly counter to shareholder needs. Very few conservatives seem willing to acknowledge that this might be an issue, let alone recognize the reality of the problem.

[Jesurgislac]

A newspaper in the UK which has an unrivalled reputation for accuracy and investigative reporting, and has maintained this reputation for at least 70 years (George Orwell mentions it by name as a newspaper known to have conscientious regard for facts, even in wartime) is also the only newspaper in the UK which is not owned by a company but by a trust - the Scott Trust, a non-profit organization set up in 1936 to safeguard the newspaper's liberal tradition against future proprietors (and to safeguard the newspaper itself against the Inland Revenue on the then-owner's death).

I don't believe it's at all coincidental that it's also the first newspaper in the UK to have a Reader's Editor, whose job is to safeguard the interests of the readers of the paper, nor that it's the only newspaper in the UK which routinely publishes retractions and corrections in the print edition, in either the same position as the original article or on the op-ed pages.

Nor do I believe it's at all coincidental that this paper is loathed and considered inaccurate and counterfactual by Americans who routinely get all their news from sources weighted much differently.

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

In an irrelevant aside which will amuse Fred, I note that I was pals with Jon Talton when we both went to Coronado High School in the early 1970s. I only recently rediscovered him on the net, first his series of mystery novels set in modern Phoenix and now his excellent blog.

Further evidence of my theory that there are really only 15,000 people in the world; the rest are stage decoration.

[Richard Hershberger]

Regarding newspapers and the free market, it's not clear to me that the free market is even working for the shareholders, at least in the long term. The downward spiral of newspaper readership is the effect of free market demands for higher profitability. At most, cutting out unnecessary expenses such as "reporting" will increase profitability until the readers notice that there is no longer any there there, and drop their subscriptions. This might make sense for shareholders planning on selling soon and looking for a bigger sucker, but the result is to destroy an entire industry.

For what it is worth, I have nearly given up on conventional newspapers. I take the local paper for local news, but it doesn't do a very good job even at that. There is currently a raging debate over forming a county police force. Currently the county pays the state police to assign troopers for local enforcement. Everyone agrees the county can do this itself more cheaply but the question is whether to create a county police department or to expand the sheriff's department, with the county commissioners wanting a county force and the sheriff wanting to expand his department.

The paper has reported the commissioner's argument that there is better budgetary control with a county force. It has reported the sheriff's claim that an expanded sheriff's department would be cheaper. I have no idea what the truth is. Why? Because my local newspaper has given me no information on this. Have any cost studies been done? I don't know. If not, why not? I don't know. There is obviously a letter-writing campaign to the paper. I say it is obvious because there is a pattern of many letters saying the same thing, in such a way that it appears as if they are coordinated. It would be useful information to know if this is the case, and if so who is doing it. And so on. The bare public facts have been reported. Nothing beneath the surface has been.

I find the best journalism nowadays is found in those free weekly independant papers. So is the worst. Most of it is self-consciously too hip for the room, but every couple of months the Baltimore paper comes up with some terrific investigative journalism, obviously letting a reporter take the time to go digging and giving him the space to write what he has to write. I rarely see anything like that in a mainstream paper anymore.

[Geds]

The odds of this ever actually happening, anywhere, are huge.

Don't you mean "The odds against this ever actually happening?"

A newspaper in the UK

That wouldn't be The Guardian, would it? Because I know that the few times I've tried to cite it to make a point it's been shrugged off as a filthy, liberal rag by my various conservative friends.

[Jay Lake]

Regarding newspapers and the free market, it's not clear to me that the free market is even working for the shareholders, at least in the long term.

Completely agreed. But the free market evaluates itself against quarterly results. Every stock is a "growth" stock these days. If it isn't, executive management is in a lot of trouble, and under some circumstances, can be charged with breach of fiduciary duty.

Any American CEO in any industry, newspapers included, who introduced a long-term growth plan that didn't include short-term and ongoing revenue enhancement would be handed his ass by investors and his own board of directors.

[Jesurgislac]

That wouldn't be The Guardian, would it? Because I know that the few times I've tried to cite it to make a point it's been shrugged off as a filthy, liberal rag by my various conservative friends.

Yes, it would be.

A Guardian reporter once recounted her experience (on a visit to the US) of being told by her friends - mostly liberal - that the kind of stories that the Guardian runs, and the critical attitude it routinely takes towards the government (whether Conservative or Labour) would be considered treasonous in the US.

[Shannon]

Jesurgislac, I love the Guardian, and I did even before I moved to England. Then, once I moved there from America, I read it all of the time for news. I think it would be unique in the US to run the kinds of stories it does, but it seemed pretty unique in the UK too, as far as I could tell.

I do have to say that when I was over there, I was surprised at the UK newspaper industry's tendency to have "campaigns" on various subjects. The Guardian's pet one seemed to be climate change, but even the mega-conservative Daily Mail had one on elder abuse.

As for being shrugged off as a filthy, liberal rag, those are probably the same people who would call the New York Times a filthy liberal rag. Although I think the Guardian has better coverage than the NYT on a lot of important issues. Of course, I'm a filthy liberal, so I would think that, wouldn't I?

[Tonio]

That wouldn't be The Guardian, would it? Because I know that the few times I've tried to cite it to make a point it's been shrugged off as a filthy, liberal rag by my various conservative friends.

I've never heard any Guardian-bashing from my fellow Americans, but then, I don't know many hardline conservatives. The ones I do know complain about CNN and CBS News.

[McMartin]

Back in the early 2000s the Guardian seemed to get cited a lot in the States in online discussions just because they had the best web presence of, well, anyone. The US papers have very slowly been catching up -- at least to the point of basic usability -- but I heard even some (mild - this is the Bay Area) conservatives praise it for being on the ball with respect to The Future.

[M Groesbeck]

That wouldn't be The Guardian, would it? Because I know that the few times I've tried to cite it to make a point it's been shrugged off as a filthy, liberal rag by my various conservative friends.

It seems like anything to the left of Mussolini gets "shrugged off as a filthy, liberal rag" here in the U.S. It's part of the "framing" side of both major/corporate parties' rightward economic drift -- the media are "liberal," therefore "the truth" must be to the right of the general media line; but the "media are liberal" claim is backed mainly by observations that reporters tend to be liberal, concealing the generally corporate-conservative bent of editorial boards (and the consequent not-so-liberal slant of the resulting "news").

[Francis]

Remember that the Guardian is sometimes known as the Grauniad because of the accuracy of its copy-editing. That said, I consider it the best of the national dailies. And I want to give the Americans who consider the Grauniad treasonous a year's subscription to Private Eye.

[Tonio]

It's part of the "framing" side of both major/corporate parties' rightward economic drift

It's interesting how American politics defines "liberal" and "conservative" more and more according to social issues rather than economic ones - abortion, gay marriage, gun control, illegal immigration. Anyone read Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas"?

[Drak Pope]

It's interesting how American politics defines "liberal" and "conservative" more and more according to social issues rather than economic ones - abortion, gay marriage, gun control, illegal immigration. Anyone read Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas"?

It's not particularly complicated. American liberalism has, in contradiction to traditional European and Asian characterizations, been characterized as being part of the economic Left instead of the economic Right. And every state actor in the country from the years 1945 to 1991 has spent inordinate amounts of money promoting a rabid, dogmatic fear of anything even remotely left of center, to the point where people like Huckabee and Giuliani are considered "right-of-center" instead of "the psycho wingnut theocrat brigade" and people like Obama, Edwards, and Clinton are considered "left-wingers", "ultra-liberals" or occasionally "socialists" even though in any country in Europe they would be seen as centrist or right-of-center. Now, since those terms are in themselves subjective to every country (after all, someone like Huckabee would be considered a crazy liberal in, say, Iran), there's nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but it's something that Europeans should take into account when discussing American politics.

[Jeff]

the only newspaper in the UK which is not owned by a company but by a trust - the Scott Trust

**Sproing!!!** That's my brain rebelling at the thought of Our Scott funding a newspaper like The Guardian (or the Observer)!

[Lucia]

Anyone read Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas"?
Please don't mention Kansas.

(For the benefit of newish readers, the last time Fred mentioned Kansas, in the context of what might be the average Kansan's view of a certain social issue near the beginning of the dictionary, hereinafter That Topic, a grand free-for-all ensued. Since then I have been at pains to avoid any thread dealing with That Topic.)

As far as I can tell, US journalism is dead. Al Franken said that the media aren't biased politically in either direction; they're biased in favor of "news" that 1) is easy to get 2) attracts a lot of readers. 1) eliminates anything that used to be called investigation or analysis: a "story" is a regurgitation of a White House press release, and "balanced reporting" is a story that says "the Democrats said blue, and the Republicans, when asked for comment, said red" (or vice versa). Noting actual facts of the case that support only one side's argument is considered biased reporting. 2) produces a lot of stories involving sex, race, violence, money, and, if at all possible, blonde women.

Supposedly all this is necessary because the public has been trained by TV to have the attention span of a gnat, especially for anything complex like how best to implement universal health care. If budget meetings were made public, would anyone care? If a newspaper carried a thoughtful, reasoned, detailed analysis of how to fix health care, or anything else, for that matter, would more than ten percent of readers read it? I fear we may be past that point.

[Drak Pope]

Perhaps the reason why "the public" appears to have the attention span of a gnat and shows little interest in politics and the truth is because the media thinks as Lucia does and realizes that they can take as many liberties with the truth and with fair and accurate reporting as they can and critics will berate the public instead.

[MikeJ]

"the Democrats said blue, and the Republicans, when asked for comment, said red"

More like, "On a scale of one to ten, Democrats said four point five, Republicans said 10 hundred lebenty gazillion. The truth is surely somewhere in the middle."

[Belisarius]

As we type, cnn.com is headlining some crap about that blonde, white girl who died in Aruba again.

[Technomad]

One thing that I think has driven away a lot of newspaper readers (and this goes for the rest of the mainstream media) is what John Leo calls the "newsroom culture." If I know, in advance, precisely what slant they'll take on any given subject, what's the point of reading much of what they say? I know that they'll scream bloody blue murder about Mathew Shepard while sweeping Jesse Dirkhising under the rug (even though comparable murders of children, without the "gay" angle, got coast-to-coast coverage...)

[Spalanzani]

Lucia: "For the benefit of newish readers, the last time Fred mentioned Kansas, in the context of what might be the average Kansan's view of a certain social issue near the beginning of the dictionary, hereinafter That Topic, a grand free-for-all ensued."

Ah yes, the Great Aardvark Debate. Surely one day we'll be able to find a middle ground that both the Pro-Ant and the Pro-Eater crowds will both agree on. One day...

[Reynard]

"the Democrats said blue, and the Republicans, when asked for comment, said red"

"More like, 'On a scale of one to ten, Democrats said four point five, Republicans said 10 hundred lebenty gazillion. The truth is surely somewhere in the middle.'"

No, more like "the Democrats said blue, and the Republicans, when asked for comment, said RED!!! REDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDRED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BLUE SUX!!!DEMOCRATS SUCK!!! REDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDREDRED!!!"

[Mark]

I will just say that I will never even touch, much less read, an American newspaper ever again. The pure laziness and stupiditiy that Fred cites is only the tip of problem.

Of course I live in a town with two shitty newspapers and one, the Chicago Tribune, that is a pioneer in shittiness.

[Andrew Brown]

The grauniad signs my paycheck, so all this praise is gratifying. I wish Fred would write for us, though. On the other hand, looked at from the inside, it is actually two papers, like chocolate wafer biscuit. There is a wrapper of fairly hard news and thought around a lot of gooey nonsense and the paper divides quite clearly internally along those lines.

What's really frustrating is that American newspapers, even while they whinge about hard times, have so much more money, and so much more staff than we do; and so much less pressure to do things wrong because they are in a hurry. The reason for the decline of most of the British press in the last thirty years is perfectly simple. Journalists, even good ones, are expected to produce three times as much copy as they were in the mid Eighties and it is simply impossible to check things out, or to think, under such circumstances. When I worked on the Independent, at its nadir in the mid-nineties, we had a joke: "One phone call is a news story; two is a feature; three is an in depth investigation" but nowadays you would change that to read "one press release ..."

[Turcano]

As far as I can tell, US journalism is dead. Al Franken said that the media aren't biased politically in either direction; they're biased in favor of "news" that 1) is easy to get 2) attracts a lot of readers. 1) eliminates anything that used to be called investigation or analysis: a "story" is a regurgitation of a White House press release, and "balanced reporting" is a story that says "the Democrats said blue, and the Republicans, when asked for comment, said red" (or vice versa). Noting actual facts of the case that support only one side's argument is considered biased reporting. 2) produces a lot of stories involving sex, race, violence, money, and, if at all possible, blonde women.

There are still some bastions of good journalism, but it's pretty much limited to Public Broadcasting. These include The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (which does have some of the problems of other US journalism but is better than most), NOW and other programs affiliated with Bill Moyers (which are roundly derided by conservatives), and Frontline (which seems to be well-regarded by almost everyone).

[bad Jim]

When I started reading the Guardian on a regular basis, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, it seemed startlingly leftist at first. It really isn't, and I can't think what gave me that impression. FWIW, both my home papers, the L.A. Times and the O.C. Register, opposed the war.

I don't read it often anymore, perhaps because my attention has been drawn to national issues, perhaps because the perspective it offers is available from my daily weblog gleanings, perhaps because I opened one too many opinion pieces with Labour Party inside baseball.

A few years ago I was in London and was lucky enough to get a ticket to the world premiere of the opera "1984", music by Lorin Maazel. I liked it, I thought the rest of the audience liked it, but the next day the Guardian savaged it, calling it an exercise in vanity. The following Sunday the (cousin publication?) Observer said much the same. Nevertheless, it's being performed at La Scala this season.

(My local papers review performances two days later; I was impressed that the Guardian had its review in print the next day. Perhaps I should wonder if its reviewer stayed past the intermission.)

[OneFatEnglishman]

As the nephew of a fairly prominent British theatre critic, who occasionally accompanied him to first nights, let me assure bad Jim that the reviewer certainly stayed to the end. I have watched these people in action, and back in the 60s it used to go like this:

The critics would have done their homework on the production in advance, and would read the programme carefully before the curtain went up. They would take a seat as near the aisle as they could. During the interval they would not go to the bar, but make notes. As soon as the curtain fell, they would walk smartly out of the auditorium while everybody else was still applauding and, as soon as they reached they foyer, would run like the clappers for the bank of pay phones to be found there. They rang their paper, where a subeditor was waiting for their call, and - this is the impressive bit - dictate their copy word perfect, to a precise word count and including heads, down the line. This then usually gave the production people at the paper about an hour to set it in time for the London editions.

In about 1980 his paper gave my uncle the first laptop I ever saw, a dedicated word processor with a telephone modem. After that there was no holding him back.

[Tonio]

There are still some bastions of good journalism, but it's pretty much limited to Public Broadcasting. These include The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (which does have some of the problems of other US journalism but is better than most), NOW and other programs affiliated with Bill Moyers (which are roundly derided by conservatives), and Frontline (which seems to be well-regarded by almost everyone).

It's interesting that you critique TV journalism as opposed to print journalism. These are two different creatures. I favor print journalism because I generally get more detail and I can absorb the information at my own pace. With TV, the viewer is held hostage to the pace of the editing. The message has an emotional content not usually found in the written word, partly from the images and partly from the inflections of the speaker, and that emotional context can distort or even contradict the factual information. I can't watch Fox News for more than a minute, and not just because of the more blatant bias. It's because the inflections and editing and background music are reminiscent of trailers for doomsday films.

I was never a big watcher of TV news growing up. In the decade or so before 9/11, the medium was dominated by tawdry, sordid drams (Kerrigan/Harding, Fisher/Buttafuoco) and damsels in distress (Levy, Peterson). It's interesting that the OJ and JonBenet Ramsey stories had elements of both types. Often the male reporters on these stories seem to view themselves as rescuers. Susan Faludi has an interesting theory about why the damsels are almost always white, involving colonial-era conflicts with Native Americans.

[inge]

bad Jim,
My rule of thumb: Never trust the critics writing for a respectable newspaper. They are not on the same planet as anyone else. If they ever actually like something, the critique is either full of justifications aiming to proof to their peers that they are cool despite liking that piece of dreck, or whatever they are criticising is so "out there" you'd have a hard time to see it with the Hubble telescope.

[MikhailBorg]

There was a movie reviewer in my hometown paper with aspirations to become a Big Name Critic. Notably, he hated science-fiction and fantasy films so much that the worse review he gave a genre flick, the more we knew we had to go see it.

I think his brain finally imploded with Star Trek: First Contact, which even the Art types rather enjoyed. He's no longer with the paper, that's all I know.

[Tonio]

I see a difference between reviewers and critics. Reviewers skim the surface, usually accurately, but with little understanding of movie history or subtext. Reviewers often use bad movies as opportunities to exercise their wit, and I can't blame them. Critics use bad movies to talk about larger issues such as artistic failure, especially when the movies were made with serious aspirations. My personal favorite, Pauline Kael, belongs in the latter category. Her landmark piece "On the Future of Movies" is brilliant. I still like her idea of top directors forming cooperatives to finance and distribute their movies, bypassing the studios entirely.

[Robb]

I can't watch Fox News for more than a minute, and not just because of the more blatant bias. It's because the inflections and editing and background music are reminiscent of trailers for doomsday films.

Amen to that! The only "mainstream" newsmedia I regularly subscribe to is NPR, and it's primarily because it's the opposite of Fox: calm voices, relatively muted emotions, serious but not melodramatic or laden with faux-gravitas. There's an extent to which I don't care what they're talking about, rather that they way they present their topics encourages further thought & discussion, as opposed to trying to jam a soundbyte & opinion combo down your throat.

I actually like my local paper, because for all it's faults, it's pretty good at focusing on local news, and doesn't pretend it's any more than that. It's dry, though (partly because this is a relatively boring part of the country, newswise), and whenever I run across a print edition (rare), I'm always annoyed to see how much of it is advertising.

*****

I should note that we also have some excellent reporters who actually report while working our police beat -- leaving the building and everything.

They don't make lots of phone calls? Tell me they're at least leaving the building to meet with MLOs in exotic locations.

[Monkay]

Searching 'Guardian' will show that there are a lot of papers out there called something Guardian or Guardian something (also a band!). I went through Scott Trust/Guardian and this is the url:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

[Tonio]

Robb, I absolutely agree about NPR. Despite the claims of conservatives, the true left-wing equivalent of Fox News is not NPR but "Democracy Now" on Pacifica. It makes a decent attempt at advocacy journalism, but Amy Goodman ruins it with her strident tone.

[Jim]

Of course I live in a town with two shitty newspapers and one, the Chicago Tribune, that is a pioneer in shittiness.

Oooh, Oooh. You're forgetting, we now have a third shitty daily newspaper in Chicago: Redeye! (I'm sure I screwed the capitalization up there.) The Tribune publishes it in an apparent attempt to make sure that it is never again mistaken for a respectable newspaper. (I happen to think it was OK for a short while, back when Royko was writing for it, and it still does some good investigative reporting once in a while.)

[Jim]

I can't watch Fox News for more than a minute, and not just because of the more blatant bias. It's because the inflections and editing and background music are reminiscent of trailers for doomsday films.

I watch Faux News sometimes for the unintended humor quotient. I'm rarely disappointed. My favorite example is the time they were reporting on some statement made by al-Qaeda-in-Iraq and, rather than simply (i) trust their viewers to take the statement with several large bags of road salt or (ii) trust the Bush Administration to competently counter the statement (OK, bad example), they felt they needed to rebut it themselves, beginning with the statement "This is ridiculous because..."

[Geds]

You're forgetting, we now have a third shitty daily newspaper in Chicago: Redeye!

It's hard to forget something that no one wants to acknowledge...

I remember a few months back Fred wrote a disparaging entry about the intent behind his paper's version of Redeye. Every time I see that commercial that basically says, "Hey, if you're dumb and hungover, you'll love Redeye!" I can't help but recall Fred's thoughts on the stupidity of the whole thing.

The Daily Southtown and the Daily Herald still manage to not entirely suck though. But that's only for local stuff.

And, to be fair, the Trib did do some excellent work exposing the underhanded deals with Indiana allowing BP to break all of the environmental regulations to build that new facility on Lake Michigan over the summer. They didn't even pull a, "Won't somebody think of the children!" sort of panic in article that exposed it and simply laid out why it should be stopped and the possible environmental disaster from ammonia and mercury. Hell, I cited the article when a massively self-assured friend of mine tried to shrug it all off as overblown hippie tree hugger B.S. and he shut up about it pretty quickly.

[Ian]

If you want good opinion and commentary in North America you go to the blogs. Blogging doesn't usually help alleviate the scarcity of investigative reporting, of course, but it is the only respect I can think of in which reporting has improved in the past twenty years. Thanks Fred.

[Ken]

Wait for the official to give the official word. The official will tell you what the news is and you can write it down. But be sure to use proper spelling and grammar -- you're a professional journalist, after all.

That remind you of anyone named "Buck Cameron, GIRAT"?

[McJulie]

Robb, I absolutely agree about NPR. Despite the claims of conservatives, the true left-wing equivalent of Fox News is not NPR but "Democracy Now" on Pacifica. It makes a decent attempt at advocacy journalism, but Amy Goodman ruins it with her strident tone.

Gotta stand up for Amy Goodman here.

I would describe her as "way more hard core than I would be," but I flinch mightily whenever an opinionated woman is described as "strident." Also, that is her deal -- the deal of being absolutely uncompromising on any topic, even to the point of getting almost killed in East Timor. I think we sometimes need that voice, that no-compromise voice.

And... GOOD LORD, THE EQUIVALENT OF FOX NEWS? No, no, a thousand times no. Amy Goodman does not hide her biases under disingenuous slogans like "fair and balanced." Her opinions and biases are stated openly and obviously.

Also, she doesn't report factually untrue things. She doesn't use slippery pseudo-factual constructions like "some say" and then her own opinion. Etc. She reports true things with a strong bias toward what she considers worth reporting (the "war and peace report" part of the show). She has strong opinions which come through very clearly during the interview portion of the show.

There *is* no left-wing Fox News. There is no left-wing Rush Limbaugh. There is no left-wing Ann Coulter. In current American society, the left and the right are not equal and opposite, balanced opposing forces. The mental trap of thinking that must be the case has led to a lot of blatant misrepresentation of both the left and the right over the past... well, more than ten years.

[Jim]

I remember a few months back Fred wrote a disparaging entry about the intent behind his paper's version of Redeye.

I just read that entry. Fred's description of his paper's Yoof edition sounds a lot like Redeye/RedEye/RedEye!

RedEye! seems to be written for a young professional who has just moved to Chicago and has no concerns more urgent than where to drink after work. The answer seems to be the V_____ Triangle (damn you, anti-spam filter!), which as the name suggests, seems to be more the perception of the (older male) people who run newspapers of where the kids go, as opposed to where they actually go.

In addition to providing listings of tired, cookie-cutter nightspots, it also covers celebrity news, impersonating the world's dullest tabloid. Honestly, if they want to cover that crap, they should read the Post and at least see how it can be entertaining.

[Ken]

Back to a point raised in the original post, regarding news organizations blogging their news meetings: The Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review has been blogging its news meetings since May 2005 here:
http://spokesmanreview.com/blogs/briefing/

and has been webcasting those meetings since 2006.

[Tonio]

I would describe her as "way more hard core than I would be," but I flinch mightily whenever an opinionated woman is described as "strident." Also, that is her deal -- the deal of being absolutely uncompromising on any topic, even to the point of getting almost killed in East Timor. I think we sometimes need that voice, that no-compromise voice.

Thanks for the information about her career. I should clarify my use of "strident." I wasn't referring to her words or opinions or her journalistic abilities, which I don't question. I was referring solely to her tone of voice, her inflections. I have the same reaction to Bill O'Reilly, whose tone is that of arrogant smugness no matter what he is saying. I would have the same reaction to Goodman and O'Reilly if they were reading from technical manuals. Similarly, if their newscasts were read by Paula Zahn and Charles Kuralt, I would find them much more listenable.

And... GOOD LORD, THE EQUIVALENT OF FOX NEWS? No, no, a thousand times no. Amy Goodman does not hide her biases under disingenuous slogans like "fair and balanced." Her opinions and biases are stated openly and obviously.

Again, I was talking about the tone of the presentation, not the content. I'm saying that Goodman's voice and Fox News' doomsday-movie-trailer tone bring out the same reaction.

If one took their copy and had, say, Paula Zahn and Charles Kuralt read

[Tonio]

Oops, I left an extra uncompleted sentence at the end of my post.

[LL]

My local paper (Dallas Morning News) does a pretty good job with long-form stories. Mostly these are in the Sunday edition. They frequently do multi-part stories that appear over a number of days. A good one was about the jury system in Dallas county, how many people don't bother to show, why they don't, etc. They're had quite a few others, they're informative and tell me stuff I actually don't already know and would like to. Their economic stories are OK, fairly informative, though I get most of my financial news from the WSJ (our office gets it for no charge). If I want to know how the Dallas city govt is doing, I have to go to the free weekly, The Dallas Observer. DMN does not have much to say about the city govt other than how great and awesome those unbelievably expensive bridges are going to be. I don't watch any cable TV news. Watch local news only for weather and traffic.

Younger people just don't want to read the newspaper. And the people who still do are dying off (literally). I don't have any answers. I'd hate for newspapers to go away entirely. The minimal format changes (fonts, colors!, etc.) aren't gonna help. Personally, if newspapers want to free up some space that is now being wasted, I'd say ditch the editorial page (seriously, I don't need the editors or nationally syndicated columnists to tell me what to think) and the letters to the editor (because I don't really care what the other readers think). That would be two full pages of the DMN every day freed up for actual useful information. They'd probably fill it with ads, though.

[Robb]

I wouldn't go so far as to say Democracy Now! the equivalent of Fox News, but Goodman is rather harsh in her presentation. I always appreciate those that make their biases known, but Democracy Now is just not something I want to watch (reading transcripts I can do).

There is no left-wing Rush Limbaugh. There is no left-wing Ann Coulter.

I dunno, Bill Maher seems to be only slightly less full of bullshit than either of them at their best, and Rolling Stone (and to a lesser extent, MoveOn.org) can come on pretty strong with the whole "Conservatives will Destroy all your freedom and make everyone go to War!" But it's also an issue of message: Limbaugh, may he die gaspingly of an oxycodone overdose, is a gloom & doom pessimist, who doesn't really have a lot to look forward to. His message is mostly about inciting fear & anger in his audience. There certainly are a lot of leftist commentators that are mighty spouters of vitriol, but it's much more a chacteristic of the Reich Right-leaning media monkeys (with their junky-junkies).

*****

And suddenly out of nowhere, it was back:

...but Amy Goodman ruins it with her strident pants.

[Jenny Islander]

There are still some bastions of good journalism, but it's pretty much limited to Public Broadcasting. These include The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (which does have some of the problems of other US journalism but is better than most), NOW and other programs affiliated with Bill Moyers (which are roundly derided by conservatives), and Frontline (which seems to be well-regarded by almost everyone).

My husband and I used to watch CNN before it lobotomized itself some years back; now we read MSN, but check our facts with NPR and PBS. We both respected Monitoradio back when our station carried it; has anybody heard it recently?

My local paper is actually quite good even though it's been bought out by some megaconglomerate. The local team inserts the requisite number of predigested, slightly outdated national stories, but fills in the rest with local headlines and interesting columns. There's a guy who writes two or three pieces a week about the old-timers in the community, getting them to tell fascinating stories about the Old Days; then there's the park ranger who does a nature column and the master gardener who is all about locavorism and the reporter who walks through the harbor once a week asking a particular question of everybody she meets ("Talk of the Docks") and the very meaty commercial fisheries page and the excellent photographer and so on. I guess I'm lucky.

[Jim]

here is no left-wing Rush Limbaugh. There is no left-wing Ann Coulter.

I dunno, Bill Maher seems to be only slightly less full of bullshit than either of them at their best, and Rolling Stone (and to a lesser extent, MoveOn.org) can come on pretty strong with the whole "Conservatives will Destroy all your freedom and make everyone go to War!"

But I think it is important to realize that, even though there are some left-wingers out there (Maher, Al Franken, Michael Moore), whose hate-on for Bush and Republicans in general (I mean, I doubt Bush is responsible for everything bad that happens in the world.) makes them sound deranged, none of them have the status within the Democratic Party that Rush has with Republicans. In 2000, Bill Kristol credited Limbaugh with pretty much single-handedly creating the notion that W. was the conservative candidate and McCain was a Republican in Name Only. Considering that Bush's signature issue was education and he was proposing to drastically expand the federal government's role in it, his claim to the conservative mantle was far from obvious. Nevertheless, the dittoheads credulously bought into the crap Limbaugh was selling.

There is no one person or organization with comparable influence in the Democratic Party. The liberal blogosphere in general is influential, but that's a category, rather than a single entity.

[Jim]

...but Amy Goodman ruins it with her strident pants.

Hmmm, I don't know what strident pants are, but I suspect I would like a reporter who wore them. But, since Pacifica is on the radio, how do you even know she's wearing pants at all?

[Bugmaster]

There's a guy who writes two or three pieces a week about the old-timers in the community, getting them to tell fascinating stories about the Old Days; then there's the park ranger who does a nature column and the master gardener who is all about locavorism and the reporter who walks through the harbor once a week asking a particular question of everybody she meets...

I guess I'm jaded, but, from my perspective, this isn't a newspaper -- it's a hobby magazine or some other periodical, focusing on local history and culture. There's absolutely a need for such publications, but they're performing a different service.

When I read the newspaper, I want to see an investigation into the mayor's budget (and any unexpected disappearance of parts thereof). I want to know if increased education spending has had any effect on local colleges. I want to follow a reporter as he drills deeper and deeper into the chain of shell corporations which is ultimately responsible for polluting my river. And I also want to know what is happening in the world, right now, and how it's likely to affect me in my hometown, throughout the coming months.

Stories from charming old folks about the good old days are fun, and perhaps even educational, but they're not news. Nowadays, I get my news from Slashdot, Google News, and The Daily Show... Newspapers don't really print news anymore, as far as I can tell -- just "human interest" pieces and corporate press releases.