Please update your feeds, bookmarks and blogroll: I’ve moved all of my posts to my new domain: http://mediascaper.wordpress.com. Mediascaper is my Twitter ID, and I’ve long preferred it to “Virtualjournalist,” so last night I finally made the change.

If  the St. Petersburg Times wants to start a constructive conversation about St. Petersburg’s relationship with the gay community, they’ve been presented with as good an opportunity as any:

Thus far, Cristina Silva’s story about the clash between St. Pete Pride and the city has generated well over 100 comments.

That’s the kind of reader interest the Times needs to take advantage of — and strike while the iron’s hot.

The issue: Pride organizers want to hang rainbow banners from light posts in the city’s gay-friendly business district throughout the month of June, to coincide with Pride Month.

According to Silva’s story, the city has rebuffed their initial proposal, citing a policy that states “all banners must carry a written message.” Pride organizers see that rejection as a violation of their constitutional rights.

Considering that this story has clearly touched a nerve, the Times would do well by itself — and the community — by dedicating a blog to the issue, one where reporters give continuous updates while also providing a forum for interaction with readers.

Off the top of my head, I can think a few questions prompted by Silva’s article and the reader comments that beg to be answered:

• Is the city trying to make it difficult for Pride organizers to express themselves?
• Is St. Pete Pride overreacting to a reasonable request for compliance with city policy?
• When was the street banner policy developed, and under whose advisement?
• What is Mayor Baker’s opinion about St. Pete Pride and does it differ in any way from his attitude toward the gay community at large?

Beat-blogging this issue — which can be expanded to gay issues in general — has several advantages over traditional follow-up stories, for readers and newspapers alike:

• Reporters can share information with readers as it becomes available, without having to wait to file a traditional article.
• Readers will know where to go throughout the day for updates.
• Reporters can interact with readers by addressing their concerns, questions and misperceptions.
• Readers will develop a deeper connection with the paper, and reporters will learn to be more responsive and accountable to the community they cover.

In Slate, Christopher Beam looks at what the 2010 Senate-seat showdown between Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist would mean for the GOP:

Yes, he’s more conservative than Charlie Crist. He’s pro-life, anti-stimulus, and anti-gay marriage. But he favors reaching out to independents as much as anyone. And as a Hispanic, he represents the GOP’s best hope to avoid losing an entire demographic the way it lost African-Americans.

In other words, the Crist-Rubio matchup is not a perfect test for whether the Republican Party should moderate. The lines are not clearly drawn. Sure, one is center-right and one is conservative. But the conservative belongs to a largely moderate/liberal demographic and has carved out a niche for himself as the ideas guy—two qualities that soil an otherwise pure litmus test.

Some say Rubio will hurt Republicans by bruising Crist. (Crist is still far ahead in the polls and won the coveted endorsement of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.) But that’s in the short term. In the long run, the GOP needs Rubio, both as a charismatic young conservative and as one of the party’s rising Hispanics. Putting his face out there will pay dividends in the future, even if it damages Crist now. Republicans might even hear a new idea or two.

From Michael Kinsley, writing in the New Republic:

The new Newsweek, judging from the first issue (which [Editor Jon] Meacham calls “a model of the form”), bizarrely resembles the old Newsweek more than the new Newsweek Meacham describes. It is cluttered with departments and headlines and labels and tiny features, all of which imply some hierarchy or order in the editors’ minds, but only add to the chaos in the readers’. Its longer pieces follow all the stale conventions of newsmagazine prose.

For the unemployed journalist thrown out on his or her keester, Jim Gold, a former senior editor for the Arizona Republic, and his wife Sue have created Jilted Journalists.

It’s nothing much to look at design-wise, and the content is rather thin so far. But it has a cheeky tone, and at least endeavors to offer some helpful advice for those recently reacquainted with the ranks of the unemployed. A couple of highlights:

Interview tips (Don’t dress like a slob, prepare questions for the end of the interview, don’t reveal too much personal information. You know, common sense stuff.)

Speaking of which, Jilted Journalists has a section on Strangest interview questions (which I sincerely hope receives many contributions).

I can attest that at one fairly recent interview, I was asked a litany of personal and just plain weird questions: What music I listen to, what movies I like, what superpower I’d like to have.  I’d never encountered such interview questions before on matters so thoroughly immaterial to my ability to perform a job. Needless to say, I received the familiar “We had to make a very difficult decision” e-mail. Perhaps I should have chosen Ninja over Pirate. No joke — I was really asked this question by a firm with major retail clients.

Thinking about  giving your news site a fresh coat of paint? Before you do, prepare to read in humbled awe Alexander Shaw’s incredibly detailed and valuable look at how he redesigned the front page of the Talking Points Memo website.

Bit by prevaricated bit, reporters for McClatchy, Columbia Journalism Review and Slate pick apart former Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech before the American Enterprise Institute:

First up, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel’s piece for McClatchy, in which they remove the shaky supports from Cheney’s defense of U.S. interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists:

[Cheney] quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a “deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country.”

In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information “was valuable in some instances” but that “there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.” …

Cheney said that President Barack Obama’s decision to release the four top-secret Bush administration memos on the interrogation techniques was “flatly contrary” to U.S. national security, and would help al Qaida train terrorists in how to resist U.S. interrogations.

However, Blair, who oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, said in his statement that he recommended the release of the memos, “strongly supported” Obama’s decision to prohibit using the controversial methods and that “we do not need these techniques to keep America safe.

Writing for Columbia Journalism Review, Charles Kaiser aims squarely at the contradictions between Cheney’s professed beliefs and his actions:

Besides bringing his usual beguiling demeanor of a medieval executioner to the podium of the American Enterprise Institute, just about every sentence he uttered managed to encapsulate the exact opposite of the truth.

Let’s parce just one of those sentences: “List all the things that make us a force for good in the world – for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences—and what you end up with is a list of the reasons why the terrorists hate America.”

This from a man who violated the nation’s devotion to liberty by kidnapping suspected terrorists (who often turned out to be innocent bystanders), who made a mockery of human rights by embracing torture methods which are war crimes under treaties we have signed, and whose commitment to the “rational, peaceful resolution of differences” was exemplified by a disastrous war of choice which killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Finally, here’s Slate’s Fred Kaplan on Cheney’s “straw men, red herrings and lies“:

… After justifying “enhanced interrogation methods,” as part of the Bush administration’s “comprehensive strategy” in the wake of 9/11—and noting that the next seven and a half years saw no follow-on attack—he said this:

So we’re left to draw one of two conclusions, and here is the great dividing line in our current debate over national security. You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked, and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event … and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort.

This is a blatant evasion. The debate—or one of the debates—is, in fact, over whether or not the war on terror required “tough interrogations,” as Cheney called them. Does he believe—should anyone else believe—that removing one chunk of this strategy would cause the whole edifice to topple? If these interrogations are so essential, why did President Bush stop them in 2004? And why haven’t we been attacked since?

Cheney’s evasiveness is more basic than this. He still refuses to acknowledge what nearly everyone else has: that these interrogations did amount to torture. “Torture was never permitted,” he said, even while conceding the occasional water-boarding. These methods, he noted, “were given careful legal review before they were approved”—ignoring that these legal reviews were conducted by his own aides and have since been discredited almost uniformly. …

… Cheney’s next volley against Obama—for releasing the Bush administration’s legal documents that justified water-boarding and other harsh practices—was where the outright lying began. “President Obama has reserved unto himself the right to order the use of enhanced interrogation, should he deem it appropriate,” Cheney said. Yet, this authority would have little use because, thanks to the release of the documents, “the enemy now knows exactly what interrogation methods to train against.”

This argument might make sense, except that Obama has not reserved the right to use enhanced interrogation. In fact, he has explicitly, repeatedly, and unconditionally banned the practice. In his speech this morning, Obama said there was no security risk in releasing the Bush documents precisely because they no longer reflect U.S. policy.

Because love is a two-way street, Oregonian columnist Anna Griffin gently but firmly tells The New York Times that its courtship of Portland will only end in heartbreak:

Here’s the problem: You’re making us something we’re not. Most of us don’t have time for a weekend at the Ace Hotel, or the wardrobe for First Thursday. Sure, we talk about racial tensions, but we haven’t conquered them. We still aren’t sure what to do with either our mayor or our major-league ambitions. …

…Besides, frankly, we’re just not that into you. Sure, we love curling up with you on Sunday mornings, sipping our Stumptown and taking a glimpse into a world where people talk about “frenemies,” “man dates,” and where their parents’ parents went to college. But, at heart, we’re simpler folks. You’ll eventually grow bored of our easy commutes and healthy living. One of these days, we’re going to wake up to discover you’ve dumped us for Detroit or Houston.

Another post to save to your bookmarks: Knight Digital Media Center has an article about the Top 10 search engine optimization tips for online news startups.

Ben Eason, Creative Loafing’s CEO, gets some prime real estate in Editor & Publisher’s Special Report on newspaper bankruptcy.

The most interesting part of the article is Eason’s revelation that he expects CL to emerge from bankruptcy over the summer, at which time “everyone will know the company’s real worth”:

“As time goes on, people are more realistic in what the company can produce going forward. We have an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to suggest to the creditors, to the judge, to everybody involved what we believe the company will look like going forward and then we have the opportunity to suggest what the capital structure is going to be. We are forced to value the company, not as we would like it to be, or what it was, but what it is today.”

Other than that bit of info, there’s not much to the Eason-related parts of the story.  Its authors don’t press him on what he believes CL’s “real worth” is, nor does it ask him to explain for the reader his “digital transformation strategy.” This doesn’t reflect poorly on Eason — he’s answering questions and hitting talking points that he understands  –  but the casual way the writers unquestioningly accept the notion that the purchase of Washington City Paper and Chicago Reader was undermined by the real estate collapse of 2007 is disappointing.

As a piece of journalism, the article also falls flat because it never asks Eason to elaborate upon any of his statements. He talks, they record:

Eason explains that Chapter 11 allows his company to take advantage of dramatically reduced costs tied to legacy contracts and “outdated” processes. As such, he can have his employees spend 90% of their energy presenting content online and selling bundled offerings to advertisers, and the other 10% on the print product. “Everyone in the business knows print pays the bills, but most folks don’t understand that digital contributes to the profits,” he says.

There’s a lot here that begs for elaboration. It would have been useful  to inquire about those legacy contracts and “outdated” processes, and get more in depth about the revenue stream in a digital world where ads garner only about 10 percent of their print counterparts. Journalism as stenography is a common trait, but I expected more of an article that purports to be about how newspapers are navigating the rough waters of bankruptcy.