THINK!: Credibility

Showing posts with label Credibility. Show all posts

Wednesday, 19 November 2008

NYT's media correspondent tells us all we need to know about what's wrong with newspapers

I think this speaks for itself. I mean, really, this is like GM backing SUVs and being surprised when Toyota and Renault do better.

Filling media gaps, watchdogs spring up online
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
SAN DIEGO: Over the last two years, some of this city's darkest secrets have been dragged into the light - city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, misleading crime statistics.
Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego's television and radio stations or its big newspaper, The Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from the downtown - a site that did not exist four years ago.
As newspapers in the United States - and much of the western world - shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, taking up some of the slack and forcing the mainstream media to follow the stories they uncover.
Here, it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists - the province of the mainstream media, but without the expensive paper and ink. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, Connecticut; the Twin Cities in Minnesota; Seattle; St. Louis, Missouri; and Chicago. More are on the way.
Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.
The fledgling movement has reached a critical mass, its founders think, to form a planned association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for by themselves. And hardly a week goes by without a call from frustrated journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets.
"Voice is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and businesses on the hot seat," said Dean Nelson, journalism director at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. "I have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, 'This is the future of journalism."'
That is a subject of hot debate among people who follow the besieged newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is nowhere near robust enough to sustain a newsroom.
And so, financially, VoiceofSanDiego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising.
New nonprofits without a specific geographic focus also have sprung up to fill other niches, like ProPublica, devoted to investigative journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which looks into problems abroad. A similar group, the Center for Investigative Reporting, dates back decades.
But experts question whether a large part of the news business can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.
"These are some of the big questions about the future of the business," said Robert Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Nonprofit news online "has to be explored and experimented with, but it has to overcome the hurdle of proving it can support a big news staff. Even the most well-funded of these sites are a far cry in resources from a city newspaper."
The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future among many. They have a complex relationship with the mainstream media, whose failings have created an opening for new sources of news, and whose cutbacks have created a surplus of unemployed journalists for them to hire.
"No one here welcomes the decline of newspapers," said Andrew Donohue, one of two executive editors at VoiceofSanDiego. "We can't be the main news source for this city, not for the foreseeable future. We only have 11 people."
Those people are almost all young, some of them refugees from the mainstream media. The executive editors - Donohue, 30, and Scott Lewis, 32 - each had a few years of experience at small papers before abandoning newsprint. So far, their audience is tiny, about 18,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast, a media measurement service. The biggest of the new nonprofit news sites, MinnPost in the Twin Cities and the St. Louis Beacon, can top 200,000 visitors in a month, but even that is a fraction of the Internet readership for the local newspapers.
VoiceofSanDiego's site looks much like any newspaper's, frequently updated with breaking news and organized around broad topics: government and politics, housing, economics, the environment, schools and science. It has few graphics, but plenty of photography and, through a partnership with a local TV station, some video.
But it is thin - strictly local, selective in coverage and without the wire service articles that plump up most sites.
On a budget of less than $800,000 this year - almost $200,000 more than last year - everyone does double duty. Lewis writes a political column, and Donohue works on investigative articles. But the operation is growing, and Woolley, president and chief executive officer, said he is convinced the nonprofit model has the best chance of survival.
"Information is now a public service as much as it's a commodity," he said. "It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It's one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn't doing it very well."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/18/business/voice.php

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Saturday, 8 November 2008

What the U.S Elections Told Us About MSM

First-off, print is alive and well. The NYT had increased print runs (35% more copies election Wednesday than usual, an increase of about 150,000. It then added another 75,000) and ran a full-page advert on Thursday offering readers an election result day copy of the paper for a staggering $14.95. Despite the fact that if you check EBay the going rate is $200!

What a bloody shambles, what a chronic sign of miscalculation on their print runs. Only a 35% extra print run? You're kidding me right? They had people queing round the block on Wednesday to buy their paper!!!

Kiosks ran dry, they didn't even believe themselves how many copies they could sell. Absolutely staggering and a sign that not even the NYT's own circulation department believes any longer in the power of print.

The anti-newspaper blogosphere was laughing its head off.

Wednesday, Nov 05
Obama Sells Out Dead Tree Editions of Local Newspapers

We've noticed a number of people twittering and facebooking today that they couldn't find a copy of various papers this morning. Turns out they weren't imagining it! The Daily News sold out of even the extra printed copies of their regular morning edition and planned on printing and distributing an updated second edition. The New York Times reported that the New York Post had also sold-out (in our non-scientifically based experience it is always the first to go) along with the Times.

The [Times] printed 35 percent more papers in the 'single copy' print run, which supplies newsstands. Still, by morning, company officials found that papers were "selling out all across the metropolitan area" and decided to print 50,000 more copies for sale in the New York area.This isn't a New York-based phenomenon, either.

Apparently the Washington Post also sold-out of newsstand copies and the Chicago Tribune was experiencing very long lines. Now if Barack Obama could just do something historic and momentous every single day for the next four years he could feasibly save the entire print journalism industry!

Secondly, Palin: She got a free ride. Not only that but I didn't see a MSM outlet explore this possibility, which happens to be my own personal opinion:

Did the Republican Party of George W. Bush want to win this election? I wonder.

With many of its moderate senators and congressmen unseated, that party still exists and it's not evident it belongs to Senator John McCain.

But either way, this was a hospital pass election if ever there was one. Perhaps either McCain, or the GOP grandees, came to the conclusion that this wasn't a ball they wanted to receive, that only a Democrat administration could wipe clean the slate for the GOP or at least begin to. Were I a Republican party grandee, I'd be quite happy to let the Democrats pick up the check for the last 8 years and try and pay it off, because the chances are they'll end up having to wash dishes in the kitchen to sort this mess out.

McCain began his primary campaign well before the financial meltdown, before the war in Afghanistan was lost, before Mexico began the final journey to becoming a narco state (a government plane crashed on the day of the election, an accident we are told, at least for now, but a fine time for a cartel to murder the U.S.A.'s southern neigbbour's Interior Minister); before Bhutto's assasination and a nuclear Pakistan possibly falling to the Taliban, before the escalation of Iran's nuclear capabalities; beforethe Congo, before India degenerating into ethnic chaos, before global recession/depresssion, before Obama won the democractic primary. Surely he must have realised that the presidency was a poisoned chalice.

Chosing Palin, someone so clearly incompetent and in the very midst of an ethics investigation, a person who who stood a 1 in 8 chance of becoming President, given all the variables, was the equivalent of scuttling his campaign.

McCain may have started out wanting to become President of the U.S.A but by the time it looked like he might actually have a chance, he bailed.Palin moved the undecided and previous moderate republicans firmly to Obama. Race relations in the U.S.A are so appalling that only such a fine W. mess could possibly have allowed a black man to be elected, even a half white one who has spent his entire adult life less than 12 miles from an elite American university campus.

Berlusconi's tasteless remarks about Obama being young, handsome and even tanned pretty much summed up what type of black man is 'in'. Gays on the other hand are still very much 'out' as judged by the large number of anti-gay marriage ballot successes.

Nevertheless there was a photo from the campaign trail of a confederate flag with the slogan "Even Rednecks Have Had Enough". Perhaps so had McCain.

I'll leave someone more eloquent than I to explain this Palin Oversight by papers such as the NYT but MSM failing to nail Palin, as they could and should have done, is cited below as a reason why MSM is imploding:

Andrew Sullivan: The Daily Dish 06 Nov 2008 11:51 am
The Civic Responsibility Of Carl Cameron
Look: I understand that information given strictly off the record cannot be used. I am a stickler for that myself and there's stuff I know that I cannot tell Dish readers because of those rules. But at the same time, my commitment to you is never to bullshit my opinion that reflects that information. And the reporting of Palin fell into that category at times. I became convinced very early - just from public information - that she was obviously a disastrous choice, made on a whim, and obviously not ready for prime time. On August 30, I posted the following quotes from serious leaders in Alaska who knew Palin:
"She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" said Green, a Republican from Palin's hometown of Wasilla. "Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"
And this:
Anchorage Democratic state Sen. Hollis French said it's a huge mistake by McCain and "reflects very, very badly on his judgment." French said Palin's experience running the state for less than two years hasn't prepared her for this.
But actual reporters were soon finding this out for themselves - and not even conveying the gist of that to their viewers and readers. Why not?
They kept taking Palin seriously as a veep candidate when she didn't come close to even minimal standards for passing a citizenship test. I'm sorry but I think this is a terrible failing, and it is a reason the mainstream media are imploding. They let the rules of the game over-rule their duty to tell the American people the truth as they began to discover it. The truth is that Sarah Palin had no business whatever being on a national ticket. It was an insanely reckless choice. She could never adequately perform the job of president at a moment's notice, and the McCain campaign and their media enablers were putting this country and the world at serious risk by perpetuating this farce.
It was a farce. And it was a potential threat to national security if anything happened to McCain in office. But they couldn't admit a mistake because it would have killed their campaign, destroying our impression of McCain's judgment and management skills. So they kept this farce alive for two months, putting the country at potentially great risk to massage their own careers. Now they are doing all they can to dump on her. But the dumpage goes both ways. The McCain camp picked Palin and stuck with her far longer than any people who put country first would have. Every reason why she should not have been picked is a reason why McCain should never have been president.

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Wednesday, 5 November 2008

The Black Week for Print - October 27th to November 2nd, 2008

Many people are writing that last week was the worst week for Print Media since the Great Depression, as judged by layoffs, results and sea change shifts in reading habits. In many respects they're not wrong.

The front page of the IHT was dominated today by an article speaking about a similar paradigm shift in U.S elections, one that was turned upside down and 'truly became bottom up instead of top down'.

Speaking of the election, and the same can be said of media in the 21st century, the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections 'leveraged the Internet in ways never imagined. This year we went to warp speed.'

Exactly.

I've spoken of tipping points for the NYT Company and it is at one right now, because of this warp speed year.

A part of the Black Week for Print narrative was Gawker announcing rumoured sales of About.com (on Sunday 2nd November) by the NYT Company to reduce its debt and help it go private.

(BTW, all those people who took exception to my recent analysis of About.com really ought to go and read the derogatory comments about About.com posted on Gawker and elsewhere.)

I finally realised what the difference is between a blog and a non MSM news site like Gawker.

A good blog - hopefully this one - speculates on the future, using a platform of what I call 'conditional information' - things that might be true, things that might happen. Sites like HuffPo, Gawker etc rely often on reporting rumours without sources or verifiable fact checking. Nothing wrong with that, provided the reader knows what he or she is getting.

What you're getting at this blog is nothing more than informed speculation. It's what MSM calls opinion, and that the NYT hasn't an official editorial definition of what a blog is or should do tells you all you need to know about just what trouble they are in.

I had blogged several times on the dismantling of the NYT Company and the possibility of it being taken private well before actual rumours hit sites like Gawker.

I'll come back to this so-called Black Week to see if it's as black as everyone says it is.

For now, my personal point of view is that print has DEMAND side problems, not from READERS, but from ADVERTISERS who are losing faith in print as a viable option. I remain convinced that there is a demand for print from the reader, but what papers like the NYT and the IHT are SUPPLYING is not what (enough valueable) readers want.

The NYT Company Annual report of 2007 complained of audience fragementation.

OK. So what's the big effing problem?

Of course there is audience fragmentation, so having a single monolithic entity, be it on print, or online, as the NYT has, is clearly not a very smart idea as the middle ground CONSENSUS about what the intelligent mass market reader WANTS is over. Get it?

When I speak of dismantling the NYT Company, yes, I am talking about selling some assets to reduce debt, and going private wouldn't be a bad idea either.

However, what really needs to be dismantled and built from the ground up is the NYT newspaper and brands within the NYTMG stable, including the IHT.

Now naturally, with a million circulation and over two thirds of the company's revenues coming from the NYTMG, I wouldn't be doing that in a hasty or ill-considered manner.

However, I would be thinking about how the NTY Company can sit atop a framgmented audience and stop pursuing a strategy that seems to think that the NYT newspaper can somehow hold together that fragmentation.

It can't, for reasons of the audience's various, framgmented, age, income, interests, political affiliations and other things too many to get into right now.

The NYT Company needs to strip out its core brand values and apply them to other brands, new ones or existing ones, that cater to various audience splinters, some of which will be highly profitable in print as well as online.

It conspicuously failed to do this with About.com which serious Net Heads haven't looked at since they closed their AOL account about 9 years ago.

On this historic day, I'll leave you with this article from The Economist to think about.

A BIASED MARKET
Oct 30th 2008
Skewed news reporting is taken as a sign of a dysfunctional media. In fact, it may be a sign of healthy competition

BARACK OBAMA recently told a writer for the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE that he was convinced he might be two or three percentage points better off in the polls for the American presidential election if Fox News, aright-leaning television station, did not exist. Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for vice-president, has made hay railing against the bias of the "liberal media". Allegations of partial news reporting are common in American politics. But few stop to ask what leads to differences in the way the news is reported. Bias can be thought of as a supply-side phenomenon that arises from ideology. Owners' or employees' political views will determine how a newspaper or channel slants its coverage of a piece of news. But this does not square with the assumption that readers and viewers value accuracy. If so, then competition should hurt media outlets that systematically distort the news (in any direction). The brouhaha about bias in America, as free a media market as any, suggests something else is going on. The key to understanding why bias flourishes in a competitive market may lie in thinking more clearly about what readers actually want.

Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer, two Harvard economists,argued in an influential paper*[1] that it may be naive to think that people care about accuracy alone. Instead, they modelled the consequences of assuming that newspaper readers also like to have their beliefs confirmed by what they read. As long as readers have different beliefs, the Mullainathan-Shleifer model suggests that competition, far from driving biased reporting out of the market, would encourage newspapers to cater to the biases of different segments of the reading public.

A more recent paper**[2] by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro,two economists at the University of Chicago's business school, set out to test this proposition. To do so, they first needed a way to measure the political slant of American news coverage. Their solution was rather imaginative. The researchers ran computer programs that analysed debates in Congress and identified phrases that were disproportionately used by Republicans or Democrats. The list of frequent Democratic phrases, for example,included "estate tax". While talking about the same issue, Republicans tended to use the phrase "death tax". (This is not just coincidence. MrGentzkow and Mr Shapiro quote an anonymous Republican staffer as saying that the party machine trained members to say "death tax", because"'estate tax' sounds like it hits only the wealthy but 'death tax' sounds like it hits everyone".) Having identified partisan phrases, the academics then analysed the news coverage of more than 400 American newspapers to see how often they cropped up in reporting. This gave them a precise measure of "slant", showing the extent to which the news coverage in these papers tended to use politically charged phrases.
Mr Gentzkow and Mr Shapiro then needed to assess the political beliefs of different newspapers' readerships, which they did using data on the share of votes in each newspaper's market that went to President Bush in the 2004 presidential elections, and information on how likely people in different parts of that market were to contribute to entities allied to either Democrats or Republicans. The researchers were now able to look at the relationships between circulation, slant, and people's political views.First, they measured whether a newspaper's circulation responded to the match between its slant and its readers' views. Not surprisingly, they found that more "Republican" newspapers had relatively higher circulations in more "Republican" zip codes. But their calculations of the degree to which circulation responded to political beliefs also allowed them to do something more interesting: to calculate what degree of slant would be most profitable for each newspaper in their sample to adopt, given the political make-up of the market it covered. They compared this profit-maximising slant to their measure of the actual slant of each newspaper's coverage. They found a striking congruence between the two. Newspapers tended,on average, to locate themselves neither to the right nor to the left of the level of slant that Mr Gentzkow and Mr Shapiro reckon would maximise their profits. And for good commercial reasons: their model showed that even a minor deviation from this "ideal" level of slant would hurt profits through a sizeable loss of circulation.

HAVE I GOT SKEWS FOR YOU
Showing that newspapers have a political slant that is economically rational does not necessarily answer the question of whether ownership or demand determines bias. Here, the academics are helped by the fact that large media companies may own several newspapers, often in markets that are politically very different. This allowed them to test whether the slants of newspapers with the same owner were more strongly correlated than those of two newspapers picked at random. They found that this was not so: owners exerted a negligible influence on slant.

Readers' political views explained about a fifth of measured slant,while ownership explained virtually none.None of this is particularly helpful to seekers of the unvarnished truth. These conscientious sorts still have to find the time to readlots of newspapers to get an unbiased picture of the world. But by serving demand from a variety of political niches, competition does allow for different points of view to be represented. After all, just as Mrs Palin does not spend her time condemning Fox News, Mr Obama is unlikely to have too many complaints about the NEW YORK TIMES.
* "The Market for News", American Economic Review (September 2005).
**"What Drives Media Slant? Evidence from U.S. Daily Newspapers" (May2007)http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/matthew.gentzkow/biasmeas081507.pdf[3]-----[1] http://www.economist.com/#footnote1
[2] http://www.economist.com/#footnote1

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12510893&fsrc=rss

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Thursday, 23 October 2008

But About.com revenues rise 16% (or shoutld that be only?)

I think my PERSONAL CONSUMER views about About.com are know - so know emails please - but the NYT's own media correspondent RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA should know better to write about increases in about.com revenues (a meagre 16.1 percent) as if this was something to write home about. From what base Richard and how fast do they need to grow to prop up that declining print revenue? And how much of that growth came from acquisitions?

There's no BUT here Richard, only an ONLY about About.com revenue.

October 24, 2008
New York Times Co. Posts Lower Profit
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
The New York Times Company reported a 51.4 percent decline in third-quarter profit on Thursday and swung to a loss on continuing operations as deeper-than-expected expense cuts could not keep pace with declining revenue.
The company said it would consider cutting its dividend and planned to write down the value of assets in its New England Media Group, which includes The Boston Globe, by as much as $150 million.
“Our board of directors plans to review our dividend policy before the end of this year to determine what is most prudent in light of the overall market conditions,” the company’s chief executive, Janet Robinson, said in a statement.

Online revenue rose just 2.5 percent for the company’s newspapers, which include The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune and 17 smaller papers. But the company’s other online businesses, including About.com, increased revenue by 16.1 percent, despite the economic downturn.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/media/24times.html?ref=business

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War seen eroding respect of press freedoms (IHT)

Reuters
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
By Tamora Vidaillet
The United States and Israel, despite their democratic credentials, fall down badly in their respect for press freedoms in conflict zones, a media group said on Wednesday.
Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said the U.S. had slipped to 119th in respect of press freedoms outside its own territory in an annual ranking of more than 160 countries, from a joint ranking at 111 in its previous annual report.
Israel, whose armed forces killed a Palestinian journalist this year for the first time since 2003, was 149th on the list for press freedoms beyond its frontiers, compared with 103rd place in RSF's 2007 rankings.
Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana was killed in April by a shell packed with darts fired from an Israeli tank in the Gaza Strip. Israel's senior military lawyer said troops could not see whether Shana had been operating a camera or a weapon but were nevertheless justified in firing.
Both Israel and the United States moved up the table for 2008 with regard to respect of press freedoms at home.
"Democracies embroiled in wars outside their own territory, such as the United States or Israel, fall further in the ranking every year," the report said.
"Destabilised and on the defensive, the leading democracies are gradually eroding the space for freedoms," it added.
It said countries in the top 20 -- led by Iceland at No. 1 -- had in common that all were parliamentary democracies and none were involved in conflict beyond their borders.
The ravages of war had also taken their toll on conditions for journalists in Georgia, which held 66th place in 2007 but plummeted to 120 this year following conflict with Russia.
The African country of Niger also took a hit, plunging to 130th place from close to 87 in the previous report due to a resumption in fighting, it said.
Kenya fell as a result of post-electoral violence, it said.
Violent conflicts kept countries such as Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan towards the bottom of the rankings, with RSF describing them as highly dangerous "black zones" for reporters.
Journalists in such countries were targeted daily for murder, kidnapping or death threats, it said.
LITTLE SUCCESS
Countries run by what RSF described as dictatorships, including China, Iran and Zimbabwe, continued to make it highly risky for journalists to operate, it said.
The year of the Olympics in China saw the jailing of dissidents and journalists but RSF noted that the Games also provided opportunities to liberal media trying to free themselves from the country's "pervasive controls."
Being a journalist in such countries involved endless frustration and constant police and judicial harassment, it said.
Eritrea stood at the bottom of the list for a second year running, again flanked by North Korea and Turkmenistan.
"North Korea and Turkmenistan are unchanging hells in which the population is cut off from the world and is subjected to propaganda worthy of a bygone age," it said.
Assurances from the international community that dialogue was the only solution had little impact, RSF said.
(Reporting by Tamora Vidaillet; editing by Michael Roddy)

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Wednesday, 22 October 2008

More Chinese Water Torture - NYT Technology Coverage

I've blogged many times on the cumulative affect of media criticism of the NYT, not so much in the consumer market, but in the trade market. If young wired media buyers don't buy the NYT brand on a subject as important as technology, why would they think the NYT's readers do?

To the power of people two years behind the curve?

Tuesday, Oct 21
NYT Writes Wired Article, Two Years Later
The New York Times isn't known for the timeliness of its technology coverage, but today's article about how bot networks are a danger to the Internet comes almost two years after Wired covered the same problem — much more thoroughly — in its November, 2006 issue.

Attack of the Bots (Wired) — "The latest threat to the Net: autonomous software programs that combine forces to perpetrate mayhem, fraud, and espionage on a global scale."

A Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer (NYT) — "An automated program lurking on the Internet has remotely taken over the PC and turned it into a 'zombie.' That computer and other zombie machines are then assembled into systems called 'botnets' — home and business PCs that are hooked together into a vast chain of cyber-robots that do the bidding of automated programs to send the majority of e-mail spam, to illegally seek financial information and to install malicious software on still more PCs."

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New York Times Credibility Stress.

In times like these, people have got to believe in your brand. A NYT subscription is easy to cut from one's personal budget (and lest we forget, the NYT Co. does still earn about 30% of its revenue from circulation) and you surely want info you can believe in.

I fear an awful consumer tipping point (again that phrase) for consumer confidence in the NYT.

JB, JM, and now this: a NYT writer distorting a survey’s findings to fit his theme, contrary to The Times’s standards of integrity. (Oh yeah, I liked a correction in the IHT yesterday that got the number of a loan wrong - it was US$500 million, not US$5oo billion as previously reported. Please. Coffees on me.)

October 21, 2008

Corrections
Editors’ Note
An article in the Itineraries pages last Tuesday reported about the increasing stress on business travelers, and cited the findings of “Stress in America,” an annual survey of the American Psychological Association. That survey found that economic factors were the leading causes of stress levels in 2008, but it did not say, as the article did, that “the crisis on Wall Street was the No. 1 cause of anxiety,” nor did participants in the survey say they felt most vulnerable to stress “in the office and on a business trip.”
The survey included data from Sept. 19 to Sept. 23, 2008, a period of volatility on Wall Street, but none of the questions in the association’s survey referred to Wall Street or any economic crises. Participants were not asked how business travel affected their stress levels or where they felt most vulnerable to stress. The author of the article distorted the survey’s findings to fit his theme, contrary to The Times’s standards of integrity.
The article also quoted incorrectly from a comment by Nancy Molitor, a psychologist in Wilmette, Ill., who told the author that, “In my 20 years of practice I’ve never seen such anxiety among my patients,” not “among my banking and business patients.” While Dr. Molitor does have patients in banking and business, she did not single them out as being more anxious than her other patients. (Go to Article)

OK, those are the facts, no big deal you might think. You read the correction, if you spot it, appreciate their frank and timely response and move on.

But here's the damage.

Gawker reporting, love 'em or hate 'em, and the comments from Gawker I like to post because I think they do often reflect undercurrents about the NYT's brand perception (and my fear of this tipping point), follow below, but it's interesting to note how many of the comments from Gawker readers fit into Slate's criticisms of the NYT's back of the book feature people coming up with false trends. Gawker is Gawker but Slate is in fact owned by the WP.

And both, I am sure, are read by young, impressionable media buyers and planners within agencies. Chinese water torture...

I pick up a range of opinion that Thursday and Sunday NYT's are full of soft-news rubbish. That's 2 out of 7 days of that 30% circulation revenue.

The NYT people I speak to just don't seem to have any sense of this weakness within their brand perception. We're the NYT, Krugman has a Nobel Prize for God's sake, we're invincible. A must read, a must advertising buy.

There is no such thing as a must read and a must advertising buy when you're dealing with people who don't read much and buy advertising.

The Times ran a special editors' note this morning accusing one of its freelancers of twisting the truth "to fit his theme, contrary to the Times' standards of integrity." The writer, Paul Burnham Finney, apparently distorted an American Psychological Association survey to reflect his article's thesis that business travel and the Wall Street meltdown are stressing people out more than anything else. In fact, the survey showed the economy generally is stressing people out. Also, he rewrote a therapist's quote to also be more specific in the same way, the paper said. Having developed something of a history running false stories, the Times seems to have been eager to get out in front of this one, running its correction barely one week after the original article came out — quite a speedy timeframe for deciding one of your contributors is a liar.

GAWKER COMMENTS (BTW, you can skip the first rather crude comment if you like but I'll bet you a pound to a penny he's an IHT reader living in France.)

drunkexpatwriter 7:00 AM
You know, this could almost become an underground game/meme. People could try to get freelance gigs at the Times and then intentionally insert obviously false/misleading information into the stories to see what level of bullshit gets through.
The point of the game would be to see who could become possible for the most ridiculous correction in the Times.
Like, seriously, I'd love to be the dude who writes a story that eventually ends up leading to this type of correction:
"An article appearing in last Sunday's Times Magazine about Hollywood celebrities contained information that was skewed by our contributor, Bart Calendar, to fit his theme. While Paris Hilton did indeed make a sex tape, she has never said "I'd rather suck a Doberman's cock than lick Alan Arkin's asshole." Instead, she said "I'm thinking about getting a Doberman and appearing in a movie with Alan Rickman." In addition, Lindsay Lohan has battled drug addiction in the past, but did not say "I love shooting heroin with Milley Cyrus." Rather, the actress commented that "I'm going to be the heroine in a new movie they are shooting with Miley Cyrus." Furthermore, representatives of Tom Cruise insist that he never said "I'm a Catholic cockaholic and terrified of tasting tuna, suck my balls you bitches."
The Times regrets these errors.

drunkexpatwriter You know, this could almost become an underground...
4 replies by drunkexpatwriter, zaropa, drunkexpatwriter ...

AlexanderKerensky 7:55 AM
@drunkexpatwriter: That would, indeed, be the best correction ever.
Now the trouble is getting a gig with the Times after saying that.

AlexanderKerensky @ drunkexpatwriter : That would, indeed, be the best...

drunkexpatwriter 8:09 AM
@AlexanderKerensky: Do you think they really check credentials?

drunkexpatwriter @ AlexanderKerensky : Do you think they really check...

zaropa 9:28 AM
@AlexanderKerensky: You dont need a gig at the Times after that, you just go to Fox news.

zaropa @ AlexanderKerensky : You dont need a gig at the Times...

drunkexpatwriter 9:55 AM
@zaropa: But where is the challenge in doing that to Fox News?
Plus, you can't frame a video correction and keep it on your wall.

drunkexpatwriter @ zaropa : But where is the challenge in doing that to...

7:03 AM
veganrampage2 7:03 AM
I find the truth stressful enough.

veganrampage2 I find the truth stressful enough.

7:45 AM
PRIsNotJournalism 7:45 AM
Does that mean he doesn't get paid?

PRIsNotJournalism Does that mean he doesn't get paid?

9:05 AM
plasticene 9:05 AM
Does anyone believe the Times anymore?

plasticene Does anyone believe the Times anymore?

9:34 AM
Aaron Altman 9:34 AM
The ultimate stressor? Commercials for the Times "Weekender" subs.

Aaron Altman The ultimate stressor? Commercials for the Times...

10:45 AM 1 reply
themediatrix 10:45 AM
They have an entire section of articles twisted to fit the suppositions of the reporters. It's called the health section. Terms like "obesity crisis," and "lifestyle choices," and "the study reveals an association between..."
There is a sad lack of science literacy among Times reporters, and as a result, the health and medical writing is all based on givens, and conventional wisdom. They don't understand statistics, and continue to repeat information that is untrue without ever questioning their assumptions.
And I hate that stupid Tara Parker Pope, who can't manage to write anything original. WTF.

themediatrix They have an entire section of articles twisted to fit...
1 reply by themediatrix

themediatrix 11:36 AM
@themediatrix: FOR EXAMPLE, from today:
"One of the best ways to prevent cavities in children is to treat their molars with a dental sealant that protects the teeth..." Really? One of the best? According to...?
Sure, let's not worry about sourcing that "fact," everyone knows it's true, right? Plus, it sets up your whole column for today, right Tara. Actually, one of the best ways of preventing cavities is to keep kids from eating processed carbs and processed sugar, while pumping them full of raw milk [source: weston price]. But hey, it's better to say this other thing so that you can get that blog post pumped out, right?
[well.blogs.nytimes.com]

themediatrix @ themediatrix : FOR EXAMPLE, from today: "One of the...

10:50 AM 1 reply
HK_Guy 10:50 AM
I smell a rat, in the shape of an editor. Editors constantly badger freelancers to torture their quotes to fit some a priori theme in the editor's head. Since freelancers are under such stress to get stories in so they can get paid and go on to the next gig, they eventually succumb. So the freelancer takes the fall for the editor.

HK_Guy I smell a rat, in the shape of an editor. Editors...
1 reply by Seeräuber Jenny

Seeräuber Jenny 12:29 PM
@HK_Guy:
That is a possibility. Perhaps we'll hear more.

Seeräuber Jenny @ HK_Guy : That is a possibility. Perhaps we'll hear...

12:28 PM 1 reply
Seeräuber Jenny 12:28 PM
So the moral of the story is that it's better to just make sh-t up as they do every Thursday and Sunday?
At least the freelancer didn't claim to see Pol Pot masquerading as a Native American who was raised by a ghetto foster mother while engaged in the act of personally carrying aluminum tubes that could be used for weapons of mass destruction.

Seeräuber Jenny So the moral of the story is that it's better to just...
1 reply by HK_Guy

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Tuesday, 21 October 2008

Judith Miller to Join Fox News (Fishbowl)

So what do you do if you're a disgraced former investigative reporter for the national paper of record, who, in your own words, became a "lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war?" You go work for Fox News of course!

Over at WaPo

Howie Kurtz is reporting that Fox News has signed Judith Miller to be an on-air analyst as well as contribute to Fox's website. Says says Fox senior vice president John Moody: "We've all had stories that didn't come out exactly as we had hoped. [Ha!] It's certainly something she's going to be associated with for all time, and there's not much anyone can do about that, but we want to make use of the tremendous expertise she brings on a lot of other issues." The "for all time" bit does seem a bit overdone, but still that was a pretty fundamental screw-up. Television is the great absolver, however! Miller isn't the only questionable hire Fox has made of late.

Shortly after Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign last June Fox announced that her top advisor Howard Wolfson would be joining its lineup of talking heads. According to NYMag this makes him the "makes him the most prominent Democrat ever placed on the conservative channel's payroll." Perhaps Fox is gearing up for a coming Democratic administration, arguably the first one it's ever had to deal with since it became household name during the Bush years. Of course, before you express too much wonderment, NYMag also points to this minor phenomenon:

There exists in Washington, of course, a kind of permanent political class...These people aren't without their political beliefs, but above all they are professionals. They may tear into each other by day, or from one campaign to the next, but in the shape of their lives they are more alike than they are different. They eat at the same restaurants, go to the same parties, and send their kids to the same schools...Howard Wolfson is a particularly nimble and skillful member of the permanent political class.