A Royal Pain for IHT Readers - repeat stories, way behind the news curve.

I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by the IHT running NYT pieces, on stories that IHT editors (alert, on the ball, all good) had already picked up weeks earlier.

To give an example from today's paper, compare and contrast the following:

A royal pain for the Spanish monarchy
By Victoria Burnett
Monday, November 17, 2008
MADRID: When the English monarch in Alan Bennett's novella "The Uncommon Reader" decides to write her memoirs, she takes the prudent step of abdicating first. Queen Sofia of Spain may be wondering whether she, too, should have waited for her husband, King Juan Carlos, to leave office before granting a Spanish journalist a series of uncharacteristically candid interviews.
The resulting book, "The Queen Up Close," has provided Spaniards an uncomfortably close look at their queen's conservative views. Her comments on homosexuality, gay marriage, euthanasia and religious education have outraged liberal Spaniards and tarnished an image of discretion that she had carefully tended for decades.
In the most notorious gaffe in the book, the queen said that she respected people's different sexual tendencies but did not understand why "they should feel proud to be gay."
"That they get up on floats and parade in the streets? If all of us who are not gay were to parade in the streets, we'd halt the traffic in every city," she said. She then added that while gay people had a right to unions, they should not be permitted to call them marriages.
As well as homosexuality, the queen takes several forays into politically tricky territory, saying that she does not support euthanasia - an issue being hotly debated in Spain - and that she believes schoolchildren should be taught the origins of man from a creationist point of view.
The book is also peppered with personal tidbits about world leaders and royal travels. At one point, Sofia congratulates herself on persuading the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, to wear a suit and tie, instead of his "shapeless" military garb. The late King Hassan of Morocco drove her "crazy" with his mania about food, she says, bringing a retinue of cooks and his own supplies when he visited Spain because "he didn't trust us." Former President Jimmy Carter was a good enough sort, but "behaved really badly toward the Shah of Iran" when he refused him asylum, she said.
The controversy is one of a series of incidents that have revealed cracks in the cocoon of respect that envelops the Spanish royal family. Recent attempts to stifle embarrassing cartoons or claim privacy from the news media have challenged the balance between protecting free speech and protecting Spain's royals.
"I don't think many people would be surprised to learn these were the queen's views," said Juan Díez-Nicolás, a professor of sociology whose organization, ASEP, polls the Spanish public about the monarchy. They are routinely voted the most respected public figures in the country.
"What surprises them is that she would say such things for publication," he said. And moreover, "not offering a view that is widely shared by Spaniards."
Born Princess Sophia of Greece and Denmark in November 1938, the queen converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Catholicism when she married Juan Carlos, then the future king, in 1962. Elegant, circumspect and fluent in several languages, she became popular in part because of her role in helping to steer Spain toward democracy after the death of Franco in 1975.
Long considered a paragon of royal reserve, the queen emerges from the book as the 70-year-old observant Catholic that she is, rather than the sweet, demure figure that the Spanish public apparently wants her to be, people who follow the monarchy said.
Her comments on gay pride and marriage provoked indignation from the gay community, which won the right to marry in 2005, and prompted a swift apology from the royal household. In a statement read to the press late last month, a spokesman for the royal family said the queen "deeply regrets that the inaccuracy of the comments attributed to her may have caused discomfort or offense."
The statement claimed that the queen had been quoted "inexactly" and suggested that the interviewer, the journalist Pilar Urbano, had published comments intended to be private. Urbano denied this and said galleys of the book had been reviewed by the queen's office, which approved them for publication.
In an interview by telephone, Urbano said she had interviewed Sofia several times, though she did not use a tape recorder. Journalists who closely follow the royal family said that the king was incensed by the book and that those responsible for giving the green light may yet be fired.
Antonio Poveda, president of the Spanish Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transsexuals, said his organization accepted the palace's apology but that "there's definitely still some bad feeling among the gay community."
"The monarch has always been at pains not to comment on social or political issues," he said. "It seems they have broken with this tradition."
The publication of the book, "The Queen Up Close," follows a rash of setbacks for members of the royal family and Spanish aristocracy looking for greater protection from the press that have contributed to a sense that they are no longer untouchable. A court this month ruled against the Duchess of Alba, who was seeking to have copies of a satirical magazine whose cover featured her lying naked in pile of money removed from news stands.
Telma Ortiz, sister of Queen Sofia's daughter-in-law Princess Letizia, this month lost a court battle to obtain restraining orders against dozens of media outlets, which she accuses of hounding her and her family. The court ruled that Ortiz, an aid worker, is in the limelight by dint of her relationship with her sister and ordered her to pay around €45,000, or about $57,000, in costs, according to press reports.
While Díez, the sociology professor, said the ruckus over the book would blow over and have no impact on Sofia's popularity, other analysts said the dents in the Spanish royal family's image were part of a wider trend away from monarchy in Europe.
"Monarchy is old-fashioned by nature, and Europe is modern in its self-esteem," said Geoffrey Hindley, a historian who has written on European monarchy. "The ethos of republicanism is the style of the majority in Europe."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/europe/sofia.php

Over two weeks ago, the IHT ran the piece below on www.iht.com and an edited version in the paper.

I imagine the NYT didn't but their global edition did and it's not evident to me that two weeks later Victoria Burnett (was she on holiday at the time?) has added all that much value.

And if you're an IHT reader in Spain, you must be yawning over breakfast.


Spanish book quotes queen's disapproval of gay marriage
The Associated Press
Friday, October 31, 2008
MADRID: A Spanish journalist on Friday defended the accuracy of her book that quotes Queen Sofia criticizing gay marriage.
The book has irked the Royal Palace.
The Spanish king and queen are largely respected as figurehead representatives of the state, and rarely speak out on political or social issues.
The veteran journalist, Pilar Urbano, released the book - "La Reina muy de cerca," or "The Queen, very close up," - this week to mark the queen's 70th birthday Sunday. The journalist said it was based on 15 interviews with Queen Sofia, and that the Royal Palace approved the book's galley proofs before it was published, according to news agency Efe.
"What the queen said is what my book says," Urbano said.
The Royal Palace has challenged the comments attributed to the monarch, however, saying in a statement they "do not correspond exactly" with what she said. The palace also said the book also fails to reflect the queen's traditional neutrality on public affairs or respect for people who suffer discrimination, like homosexuals.
"I do not answer to the queen or king, or the Royal Palace. I answer to the truth," Urbano told Efe.
In the book, the queen is quoted as addressing a wide range of issues and saying she opposes abortion and euthanasia. Spain allows the former under restricted circumstances, and outlaws the latter. But the queen's alleged remarks on same-sex marriage are the main source of friction and have angered gay rights groups.
Spain legalized gay marriage in 2005, becoming one of the few countries in the world to recognize same-sex couples as having the same rights as heterosexual ones, including the right to adopt children.
"If those persons want to live together, dress up as bride and groom and get married, they can do so, but that should not be called marriage because it is not," the queen is quoted as saying in Urbano's book.
The conservative newspaper El Mundo said the queen erred by breaking with her tradition of quiet neutrality.
"As human as this burst of royal sincerity might be, certainly there were better ways to make Queen Sofia's birthday a new tool for bringing society closer to the throne," the newspaper said in an editorial.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/31/europe/01spain-fw-360944.php


REVISED: WEDNESDAY 19TH NOVEMBER, 2008

Just so you know I'm not imagining this problem as being regular, as opposed to infrequent, compare and contrast today's story about fighting in the Congo threatening gorillas (by Gettleman) with the same story from Reuters run in the IHT and on www.iht.com on November 10th, 2008, on the same subject.

Once again, wire service well ahead of the curve, and not a hell of a lot of added value from the NYT correspondent.

It's this type of absurd allocation of precious foreign correspondent resource which is why newspapers seem so damn irrelevant and it seems their own memories of what they've already run are really pretty poor.

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How the NYT hides financial meltdown journalistic failure

Let's just leave aside for now who is sorting out the 'financial meltdown' and the lack of penetrating questions about this (I hadn't seen that actual term, financial meltdown, used in the IHT in a headline until an Opinion piece in Friday's paper btw!!), namely an ex-Goldman Sachs chief who got us into this mess (that's him up there - yes, I know you know that, so why do the IHT keep running boring pictures of men in suits whose faces we already know? Another question...)

What blew me away from the article below, which could have been given the entire front page, was the fact that the absolutely key SEC meeting back in 2004 that got us into this thing - that the IHT now, only now, dares to refer to as a financial meltdown - was NOT attended by anyone from the MSM, INCLUDING THE NYT.

(What did get most of the IHT front page on Friday was the fighting in Pakistan; again, for anyone who follows my blog A Place in the Auvergne check out the labels Afghanistan/Pakistan and Financial Meltdown to see when I first started using those labels, when I first made the fighting in Pakistan my lead daily story and where the NYT story sits in the news cycle).

In fact a software engineer from Indiana was more on the ball about the implications of this meeting for investment banks,the credit markets and the global financial system than the entire journalistic might of the NYT, WSJ, FT etc etc etc.

And why this pretty damning admission was buried in the 19th para is another very good question as it is extremely newsworthy in and of itself.

So this is a double fault for me: being 4 years behind the news curve, and then not making that fact itself the front of the news curve.

Hello Newspaper 1.0: it's no point telling us about this meeting now, interesting as it may be for historians, whom I'm sure will do a better job of putting the past together than the IHT/NYT.

What we want - given that you know when these types of hearings are going to take place - is to have people smart enough to understand the possible implications and report on it, before the meeting takes place, not four years later.

U.S. regulator's 2004 rule let banks pile up new debt
By Stephen Labaton
Friday, October 3, 2008
"We have a good deal of comfort about the capital cushions at these firms at the moment."
- Christopher Cox, chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, March 11, 2008.
As rumors swirled in March that Bear Stearns faced imminent collapse, Christopher Cox was told by his staff that Bear Stearns had $17 billion in cash and other assets - more than enough to weather the storm.
Drained of most of that cash three days later, Bear Stearns was pushed into a hastily arranged merger with JPMorgan Chase - backed by a $29 billion dowry of taxpayers' money.
Within six months, other lions of Wall Street would also either disappear or transform themselves to survive the financial maelstrom - Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley converted themselves into commercial banks.
How could Cox have been so wrong?
Many events in Washington, on Wall Street and elsewhere around the United States have led to what has been called the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s.
But decisions made at a brief meeting on April 28, 2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The Securities and Exchange Commission's failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why regulators did not see what was coming.
On that bright spring afternoon, the five members of the SEC met in a basement hearing room to consider an urgent plea by the big investment banks. They wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities, credit derivatives - a form of insurance for bond holders - and other exotic instruments.
Five investment banks led the charge, including Goldman Sachs, then headed by Henry Paulson Jr. Two years later, he left Goldman to become the U.S. Treasury secretary.
A lone dissenter - a software consultant and expert on risk management - weighed in from Valparaiso, Indiana, with a two-page letter to warn the commission that the change would be a grave mistake. He never heard back from Washington.
One commissioner questioned the staff about the consequences of the proposed exemption. It would only be available for the largest companies, he was reassuringly told - those with assets greater than $5 billion. "We've said these are the big guys," said one commissioner, Harvey Goldschmid, provoking nervous laughter, "but that means if anything goes wrong, it's going to be an awfully big mess."
Goldschmid, an authority on securities law from Columbia University in New York, was a behind-the-scenes adviser in 2002 to Senator Paul Sarbanes when he rewrote U.S. corporate laws after a wave of accounting scandals.
"Do we feel secure if there are these drops in capital we really will have investor protection?" Goldschmid asked.
A senior staff member said the commission would be hiring the best minds, including people with strong quantitative skills, to parse the banks' balance sheets. Annette Nazareth, the head of market regulation, reassured the commission that under the new rules, the companies for the first time could be restricted by the SEC from excessively risky activity.
"I'm very happy to support it," said Commissioner Roel Campos, a former U.S. government prosecutor and owner of a small radio broadcasting firm in Houston who then deadpanned: "And I keep my fingers crossed for the future."
The proceeding was sparsely attended - none of the major media outlets, including The New York Times, covered it.
After 55 minutes of discussion, which can be heard on the Web sites of the agency and The Times and its international edition, the International Herald Tribune, William Donaldson, then the SEC chairman and a veteran Wall Street executive, called for a vote. It was unanimous. The decision, changing what was known as the net capital rule, was completed and published in the Federal Register a few months later.
With that, the five big independent investment firms were unleashed.
In loosening the capital rules, which are supposed to provide a buffer in turbulent times, the SEC also decided to rely on the firms' own computer risk models, essentially outsourcing the job of monitoring risk to the banks. Over the following months and years, all would take advantage of the looser rules.
The leverage ratio - a measurement of how much the companies were borrowing compared to their total assets - rose sharply at Bear Stearns, to 33 to 1. In other words, for every dollar in equity, it had $33 of debt. The ratio at the other companies also rose significantly.
The 2004 decision gave the SEC, for the first time, a window on the banks' increasingly risky investments in mortgage-related securities. But the agency never took true advantage of that part of the bargain. The supervisory program under Cox was a low priority.
The SEC assigned seven people to examine the parent companies- which last year controlled financial empires with combined assets of more than $4 trillion. Since March 2007, the supervisory office has not had a director.
And as of September 2008, the office had not completed a single inspection since it was reshuffled by Cox more than a year and a half ago.
The few problems the examiners preliminarily uncovered about the riskiness of the companies' investments and their increased reliance on debt - clear signs of trouble - were all but ignored.
The SEC's division of trading and markets "became aware of numerous potential red flags prior to Bear Stearns's collapse, regarding its concentration of mortgage securities, high leverage, shortcomings of risk management in mortgage-backed securities, and lack of compliance with the spirit of certain" capital standards, said an inspector-general report on Sept. 26.
But the division "did not take actions to limit these risk factors."
The commission's decision to effectively outsource its oversight to the companies themselves fit squarely in the broader Washington culture of the past eight years under President George W. Bush.
As with other agencies, the SEC's decision was motivated by industry complaints of excessive regulation at a time of growing competition from overseas. The 2004 decision was aimed at easing new regulatory burdens that the European Union was about to impose on the foreign operations of U.S. investment banks. The Europeans said they would agree not to regulate the foreign subsidiaries of the investment banks on one condition - that the commission became the regulator of the parent companies, along with the brokerage units that the SEC already oversaw.
A 1999 law, however, had left a gap that did not give the commission explicit oversight of the parent companies. To get around that problem, and in exchange for the relaxed capital rules, the banks volunteered to let the SEC examine the books of their parent companies and subsidiaries.
A lone voice of dissent in the 2004 proceeding came from the software consultant from Indiana, who said that the computer models run by the companies - and that the regulators would be relying on - could not anticipate moments of severe market turbulence.
"With the stroke of a pen, capital requirements are removed!" the consultant, Leonard Bole, wrote to the SEC on Jan. 22, 2004. "Has the trading environment changed sufficiently since 1997, when the current requirements were enacted, that the commission is confident that current requirements in examples such as these can be disregarded?"
He said that similar computer standards had failed to protect Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that collapsed in 1998, and were unable to protect companies from the market plunge of October 1987.
The SEC's most public role in policing Wall Street is its enforcement efforts. But critics say that in recent years it has failed to deter market problems.
"It seems to me the enforcement effort in recent years has fallen short of what one Supreme Court justice once called the fear of the shotgun behind the door," said Arthur Levitt Jr., who was SEC chairman in the administration of President Bill Clinton. "With this commission, the shotgun too rarely came out from behind the door."
Cox was a close ally of business groups in his 17 years as a member of the House of Representatives from one of the most conservative districts in Southern California. Cox had led the effort to rewrite securities laws to make investor lawsuits more difficult to file. He also fought against accounting rules that would give less favorable treatment to executive stock options.
Under Cox, the SEC responded to complaints by some businesses by making it more difficult for the enforcement staff to investigate and bring cases against companies. The commission has repeatedly reversed or reduced proposed settlements that companies had tentatively agreed upon. While the number of enforcement cases has risen, the number of cases involving significant players or large amounts of money has declined.
Cox dismantled a risk management office created by Donaldson that was assigned to watch for future problems. While other financial regulatory agencies criticized a blueprint by Paulson that proposed to reduce their stature - and that of the SEC - Cox did not challenge the plan, leaving it to three former Democratic and Republican commission chairmen to complain that the blueprint would neuter the commission.
In the process, Cox has surrounded himself with conservative lawyers, economists and accountants who, before the market turmoil of recent months, had embraced a far more limited vision for the commission than many of his predecessors.
On Sept. 26, the commission formally ended the 2004 program, acknowledging that it had failed to anticipate the problems at Bear Stearns and the four other major investment banks. "The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work," Cox said.
Cox declined requests for an interview. In response to written questions, including whether he or the commission had made any mistakes over the past three years that contributed to the current crisis, he said, "There will be no shortage of retrospective analyses about what happened and what should have happened."
He said that by last March, he had concluded that the monitoring program's "metrics were inadequate."

I think this stunning journalistic failure is worthy of a bit more than a one sentence nod in para 19 and I'd love to know which media did attend, if "none of the major media outlets, including The New York Times, covered it."

The arrogance of it!

Because I'd sure like to be reading the 'minor' ones who did.

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IHT Behind the news curve winner of the day

Tell me something I don't know, tell me something new, tell me something in a timely manner.


EDITORIAL
There's no time to lose for Pakistan's new spy chief
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/02/opinion/edpakistan.php




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The IHT's online version is slower than its print edition in bringing news to my attention: surely not?

Surely, in frequent cases, yes.

Sorry to bang on about this, but I look at iht.com first thing every morning. I did not see this yesterday morning.

Life in Zimbabwe: Wait for useless money
By Celia W. Dugger
Published: October 2, 2008
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/02/africa/02zimbabwe.php

However, I saw it in my print version yesterday when it arrived in the post at 13.00hrs.

I did see it in the daily article index for today (Friday) but did not yesterday.

Nor do I see it in the daily article index for yesterday, today
http://www.iht.com/indexes/articleindexes/thursday.php

In other words, if I relied on iht.com exclusively, I would 24 hours minimum behind seeing information that the IHT has already published in print!! Is that the point of online newspapers?

If the IHT can't be timely with its own information online then its hard to believe in their capacities to be timely with other people's (like the wires).

A small but important irritation; a reflection of bigger problems?



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Four Columns, Four Writers, and a 'Written By': The NYT Attempts to Put the Credit Crisis in Context (Fishbowl)

A good observation from Fishbowl. Especially concerning the news cycle, a concept familiar to any regular reader of this blog and a problem for newspapers

Some of you may have noticed the rather thick byline on today's New York Times four column-wide, front-page story about the last 36 hours of the credit crisis. Multiple bylines are not unusual on reported pieces, however, generally when other reporters contribute to a story they are mentioned at the end. What caught our eye this time was the phrasing of the byline: "This article was reported by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Diana B. Henriques, Edmund L. Andrews and Joe Nocera. It was written by Mr. Nocera." [emphasis ours]
A quick search through the Times database reveals that the phrasing is unusual at best: it's only been used a handful of times and almost always for a "news analysis" piece. What also caught our eye was the timing of this story. Normally, these sort of round-up, analysis pieces are reserved for the Sunday Times (notwithstanding the long and glorious era of R.W. Apple) but one supposes with the super accelerated news cycle of the past three weeks, every second counts.

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Another example of good off the news reporting from the wires

When the front page of www.iht.com can't be filled by NYT/IHT correspondents, and has to rely on the wires, even for ahead of the news curve, off the news, stories, you know you have a problem.

Don't you?

And you need to re-tool how you allocate foreign correspondents?

Example from today (and again, I could quote examples for nearly any day of the year) this front page iht.com story, from the NYT?

No, from Reuters.......once more.

(It used to be, I think, that any Reuters story was cleary sourced as such in the online url link but not on this one. Is anyone trying to hide something here?)

Lack of medical workers causes new health crisis in developing countries
By Kavita Chandran and Tan Ee Lyn
Reuters
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/01/asia/medical.php


And today also, ANOTHER iht.com front page story, also from Reuters, indexed on iht.com not as a Reuters story, not even a medical story, but a business story?

HIV infection up eightfold among gays in southern China
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/01/business/01hiv.php




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Another timeliness problem: iht.com

On the subject of timeliness (see previous post) www.iht.com is consistently running behind the print edition. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?

Example (and I could provide many):

This story was published in the four star European edition of the IHT on Wednesday.

It did not appear on www.iht.com (or at least the daily article index on Wednesday morning) until Thursday.

Even after war, many Georgians revere Stalin
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/01/europe/01stalin.php


Why?




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The Wires versus the NYT: who wins in the news cycle war?

I've been saying for some time that NYT correspondents are often hopelessly at a loss when trying to compete with the wires for 'on the news' reporting. How can 1 foreign correspondent in 28 countries compete with, for example, 2,200 Reuters staff?

The problem isn't just on the news reporting i.e what happened yesterday, but broader brush stroke off the news reporting.

The IHT ran this story on Wednesday, from AP:

Conservatives in Britain tone down celebratory mood
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/30/europe/tory.php

On Thursday, the NYT's Sara Lyall gets round to, a day later, running pretty much exactly the same story.

U.K. crisis weighs on Cameron's buoyancy
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/01/europe/britain.php

Lyall's story, as a result, well-written though it may be, is a day late - at least. Better to have read this article say five days ago, at least on Monday. It's familiar to me - I read it yesterday thanks to AP, perfectly adequate - and for any U.K reader of newspapers you can find this sort of commentary and reporting from last week.

Newspapers used to print new information on paper. This is old information printed on paper. Hardly an advancement in the history of the timeliness of Newspaper 1.o. In fact, it's a step backwards.


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Reuters and the news cycle

I was having an interesting chat the other day in Paris about how many correspondents (foreign) the NYT have (28) and how many Reuters have (c2,200)and as a result how Reuters did a pretty stand up job of reporting what happened yesterday, but also have the resources to go off the news and break out from the news cycle.

I told the same thing to a senior IHT editor who wasn't very complimentary about Reuters journalists (too young, too inexperienced was the general point made), but I did point out that if Reuters were so crap how come about two thirds of the content on www.iht.com - a global news site - is coming from Reuters? Clearly someone at the NYT Company rates their content, if not, why dish it up?

I also posted yesterday about the nascent Global News Enterprise - which aims to field c70 foreign correspondents.

Anway, two points:

Here's a nice example from the IHT with a Reuters correspondent going off the news (see below).

The other great thing about their people, largely, is that you know what?

They're not white, they're not American, they don't have names like Dexter and Steven and they actually come from the communities they report on.

Which I guess is kind of handy.

If you'd like a sense of how much IHT content comes from Reuters check out my own version of the IHT at www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com

There you will see something called narrative and story, but you'll also see by looking at the article links provided, how many of the articles come from Reuters. A lot more than NYT/IHT.




Little holiday joy in Gaza but tunnellers thrive
Reuters
Monday, September 29, 2008
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
There was little joy in the Gaza Strip on Monday as the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan drew to a close and 1.5 million Palestinians scraped together their meagre resources to celebrate the feast of Eid al-Fitr.
Sealed off by Israel since it pulled out troops and Jewish settlers three years ago, and now run by the Islamist group Hamas, Gaza displays classic symptoms of a land under siege.
Border crossings to Israel and Egypt are as good as closed. No freighters anchor off the Mediterranean shore. Israel controls, and has shut down, air and sea approaches. Goods are scarce, prices high, and smuggling thrives no matter the danger.
At least 43 people have been killed this year in the collapse of secret tunnels to Egypt that provide a precarious lifeline for traders and intrepid travellers with cash to spare.
"The crossings have been closed and the siege has been tightened and there is no other way," said Sami Bashir, foreman of a tunnelling crew.
"Without the tunnels we would have been strangled by the Israeli siege," said clothing merchant Khaled Adna.
Tunnelling has flourished since Hamas took over in Gaza in a week-long Palestinian civil war last year and the Israeli blockade hardened. There are hundreds of makeshift earthworks barely concealed behind tents along the border.
A six-month cease-fire agreed in June by Hamas and Israel permits limited trade of mostly food and tiny amounts of construction materials. Hamas and its allies have largely held off firing rockets into Israel. Israel has held off its raids.
Gaza markets were crowded ahead of Eid but demand was weak and choice very limited, merchants and buyers agreed.
"Faced with a choice between buying new clothes or food for their children, people buy food," said Ehab Qassem, a 25-year-old university student selling clothes in Palestine Square. "The mood is not joyful, it is sad and tragic."
As with other dates in the Muslim lunar calendar, the end of the Ramadan fast and start of the Eid feast is timed according to sightings of the moon. It may be as early as Monday evening.
DIVIDED HOUSE
Residents of Gaza blame their predicament in part on the deep split in Palestinian ranks, between Hamas and the secular Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. He runs the Israeli-occupied West Bank, about an hour's drive to the west of Gaza -- if such a drive were possible for local people.
"The two sides should be ashamed of themselves," said Ibrahim Abu Amra, an employee of the Health Ministry.
"They should sit together and form a unity government. Unless they do that, we will get lost, the Palestinian people will get lost," said Abu Amra, a father of seven.
Israel tightened the blockade after Hamas, which wants to destroy the Jewish state and had led a government after winning an election in 2006, routed Fatah forces in June 2007. Political and social divisions have since worsened. Failing a breakthrough in unity talks sponsored by Cairo there may be further violence.
Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman conducted separate talks with the two sides throughout September. He met Fatah last week and will see Hamas officials on October 8. A Fatah official said on Monday that all factions may convene in Cairo on November 4.
"Either Hamas and Fatah are reconciled this time or we may be going to hell," commented Gaza taxi driver Ali Hassan.
Meanwhile, the tunnellers get rich. It costs about $250 (139 pounds) to traverse approximately 1,000 metres (3,300 feet) underground from Gaza to the Sinai border zone, or $1,000 for the VIP tunnel fare which includes electric lighting and a mobile phone signal.
"The typical caller is probably saying: 'I'm half-way through and I'm still alive'" joked one Gaza resident.
Gaza's border with Egypt is only 14 km long (9 miles), coming inland from the sea, and the tunnel builders make no great effort to conceal their diggings. Gazans say Egyptian officials take their cut of the underground trade in bribes.
As with its conventional border crossing at Rafah, Egypt has come under pressure from Israel also to close the tunnels down, and Hamas has accused Egypt of causing the deaths of several Palestinians by pumping gas into the tunnels or blowing them up.
Bashir, supervising diggings at a tunnel, said his crew knows the risks: "They have no choice," he said.
"There is no work in Gaza and death is a destiny and it will not happen until someone's time is up."
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/09/29/europe/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-HOLIDAY.php




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Today's award for content in the IHT most behind the news curve

And the winner is:

OPINION
Brown's labors lost
By Oliver Kamm
Oliver Kamm is an editorial writer for The Times of London.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/29/opinion/edkamm.php


And the runner up is:



OPINION
An arms race we're sure to lose
By Gary Milhollin
Gary Milhollin is the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control and the executive editor of the Web site Iran Watch.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/28/opinion/edmilhollan.php





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Election 2008: Shining a Light on the (Ir)relevance of Print? (Media Bistro)

I ran a post yesterday about the relevance of print as exposed by the news cycle in the U.S elections. Seems I am not alone in my concerns or thinking.

The is a comment from Media Bistro, quoting on Bill Keller in the NYO.

Election 2008: Shining a Light on the (Ir)relevance of Print? (Media Bistro)
The fallout from this election season is being felt in many different corners of our lives: feminism, such as it is, is once again on the front-burner, SNL may actually be relevant again, and the merits of the caucus vs. primary, may no longer qualify as a bonus question on a civics test, so common a topic did it become last spring. But for our purposes it all comes down to, you guessed it, whether print journalism is still relevant in this election cycle. Not so much, Bill Keller tells the NYO.

"The news outlets that aim to be aggressive, serious and impartial — don't dominate the conversation the way we once did, and that's fine, except it means some excellent hard work gets a little muffled."

But is it really fine?

Actually we think so. And since we still turn to the NYT (online) as a main source of news the fact we rarely see it in print has had very little effect on its relevance in our lives. However! The parts of the paper that pack a punch may be what is shifting. We only have a vague memory of the Johnny Apple days (though, one suspects he's the sort of person that might have made the transition to online life rather smoothly), but Keller points out that the Times investigative pieces appear to be losing their staying power:
One of the casualties, I think, is that powerfully reported and written stories, especially investigative and accountability ones, do not land with the impact they once did, they might still turns heads — and thankfully at times change things — but usually they get pushed aside as the new-media machine moves to the next 'thing.'

(Or they get picked up and carried (or fisked) by the blogosphere.)

Keller uses the Times recent Palin article as an example:

"Even a meaty, damning, 3,100-word, three-bylined front-page Sept. 14 Times piece on Sarah Palin's management style doesn't appear to have the same sort of impact on the campaign trail that it might once have."

But, as we all know, size does not matter in these new media lands the way it once did — perhaps the Times investigative team should consider reporting its next piece via Twitter, we bet that would carry.
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/newspapers/election_2008_shining_a_light_on_the_irrelevance_of_print_94735.asp



What I like about the NYO Observer piece is its similarity to the article in the NYT that I posted yesterday as an illustration of the problem. It's not as is if the NYT and MSM is blind to the problem?



Amid 2008 Campaign Cacophony on the Web, Print Reverts to Hobbesian State

Does print journalism matter in this election?
“It’s obvious, and no crime against humanity, that the world has many, many places to turn for information, misinformation, analysis, rants, etc,” wrote Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, in an e-mail. “We—The Times, The Washington Post, Politico, the news outlets that aim to be aggressive, serious and impartial—don’t dominate the conversation the way we once did, and that’s fine, except it means some excellent hard work gets a little muffled.
“But we do want our work to be noticed,” he wrote, “and I’ve been repeatedly surprised at the rich, important stories that fail to resonate the way they deserve.”
On one level, more people read The Times, albeit in digital form, than ever. The pipeline piece did a brisk business as an e-mail forward. But so did everything else anyone had to say that day about the campaign—whether it was true or false, reported or simply asserted, fact or opinion. In-boxes crammed with New York Times articles and Huffington Post hyperlinks do not advertise their relative value or importance. Everything is equal, everything is a tie and nothing, it seems, is important anymore.
Nobody has felt this more acutely than the Newspapers and Magazines of Record in the United States. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time: all over the world of “quality” journalism, there is a feeling of decline.
“There can no longer be a Johnny Apple—a single political reporter who can set the agenda as he did when he discovered Jimmy Carter,” said Frank Rich, columnist for The New York Times. “Whether in print or on the Internet or on television.”
“At Politico we often talk about winning the morning, not just winning the day,” said Jim VandeHei, the editor of Politico. “Because the news cycle is no longer 24 hours—it might be 16 hours or even shorter.”
It works well for Politico, but if everyone is readjusting to that breakneck pace, how much real news is left? And who’s there to suss out the real from the junk?
“The story burns more intensely and then it burns out more quickly,” said Jonathan Alter, the Newsweek writer, musing about the life cycle of pieces. “And there’s so much information and so much political coverage that it’s easy for good stories to be lost entirely in that register.”
“Very few of these stories have a long finish,” said Michael Duffy, the nation editor for Time. “The gong dissipates quickly.”
“My instinct is that there is such cacophony of commentary that it does sometimes drown out ideas from good and deeply reported journalism,” said Marcus Brauchli, the executive editor of The Washington Post.
“In the Internet age, the cycle is constant and people don’t really have time to reflect all day on a single story in the newspaper,” he added. “And it’s more difficult to set the agenda for very long.”
Mr. VandeHei agrees.
“One of the casualties, I think, is that powerfully reported and written stories, especially investigative and accountability ones, do not land with the impact they once did,” he said. “They might still turns heads—and thankfully at times change things—but usually they get pushed aside as the new-media machine moves to the next ‘thing.’”
But such are the pressures of trying to produce material all day—even if it’s unclear what’s actually being absorbed from the information that’s being produced.
Mr. Keller, for one, wonders what happened to the big stories The Times reported during the election cycle.
There was a Jo Becker and Don Van Natta investigative piece of Bill Clinton’s relationship with Kazakhstan—barely noticed. There was a piece in the spring by David Kirkpatrick and Jim Rutenberg about John McCain’s relationship with Donald Trump in Arizona—hardly a word.
Even a meaty, damning, 3,100-word, three-bylined front-page Sept. 14 Times piece on Sarah Palin’s management style doesn’t appear to have the same sort of impact on the campaign trail that it might once have, Mr. Keller said.
“And it’s not just us,” said Mr. Keller. “The Washington Post did an impressive review of Cindy McCain’s drug addiction the other day, and I didn’t hear an echo. I could go on, and so could you. This kind of rigorous, intricate reporting is a major contribution to the public debate, and it certainly gets read. (Our Sunday Palin piece is still number one on the most e-mailed list.) But this kind of work doesn’t dominate the discussion the way it might have in elections past.”
That Palin piece, as of Tuesday morning, was still the second most e-mailed story on the Times Web site, and it had more than 1,050 comments.
Doesn’t 1,050 comments mean something? Doesn’t that suggest an even more meaningful impact than in the old days?
“The answer is no,” said Michael Powell, one of the three authors of The Times’ Palin piece. “It doesn’t get picked up the same way.”
That is, it gets picked up, but only by people who seem to refuse to break the tie between the journalism coming from The New York Times, the spin coming from the campaign trail, and the white noise of punditry and Web-ready opinionizing.
Despite its popularity, the Palin piece appears ready for the inevitable lifetime of a print story these days: It’s hot one second, gone and forgotten the next.
“I say this from a cultural point of view, not a political point of view or journalistic point of view—but bubble gum music just fades and leaves no trace,” said Mr. Rich. “We’re in a laboratory right now and we don’t know what’s really landing with voters.”
There is, of course, good old television.
Keith Olbermann isn’t sitting in his office with the morning papers weighing which lead-all from which major paper will drive the news for the night—in a way that, say, Uncle Walter would do before the CBS Evening News. Instead, you might get a nice anecdote from an Adam Nagourney story in The Times, a response from the McCain camp—and then it’s up to you, the viewer, to break the tie! If you can.
“Everybody knows that if it takes more than five seconds to explain the story, it’s not going to make a lot of noise on the campaign trail,” said Matt Taibbi, a columnist for Rolling Stone.
Mr. Keller, for his part, said that television “seems to shy away from complicated stories, and these big stories tend to be complicated.
“The simple-minded silliness of lipstick-on-a-pig filled at least one cable news cycle, but the question of what kind of executive Sarah Palin has been as mayor and governor didn’t lend itself to the bite-sized format of the nightly news or the constant low-grade babble of cable,” he continued.
In addition to the increased competition from blogs and electronic media, major print news outfits are, of course, indulging in all that the modern-day media environment offers: quick items, videocasts, online chats.
And, if you talk to the dinosaurs, it doesn’t help any.
“The big change for all of us is that we’re all multimedia players now and it means that we’re much busier writing and being on TV or Webcasts, and that can often leave less time for reporting,” said Mr. Alter. “That’s the real problem.”
“I think what’s changed mostly is that we are working every day in three or four dimensions—plotting stories for the Web today, the magazine tomorrow and long investigative pieces three or four weeks from now,” said Mr. Duffy, an editor at Time. “Maybe there’s a fourth dimension, too, and folks are blogging stuff every hour.”
“There’s so much content to fill,” said Mr. Taibbi. “People who write for news magazines like Newsweek and Time, in the old days, they’d be writing one feature a week. Now they have to file every single day for Web sites, and do video hits, appear on TV shows, and that’s in addition to writing their features. The same people are doing four and five times as much work and, obviously, they’re not going to have a great deal of depth on any subject.”
“Hobbes talked about the war of all against all,” said Mr. Alter. “Now it’s the punditry of all against all.”
http://www.observer.com/2008/media/amid-2008-campaign-cacophony-web-print-reverts-hobbesian-state?page=0%2C1


My response to all this is nothing more than
a) newspapers are increasingly demonstrating and even admitting to their increasing irrelevance (or rather Newspaper 1.0 is)
b) time to move to Newspaper 2.o


As I've said before: print needs to change.



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Why newspapers are in trouble: the news cycle.

This pretty much sums up the problem for Newspaper 1.0.

Time for a major re-think.

U.S. candidates struggle with a proliferation of news sources
By Adam Nagourney

Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Senator Barack Obama went to Granby High School in Norfolk, Virginia, last week to talk about education. But first, he said, "I've got to spend just a brief moment talking about politics."
For the next few minutes, Obama offered one of his most scathing attacks on his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, accusing him of "lies and Swift boat politics" and denouncing his campaign tactics as insulting to the American public.
Yet that attack barely broke through the day's crush of blog postings, cable television headlines, television advertisements, speeches by other candidates and surrogates, video press releases, e-mailed charges and countercharges - not to mention the old-fashioned newspaper article or broadcast report on the evening news.
So on Friday, Obama tried again, this time with the release at 6 a.m. of two new attack advertisements, followed by a memorandum from David Plouffe, his campaign manager, telling the world exactly what Obama was doing and why attention should be paid.
That episode reflected one of the most frustrating challenges the two candidates face going into the final weeks of this campaign: the ways in which the proliferation of communication channels, the fracturing of mass media and the relentless competition in each news cycle are combining to reorder the way voters follow campaigns and decide how to vote.
Senior campaign aides say they are no longer sure what works, as they stumble through what has become a daily campaign fog, struggling to figure out what voters are paying attention to and, not incidentally, what they are believing.
Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for President George W. Bush's re-election campaign in 2004, said that given the proliferation of news sources - and the fact that so many once-trusted news organizations are under attack - campaigns would be wise to discard the standard playbook. Dowd went so far as to suggest that McCain and Obama were wasting their money on television advertisements, and that they would be better off preparing for the debates.
"At this point, the ability to create and drive a message narrative is all but impossible," he said. "There's just so much stuff."
Beyond that, he suggested, in this increasingly partisan atmosphere - one in which the dueling campaigns are accusing each other of lying, and in which McCain has made an orchestrated effort to discredit news organizations - voters are no longer as apt to accept what they hear as truth. "They distrust, more and more, the marketplace of the campaign," Dowd said.
Obama and McCain have responded to this challenge in vastly different ways. The McCain campaign, reflecting the influence of Steve Schmidt, his day-to-day campaign chief, sees opportunities in this chaos. The McCain campaign is the more aggressive of the two, throwing out information, often frivolous and often stretching the bounds of truth, to try to keep things churning (and to draw attention away from the kind of attacks Obama made in Norfolk).
For example, the McCain campaign resurgence has come over a summer in which he has regularly released what are presented as hard-edged, provocative - even entertaining - advertisements attacking Obama.
In truth, McCain's campaign often does not buy the television time to actually run the advertisements. It knows that cable news and Web sites will replay them, possibly drawing even more attention than McCain could hope to get from a speech, and all of it nearly free.
Still, aides to Obama and McCain said they were not certain how much these kinds of attacks are noticed beyond the audience that spends its time watching CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, or clicking on the latest post on any of numerous political blogs.
In this Wild West atmosphere, the McCain campaign was able to get attention by leaping on a colloquial remark that Obama made about "putting lipstick on a pig." Obama was referring to McCain trying to present himself as an agent of change, but the McCain campaign portrayed it as an attack on Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. McCain's associates said that, at the very least, they were able to divert attention from Obama. Yet at the end of the day, no one was really sure how much those charges mattered to voters.
Obama's efforts to break through are comparatively routine, although they reflect the fact that a simple speech or angry statement will no longer do. Thus, along with the speech in Norfolk, he rolled out two television advertisements, alerts to various political Web sites and a series of satellite interviews with television news stations in battleground states. Advisers to Obama said the outcome was the best they could hope for.
Which might not be much. If Dowd is right, this glut of information has created, at least for now, a level playing field where voters are taking in all this information, but ultimately will believe only what they see with their own eyes.
"The only things that are going to change the equation of the election are the four debates," Dowd said, referring to the three presidential debates and one vice-presidential debate. "That's it."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/16/america/obama.php



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