I don’t know how many of you will be fans of The Smiths, or their former front-man Morrissey. For the uninitiated, The Smiths were one of the most influential indie bands of the 1980s. Their very-English, very-dry, beautiful and haunting songs were and are the soundtrack to many people’s lives in England.

But even if you are not a Morrissey fan, this is fascinating:

http://true-to-you.net/morrissey_news_071127_01

To be brief, a reporter for the NME (a music magazine in the UK) conducted two interviews with Morrissey, and wrote a profile. During those interviews, Morrissey spoke about immigration. The NME reported that he said:

 “The gates are flooded and anybody can have access to England and join in… If you walk through Knightsbridge on any bland day of the week you won’t hear an English accent… You’ll hear every accent under the sun apart from the British accent.” 

The editorial board of the magazine deemed his comments so offensive that they rewrote the article to reflect their own views. The rewrite was apparently so comprehensive that the original journalist (Tim Jonze) asked to be taken off the byline because it no longer represented his “views or beliefs.”

 “While Morrissey is obviously entirely entitled to his point of view we’re not beholden to re-print them without comment,” editor Conor  McNicholas wrote to Morrissey’s management in an email, according to the singer’s website. “And given that his views are not those that we’d normally expect to come from someone in the very liberal world of rock’n'roll, we’re not able to either support them or print them without comment.”

The piece subsequently ran with the dual credit “Interview: Tim Jonze, Words: NME.” Based on the content of the article, Morrissey is now threatening legal action.

 “The story reads like a cynical exercise by yet another NME editor trying to put his name in the history books via a poorly thought out and terribly executed attempt at character assassination,” reads a message on the singer’s website. 

Having not read the complete article, I can’t comment on its contents. But at first glance this appears to be an incredible instance of editorial interference by the NME. Does any board of editors, based on the quotes used in a profile piece, have the right to rewrite the article to reflect its own political opinions? 

Someone would have to work very hard to convince me this is not an abuse of power. 

Just for good measure, I should say that this post should obviously not be taken as condoning Morrissey’s statements in the NME article, or any kind of xenophobia. What shocks me for the purpose of this post is the action of the NME editors, regardless of what they were editing.

Saying that, I am surprised by the quotes, particularly because Morrissey has previously been very outspoken against racism in all its forms. In fact, that alone makes me doubt the accuracy of the piece.

Michael 

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/journalism-no-place-for-one-hit-wonders/2007/11/20/1195321743207.html?page=1

“An Australian journalist at one of the world’s most respected technology publishers says he was retrenched because his stories were not generating enough website hits.

It is one of the first cases where the firing of an Australian journalist writing text articles has been linked directly to the number of hits – or reader clicks – they generate.

The move is seen by some as an omen for journalism, a profession still coming to grips with the impact of the web and the influx of armchair publishers and part-time writers.”

In a way this is nothing new — publications have always been able to work out what their audience liked and disliked to some extent, and build their product, (and court advertisers,) accordingly.

But while in the past editors knew that longer, more considered pieces might not be the most popular, they didn’t have specific data to go by, minute-by-minute, every single day, and they weren’t held accountable to those numbers by their publishers.

Now they are.

The BBC News website, for example, has a real-time table of the most popular stories updated live online. In response to that data, and the insane popularity of “Also in the News” items — the dog who saved the school, the discovery of a new dinosaur, the man who married a goat… — the BBC created a separate section and devoted more time to those stories. That hasn’t improved their news output, but it’s generated more hits — and that’s good for advertisers. But is it good for us?

I’m skeptical about that. Places who already expressly reward page hits above quality — Gawker, for example — don’t produce great stories. And in a hypothetical world where the New York Times hired and fired based on page hits, journalistic standards could easily collapse. We could become slaves to the tragedy of the commons, and the rationale for spending time and money on serious journalism would evaporate. The internet transmits information well, but it doesn’t yet tell great stories. Ideally journalism should do both. But in a world where we are judged on page hits and not the quality of our stories, finding a place to print those stories could become all but impossible.

There are other sides to the argument, of course. People say that while only 1 percent of readers might connect to a longer story, they will stay with the publication for a lifetime when they do. But is brand loyalty like that as easy to build, and maintain, on the internet? I’m not sure it is.

What do we think about this?

Are we moving towards a world where journalists are judged day-by-day on hits and flops, and what will the impact of that be?

Michael

Passing this along from the Times political blog …

November 16, 2007,  12:54 pm

Questions about Carville and CNN

By Julie Bosman

There are very few political analysts more closely associated with the Clintons than James Carville, who was a key adviser to Mr. Clinton in the 1992 campaign.

So it’s no surprise that Mr. Carville’s appearance on a round table after last night’s CNN-sponsored Democratic debate is arousing some morning-after controversy.

“Would it kill CNN to disclose that James Carville is a partisan Clinton supporter when talking about the presidential race?” wrote Daily Kos. “Would it kill James Carville to disclose that he is a partisan Clinton supporter when on the air talking about the presidential race? Apparently so.”

Last night, Anderson Cooper of CNN introduced Mr. Carville, who appeared alongside panelists David Gergen and J.C. Watts, as a “former presidential adviser.”

And Mr. Cooper made one attempt at a disclosure: “I should point out David Gergen was an adviser in the Bill Clinton White House,” he said. “As, of course, was James Carville.”

But he didn’t point out that Mr. Carville is also an informal adviser to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.

Last night, Mr. Carville praised Mrs. Clinton’s performance along with the other panelists. “I agree with David and J.C.,” he said at one point. “I think that Senator Clinton’s people have to be — and Senator Clinton — have to be pretty pleased tonight that they certainly reversed a trend. We will see where it goes from there.”

And he was pointedly critical of Mr. Obama’s debate performance. “I think he might be even slightly intimidated, that he thinks Senator Clinton is more experienced than him, a little more hungry than he is,” Mr. Carville said.

There is also a fair amount of criticism of CNN’s overall conduct of the debate, especially Wolf Blitzer’s questions.

We put in a call to CNN and will update this post when they get back to us.

This media-on-media story adds another dimension to the Pakistan power struggle.

“The crackdown had been long coming. Three months earlier, in March, GEO-TV’s offices were the scene of a defining moment for the journalists in Pakistan’s independent television news business—when their struggle against government restrictions itself became news, and helped them glimpse their untapped potential as a force for political change.” (CJR)

I wonder what the championed Bhutto would do with the press if they turned on her?

What would it be like for news writers/reporters to go on strike?

No permits! No insurance! Let’s hope these proposed rules go through, and the original strictures on filming and photographing in New York City are forgotten.

Just noticed this… Life is easy when you cut out the middle man/woman. cw  

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: October 26, 2007

Filed at 11:07 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — One way to get decent coverage in this rough-and-tumble city is to arrange to have your own employees interrogate you at your news conference.

That would seem to be the strategy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, much maligned for its sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina over two years ago.

FEMA scheduled an early afternoon news briefing on only 15 minutes notice to reporters here Tuesday to talk about its handling of assistance to victims of wildfires that were ravaging much of Southern California.

But because there was so little advance notice for the event held by Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy FEMA administrator, the agency made available an 800 number so reporters could call in. And many did, although it was a listen-only arrangement, The Washington Post reported Friday.

It said that at the news conference itself, some FEMA employees played the role of reporter, asking questions of Johnson — queries described as soft and gratuitous.

”I’m very happy with FEMA’s response,” Johnson said in reply to one query from a person the Post said was an agency employee, not an independent journalist.

Asked about this, Mike Widomski, FEMA’s deputy director of public affairs, said, ”We had been getting mobbed with phone calls from reporters, and this was thrown together at the last minute.”

- Micheal Lancey and Jim Larkin have, going strictly by the letter of the law, not done the right thing by putting out the information about their subpoena. They not only put themselves in a difficult position but also the readers who for no fault of their own have become a part of this tangle.

- The fact that they clearly spelt out at the beginning of the story the legal implication for the reader shows a willful stance being taken – ‘civil disobedience’, as they say themselves.

From the point of view of an outsider, my take is that what Micheal and Jim have done is not ethically wrong. There is a judgement to be made, from time to time, which is beyond the confines of legal and generally accepted norms in the larger good. If the genesis of all this is the ‘exposing’ of Maricopa Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s real estate dealings which led to ‘revenge and vindictive response’ then Micheal and Jim are possibly right in continuing to use the ‘public medium’ to keep the issue and case in the open. The intention here does not seem to be malicious or for personal gain but to bring to the public the true picture and hence, possibly, on the right side of reporting ethics.

Reposted from my blog: Girl Meets World

I’m currently writing a comprehensive analysis of a NY Times story on a Berkeley, Ca. protest, and finding the task interesting because some of the story was left out. My job is to see what was written and what was left out and discern if the story is an ethical representation of truth.

So when I stumbled upon this AP story about Jena Six, I was astonished to find a “consider this” section where facts of the story are deliberated further without the flounces of “color” that are so necessary, according to many journalists, in keeping a reader engaged. I am learning to abhor the narrative where everything has to fit in this little scheme of human experience that has come before and been so controversial. It’s like we’re saying, “Oh, yeah, it’s just like back in the day.”

No, no it’s not. Sure, there are some similar factors like race, religion and gender in many of the stories we read, but that’s the human condition, and there are nuances to each of those themes in each news item, but it’s a good journalist’s duty to make a break from the canned accounts to true experience at this time, and in a certain place. After all, reruns are just not as interesting and plain lazy. Why should we settle for reruns in our news, of all things?

Dear Thinkers,

And now, I enter the world of BLOGS.

Please understand if I sputter here. I never thought I would cross this threshhold, and now that I am here, my stomach is unsettled, my knees shaking.

To begin with, I don’t like the word. BLOG sounds like a genetic mutation. (cross a frog with a blue fish and this is what you get.) It sounds like something that happens accidentally, something you don’t have to think about or check out, something you can throw up against a wall and defy the reader not to get some meaning out of it. You can be smug about your blog. “Well, it’s how I feel, and feelings can’t be wrong.”

Most importantly, perhaps, a journalist can infer that she doesn’t have to get it all into the coverage, because, after all, you can always use the loose ends — the bits that didn’t find their way into your coverage — and make a small blog bouquet out of them. Blogs can give a reporter a false sense of security, because a reporter should always thrive to get most everything into the coverage, impressions too.

All that said, there is no question that sharing ideas in a forum like this can only help us as we journey on. Questions about what to do, how to do it, why we’re doing it, etc… are flying at us from so many different directions — from what we read and of course our own work. This can be a space where we can push back a bit from the sweat of our daily work and think out our actions and our visions.

That said, this is not a place to rant, to spiel, to fall in love with received wisdom. This is a place where we should offer ideas and the benefit of new wisdom that comes from our experiences. Critically, we should back up our assertions. Critically, we should challenge one another to look at our work from new and even innovative perspectives.

There is more to be said about this space. For now, welcome. And please be gentle with your somewhat intrepid professor.