Unjournalism

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A recent Wall Street Journal article attempts to explain to old people how sites like Digg, Reddit and Newsvine work. It’s really a very good article — a great effort by a big, old, traditional media outlet to cover some of this wild stuff you crazy kids are up to on the Interwebs.

The Journal’s tireless reporters explain their process for identifying the top influencers at these sites:

To find the key influencers, The Wall Street Journal analyzed more than 25,000 submissions across six major sites. With the help of Dapper, a company that designs software to track information published on the Web, this analysis sifted through snapshots of the sites’ home pages every 30 minutes over three weeks. The data included which users posted the submissions and the number of votes each received from fellow users. We then contacted scores of individual users to find which ones are tracked by the wider community.

OK. So you worked your ass off. Good for you. But maybe you could have pulled your heads out of your stuffy Manhattan orifices…sorry, offices… for a second and recognized that you didn’t really need to do all that work. Digg used to post its top users — no research necessary! — on its site, but even after it took the list down, ten seconds of Google delivers the “key influencers.” Reddit? Same deal, but it still has its own stuff on its own site.

Way easier than sorting through 25,000 pieces of captured data. Noble effort, Jamin Warren and John Jurgensen, but if you tried getting in touch with what you’re writing about first, you would have found the info you wanted — fast and free — on the Interwebs.

Tags: journalism by Mike Keliher
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A good article from the New York Times attempts to explain this absurd process of presidential candidates-in-the-making first pre-announcing, then officially announcing and then otherwise making news about their declared candidacies.

The obvious answer: The politicians do it because the media eat it up. Great opportunities at free publicity for lesser-known candidates and even more of the same for people like John McCain and Barack Obama.

Here’s the part that bothers me, though: This article’s reporter spoke to Elizabeth Wilner, the political director for NBC, presumably overseeing all of the network’s (and MSNBC’s, too, maybe) news coverage of anything related to these candidates.

From the article:

“Candidates stretch out the announcements because they can,” [Wilner] said.

Twenty-four-hour cable and Internet saturation, Ms. Wilner said, “means there will always be someone waiting to report on every infinitesimal word change relating to their candidate status.”

Just because it’s easy to get a story out of each and every little hiccup about an “exploratory committee” and each time Senator Clinton says a word that rhymes with “candidacy,” that doesn’t mean these news outlets should be reporting on it. And let’s stamp out one of the arguments in their defense right now: Raise your hand if you give a shit about Sam Brownback’s exploratory committee. Anyone? Bueller?

When a candidate hold a press conference or some other event to say, in front of an audience of people who care, then let the cable news anchors ask their “political analysts” about the significance of this announcement. When Evan Bayh forms an exploratory committee, leave that for page A12 of the newspapers — it sure as hell doesn’t warrant the amount of coverage things like this have been getting lately. (The Times article reminds us that Bayh formed an exploratory committee in December, “only to announce a few weeks later that he was not running.”)

News folk: Just because you can get a few minutes or a few hundred words out of something, doesn’t mean you should. For those of you who went to journalism school — or just plain know how to do your job well — you should understand that a big part of your job is news judgement. Figure out what’s important, and tell the people what happened and why it’s worthy of their time to listen to or read about.

On a similar note, I’m sick to death of hearing about Anna Nicole Smith. Some brilliant son of a bitch on MSNBC today — I wish I could remember who — put it best: An MSNBC anchor (who was all too willing to head into “Casual Land” and jump right over the wall separating journalism’s church from its state) asked this guy if the news media are paying too much attention to the Anna Nicole Smith story. After all, she said, the media are supposed to serve the public interest and so on, but really, “we’re a business, too.”

This guy — god bless him — says (and I quote from memory, so excuse slight inaccuracies), “I’m not just saying this because I work for MSNBC but because I believe it’s true. It’s easy to report all day about Anna Nicole Smith and try to justify it by pointing to our competitors, saying ‘they’re doing it, too!’ But we’re better than that. We should be doing what’s right, not what’s easy.”

I want to find out who this guy was and…mail him a Best Buy gift card or something. Seriously. Well done, hombre.

Tags: journalism, politics by Mike Keliher
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Kate Parry, reader’s representative at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, wrote a piece last Sunday about Sid Hartman, a 130-year-old sports columnist at the paper, and his apparant breach of journalism ethics resulting from his appearance in a commerical for Sun Country airline. In her Sunday column, Parry explains:

In the commercial, Hartman appears holding a Star Tribune and remarks that he is reading “the greatest newspaper in the world.” That comment, he said, was why he didn’t consult with editors before signing on with Sun Country. “I thought I was doing a favor for the Star Tribune. I say nothing about Sun Country. This was a free commercial for the Star Tribune.”

Hartman would not be where he is professionally if he were that naive.

What an uncomfortable situation he has created for his colleagues, particularly reporters covering the airlines, and for the three top managers — Publisher Keith Moyer, Editor Anders Gyllenhaal and Managing Editor Scott Gillespie — who determined what would and wouldn’t be the consequences for Hartman’s disregard of the Star Tribune’s ethics policies.

I understand the need for a strong sense of ethics in the newsroom. But at the same time, I’m a huge fan of common sense. Common sense and stern rules often butt heads, but for the sake of argument, let’s give this a try:

Ethics in the newsroom, yes, great. But Sid’s hardly part of the newsroom. Generally, newspapers make the “newsroom/not newsroom” distinction when explaining the separation between reporters and editors on one side and editorial writers and their colleagues on the other. But even within the newsroom, you’ll find columnists — the writers whose pictures run in the paper along with their column — whose work is different from completely impartial (in theory) reporting but still appears on the same page as that reported news.

More importantly, Sid is a damn sports columnist. I know that sports sections are probably among the most-read pages in the paper, but I’m too lazy to Google up the numbers to show it. At the same time, you’re retarded if you think sports coverage is on the same level as the content in the A section or the local news section. Hell, even the editorial and op-ed page — opinionated as they may be — are more newsworthy than the sports section.

Even when a news reporter is writing about a dull-ass city hall meeting or the like, it’s still more significant than box scores or “you’ll never believe what the goalie said in the locker room after the game” reporting. Considering the financial tumult in the newspaper business, though, I don’t think anyone’s going to seriously advocate dumping the sports section any time soon. I’d rather throw the sports section away to get to the business section than not have a newspaper.

Getting back to Sid and Sun Country, let’s throw a little common sense at the situation. Parry asks if reporters covering the airlines and related business issues will be able to do their jobs as well in light of this “disregard” for ethics, or if those reporters will be taken seriously, citing the possible perception of compromised integrity. Well, if those reporters honestly — and I do mean honestly, not just “honestly” when discussing the ethics of the situation and feel it necessary to sound righteous — think Sid’s commercial appearance prevents them from doing their jobs, fire those pussies.

I thought reporters were supposed to be hard-asses who don’t take “no” for an answer and want to stick it to the man (that link is a little joke) no matter the cost. If a sports columnist showing up in an ad — saying little more than to declare his newspaper is “the greatest newspaper in the world” — maybe the newspaper business should go belly up.

Tags: ethics, journalism by Mike Keliher
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Alan Mutter, some “CEO in Silicon Valley” who I’ve never heard of until Jim Romenesko linked to him, has a recent blog post that tries to be insightful - hell, he even did some primary research - but comes off as a little short-sighted.

Mutter seems bothered that many of the most-often e-mailed stories from newspapers’ Web sites - a commonly tracked piece of data on those sites - don’t deal with serious political issues such as the election and Donald Rumsfeld’s departure but rather “a no-knead bread recipe in the New
York Times [and...] a USA Today story about a naked man arrested for
carrying a concealed weapon.”

Mutter also suggests that this prominence of less-than-hard news in the “most e-mailed” lists “suggests there is a major disconnect between what editors want to print and what readers want to read.” Interesting, but…

How about applying some common sense to your research, Alan?

As Romenekso said, “I say this suggests that people know that their friends already have
read a million stories about the election and don’t want another one
e-mailed to them.” In fairness, Mutter gets close to this point on his own, but he still misses a big idea:

First, I’m sure my friends are capable of finding their own election- and Rumsfeld-related news. It can’t be missed, really. Plus, that shit’s boring. I gnaws at you after a while. More importantly, Mutter fails to understand the true nature of the “viral” spreading of news stories when people implement that little “e-mail this story” function on a news Web site. For the most part, anything someone sends is going to be useful (like, I don’t know, no-knead bread, maybe) or damn funny (like a naked guy finding a way to conceal a weapon - I don’t want to know…).

When I send a friend a news story, I don’t want to bog him down with another almost-profound piece about the election. I’m sending him stuff that will make him chuckle, and I hope he’ll return the favor.

Technorati Tags: Romenesko, Alan Mutter, most e-mailed, election, politics, news

Tags: journalism by Mike Keliher
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Alright, Keith. The pedantic, ego-driven “Special Comment” segment of your show must now die. It’s too much.

The first one was refreshing. It lacked the shmucky condescension of Anderson Cooper, and it had a level-headedness you’d never in a million years get from a Bill O’Reilly. And far smarter than that Wolf Blitzer lame-ass.

The second one was acceptable. Hell, the first was so good, why not try again.

Now, though, you’re killing me. Today’s rant, like a couple before it, is over the top. It’s bad enough that these “special” commentaries take on a forced, unnatural where’s-my-thesaurus tone. But when you’re taking this self-righteous high road, don’t do so based on a blatantly out-of-context quote.

In today’s rant against President Bush, Keith hangs his hat on the president’s need to apologize to the nation for having the audacity to say that “It’s unacceptable to think.” Pulling this out of what the president actually said is akin to me saying, “Sex with donkeys is disgusting,” and you saying, “Mike likes ’sex with donkeys.’ ”

What the president actually said: “It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.”

Argue about the implications of that statement all day long. Go ahead. But Olbmermann fouled badly here.

If the president were to take a detractors words so far out of context and make a national media spectacle out of that abomination, surely Olbermann and his producers would shit themselves at the opportunity for some “let’s re-air Keith’s bit all day and ‘debate’ about it on cable news” attention.

I’m honestly surprised at this. I sincerely hope that I’m missing something here.

Technorati Tags: Keith Olbermann President Bush misquote UnJournalism

Tags: journalism by Mike Keliher
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