Link: Bowling 1, Health Care 0
Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden’s health care plan? Anything at all? But let me guess, you know Barack Obama’s bowling score. We are choosing a president, the next leader of the free world. We are not buying soap, and we are not choosing a court clerk with primarily administrative duties.
Link: CBS Said to Consider Use of CNN in Reporting
CBS, the home of the most storied news division in broadcasting, has been in discussions with Time Warner about a deal to outsource some of its newsgathering operations to CNN, two executives briefed on the matter said Monday.Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS’s newsgathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network’s news feeds.
Another possibility, these people said, would be that CBS would keep its correspondents in a certain region but pair them with CNN crews.
Taking all bets that “certain regions” will include such world hotspots as London, Paris and New York, while “not certain regions” will be roughly congruent with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Congratulations to Amy Harmon for winning the Pulitzer prize for explanatory journalism for her amazing series on genetic testing.
We became acquainted with Amy when she did a story on a conference I host on The Well many years ago, back when she was still reporting for the LA Times. It’s terrific to see someone who’s as hard-working and smart as Amy get the recognition she deserves.
Fifteen years ago, when I endured a brief stint as a news reporter, things were simpler. I’d go into the office, meet with the managing editor, figure out what I was going to cover that day, go to the police station and shoot the bull with the cops and write down what they said about what was going on, crime-wise, in the city that day. If something caught on fire or somebody shot their spouse in the head, I’d drive out to the scene in my Hyundai and take notes until the cops got things under control. The next morning, the 30,000 citizens of our fair town would find out what happened after the newspaper with my story in it was dropped on their doorstep.
Now things are different. The “news cycle” (the gap between the time a newsworthy event happens and when your news medium of choice can deliver information about it to readers or viewers) has become infinitesimal thanks to the internet.
This has caused something maddening to take place. In an attempt to magically extend the news cycle, the news now tries to predict the future. It’s understandable that they would try to do this, since today anything that ever happens is old news the instant it happens. But unless news-gathering organizations have a fleet of time machines that they’re not telling us about, the practice is completely bogus. It is worse than making stuff up, because today, predictions are frequently offered up as fact.
Elections are one area where this happens a lot. In the last few presidential election cycles, TV news obsessed about polling, often running several different and conflicting opinion polls at once. They aren’t using polls as much to fill the news hole this time around, and I suspect that’s intentional — they looked like buffoons trying to call the 2000 election, but more importantly, the results of public opinion polls aren’t particularly newsworthy.
Of course, in this election cycle it was clear early on that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee (because she had all this experience as a former White House tenant) and the Republican nominee would be anybody-but-McCain (since McCain had no money and he didn’t appeal to the bible-thumpers).
Oops. So much for news reporters’ ability to predict the future.
The economy is another area where prognostication dominates, especially these days. It’s pretty clear we’re in a recession right now although no politician will admit it. So the question is really what kind of recession this will be — will it be bad (like the recession of the 1970s), or will it be comparatively mild (like the 2001 recession)? The answer to this question is a big deal, particularly for business owners like me. Do you hold back on hiring and purchases because you want to hold on to your money to weather the recession? (Understanding, of course, that businesses holding back on hiring and purchases can cause a recession.)
The word that’s been batted around recently is “stagflation“, a pernicious combination of price inflation and unemployment. Stagflation characterized the 1970s recession, and it had a lot to do with the fact that the government printed money to finance the Vietnam War. But each time I hear the term applied to what’s supposed to happen in the recession of 2008, it sounds made-up. “Stagflation” might be a proxy term for “really bad recession,” I’m not sure. But when it appears in the news, it’s nearly always unsourced — meaning some writer is making it up. (This morning on NPR I heard that U.S. inflation was actually flat last month, so maybe they’re going to have to find a new proxy term. Memo to NPR: “deep recession” sounds less comical than “stagflation,” which to me always invoked the image of a bloated bovine.)
News writers try to predict the future in other kinds of business reporting all the time, especially in technology. Coverage of Apple is foremost here. For every true story about the next Mac or iPhone release, there have to be at least a hundred “rumors”, stories or predictions about what Apple will do next. The Nintendo Wii gets some of this, too, but not as much. In today’s Times there’s this story where the writer breathlessly proclaims that Super Smash Bros. Brawl “will almost surely be one of the top-selling games of 2008 and may become the best-selling game yet for Nintendo’s popular Wii console”. Says who? And why is that relevant to your review, anyway? Just tell me if the game is any good.
Consumers of news should pay closer attention to when writers make stuff up and call them on it. The incredible shrinking news cycle is no excuse. Listening to one bonehead or another try to predict the future is what people in primitive cultures do when they can’t figure out what makes it rain. We shouldn’t stand for it in our news.
I don’t even think it’s necessary to comment about how perfect this photo is of Hillary in Las Vegas. Study it for a moment. There is absolutely nothing about it that is not hilarious.
Link: Tata launches Nano, the 1-lakh car
I don’t care about the car necessarily but I wanted to take a moment and celebrate the awesomeness that is the word "lakh". It means "100,000" and it’s what Indians use to express a big number (the way we use "million"). So in this case, we’re talking about a car that will cost 100,000 rupees, less than $2,500. Not bad unless you had your heart set on going faster than 35 mph.
One of the NY Times blogs is reporting that of the "major" news networks, only CNN and ABC had reporters on the ground in Pakistan to cover Bhutto’s assassination yesterday.
This seems crazy to me. I mean, it’s long since past time that we stop thinking of the TV networks as major news-gathering organizations, but not having people on the ground in Pakistan is embarrassing. Imagine if we had no reporters on the ground in England in 1942.
Either cover the news, or not, but for Toqueville’s sake, don’t fake it.
Holy effing crap, my college contemporary and Daily Nexus colleague Tony Pierce has been hired by the LA Times to run their blogs.
This, to me, suggests the the LA Times is serious about doing amazing stuff with blogging. I’ve probably mentioned a few times that I’m feeling sort of meh about the NY Times’ blogs (treating blogs as first-class content on home page good; creating dozens of not-terribly-distinctive outlets to feature the voices of B-list staffers sans editorial and fact-checking bad). So I’ll be interesting to see where Tony takes the LA Times blogs — he’s passionate about blogging and passionate about the news, but he also won’t let up until you pay attention. I’m prepared to be revolutionized.
More proof that Slough isn’t fit for humans now from the NY Times, who feature it prominently in today’s story on the unfortunate childproofing of Guy Fawkes day.
The piece says that the Slough council has retained an Asian Elvis impersonator which honestly and in all seriousness has me wanting to look up airfares.
I’m awed by the way that news organizations are covering the fires in Southern California this week. This kind of thing is near to my heart since I began my short career as a news reporter covering the Santa Barbara Painted Cave fire in 1990, and then spent a few years after that chasing big fires (among other things) in Ventura County.
As is often the case with fast-moving big stories, we’re seeing news organizations peel back their normal editorial process in favor of a just-in-time approach to getting the word out. They’re using the new tools of the trade — blogs, certainly, but also some amazing work with customized Google Maps. The L.A. Times even set up a Twitter page for brief updates that you can get on your mobile phone. Amazing. I wish I had access to all these tools when I was reporting the news 17 years ago.
Link: Mattel Apologizes to China for Recalls
"U.S.-based toy giant Mattel Inc. issued an extraordinary apology to China on Friday over the recall of Chinese-made toys, taking the blame for design flaws and saying it had recalled more lead-tainted toys than justified."
At first I thought this was an April Fool’s joke. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s going to feel a twinge of nervousness if I ever Mattel toys for my kids in the future.
A funny thing happened to NYTimes.com following the Minneapolis bridge collapse yesterday. The front page of the web site was festooned with the usual interactive feature, but they ran it as their feature above-the-fold image, which was unusual. The Times’ online interactive features have been getting better and better in recent years, but they’re often difficult to find. Today, you couldn’t avoid it.
But the thing that really grabbed me were the captions beneath the interactive piece — they wasn’t written by an editor, they were quotes pulled from the Times’ online message boards. It looks like they’ve been doing this all afternoon, rotating different quotes from community members in and displaying them beneath the interactive feature.
This is an interesting tactic and it’s not something I’ve seen NYT.com do before in quite this way (although the 24-hour news channels do it all the time — after 9/11, Katrina, and Virginia Tech, every camera phone is now a potential stringer). Since official sources aren’t yet willing to speculate on (for example) how many casualties there are and why the bridge might have failed so spectacularly, using community-generated content makes a lot of sense at this point in the story’s trajectory — everybody already knows the "what" of the story but nobody knows the "why." Disembodied voices on a message board might be just as good, or better, than CNN’s tired gallery of talking heads for hire.
I wonder if attacking a big story in this way is part of the Times’ standard disaster plan now — it doesn’t seem like this kind of thing could have been whipped up overnight.
Link: Talk to the Newsroom — The New York Times
Q. Having grown up on the west coast, and having read the NYT for years, I’ve noticed that the Times and several other large east coast papers occasionally run stories that treat life in the west as a kind of foreign novelty, with vast untamed and uncivilized lands. Why is rural life in the west given such prominent treatment (A section, Sunday Times, etc), when rural life in the east coast is seldom treated?
– Danica Willard
A. For decades, our West Coast reporters have been accused of treating the west like an exotic, odd place. Even our correspondents who were born and raised out there are accused of not understanding the west….But let’s also remember that California IS different from the East Coast; that’s what makes it so intriguing. And remember that most of our readers do not live in California, so it’s important that when we write about the West Coast, we give proper background and context to readers who have never experienced Surf City.
We deserve a somewhat more satisfying and less defensive explanation from the paper’s Assistant Managing Editor. It’s not his job to defend this practice. Using his reasoning it should be okay for Times writers to refer to the residents of foreign countries using quaint euphemisms and air quotes. And shame on him for assuming that his readers are not sophisticated enough to understand that the West is "different" from the East Coast.
Suffice it to say that most Times readers haven’t been to, say, Tel Aviv or Beijing either, but if the Times’ writers used the same tone when writing about those places as they do about Los Angeles or Fresno, they’d be locked up.
The NY Times has a story about BBC World, the 24-hour news channel, coming to U.S. cable systems. I hope DirecTV picks it up soon so we can get some of this beebish goodness at our house. American TV news has been utterly bankrupt for quite a long time now and I really miss it. (To give you a sense of how much into the news I am, I started reading the newspaper and watching local and national TV news on a nightly basis around the time I started kindergarten. I haven’t mentioned it on the blog much, but I also reported the news when I was in school and professionally for a few years after college.)
Some of the quotes in this story that highlight the rationale for BBC entering the U.S. market are pretty interesting. One consultant says that some Americans are looking for an alternative, not just to one particular source of news, but to all American news organizations — ouch. The theory is that because of its locale and its non-corporate nature, the BBC provides a useful alternative to corporate American news, which seems right to me (although the story doesn’t mention that we already have a terrific source of non-corporate news in this country — it’s NPR). I read the headlines on BBC News Online pretty much every day as a way to get a counterpoint on what’s going on and to get a break from the homogenized topics we get here. (Too much Washington, not enough Zimbabwe, in my opinion.)
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