Is journalism dying?

http://i.imgur.com/B5ez7.jpg

http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/216382_1923770406620_1012896840_32277949_7741349_n.jpg

So the Cape Cod newspaper has its very own Stephen Glass:

There is an implied contract between a newspaper and its readers. The paper prints the truth. Readers believe that it's true.

It's not always so simple, of course. There are nuances in how a story is presented, what words are used to describe the action. Papers have personalities, and no two are exactly alike, but at the end of the day, facts are facts. And a good newspaper holds nothing more sacred than its role to tell the truth. Always. As fully and as fairly as possible.

This is our guiding principle, so it is with heavy heart that we tell you the Cape Cod Times has broken that trust. An internal review has found that one of our reporters wrote dozens of stories that included one or more sources who do not exist.

The reporter was Karen Jeffrey, 59, a writer for the Cape Cod Times since 1981. In an audit of her work, Times editors have been unable to find 69 people in 34 stories since 1998, when we began archiving stories electronically.

On Tuesday, Jeffrey admitted to fabricating people in some of these articles and giving some others false names. She no longer works for the Cape Cod Times.

We were able to verify sourcing in many stories written by Jeffrey, mostly police and court news, political stories, and recently a series on returning war veterans. The stories with suspect sourcing were typically lighter fare – a story on young voters, a story on getting ready for a hurricane, a story on the Red Sox home opener – where some or all of the people quoted cannot be located.

In 2011, for example, a story on the Fourth of July parade in Cotuit featured Johnson Coggins, 88, “the patriarch of the family” and a longtime Cotuit summer resident. No one by that name can be found using public-records searches and there is no Coggins in the town of Barnstable's assessor's database. We were unable to locate five other people featured in that story.

In a 2006 story on the Falmouth Road Race, we were unable to find five individuals, including Daniel Fortes of San Diego, a marathon runner who, Jeffrey wrote, has run the Boston Marathon and the Falmouth race but was sidelined with an injury that year. Fortes could not be found using public records and no one with that name had competed in the Falmouth race or the Boston Marathon for the five years leading up to the story, according to the races' websites.

Times editors reviewed Jeffrey's stories using a variety of search techniques, including a public-records database tool called Accurint, searches of voter rolls and town assessor's records, a review of Facebook profiles and attempted phone calls in an effort to find the sources.

1 Herald Plaza is gone.

http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/nyt_hasnt_been_hit_that_hard.php

http://crookedtimber.org/2014/03/27/journalism-and-astroturfing/

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-note-on-sponsors

"You probably think of us as big innovators on the editorial side."

Ha.

former alt-weekly editor, now in the academic world, makes hipster plea to rich folks to buy alt-weeklies

Because if the John Henrys and the Jeff Bezoses can pick up papers for a song, it's a song popular when they had more hair and it was on the "radio." Alt-weeklies, however, can be yours for the cost of a download by a band you've never heard of, but one you will totes YouTube after reading that review by an alt's music writer who wears a knit cap, always, even in summer. Because she knows what she's talking about, and she's talking about it in a medium that continues to be relevant — and even sometimes makes money.

What I'm saying is that alt-weeklies are still a darn good value in today's media market. And here's why:

No. 1: They're cheap! So cheap, even broke-ish dailies are plunking down for them! Baltimore City Paper just got eaten by the Baltimore Sun Media Group. The price? Undisclosed, but it couldn’t be much. The underpaid City Paper staff had concocted a scheme before the sale to pool money and buy the thing outright. And let's visit Chicago, shall we? The Sun-Times bought the Chicago Reader in 2012 for about $3 million, according to sources "close to the deal." Consider that's half a million less than a group of eight people paid on eBay that year to have lunch at a steakhouse with Warren Buffet. So instead of a side of creamed spinach (and a few stilted selfies) you could own an institution that's been kicking tail since 1972

http://www.altweeklies.com/aan/an-open-letter-to-the-guy-who-owns-snapchat-and-other-hip-wealthy-people/Article?oid=7596431

INCREDIBLE STORY

http://www.pressherald.com/news/Squirrel_goes_nuts_as_Maine_teen_takes__selfie_.html

http://m.fredericknewspost.com/news/politics_and_government/delauter-to-the-news-post-don-t-use-my-name/article_e965025f-6c48-5a02-b162-600dfd2b5495.html?mode=jqm

http://jimromenesko.com/2015/01/06/start-suing-mr-councilman/

http://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/politics_and_government/kirby-delauter-kirby-delauter-kirby-delauter/article_da85d6f4-fa3c-524f-bbf6-8e5ddc0d1c0a.html

Just saw this. Was wondering if he was connected to the sovereign citizen movement. And if not, could he be pushed if someone were to send him a few youtubes?

Sovereign Citizen types claim the right not to have their names spoken/published? Damn, those people are crazier than I thought.

Well, they have weird and tricky ownership procedures around them anyway.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/business/media/nudes-are-old-news-at-playboy.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

good vice diss

i've noticed that i have a new anxiety, just before i am about to post something somewhere that links to a news story or anything dated/dateable, i think to double check to make sure it really is 'now' and not like, four days old

i saw that the guardian has started putting, in addition to the dateline, notices at the tops of stories: 'this article is 2 years old' etc

lol The New Day closes before we even bother to take the piss

Upbeat, optimistic approach

Don't remember even noticing this on sale. Business model seems to have been, a free paper, but costing money?

amazed that their innovative pitch of 'A brand new UK National Paper for women and men' somehow failed to grab the attention of readers

it didn't have a political stance

or readers

rip the new day heaven needed a... whatever you were

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeo1V-47BBw

these guys did the pied piper table ad, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdkz9y8LRDI

when she says "that's the fun part" a little part of her dies

that tronc recruitment video would make me run away screaming, rather than be put through a funnel and optimized.

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/google-funds-press-association-robot-reporter-project-which-will-provide-30000-local-media-stories-a-month/

"The Press Assocation has been awarded €706,000 by Google to develop a robot reporting project which will see computers write 30,000 stories a month for local media."

"The only other recent movie I can think of that deals with journalism is Spiderman, which certainly doesn't portray it positively." -- original post

Journalism is dying but diaryism is on the rise.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, May 29, 2003 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

* spooky music *

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand)

i answer all phones ever with an exasperated "STUdio"

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, May 29, 2003

Maybe the problem is that journalists don't have anyone cool like Spiderman to cover. We need more superheroes!

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, May 29, 2003

Are you accusing me of killing journalism with my glib one-liners? I don't think I deserve that but they are symptomatic of the disease, tbh

man google still can't tell me whether local businesses have changed holiday hours, how will they handle this

a robot reporting project which will see computers write 30,000 stories a month for local media

the news has been more and more about reposting tweets and crap it finds on the internet. seems like an area where bots will really excel.

Tracer, really I was celebrating the unexpected spirit and quality of ilx c.2003, exemplified by you. :D

clickbait necessary to survive in today's media failed environment

Ha! Thank you pf :)

It seems like Facebook is causing many people who didn't read news before to be forced now to read the shittest news sources ever - and they vote

https://fashionista.com/.amp/2017/08/magazine-interview-format-trend

On Thursday, Harper's Bazaar released the cover story for its September issue, featuring an interview with cover star The Weeknd that was conducted entirely via email. It was a move Rihanna also pulled in The Fader for their May/June issue, with the added stipulation that only five questions could be sent to her. And earlier this year, Paris Jackson was the cover star for not one, but two publications (Teen Vogue and Vogue Australia) where the accompanying interview happened over text. Like, on a phone.

So what exactly is going on here? Is this about magazines being too short-staffed and tight-budgeted to send a writer to the mansions or yachts on which their cover stars are dallying? Is it about celebrities attempting to keep more of their private lives private without missing out on press opportunities? Are publicists and managers wanting to keep a tighter control on what their star clients say to the media and how it's construed?

There's evidence supporting all of the above. It hardly takes sleuthing at this point to uncover the fact that print media is bleeding money. And The Weeknd's interview gave clues about the reasoning behind his email-only mandate: He cited annoying questions about his hair, his desire to maintain a sense of mystery and the claim that "the only thing the world demands of me is music."

on the flip side, this would lead to an end of a) the writer describing what the celebrity ordered for lunch at the upscale hotel where they're conducting the interview (RIP truffle fry-gate) and b) male writers describing how hot their female interviewees are (RIP Neil Strauss-on-Jewel).

Or just make the latter worse.

"I had regularly felt a stirring during my obsessive review of her selfies, and I admit when I was typing out the email questions, I only used one hand."

At our student newspaper we don't allow email interviews with administrators unless the editor in chief okays it, for obvious reasons, I think. I sympathize with The Weeknd's attitude if he means it. But he and the reporter can discuss the scope of the interview before it happens and come to an understanding (i.e. no questions about truffle fries, hair, etc).

you interview in person partly to catch their lies. but usually, who cares if celebrities lie?

i think you answered your own question, maura - seems like this is the natural endpoint of publicists' powers to demand concessions increasing as print media's influence wanes

i'd imagine too that celebs are now so used to communicating with their audiences directly through social media that a significant proportion of them view interviews as anachronistic - in that case why not stick to communicating with journalists using text or email if that's what you're comfortable doing, and your publicist can swing it?

oh that was cut and pasted from the link, sorry. but yeah, i think that's a big part of it

"access" is a trap

risk vs reward of an interview with harper's bazaar vs self managed instagram account not looking so hot these days

Would rather read an essay about The Weeknd (especially if it was called "Why The Weeknd Sucks") than an interview with his boring ass anyway. I mean, that's the other thing - the three people cited in the above blog entry (Ironclad Journalism Rule: Three Is A Trend) have always seemed like paralyzingly boring human beings whose opinions should mean basically nothing to anyone with two brain cells to rub together.

The essay's right about the forces at work, but what's amazing to me — and The Messenger is obviously the most ridiculous example of this — is how many people with lots of money at big media companies have just totally failed to understand the realities. Advertising is gone as a primary revenue stream for news/media companies. But these guys still think they're gonna get rich selling ads.

Subscription and/or nonprofit models are the obvious ways to go. They both have their challenges, but there are a lot of people doing good work with both of them right now. Will just have to see how well they can sustain themselves. I'm less pessimistic about journalism than I was five years ago, because I think there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. But for sure it's unstable, and I'm happy not to be working for legacy media companies still trying to retrofit their old models.

More and more, I feel like a medieval peasant. The rulers are gonna do what they're gonna do, and the people in charge of telling us about that are mostly cheering them on (in a "can't argue with success!" sort of way), so fuck "the news." I'd rather spend my money on music, books and movies, and if I'm "uninformed," so be it. I don't feel like I'm missing much.

― Tahuti Watches L&O:SVU Reruns Without His Ape (unperson), Saturday, 10 February 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Most people in the medieval era couldn't read or write. Which is what I get from your posts

The essay's right about the forces at work, but what's amazing to me — and The Messenger is obviously the most ridiculous example of this — is how many people with lots of money at big media companies have just totally failed to understand the realities. Advertising is gone as a primary revenue stream for news/media companies.

And when a much-ballyhooed site like The Messenger collapses the crash sounds louder -- it becomes another warning sign, another "there, you see? Media IS collapsing!"

xp I suspect that primary and secondary school teaching is going to mostly be a volunteer force in 20 years and work on an equivalent of the original Sunday School system in 30.

please consider teaching! media literacy is absolutely kicking our collective asses and we don't have enough people who understand it to teach kids about it

Teaching media literacy would have to be a stealth operation, because with the enshrinement of standard tests driving the entire curriculum these days there's not much space for anything else in a school day.

I disagree. It’s pretty easy to align lessons on media literacy with the common core. You are assessing their ability to make inferences and comprehend nonfiction texts.

treesh, I know you're a smart and experienced enough teacher to control your own lessons in depth and make your teaching materials work for you rather than the other way around, but that is a high level and a difficult attainment. For a less experienced or committed teacher, the fact that most contemporary media are not consumed as nonfiction texts places a large constraint on their effectively teaching media literacy. Even more so, if the classroom materials are imposed rather than discretionary.

Anyway, I acknowledge your greater expertise on this, so if you think my perspective is insufficiently grounded, I'll accept your conclusions.