Everything makes a comeback. There is an eternal renaissance of essential things. In journalism, design, literature and art. Things tend to simplify themselves. As life in the big cities turns more chaotic, technology becomes more accessible with wireless, fast communication available to larger masses of the population. For the printed media, this translates into smaller formats, more reader...
WASHINGTON – The number of full-time journalists working at daily newspapers continues to fall while the number of minority journalists inched up nearly a half of a percentage point to 13.42 percent in 2004. Since the economic downturn of 2001, newsrooms have lost a net of more than 2,200 journalists while the number of minority journalists has increased. These are among the key findings from the...
In 2001, a Seattle woman named Zannah won the "Weblog of the Year" Bloggie award for her blog titled, "#!/usr/bin/girl." In late 2004, the high-profile political blog Powerline was named Time Magazine's Blog of the Year for raising questions about the Bush National Guard story on "60 Minutes II." In the space of a few years, Weblogs have gone from the province of chatty geeks into mainstream...
Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper's 6-year-old son doesn't read the New York Times or watch C-SPAN, so as Christmas approached he remained blissfully ignorant that his father faced up to 18 months in jail for refusing to reveal his confidential sources. While a three-judge federal appeals court panel in Washington weighed whether the First Amendment and legal precedent bestow a "reporter's...
In November 1969 Paul Branzburg, a twenty-eight-year-old reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, spent a few days hanging out with two local men for a story about how they planned to clear $5,000 making and selling a batch of hashish. The resulting article, THE HASH THEY MAKE ISN'T TO EAT, ran in the paper’s November 15 edition. In it Branzburg, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia...
As the war in Iraq has turned into a grueling occupation, the question of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction persists. To investigate that question, there would seem to be no better-qualified reporter on Earth than Judith Miller of the New York Times. Miller is a genuine expert on weapons of mass destruction or, in Washington parlance, WMD. She has written important books about Saddam...
It's been called an industry standard, the norm, an average and a rule of thumb. It's also been called a myth, folklore and flat-out wrong. Yet it's often cited--even if it's being derided--and widely known by most in the newspaper business. What is it? The infamous staffing benchmark that says a paper should have one newsroom employee for every 1,000 in circulation. Most of you know of it. In my...
Ron Recinto had been toiling at daily newspapers for more than 10 years when an old friend called him up to lure him away from the world of crackling police scanners, city budgets and agate type. It was September 2000, the tail end of the Internet boom, and Recinto, now 36, was an editor at the State in Columbia, South Carolina. He loved his job, he cherished newspapers and he had no plans to...
You may as well get used to mistakes like those in that headline. If the résumés and cover letters that have come across my desk in the past year are any indication, we, the print media, are doomed. I have advertised four open editorial positions for my sports-related trade magazine in the past sixteen months. Every day during my search for qualified candidates, I'd open my mail with a quiver of...
ONE BY ONE, THE COUPS were carried out swiftly, often without warning. By May, more than a dozen editors from around the country had left their offices in the past year, mostly under duress, virtually all without new jobs, replaced by other managers eager to get into the game. Press reports painted pictures of brutal departures: In Oklahoma City, Daily Oklahoman Executive Editor Stan Tiner walked...
