Imagining Hartford without its daily

Even though my media history class was discussing "What 'missing the newspaper' means," I missed David Folkenflik's NPR piece last month that used my alma mater, The Hartford Courant, as a "what if?" example of just that topic. I'm glad I stumbled on it today. And, thanks to NPR's use of the Web, a transcript and the original audio are online...

See Imagining A City Without Its Daily Newspaper. As Folkenflik mentions, the Courant is the nation's oldest continuously published newspaper, as well as being the main source of news in the capital city of one of the wealthiest states in the union.

Here's one telling scene:

"In the State House press room, unopened mail was piled high on the desk set aside for The New York Times on a recent day. The Times stopped covering Hartford altogether last year. Some in-state dailies no longer send reporters either. The retreat by other news organizations makes even the diminished Courant more relevant than ever."

Folkenflik's follow-up story discusses the nonprofit model for newspapers, and one of his examples is another Connecticut publication, the online-only New Haven Independent, started a few years ago by former newspaperman Paul Bass.

Note: "What 'Missing the newspaper' means" is a classic study by Bernard Berelson, conducted during a newspaper delivery strike in New York City more than 50 years ago. For a good summary, and a follow-up, see "No newspaper is no fun--even five decades later," by my friend Clyde Bentley.

Related stories:

• The New Hybrids: Why the debate about financing journalism misses the point (Slate)
• As cities go from two newspapers to one, talk of zero (NYTimes)
• Yesterday's links here
  

Growing a new forest of news while dead-tree media fall

Seeing a new media ecology

My headline takes some liberties with Stephen Berlin Johnson's ecological metaphor for the current transition in the reporting and delivery of news, but I recommend his essay, one of several good ones this week on saving the news or finding a sustainable model for civic or public affairs journalism. Johnson's discussion leads to his information flowchart at the right.

For more about the trend in newspapers going online-mostly, online-only or out of business, see these:

• NPR: Chronicling the death of American newspapers
  
• Seattle Post Intelligencer
• Christian Science Monitor
• Rocky Mountain News
  

Johnson's thoughts came out of the much-blogged-about South by Southwest (sxsw) conference, while a panel discussion on the future of The San Francisco Chronicle -- and local news reporting -- inspired Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg and blogger Dave Winer to write equally thoughtful essays, each finding some room for optimism -- if not about newspapers, about the future of news itself.

(Also see Rosenberg on journalism schools, and Clay Shirky's piece I mentioned a few days ago.)

Learning from history: Saving journalism, not newspapers

As part of this essay, Clay Shirky goes back to Gutenberg to analyze what happens in a communication revolution: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

Among his conclusions:

"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
"When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work."

There's a lot more in his essay, which I'm going to assign to media history students and to students looking for journalism careers.

Who's Clay? See his home page

Footnote: I had a sense of deja vu after writing that headline... See Saving journalism may not mean saving newspapers from December 2004.

Newspaper's story of coal country health care project wins video journalism award

A Washington Post report about Southwest Virginia has won an international video journalism award. Titled "The Healing Fields," the story by Alexandra Garcia took first place in the Concentra Award competition, which concluded last week at the DNA2009 conference in Brussels.

Garcia told the story of the Remote Area Medical volunteer corps, which brings more than 800 doctors, dentists, nurses and other health-care workers to Wise County Fairgrounds in July to offer free treatment to those who cannot afford it -- treating more than 2,600 patients in three days.

The two-part video originally accompanied Hidden Hurt, a Washington Post Magazine story by Mary Otto, subtitled "Desperate for medical care, the uninsured flock by the hundreds to a remote corner of Virginia for the chance to see a doctor."

The Concentra Award is sponsored by Avid and Panasonic. Its stated goal is to promote healthy competition in television news, and "to stimulate journalists to film and edit their own pieces, so they master the entire production process themselves." The Concentra Web site includes videos of winners and nominees for this year and the three preceding years.

In addition to Garcia's winning entry, two more of this year's eight finalists were from the Post, the work of Emmy award-winning video journalist Travis Fox. The competition is international, with entries from the BBC, Al Jazeera, and producers in Canada, Belgium, Germany, Norway and more -- all provided in English or with subtitles.

Radford University makes the Times, the Post & more

The folks in the RU public relations office have two reasons to celebrate -- not only did the school's basketball team score its way into the NCAA tournament, the university's RU Facts Web page scored a link at nytimes.com... Well, a nytimes.com sports blog, at least:

Little Ol’ Radford’s Big Man - The Quad Blog - NYTimes.com:

"Radford students skipped spring break to hang around campus for the weekend. With good reason. The Highlanders clinched an N.C.A.A. tournament bid on Saturday by wiping out a 13-0 deficit and coming back to defeat Virginia Military Institute, 108-94, for the Big South Conference title."

RU's President Penelope Kyle didn't make the New York Times, but she was the lead of Aaron McFarling's story in the Roanoke Times: What a reward for those who stuck around. Let's Dance!

RADFORD--The university president held out her right arm and swept her hand across the front of her body -- past the student revelers on the court, past the team in its championship T-shirts and hats, past the second-year coach engulfed by well-wishers, past the fans still in the stands applauding and reluctant to go.
"Look at those students," Radford University President Penelope Kyle said. "They did not go on spring break. Some of these students have been out of class since Thursday. We asked them to stay and support the team.
"And look at them. They did."

Senior guard Kenny Thomas won the most-quotable lottery, though, with everyone using his line, "Finally, Radford isn't little ol' Radford for once."

There's nothing like March Madness to shine a spotlight on a college. USA Today used the AP wire right after the game, but came back on March 12 with a comprehensive story of its own, headlined Season of wonder at Radford, along with two good photos and an info box about the school. ("Radford is the first men's or women's team in Big South history to improve from seventh place one year to regular-season champ the next.")

In case any of my news writing students missed the stories (Hah!), I'll save them a few links here. Among other things, they'll see how the AP story was used:

• The Tartan
• WSLS: '98 run helped enrollment
  
• Richmond Times-Dispatch
• The News & Advance
  
• Roanoke Times #2
• Roanoke Times #3
• The Sports Network
• ESPN
• Bloomberg
  
• Sports Illustrated/CNN (AP)
  
• USA Today (AP)
  
• Fox Sports (AP)
• Washington Post (AP)

Coincidentally, the game wasn't the only thing that put Radford in the Washington Post over the weekend. Sunday's paper carried a column headed "Second Class Citizens in Virginia," which had nothing to do with the game -- it was a wrapup on the legislature's decision not to solve the confusion over student voting rights, with Radford as a key example.

Business journalism and lines it sometimes blurs

Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Journalism Review provides a Jon Stewart clip with his column, The Daily Show Eviscerates Santelli and CNBC:

"But what makes this so interesting is what Stewart does to pierce the CNBC bubble on several different things that make the network so disliked by business journalists generally:
"Its lack of a line between opinion and reporting (and lack of disclosure about who’s a reporter and who’s not). Its Siamese-twin closeness to Wall Street. Its rah-rah rooting for the stock markets. Its inanity in interviews that too often veers into sycophancy.
"On the other hand, if there is a discomfort among the business reporters with CNBC, it might be because the network’s bad practices are only extreme manifestations of wider cultural problems in their profession.

USA Today's report on the same Stewart episode has drawn more than 80 comments already.

New York Times business columist Joe Nocera, who was also on the show, posted a clip of his own interview, but the discussion thread includes both segments.

"You should be a financial columnist. You've got the whole thing figured out," Nocera says to Stewart... then catches himself using Stewart's analytical language, referring to the financial industry's "crappy loans." He also joked that Stewart's analysis of the financial industry would give him his Saturday column.

So here's Nocera's Saturday column, actually not based on the Stewart interview, but focused on G.E., which (coincidentally?) owns CNBC. I'll recommend it to my students when we talk about thorough business journalism, versus the kind that blurs those lines between billionaire-celebrity-chat, opinion pieces and real "You're mother says she loves you, but check it out" reporting.

(Students also might be interested in discussing the interplay between Nocera's blog at nytimes.com and his column in The New York Times.)

Look who's talking... anonymously

Just a day after my introductory news writing class started asking questions about "anonymous sources," Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald has a column titled "The casual, corrupting use of anonymity for political officials."

Greenwald includes links to official policies at The New York Times and Washington Post that set reporters' ground rules for granting anonymity to news sources -- and points out widespread violation of those rules by the Washington press corps, under both the Bush and Obama administrations. He gives examples of columnists quoting "people at the White House" on issues of policy and intention, but without naming anyone who might be held accountable for those statements in the future. Says Greenwald:

This practice was so widely abused during the Bush presidency that journalists and their news organizations engaged in all kinds of tortured public discussions -- and even promulgated guidelines for the proper use of anonymity -- all of which, since then, have been almost entirely ignored.

There are, of course, narrow circumstances in which anonymity is not only justifiable but crucial -- namely, when whistle-blowing government officials risk their jobs or even careers to divulge damaging information that the Government wants to hide -- but that obviously isn't how anonymity is being used in the vast majority of cases by Beltway journalists, such as those documented here.

Instead, anonymity is now eagerly granted to any government official the minute they ask for it -- even when they are doing nothing but spouting the official, pro-administration line -- by journalists eager to be chosen as the White House's anointed message-carrier and who are therefore willing to agree to any conditions imposed by the White House in exchange for that "honor."

I encourage students to read the whole column -- and follow the links to the newspapers' policy statements, the I.F. Stone archives and the Nieman Watchdog site.

Times Policy | Post Policy | Roanoke Times Policy