Journalism: Mindset, profession or citizenship?

Some links for a possible class discussion...

Salon's Glenn Greenwald goes after Washington Post columnist David Brooks for being part of an "inside the Beltway" cultural mindset that makes the press less of a critical fourth estate.

"... One of the most predominant attributes of the contemporary Beltway journalist: Because they are integral members of the Washington establishment, rather than watchdogs over it, they are incapable of finding fault with political power and they thus reflexively defend it and want it to remain unchanged."

Greenwald, Bill Moyers and Jay Rosen discussed the same issue last week on Bill Moyers' Journal, now available as transcript, podcast or video stream. Rosen got in the last word, emphasizing the two-way Web:

"It's just as good at enabling us to send messages to them as it is for them to tell us. And I think what people have to do is remember the internet runs two ways, and to use it to tell Washington what to do."

Meanwhile, Dave Winer at Scripting.com started an interesting discussion of participatory journalism, under the heading One more time--open the news industry!

Says Dave, a longtime two-way Web writer:

"I want to be a reporter, but a new kind of reporter. Instead of one of the few, I want to be one of the millions. And I want technology to find a way to do what reporters of the 20th century used to do, to organize all the information from what they used to call 'sources' into reports that people like you and me can read and think about and discuss."

What's to become of newspapers? The debate goes on

Battle Plans for Newspapers is the current topic in the "Room for Debate Blog" at NYTimes.com, starting with the blunt statement that, "In some cities, midsized metropolitan papers may not survive to year’s end."

The question is: "What survival strategies should these dailies adopt? If some papers don’t survive, how will readers get news about the local school board or county executive?"

The voices starting the "debate" are listed below, but the blog is open for comments and there were 184 of them when I started reading. The last one was "WOW!! There are many wonderful, insightful comments here. Read them all folks. These are not your usual pablum. Read on!!" I agree.

* Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia Journalism School
* Joel Kramer, editor of MinnPost.com
* Steven Brill, founder of The American Lawyer magazine
* Geneva Overholser, Annenberg School of Journalism
* Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist.org
* Andrew Keen, author
* Edward M. Fouhy, founding editor of Stateline.org
* Rick Rodriguez, former editor of The Sacramento Bee

Lemann's first comment is "In many cities, newspaper readers are already seeing a much thinner, less complete paper than the one they used to read a few years ago."

Coincidentally, this week our local daily, The Roanoke Times, began consolidating sections, but editor Carole Tarrant said, "We don't expect this reformatting of the paper to result in a considerable reduction in the news we deliver, particularly local news. We realize that many of you look to us, foremost, for our daily community coverage. We appreciate that you value the work of our 100-plus journalists who report on and explain the significance of news happening in Southwest Virginia."

In its first 48 hours online, Tarrant's blog had comments from just two readers, both suggesting that the paper is too liberal, and one of them complaining of the paper's November price increase. (The daily paper jumped to 75 cents from 50 cents; the Sunday edition rose $1.75 from $1.50.)

Advice to journalism job-hunters

The folks at NewsLab have posted a nice collection of short interviews with people who hire young journalists (or would like to) at places ranging from local television stations to the Washington Post.

NewsLab Resources: Job Hunting

Key phrases: "know the current media landscape," be prepared with "journalism-plus," "be tech savvy," "learn Spanish and HTML," "be able to shoot video better than the standard wedding video," and "The written word is still the most important thing."

Jim Meskauskas at MediaPost has an essay on why he reads magazines as well as being an inveterate online newspaper reader...

"Part of living successfully in a democracy is being exposed to the people and things that share your world even if they don't share your views. Reading through a magazine is like riding the subway: You eventually get where you wanted to go, but you get there by going through where you aren't headed while sitting next to people you don't know. You see, hear and smell things that you may not have chosen if left to your own devices, but you still end up where you wanted to be. Only now, you have at least passing familiarity with people and things you didn't before."

MediaPost Publications The Biz: A Paean to Print 01/27/2009

Folksongs and singers in the news

A folksong-savvy friend in Boston alerted me to this month's stories about William Zantzinger, just as I was about to talk about oral traditions in news reporting in my Media History class. Here's the link he provided and a few more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/us/10zantzinger.html

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/01/26/090126ta_talk_simon



http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/slant/2004/11/10_200.html

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/hattie-carroll.html

http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/lonesome-death-hattie-carroll

http://www.peteseeger.net/Brdside1.htm

Since my search brought me to Pete Seeger's site for an old issue of Broadside, the 1960s folksong magazine, I can't avoid pointing out Pete's most recent performance.

YouTube had taken one copy of a video of that song offline, so I went looking for alternatives. This one is still there via video.aol.com, but not high quality. Is that from an international station's copy of the HBO footage? Does HBO have a free "official" copy? Is this "not currently available" notice all there is?

Aha... found it. There are some official clips posted on YouTube by "Inauguration," and Pete and Bruce are there with "This Land is Your Land" (followed by Beyonce doing "America the Beautiful") in the final ten minutes of this two-hour coverage: We Are One: Opening Inaugural Ceremonies at the Lincoln Memorial.



But I've come in late on this controversy. We may have to come back to this for discussion of private property and copyright law... or maybe that's a whole other course. Come to think of it, maybe that Dylan video is a copyright violation that YouTube will be "taking down" sometime.

Ribs, river-view and environmental journalism education

The East Tennessee chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, right on the front lines of the TVA coal-ash spill story, will have a mini-conference about environmental journalism Friday, March 27, 2009.

Location: the banquet hall above Calhoun’s on the River -- The Tennessee River, not the one the ash dumped into.

"The day-long conference will address many of the difficulties journalists face when covering the environmental beat such as understanding and translating legal, technical and scientific issues; finding sources; using different angles and approaches; dealing with ethical problems; packaging stories for today’s media market, and more.
"The objective is to prepare present and future journalists to handle the massive amount of information related to environmental topics."

East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists Environmental Journalism Conference

Wikipedia raises warning flag

After the latest high-profile cases of wiki-editing abuse, "Wikipedia May Restrict Public’s Ability to Change Entries," the Times says.

The user-edited encyclopedia has tightened things up in the past, notably after what it called the Seigenthaler incident.

Coincidentally, the names of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy came up that time; this time their younger brother is involved:

Kennedy, Byrd the Latest Victims of Wikipedia Errors

(If you want to keep watch for further abuse, or check the "history" of Senator Kennedy's page, here it is: Senator Kennedy's Wikipedia page)

For a demo of how drastically a Wikipedia page can change over time, see Jon Udell's webcast analysis of the Heavy Metal Umlaut page -- and here's the current metal umlaut page, which has lost the word "heavy" over the years.