Peter Krupa

Here’s a great, inadvertent example of why newspapers are going out of business. Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, publishes a profile in a recent issue of Portfolio on god-like media blogger Jim Romenesko. He concludes, rather presumptively, about a third of the way into the piece:

Newspaper publishers assumed that even if the printing press disappeared, the internet would still have an insatiable need for their basic product - verified facts, hierarchically arranged by importance. But Romenesko’s rapid growth showed that even newsrooms are part of the emerging market for an unprocessed sprawl of information, delivered immediately and with as few filters as possible between the fingertips of one laptop user and the eyeballs of another. In short, it’s not technology per se that’s killing newspapers; it’s plummeting demand for quality information.

The arrogance of this paragraph is toe-curling, this idea that the only place one can get “quality information” is from newspapers, and you poor, stupid pleebs on the Interwebs just don’t even realize you need an editor to wipe your ass and tell you what to read. People like Raines are seriously out of touch.

And the award for cringe-inducing investigative journalism piece of the week goes to the New York Times, for a fascinating piece revealing that the “military analysts” regularly trotted out for public consumption by TV news programs are, on one level or another, Pentagon shills:

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

…

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Three thoughts come to mind. First, TV “news” appears to be as trustworthy as I always thought it was. Second, I’m a little annoyed that the Pentagon can use tax dollars to coordinate such expensive and creepy efforts at propaganda. Isn’t that illegal on some level?

And third, I’m really going to miss this sort of thing once the New York Times goes out of business.

I used to get quite a few giggles out of Diario Extra, Costa Rica’s yellowest tabloid and, coincidentally, also the newspaper with the highest circulation in the country at over 350,000 (this in a country of 3.5 million). Oh, they’re wacky alright. Today’s front page features a picture of a deceased stabbing victim, which is more or less par for the course.

The paper really jumped the shark last July when it ran a front-page photo of a crackhead eating a live cat. Nice.

I guess I still chuckle at Diario Extra, but no longer in that “oh-this-poor-underdeveloped-country” kind of way. That’s because I now have cable, and I can turn on Fox News or CNN and watch the idiocy that passes for “news” in the United States - ie, car chases, shootings in strange little towns, terrifying tales of chemicals that might probably but not really but could - could - give you cancer, and horrible, horrible sexual things that were in all likelihood done to the pretty 18-year-old blond girl in this grainy photograph taken during happier times.

One time - I’m not making this up - CNN featured, in its killer storm coverage, a live ticker keeping a real-time count of how many lightning bolts had struck the ground. Scary shit.

That is to say, the more you look, the more it looks the same, and one can only imagine what the 24-hour news cycle would be like without the FCC.

The sky is always about to fall upon the newsrooms of America these days. It is told that way because, well, they tell us. Newspapers decide the narrative of the story, and the narrative whenever someone buys a newspaper or downsizes a newsroom is, “woe is us, journalism will suffer,” etc.

What they don’t tell us is how absurdly bloated, wasteful, and inefficient are the nation’s major dailies. Puffed up with a somewhat messianic vision of their place in society and accustomed to having something of a monopoly on information, the nation’s top-tier journalists demand salaries and expense accounts to match.

Recently my co-worker sent a story - researched, written, done - to one of the three major dailies in the U.S. Later he got on the horn with the editor, and the editor said, yeah, that’s a fantastic story, but we don’t buy stories.

“I haven’t been to Costa Rica,” he said. “But I would like to go. Would you fix for me if I came down to do the story?”

So an interesting - but not crucial - story the paper could have bought for $300 will now cost the newspaper something like $4,000, plus whatever large salary they’re paying their full-time reporter.

That, my friends, is a bad business decision.

Or take the case of another of my co-workers. He sent a freelance piece to a newspaper who, for the sake of anonymity, I will refer to only as the Miami H. The editor again said: Great story!

But you know what?

It’s such a great story we’re just going to send our own reporter down there. Besides that, our freelance budget for the year is cashed out, but we still have a lot of money in the travel budget.

Once again, instead of $300, they will now pay about $4,000, and probably get a worse story.

Does this make sense? Only if you have a sense of entitlement!

Maybe I’m just bitter because I missed the gravy train of fat staff writer paychecks and velvet-lined expense accounts. Could be.

Either way, that gravy train is slowing down for its final stop, and everyone off. It’s high time newspapers found a different business model and stopped dicking around the world as if “general interest news” was really a legitimate strategy.

I mean, I’m sorry, the nation’s newsrooms can do that if they want. Just don’t ask me for sympathy when the new owner casts his beady eye on editorial.

I’ve had a fascination with trend stories ever since reading this essay by Daniel Radosh. Like campaign-trail stories and not-in-my-backyard stories and young-lives-cut-short stories, they have their narrative, their rules of procedure.

This story in the New York Times this morning about cellular phone blockers is a textbook example. First of all, you have several unsupported generalizations in the nut ‘graph to establish the trend. For example, there is a “small but growing band of rebels” using cell phone blockers, and you have commuters on public transportation using them “increasingly.”

Then, you throw in a quote from a rather bizarre expert that the reporter dug up in some university basement:

“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people,” said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. “The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.”

Great! Thanks!

Then you pile on at least three anecdotal examples and presto! Trend sweeping America!

The final characteristic of a classic trend story is that the numbers cited in the article itself usually contradict the thesis that there is a trend happening, and such is the case with this story as well:

“The technology is not new, but overseas exporters of jammers say demand is rising and they are sending hundreds of them a month into the United States.”

Wow! Hundreds? I mean, wait, only hundreds? And what do you mean it’s not new? Doesn’t that mean it’s not, you know, news?

The really curious thing to me about trend stories is why editors and reporters feel the need to fabricate trends out of perfectly interesting bits of information. Part of it, I suppose, is the medium.

Reporters are dying to publish the equivalent of cocktail gossip, the “did-you-hear-about-X?” buzz, but it doesn’t fit the mission statements on their $40,000 Columbia School of Journalism Master’s Degrees. So they cobble those interesting bits and anecdotes into trend stories that vaguely resemble “news,” though they are generally not.

But aren’t the tidbits of information and anecdotes interesting enough on their own without the slathering of artificial context painted on by professionals?

For whatever reason, it’s impolite to speak ill of the dead, which I suppose goes some way toward explaining the coverage of the seven frat boys and sorority gals who died in a million-dollar mansion fire over the weekend.

I haven’t ventured to turn on any cable news, and I don’t think I will, but the New York Times tells us that the victims were all would-be cancer curers who “took a few days off for a chance to spend a fun weekend with their closest college pals.”

Tragic.

But you know, I just can’t help but ask, since I have this inquisitive nature and all: What were 13 Greek boys and girls doing in that beach house on Saturday night that was so exhausting that seven of them didn’t wake up when the whole freaking house caught fire?

Roasting marshmallows? Singing songs? Sharing fond memories? Growing drowsy around the campfire while wearing their letters and nursing steaming mugs of hot cocoa?

Not that it matters so much. Seven people dead in an accident is sad regardless. But if the media wants to make this a national story, they might as well do their jobs and tell us what happened.

I could have just updated the post below, but this is too good:

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night, reflecting a growing view in the industry that subscription fees cannot outweigh the potential ad revenue from increased traffic on a free site.

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYtimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to gain access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

Never before has one of my half-assed attempts at analysis  been so swiftly and completely affirmed. The Wall Street Journal is the only remaining content-hogger. We’re waiting, Mr. Murdoch. 

My mind has just been blown. A New York Times article on nytimes.com has a YouTube video posted in the middle of the text. It is not a blog entry. It is a Week in Review article about an African Grey parrot that could apparently think. Anyway, it seems like the New York Times has figured out how to think as well, on the Internet.

So I’ll go ahead and say it. From their perfect little mini-documentaries to the word double-clicks that yield a pop-up dictionary definition, to, finally, posting video material to supplement text: I think the New York Times finally gets the Internet.

I’m excited to see what happens next.

This just in: James Frey has sold a novel titled Bright Shiny Morning to HarperCollins for - rumor has it - one million dollars. Depending on who you ask, it might actually be a book of short stories.

Anyway, if you’ll excuse me I have to go write my memoirs about those harrowing years I spent in the wilds of Vietnam.

An LA Times story this morning is a good example of why naming your sources is important. The story, about that disrupted German terror plot, reports that the interception of communications between the terror suspects and Pakistan by U.S. intelligence was a “key factor” in bringing the plot down.

The source: “A U.S. counter-terrorism official,” which is more or less the only source for all the fresh news in this story.

Now, let’s think about this. Are high-level U.S. counter-terrorism officials just dying to run off to the nation’s newspapers and anonymously spill their guts? Like, what, for the thrill of giving the LA Times a scoop?

No. They’re not. It’s more likely that the newspaper got a call from some shadowy figure at the Department of Defense or the White House or the Ministry of Truth offering an exclusive interview with an un-named counter-terrorism official.

That official then said things like, “The U.S. counter-terrorism community supported efforts to draw links, to do intercepts and to monitor communications between Pakistan and Germany,” and described how U.S. intelligence eavesdropped on e-mail and wireless communications.

Suddenly the German terror plot has a fancy new spin: U.S. intelligence saves lives by using the sketchy big-brother spying tactics that have been the source of legal battles and endless criticism at home! Maybe the ends do justify the means!

Now this LA Times article kind of sounds like a U.S. government P.R. drive-by, doesn’t it? The only way to prove my suspicions wrong would be to produce this government official, find out why he talked to the LA Times, and corroborate some of his info with other real people.

But, of course, the official is anonymous. Dead end.

UPDATE: For an example of a better way to cover this story, check out the New York Times version, which came out on Monday and focuses on the law that allows more sketchy spying techniques. Sample paragraph:

This distinction is important because Mr. McConnell’s remarks, on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, were an important part of the Bush administration’s intensifying effort to make permanent the new law, which is scheduled to expire in about five months. Democrats in Congress have said that they want to write more safeguards for civil liberties into the law before renewing it. 

Ah. Now we understand the reason for the LA Times “leak.”