Tag Archives: Washington Post

Jack Shafer: Washington Post should ‘undiscover a few of its current chin strokers’

On Slate this morning, Jack Shafer takes the Washington Post to task in a response to the accusation (by the Post’s own domestic-policy blogger Ezra Klein) that the paper gives over too many of its op-ed contributions to politicians.

The problem isn’t the politicians though, according to Shafer, whose analysis of the last month’s pages shows up relatively few political bylines. The problem is that the op-ed page’s “real estate” is too often occupied by a two dozen-strong coterie of regular writers.

So absolute is the regulars’ lock on the Post op-ed page that it’s not uncommon for its every column inch to be filled by one of them (…) Instead of discovering America’s next great pundit, I’d rather the Post give its op-ed page some breathing room by undiscovering a few of its current chin-strokers and recruiting unconventional writers (John Ellis, James Altucher, and Heather Mac Donald, just to get the conversation rolling) to fill the space with a few ideas we haven’t heard 25,000 times before. (I’m talking about you, Richard Cohen.)

In a perfect world, a publication is edited for readers. In the imperfect world that we inhabit, too many publications are edited for the benefit of their staffs and their friends and associates. The Washington Post op-ed page, which hoards its space for its own, is one of the worst offenders.

Full story at this link…

US Digest: Sally Quinn vs gossipers; Deadline vs Gawker; Kevin Smith vs the media

Starting this week, the editor’s blog will feature an afternoon roundup of all things media from over the pond. From the hugely important to the very inconsequential, check in for a choice of America’s journalistic goings on.

Public feuding seems to be flavour of the week this week, with Cheryl and Ashley Cole fighting it out on the fronts of red tops and t-shirts, and Anna Ford and Martin Amis going pound for pound in the letter pages of the Guardian.

With no shortage of handbags stateside either, today’s digest seems, somewhat tenuously, to be all about what the media had to report on feuding.

Round One: Sally Quinn vs. those pesky gossipers

Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn, who writes a lifestyle column called “The Party”, used her most recent column to address claims amongst gossip columnists that two Quinn family weddings scheduled for the same day were evidence of some kind of family feud.

Unfortunately for Quinn, Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli didn’t take very kindly to the article. More unfortunately for Quinn still, Washington City Post editor Erik Wemple (who, lucky, lucky man, appears in US Digest for a second day running) turned all his communicative efforts to getting some information out of the Post, and quite impressively got around the Brauchli very own eponymous omerta, the Brauchli Doctrine, to get the scoop on his reaction.

That reaction was to bring a swift end to “The Party”, like two surprised parents returning from holiday early. As tragic an event as the failure of the Cole’s marriage, Quinn’s column has been cut from the print edition of the post, Brauchli has banished it to the doldrums of Washington Post online.

And who the hell reads their journalism online?

Amidst a raft of “The Party Is Over” headlines, Gawker, ever moderate in their approach, ran with this gem instead:

Sally Quinn’s Stupid Idiot Column Being Killed, at Long Last?

But very kindly let up in their opening paragraph:

The Washington Post is reportedly considering doing away with Sally Quinn’s godawful self-absorbed rich lady column from hell, which is an embarrassment to the entire institution.

Continuing on with the feuding theme, both the Washington Post and Gawker have their own scraps featured in the press today.

Round Two: The Washington Post vs. New York Times

Michael Calderone from Politico reports on the Post and the NYT trying to pinch each other’s staff. The Times are apparently in the lead at the moment, having raided the Post newsroom consistently for the past few years, but the Post, with a couple of fresh vacancies on the Politics desk, are eyeing up staff at the Times.

Still, it seems that the Times, a full 26 years older than the Post, is keeping the upstart down.

Both papers have long sought out top journalists in Washington and elsewhere, but in recent years, The Times has been able to grab more talent from the Post than vice versa.

Gawker doesn’t seem to think America’s top journos are too well off at either paper right now:

What are those slick bastards at the Washington Post trying now? They are trying―and failing―to hire a bunch of good reporters away from the NYT […] And that looks even worse for the Washington Post, since all the New York Times can offer its own staffers now are fake sideways promotions, like, why don’t you go from editing this one thing, to writing about this other thing? Because there are no new jobs there, you see. But hey, at least it’s not the Washington Post!

The NYT - not to be poached from

As promised, news of Gawker’s very own new spat:

Round Three: Deadline Hollywood vs. Gawker

The Deadline Hollywood blog’s Nikki Finke claimed yesterday that she had bested Gawker’s stats for the month and, not only that folks, she had done so without having to “bottomfeed about celebrities just to increase web traffic”.

Well, in hindsight, that was probably a mistake. Actually it definitely was a mistake, and Gawker came out of their corner with irrefutable stats to prove it and, more importantly, another great sucker punch of a headline:

Nikki Finke Beats Gawker In Traffic, In Her Own Mind

Finke’s very begrudging correction can be found appended to her post, with a suitable shift of blame.

Gawker - not to be messed with

Enough of media feuding now? Me too. But it’s the theme of today’s post so, the show must go on. In the case of Keven Smith much-publicised set-to with SouthWest Airlines, the show goes on, and on, and on, and…. on.

Round Four: Kevin Smith vs. the media

Having been ejected from a SouthWest airlines flight just prior to take-off because staff were worried his weight was a safety issue, the film director Kevin Smith used his Twitter account, followed by 1,669,611 people, to launch a seemingly interminable campaign against the airline. Clever Southwest.

That bit is old news.

But in a new interview with Patrick Goldstein of the LA Times, Smith has dragged the media into the feud, claiming their reaction left a lot to be desired:

It really sickened me that after all the years I’ve been so open with the press that they didn’t bother to dig at all. I was unfairly bounced and discriminated against, but they never bothered to tell that story. They just went with the easy fat jokes. Every TV show imaginable asked me to go on, from Oprah to Larry King, but I turned them all down because I didn’t want to turn into Octomom.

So Kevin Smith is peeved with the media now too, but still kindly giving them material for their ‘easy fat jokes’ with talk of bouncing and the Octomom. Which, obviously, we are not going to exploit here at J.co.uk, because I’m no good at puns.

Kevin Smith - not too big to get on tiptoes


For more airplane related tales of less-than-respectable reporting, follow this link
.

Having shamelessly cast aside everything really newsworthy in today’s digest in favour of stories that tenuously serve my feuding theme, I am running short on material. So, finally, and most tenuously of all, the social media story du jour, which sees Conan O’Brien amass way more followers with one tweet than Jesus fed with his five loaves.

Round Five: Conan O’Brien vs. Jay Leno

Conan O’Brien took over NBC’s Tonight Show from Jay Leno back in June 2009, but walked out on the show over a proposed scheduling change that would see it moved it from 11:35pm to 12:05am.

Retired, probably at a loose end, O’Brien did what any self-respecting man would do and joined Twitter, getting off to a pretty funny start:

Today I interviewed a squirrel in my backyard and then threw to commercial. Somebody help me.

O’Brien’s followers started to stack up at a mind-bending rate. At the time of writing he has 257,328, but by later this afternoon it could easily be 1040.

This fairly innocuous story soon grew into an infant media feud, with headlines uniformly reading something like this:

Conan O’Brien joins Twitter, outdoes Leno again.

Jay Leno’s followers, at the time of writing: a paltry 30,371.

Conan O'Brien - not too busy to tweet

Image of the New York Times building courtesy of ReservasdeCoches

Image of Kevin Smith courtesy of Shane Kaye

Image of Conan O’Brien courtesy of VDTA Info

US Digest: ABC announces cuts; Washington Post Co. announces profits; Yahoo! messes about on Twitter

Starting this week, the editor’s blog will feature an afternoon roundup of all things media from over the pond. From the hugely important to the very inconsequential, check in for a choice of America’s journalistic goings on.

ABC president soft-peddles what look like substantial cuts

Do you want the bad news or just the news first? Bad? OK.

The bad news today comes from the Los Angeles Times in the form of an announcement by ABC that it is to make a “fundamental transformation” to its news division. “Fundamental transformation” being bad-newsspeak, of course, for ‘streamlining’, or ‘workforce optimisation’, or ‘force shaping’, or, even, ‘mass redundancies’.

Reports suggest the company may be ‘smart-sizing’ its ‘force’ to the tune of a 20 per cent reduction. The news arm currently employs 1,400 staff. The maths, or ‘math’ in this case, produces bad news whichever way you phrase it.

David Westin, president of ABC News, went with a memo that all sounded like this:

The time has come to anticipate change, rather than respond to it. We have a rare opportunity to get in front of what’s coming, to ensure that ABC News has a sound journalistic and financial footing for many years to come, and to serve our audiences even better. But we must move boldly and promptly.

Redundancies have been offered, but it seems likely that if staff don’t move as ‘boldly and promptly’ and Westin intends to, they’ll be pushed.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not all about contraction though:

In newsgathering, we intend to dramatically expand our use of digital journalists […] In production, we will take the example set by Nightline of editorial staff who shoot and edit their own material and follow it throughout all of our programs…

So, listen up: if you can write copy, sub-edit, shoot and edit video, write code, produce an outside broadcast by yourself, mend a broken server, and all the while keep time on the big drum strapped to your back, now is the time to show your face at ABC.

Westin’s memo reprinted at the Los Angeles Times.

Washington Post Co. and A.H. Belo Corp announce Q4 profits against backdrop of newspaper arm losses

Just in from Editor & Publisher, news that the Washington Post Co. and A.H. Belo Corp (parent company to the Dallas Morning News) both had a profitable fourth quarter 2009. The Washington Post Co. reported a Q4 profit $82.2 million, or $8.71 a share, in comparison with $18.8 million, or $2.01 a share in Q4 2008. A.H. Belo recorded a much more moderate $5.6 million, or $0.27 per share, its first quarterly profit since it was spun off from Belo Corp. two years ago.

The figures behind the figures at the Washington Post Co. make for fairly grim reading on the newspaper side of things though, with advertising revenue still in decline. From E&P:

Newspaper revenue declined four per cent in the fourth quarter to $193.3 million. Print ad revenue was down 9 per cent to $92.6 million, with declines in classified, zones and retail advertising offset by an increase in general advertising.

And whilst the overall figures seem to be going in the right direction, they are nonetheless sobering:

For the full year 2009, the newspaper division reported an operating loss of $163.5 million, compared to an operating loss of $192.7 million in 2008.

Similarly, at A.H. Belo:

Advertising revenue continued to fall substantially in the quarter, with the retail down 30.9 per cent, and print classified down 31.1 per cent. Internet revenue fell 8.5 per cent, to $10.1, which accounted for 7.5 per cent, of total revenue for the quarter.

Washington City Paper editor’s second attempt to leave proves successful

From E&P again, news that Erik Wemple is leaving the Washington City Paper, where he has been editor for eight years. He will join Allbritton Communications’ new local start-up in Washington D.C.

Wemple accepted a position as editor of Village Voice in New York during his editorship of the Washington City Paper, but changed his mind before his first day, deciding instead to stay put.

Yahoo late to the Twitter party, but may have come best dressed

Today’s big social media news is a Yahoo/Twitter partnership.

TechCrunch takes an irreverent look at the embargo politics surrounding the announcement, and a sideswipe at Yahoo for being late to the party:

Yahoo and Twitter have reached an agreement to share data between their properties. That’s great. Yahoo is only a few months behind Google and Microsoft (Bing) doing the same thing.

It seems Yahoo! got so over excited at the news themselves that they toyed with their Twitter followers over the course of the day, hyping the announcement by tweeting clues, and possibly confusing its importance with your Moon landings and presidential race winners.

  • Clue #1/5: Who has approx 29,000 followers as of this morning? #ybignews
  • Clue #2/5: What kind of “moon” had teen moviegoers swooning last fall? #ybignews
  • Clue #3/5: Who might you greet with a friendly “howdy”? #ybignews (use hashtag for previous clues)
  • Clue #4/5:What’s both a sugar substitute & a mathematical symbol? #ybignews (use hashtag for previous clues-forms a phrase)
  • Final clue: A little birdie told us to find them @twitter #ybignews Thanks for following us (winners notified soon)

What fun.

Mashable goes into more detail about the partnership, claiming that despite its tardyness it is more comprehensive, and a better all round deal than Twitter’s search partnerships with Google and Bing.

“This is a local blog, for local people…” Erm, I think you mean hyperlocal there love

Following on from yesterday’s US Digest coverage of the NYT’s new East Village hyperlocal venture, a small, but useful post from Lost Remote today outlines its take on some key new terms:

There is a difference between the terms “local”, “hyperlocal” and “niche” and I want to outline our editorial policy regarding the three. We see the three used interchangeably some times, and I think it’s important we all recognise the differences. ‘Hyperlocal’ covers neighborhoods, while ‘local’ covers towns and cities. We get some press releases here about how stations or newspapers are starting new ‘hyperlocal’ websites that cover their city or a given topic in their city (say, ‘moms’). A mum blog is a niche site. A neighbourhood blog is hyperlocal. A city blog is local. Disagree? Let us know.

US Digest: paidContent 2010; Tiger Woods, Scientology vs; journalism, and more

Starting today, the editor’s blog will feature an afternoon roundup of all things media from over the pond. From the hugely important to the very inconsequential, check in for a choice of America’s journalistic goings on.

paidContent 2010

The issue of paid content was high on the agenda at the end of last week with the paidContent 2010 conference in New York. In attendance were big names from the New York Times: Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman and publisher; Janet Robinson, president and CEO; and Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations, who were interviewed at length by ContentNext’s Staci D. Kramer on “metered news and more”.

According to the paidContent coverage, “while they were willing to buy lunch, they weren’t ready to feed the appetite for detail about plans for NYTimes.com to go metered in 2011”.

See the video here

And the full conference coverage from the paidContent site here

“Does the bleeding ever stop at 425 Portland?”

image courtesy of Stephen Cummings

Presumably, ways of making newspaper journalism pay were also high on the agenda over in Minneapolis at the end of last week, where the Star Tribune announced that five voluntary redundancies would be offered to reporters and editors. “Does the bleeding ever stop at 425 Portland?” asks MinnPost.

Staff memo here

Pessimistic stories of this kind, including this one, continue to be thoughtfully aggregated by blogger and pessimist extraorinaire Fading To Black. Not featured on this chronicle of US newspaper decline was the story that down in South Florida, rather than asking him if he’d like to pack his things, the Sun Sentinel handed production maintenance manager Bob Simons a $25,000 spot bonus and a Caribbean holiday. Simons’ suggestion of a different supplier for equipment apparently saved the paper $1 million.

A very different staff memo here

AP underperforms on non-profit content distribution

An interesting story from the Nieman Jounalism Lab reports on the outcome of Associated Press’ decision to distribute content from America’s top four non-profit news outlets: ProPublica, Centre for Public Integrity, Centre for Investigative Reporting, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

The six-month project was launched back in June 2009 at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Baltimore, “with great fanfare” according to Bill Buzenberg, executive director of Centre for Public Integrity.

It seems however that the scheme hasn’t been successful so far, with admissions from both the AP and the non-profit directors that very little content has made it into print. A poor distribution model is to blame apparently, with new non-profit content not being sufficiently flagged.

“They haven’t done the technical backup work to really make it work,” said Buzenburg. “They haven’t made it a priority.”

However, hope remains for the project from both sides. Buzenburg added: “This is a good idea. I’d like it to work […] The potential of this remains.”

“It’s early yet – we’re only six months into it,” said John Raess, AP’s San Francisco bureau chief.

“We want our celebrities to show a little leg”

image courtesy of Jim Epler

Much of the weekend’s media coverage in the US was given over to Tiger Wood’s much-publicised public apology on Friday morning. Mediabistro nailed the best format for coverage by inviting readers to pen Haikus for the Mediabistro facebook page. Submissions include this clear frontrunner from Pamela Ross:

“Questions? Don’t go there.
My Thanksgiving meal was ruined.
Thanks. Now. Watch this swing.”

With more syllables at his disposal, David Carr of The New York Times’ Media & Advertising pages goes into a little more detail, considering the relationship between celebrity sportsmen and the media:

Athletes and actors would like for us to focus on the work, while reporters know that their editors and audience want more, because while the work is visible, we want our celebrities to show a little leg.

But once this bit of leg, so strictly concealed by Woods for so long, has been shown, why are the media who feed on it so relentlessly owed some sort of apology?

Those of us who have had some experience with human frailties all know why Tiger Woods did what he did last Friday, which was to get in a room with people he had hurt or embarrassed to say he was “deeply sorry” for what he had done. That part made sense, the beginning of a process of amends.

I just don’t know what the rest of us were doing there.

A sentiment echoed this side of the pond by Charlie Brooker today in the Guardian.

There are those that must hope that, now this enigmatic character has addressed his hushed audience, and delivered his much anticpated talk, that the hype, rumour, pontificating, and endless media coverage will die away.

Apple wields knife over TV show prices

It is fair to say that at least a few people thought exactly the same thing about Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the iPad. But the so-called saviour of the newspapers is back in the media spotlight this week with news that Apple are considering halving the current price of television shows on iTunes from $1.99 to 0.99 cents. Media commentators have hailed the iTunes store’s 125 million registered customers as a potential liferaft for sinking newspaper publishers, and major networks may be wary of waving a pin anywhere near that customer base by rejecting the move, instead gambling on even a small percentage increase in those paying for TV offsetting the significant price drop.

image courtesy of curiouslee

Meanwhile, Adobe and Conde Nast have jumped right aboard the good ship iPad, unveiling “a new digital magazine experience based on WIRED magazine” at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California.

The Church of Scientology vs. the St. Petersburg Times, Round 1

And finally, from Howard Kurtz’s Media Notes at the Washington Post, the improbable story that the Church of Scientology, in a tit-for-tat response to investigations by the St. Petersburg Times of Tampa Bay, has organised some investigative journalism of its own.

image courtesy of Ben Sutherland

The church has officially hired three ‘veteran reporters’ – a Pulitzer Prize winner, a former “60 Minutes” producer, and the former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors – to look in detail at the newspapers’ conduct. Steve Weinberg, the former IRE executive, who was paid $5,000 to edit the study, says that the agreement stipulates the church publish the study in full or not at all.

Weinberg claims that in spite the study being bankrolled by the church, it will be objective. Neil Brown, executive editor of the St. Petersburg Times, thinks otherwise:

“I ultimately couldn’t take this request very seriously because it’s a study bought and paid for by the Church of Scientology.”

Brown seems to feel a bit hard done by in this instance:

“I counted up something like six or seven journalists the church has hired to look into the St. Petersburg Times. I’ve just got two looking into the Church of Scientology,” he complained.

No fair.

Official Google Blog: Google launches ‘living stories’ with NYTimes and WaPo

“The Living Stories project is an experiment in presenting news, one designed specifically for the online environment (…) Complete coverage of an on-going story is gathered together and prioritised on one URL.”

What’s more Google’s new project allows readers to explore stories by theme, the characters involved or by multimedia coverage. Each time you return to the story URL new developments are highlighted and older news is summarised.

The prototype apparently came from discussions with executives at three newspaper groups and marks another step by Google to work with the publishing industry (see last week’s announcements regarding First Click and indexing) while cleverly re-emphasising its position:

“We believe it’s just as important to experiment with how news organizations can take advantage of the web to tell stories in new ways – ways that simply aren’t possible offline,” an introductory post on the Official Google Blog explains.

“While we have strong ideas about how information is experienced on the web, we’re not journalists and we don’t create content.”

Reuters: Washington Post closes US bureaux

The Washington Post has announced the closure of three of its US bureaux, in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, to focus its resources and ‘journalistic firepower’ on reporting from Washington.

Full story at this link…

According to the BBC’s report on the closure, six correspondents from the bureaux will keep their positions, but three news aides have lost jobs.

Editor&Publisher: WaPo and Bloomberg partner for global news wire

The Washington Post and Bloomberg are to launch a new global news service next January offering 120 stories (plus photos and graphics) from the Post and agency.

The wire content will be available to subscribers to Bloomberg’s Professional service.

The move follows the Post’s announcement earlier this week that it would end its long-standing news wire service with the LA Times.

Full story at this link…

AP: LA Times and Washington Post ending joint news service

Over on Editor & Publisher, a story from the AP: the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post are breaking up their news service partnership after 47 years. The divorce announced this week takes effect on January 1.

“Beginning then, the Los Angeles Times will distribute some of its best work through a news service jointly owned by newspaper publishers McClatchy Inc. and the Tribune Co, the Times’ owner.”

Full story at this link…

More over at Washington Post.

paidContent: WaPo’s social media guidelines in full

Last week, the Washington Post issued a new social media policy, to deal with its journalists’ use of individual accounts.

Raju Narisetti, one of two managing editors, took the decision to close down his Twitter account, after the views expressed in some of his tweets were called into question.

paidContent has got hold of the full text of the social media guidelines:

Full post at this link…

BeetTV: Interview with editor of HuffPo’s new tech section

Beet TV recorded this interview with  Jose Antonio Vargas, the former Washington Post reporter now editing the Huffington Post’s new technology section that launched on Monday. Technology is anthropology, Vargas says.