Cheney: Vader unmasked

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:

Talkin’ newspapers and journalism

A couple of articles worth your while regarding the financial troubles  of newspaper industry and what has brought them (in part) to this point:

The Fed shouldn’t save newspapers because they “are not too big to be allowed to fail.” (Newsosaur)

American journalism is in trouble because of “editors and reporters focused more on winning prizes or making television appearances.” (Walter Pincus, Columbia Journalism Review)

Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks

Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer lambastes newspapers for living in an “echo chamber,” failing to “adapt their business models,” and makes note of that “perfect storm” that has so many journalists bemoaning the fate of their industry. Criticisms that should sound more than a little echo chamber-ish to anyone who’s been following the pontifications about the newspaper industry.

Megan Garber (who’s awesome, btw), respectfully summarizes Lerer’s talk at Columbia University, where he prescribed the same vague calls to innovation that Clay Shirky wrote about a month ago (nothing will work, everything will work). But after initially bristling at Lerer’s generalized recommendations, upon reflection I realize he’s probably right. Now is the time for experimentation:

Lerer (after noting the usual caveats: that there’s no silver bullet to rectify journalism’s woes, and that “no one knows what the future will look like”) pointed to innovation—and hasty innovation, at that—as a necessity for newspapers and other news outlets. We need to “embrace disruptive innovation,” he said. …

News quality in the Internet Age

On the issue of quality control in the newsroom, Craig Silverman asks, What would a “new process for reporting, writing, editing, fact checking and publishing” look like?

The context for his question is the move toward publishing immediately on the Web and the reliance on a cubicle buddy to edit a post either before or after going live. Silverman’s question arises from his concern that newsrooms have embraced new processes for quality control without considering that the old way from which they derive wasn’t all that great:

We could only wish the old model of passing copy from reporter to editor and so on was as good as an assembly line.

To me, a strong editing process is only as good as the communication between editor and writer. In the small newsroom where I worked as a copy editor, I often just had to shout over my cubicle wall to clear up a concern I had about a reporter’s story. If I had to make a phone call, I did. The editor also worked in a very hands-on fashion, with the reporter at his side as they went over an article.

PolitiFact’s Pulitzer win is an evolution in journalism

Columbia Journalism Review’s Megan Garber looks at the significance of The St. Petersburg Times‘ PolitiFact winning the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting:

The fact that a piece of journalism so markedly different from its counterparts—both from its fellow finalists and from its fellows in investigative journalism more generally—has won the most prestigious prize in print journalism means that the shift in question is occurring not only in journalistic narrative itself, but also in the standards by which we judge excellence among its ranks. PolitiFact’s Pulitzer win marks the alteration of the definition of reportorial and narrative value itself.

Reporting the economy

Writing for Columbia Journalism Review, Katia Bachko has a must-read post about journalists attempting to find good news to report about the economy:

Taken separately, reports on statistical fluctuations offer little insight into the economic recovery. A stall in new jobless claims, for example, hardly signifies recovery given that while fewer people may be losing their jobs, it doesn’t not mean that those same people have found new employment and are off the rolls. Lumped together, articles that collect multiple indicators into a single piece in the hopes of sighting the end of the recession wade into the dangerous territory of premature cheerleading. There’s nothing wrong with reporting good news positively, but the WSJ and AP, among others, often overemphasize the significance of individual data to paint a rosier-than-true picture.

Even the same statistical indicator can be taken positively or negatively: Take “Jobless Claims Inch Up” from the Pensacola News Journal, compared with “Whew, Jobless Rise Tiny” from the St. Petersburg Times. Both Florida papers cite the same numbers, but the framing is substantially different. This is why cherry-picking data is wrong, and encourages premature conclusions. There’s nothing wrong with reporting data, but to extrapolate meaning is a dangerous sport.

Brilliant insight into what ails the journalism industry

Megan Garber sells her recent essay short by calling it a “modest entreaty.” It is, in fact, a brilliant, must-read call to action that says the lofty rhetoric about journalism as a sacred enterprise is hindering the preservation of journalism as a viable industry:

In our haste to elevate the theoretical, we sometimes forget the obvious: that good ideas are normatively so only insofar as they lead to good results, and that ideas more generally are useful only to the extent that they serve action. Theories are a means, not an end; a clever hypothesis that no one ever bothers to test might as well never bother to exist in the first place. Belief may create the actual fact, as William James had it; but when we fling about fanciful Monetizing Journalism proposals, as if we were characters in a bubbly Broadway musical—micropaymentsendowmentsandsubsidiesfromUncleSam, even though the sound of it won’t make the market give a damn—we serve little save our own egos. …

… The net effect of articles that rely on creative conjecture, and little else, to propose solutions for journalism’s woes is to enforce a kind of preemptive defeatism about the possibility of solving those problems. Our fanciful flings with speculation belie the true gravity of journalism’s current crisis. Each verging-on-glib proposal—stimulus bailouts for newspapers! wheeee!—serves, above all, as a subtle sanction to glibness itself. …

The numbers don’t lie. Or do they?

Well, something doesn’t add up. When Martin Langeveld crunched the numbers, he found that newspaper Web ads were yielding an absurdly high CPM (cost per thousand page views) of $80.28.

I knew that number couldn’t be correct, as I recalled an instructive post by Ethan Zuckerman:

While highly targeted ads (an ad for roofing services in Pittsfield, MA) might be worth several dollars a click, most ads sell for a dollar or less a click, often much less. An ad that sells for a buck a click and gets 1% clickthrough is functionally a $10 CPM ad, which suggests that lots of ad inventory (the nickel-a-click stuff) selling at sub-$1 CPM.

Ryan Chittum agreed the number was ridiculously high and endeavored to come up with an explanation:

If print is dead, we’re all at the wake

If you believe the estimates of Martin Langeveld, print is outdrawing websites by a country mile:

All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way.

 Not that Langeveld is advocating a contrarian’s course of action in response to the “death of print” meme:

The fact remains, of course, that not only is online revenue alone insufficient to sustain news operations, but the print operations of our larger newspapers, having lost most monopoly pricing power, are not sustainable either, recession or no recession.  Finding a solution for these industry problems demands careful monitoring of where the audience is actually spending its time and attention.  While the audience’s online attention seems to be a surprisingly low 3 percent, online is clearly where the audience is migrating to.  In my mind, as I’ve written pretty consistently since last September, the solution is an online-print hybrid in which print is consolidated to one, two or three editions per week, not seven.

Who cares about an Oxford comma?

A post for my fellow grammarians: Merrill Perlman says that use of the “serial comma” — the last comma in a series — is useful when it’s necessary to clarify groupings in a series:

People who argue that the “serial comma” is necessary for clarity usually use examples like this one: “My favorite sandwiches are pastrami, peanut butter and jelly and cream cheese.” Because the verb is plural, it’s clear that there are at least two favorite sandwiches. But because there are two “ands,” it’s unclear whether the favorites include “pastrami, peanut butter(,) and jelly,” “peanut butter and jelly,” “jelly and cream cheese,” or “peanut butter and jelly and cream cheese.” Any series that allows that kind of confusion is, by definition, not a simple one.

With simple series, such as “The flag is red, white and blue,” I’ve long abided by the Associated Press Stylebook, which dictates that no comma is needed before the conjunction in a simple series. In Perlman’s example, I would insert a comma before the last conjunction, making clear to readers that the favorite sandwiches included “pastrami, peanut butter and jelly, and cream cheese.”