Extra! Extra!

When I moved to Oregon, the print media was very much alive.  The Oregonian had won Pulitzers; the newspaper from the state capital, Salem, was vibrant; and the Register Guard was still publishing the broadsheet papers that I find only in India.

And then shit happened.

First the newspapers trimmed down their breadth.  Literally, the paper shrank in size.  The number of sheets reduced.  Newspapers were on a diet and they were slimming down fast.  The Oregonian even stopped printing the news on a daily basis, and it became more of an online presence.  The Statesman Journal stopped being a local newspaper after it became a part of the USA Today group.

The Register Guard was the lone one standing, and proud.  The paper celebrated its 150 years of being a family-owned paper that thought big.

And then shit happened.

GateHouse officially takes ownership on March 1 of the company’s media properties, which include the daily newspaper, its companion digital products, the weekly Emerald Valley Shopper newspaper and a commercial printing operation.
GateHouse is part of publicly traded New Media Investment Group. ...
The company, based in Fairport in upstate New York, has publications in 36 states.

What do the new owners say is their approach?

Our strategy is to acquire and operate traditional local media businesses and transform them from print-centric operations to dynamic multi-media operations, through our existing online advertising and digital marketing businesses.

Meanwhile, the NY Times CEO says that its print products might be around for another ten years.  And then ...?

What will happen to all the local reporting?  Who will cover what the local elected officials and corporations are up to?

There are a lot more people worried about this and are doing something. Like Report for America:

a new journalism training corps blending the traditional job-education organization with a model for sustainable reporting. The emphasis is on hiring a diverse group of journalists to cover underrepresented regions of the United States.

Similar to Teach for America. But more than that.

Report for America's pilot program, which launched last month, placed three early-career reporters in Appalachian newsrooms, at West Virginia Public Broadcasting, the Lexington World-Herald, and the Charleston Gazette-Mail. The program includes mentorship and training programs, and just like their cohorts in urban newsrooms, the journalists are expected to file stories regularly and will receive a salary equivalent to other entry-level reporters.
Report for America's first class consists of three reporters familiar with Appalachia: Caity Coyne, a recent graduate of West Virginia University reporting for the Charleston Gazette-Mail; Molly Born, a West Virginia native reporting for West Virginia Public Broadcasting; and Will Wright, a recent graduate of the University of Kentucky reporting for the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Back when I was a kid in India, I loved how my favorite newspaper covered the news from around the world.  I was mighty proud of that, until a visitor burst that bubble.  One of those in the way, way, way extended family, the kind of connections that only my father can track right in his head, this visitor said that India's problem was that news organizations did not look at their own backyards, but were covering President Carter more.  Until that day, I had never thought about the importance of local news.  I was even mighty condescending towards the local news.  But, my opinion changed.

When I came to the US, I was in newspaper heaven.  In the university library, I read the NY Times and the WSJ, and subscribed to the LA  Times.  After graduating and getting into the real world, when I no longer had the university library to supply drugs to this news junkie, there was a time that I subscribed to the NY Times, the WSJ, the LA Times, and the Bakersfield Californian.  I lugged a lot a newspaper to the recycling bins ;)

Locally, the countdown to that d-day has begun.  We will soon find out how local our local newspaper will be.

Nobody's perfect :(

By now, it would have become obvious to regular readers that I dish out the criticism if it is warranted.  That approach, in the pursuit of what it means o do the right thing, means that I have even wondered if my grandmothers could be called racists.  The grandmothers' who were and are dear to me, and whose stories I carry inside.  If I subject my grandmothers and myself to tough standards, then you think a magazine that I love has any chance?

That's what happened last week, when I tweeted this after reading an essay in the New Yorker:

As a long-time @NewYorker subscriber, I am disgusted that the magazine chose to publish the #GayTalese essay :(https://t.co/xE9Q909lcS

— sriram khe (@congoboy) April 9, 2016

At this point, you are perhaps thinking: Does anybody care whether I tweeted or if I felt disgusted with the essay?  Hey, it is no different from when I blog, right?  ;)

Why was I pissed off?  First, what is the essay about?  It is:

 about a strange man named Gerald Foos, who owned and operated a motel in Colorado. With the help and knowledge of his wife, he modified many of the motel’s rooms in such a way that he could watch his guests from above the ceiling. Although he admits to being sexually aroused by his spying, he is also intellectually curious: He fastidiously records details about the occupants (especially about their sex lives), and believes himself to be gleaning a great deal of sociological insight into them. As the story moves from the 1960s through the 1990s, he witnesses and catalogs various societal changes, such as an increase in interracial couples, that are compelling but ultimately unsurprising and never revelatory. The real interest of Talese’s piece, in other words, is Foos himself.

How did Talese get to know this?

Foos wrote to Talese in 1980, hoping someone would tell his story without revealing his name or blowing his cover. It’s here that things get murky. Talese traveled to Colorado to meet Foos and see the motel for himself. Immediately upon arrival in the state, the journalist also signed a document promising that, in his words, “I would not identify him by name, or publicly associate his motel with whatever information he shared with me, until he had granted me a waiver.” 

Yes, journalists want to maintain the confidentiality of their sources.  But, that is when there is a greater good that the report is about.  What is the greater good here?  How does protecting the privacy of the voyeur who was observing people in their most intimate moments contribute to a greater good?

There’s no greater good here; Talese has captured a strange and (briefly) compelling story of one man’s obsession and the extremes to which he will go to satisfy it.

Exactly!  The reporter is as much involved in this crime as the perv/perp was.

Talese was complicit in Gerald Foos' violation of his guests’ privacy, and not only because in the initial reporting of the story, he climbed into the motel attic with its owner and watched a young couple having sex. By failing to report Foos’ actions – either in an immediate story or to authorities – Talese enabled Foos' unethical and, indeed, illegal action to continue unabated for at least 15 years longer.
...
In addition, through his continued correspondence, Talese provided affirmation of Foos’ activity, helping him maintain the myth that his actions served some higher purpose, some noble societal goal, rather than simply gratifying his own sexual desire.

How did the editor of the New Yorker respond to people like me?

While the scene is certainly disturbing (Talese writes that he was ‘shocked, and surprised’ to read the account in the journal), the New Yorker does not believe that Talese or it violated any legal or ethical boundaries in presenting Foos’s account of it to the reader.

It was a bad, bad, bad editorial call.

But, it does not mean that I am going to cancel my subscription.  I recognize the blemish.  Nobody's perfect!

I am a NPR listener

In the traditions of "I am Spartacus" :)

I will leave it James Fallows, who has an excellent post on the importance of defending NPR against the ruthless and unprincipled attacks from Faux Noose:

We don't have so many first-rate institutions -- in general, and especially in journalism -- that we can afford to let one this valuable be delegitimized. Its leadership made a mistake in its handling of Juan Williams, but people who care about the news environment should recognize how much it has done right and defend it against the current cynical attack....

Imagine for a moment what NPR's Robert Siegel or Neal Conan or Scott Simon or Melissa Block, among many other long-experienced interviewers, might have done with such an opportunity. This is an illustration of different standards. More simply, NPR could have said: You want to continue being a personality and commentator on Fox? Fine -- it's your choice. That's a different kind of operation from ours, and we wish you all the best there.

*** Here are two illustrations of how I have seen the sense of personal embarrassment about something inaccurate getting on the air.

One: During early stages of the Iraq war, I was on "Talk of the Nation" in the studio with Neil Conan. I carelessly said "soldiers" when I should have said "troops," because the operation in question involved Marines. ("Soldiers" = Army; "airmen" = Air Force; "seamen" = Navy; "Marines" = Marines. "Troops" = any and all.) A pained look came across Conan's face -- he didn't want his show to contain an error -- and, without saying anything directly, he steered the conversation over the next two minutes so that both he and I had several opportunities to talk about the "Marines" who were fighting.

Two: A few months ago, I recorded a discussion with Guy Raz of Weekend All Things Considered about increasing polarization and logjam in Congress. As an illustration, I said that Obama's stimulus plan had received "no Republican Congressional votes." What I meant was, "no votes from Republican Congressmen" -- ie, members of the House, which was accurate. But half an hour later, just before airtime, producers called back to re-record the segment at the last minute, so I could use proper language to clarify the House/Senate difference -- and note that in the Senate three Republicans had voted for the plan. They were that determined not to have an error on their show.

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Cartoon of the day: Afghanistan and journalism

One cartoon worth a 20-page essay

"Are you journalists, or are you rushing a sorority?"

First, over to Glenn Greenwald, who is mighty pissed off at the cozy relationship between journalists and those in power (in the context of this SuperSoaker party!!!):

 The issue is the relationship between the press corps and political power which these events reveal (here's an example of the type of event the Bush White House would hold and the controversy created).  Along those lines, The Washington Post's Dana Milbank has a surprisingly decent column about Helen Thomas in which he writes:  

Yet the White House press corps will be diminished without Helen front and center, and not only because she was in that job before the current president was born. She brought a ferocity to her questioning that has eluded too many in subsequent generations. At a time when others were getting cozy with sources, her crabby, unrelenting hostility was refreshing. . . . Now that Helen is gone, there's more need than ever for others in the briefing room to share her opinion -- specifically, the opinion that anybody standing on that podium should be regarded with skepticism.

Her career-ending comments to the side, we need far more Helen Thomases in the press room and far fewer giggly, star-struck servants who are so grateful and honored to participate in circle squirts with White House officials and not even embarrassed to admit it.

 Ahem, the Jon Stewart commentary on this is darn good ...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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The DC Follies :)

You pay for Faux News, but not for the NY Times?

More than a decade ago, after returning from our Europe trip, I contacted the cable company and asked them whether I could get rid of CNN and instead get CNN-international, because the international version of CNN was infinitely better then. The cable company said I could purchase the CNN-international channel at an extra cost, and explained that there was no possibility of picking and choosing my own channels.

I hated this bundling then, and hate it even now. After Faux News came on to the scene, and the more it became insanely partisan, I simply programmed the television to skip that channel when we surfed looking for something interesting to watch.

You can see, therefore, why I like the way Peter Osnos frames this television channel bundling and contrasts with the "free" newspaper/magazine journalism:

Once aware that they are supporting Bill O'Reilly et al, most of my interlocutors shrug and say something about bundling charges on cable or their combined bill, which includes broadband access and even, in many cases, telephones. Paying these bills, which on average are well over $100 per month, is routine now in the overwhelming majority of American homes. There was a movement a few years ago to consider "a la carte" pricing for cable, which would allow customers to choose the channels they wanted. That concept went nowhere because it meant that only popular channels would flourish. Those favored by smaller numbers--my relatively esoteric cable favorites are the Independent Film Channel, Turner Classic Movies, and C-Span-would probably disappear or certainly suffer.

In the current economic media crisis, cable companies have remained consistently strong because of this fee structure, even in the face of a reduced (but steady) stream of advertising, and because cable is among the last things that struggling households would cancel.

Few readers of this piece, I suspect, would be surprised by what I have written so far. But the point of reviewing the issue now is the next question I put to people. "How much would you pay for a monthly Internet subscription to the New York Times?" The answers range from "name the price" to "why should I pay? I already get it for free." And therein resides the challenge: Americans willing to pay for cable television subscriptions to channels they never watch must be persuaded to subscribe to online versions of the publications they read in print or on the Internet.

More attacks on free speech

Even the so-called liberal democratic countries are deteriorating rapidly. Awful.
Spiked has this comment before the link to a photo-essay:

Along with the double decker bus, Big Ben and red phone booths, London ‘Bobbies’ have long been a popular motif for tourist snaps in the British capital. But from this week, under Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, photographing a cop can land you a fine or a 10-year prison sentence. spiked’s Nathalie Rothschild took to the streets in defiance of this latest assault on our liberties.

View photo essay