NPR ombudsman explains The Soloist coverage

An astute listener notices that NPR has been devoting considerable air time to Dreamworks’ new film The Soloist, coinciding with advertising time Dreamworks purchased with NPR to promote the film.

Alicia G. Shepard, NPR’s ombudsman, acknowledges that while it looks like “pay for play,” “a firewall exists between the editorial and marketing sides of NPR to prevent NPR sponsors from influencing programming.”

Shepard explains that producers receive a list of funding credits a week in advance of each show’s airing, so that they may remove those spots from running near shows that would give the appearance of a conflict:

Thomas Friedman’s lucrative “misunderstanding”

About that $75,000 speaking fee Thomas Friedman received for a speech before the [San Francisco]  Bay Area Air Quality Management District: He gave it back.

You can thank L.A. Times reporter James Rainey for pursuing Friedman to ask if he felt any guilt about accepting a significant amount of money from a public agency:

Friedman didn’t return my calls, and New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis seemed pretty cool to my questions. I got the feeling, from her long silences, that she thought my questions were a little silly.

Then late Tuesday afternoon, Mathis called to say Friedman would return the $75,000. She said there had been “a misunderstanding.”

Times ethics guidelines allow staffers to take speaking fees only from “educational and other nonprofit groups for which lobbying and political activity are not a major focus.” The Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which coughed up Friedman’s standard fee, hardly fits that bill.

Of community bloggers, anonymous comments and advertisers

I suspect a lot of journalists around the nation will be nodding in agreement as they read this letter from Des Moines Register reporter Clark Kauffman to Gannett’s then-senior VP of news, Phil Currie. I’ve excerpted a large chunk below, but it’s worth reading in its entirety:

Like other Gannett papers, the Register is cutting back on content produced by trained, professional journalists while encouraging community members to submit photos, columns and blogs. A few of our community bloggers have used this forum to write about the details of their drug use and their sexual activities. Most of our contributors choose their topics more carefully, but again, they’re not professionals. Not everyone who can type is a reporter. Not everyone with a cell-phone camera is a photographer. But in the Information Center, we’re all part of a homogenized team of “content providers” — some of whom, not coincidentally, work for free. A well-researched Register news article is published on the same Web page as a reader’s step-by-step instructions as to how a local woman under a psychiatrist’s care should commit suicide using carbon monoxide.

The Register also has government officials writing copy for its news columns. Last week, I interviewed a state department head who told me about the health columns his workers are writing, at taxpayer expense, for my employer. I know we’ve also had city officials contribute bylined columns. These are public officials working for a private, for-profit business on the taxpayers’ dime. That’s the sort of thing Gannett should uncover and report. It’s not the sort of thing Gannett should facilitate.

St. Pete Times’ Mug Shots — TMI?

Steve Yelvington, journalist and media strategist, received this response regarding the St. Petersburg Times’ new Mug Shots gallery:

In an email to several journalism-related lists, Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota declared: “I think it borders on journalistic malpractice! … Journalism should be about putting important events in a community into context. This doesn’t.”

Yelvington offers his own insight into the detriments of a digital world where the circle encompassing our private lives shrinks in circumference:

There may be public benefit in knowing John Delaney collected $325,000 as president of the University of North Florida. But do we all need to know that Mary Smith was paid $10,112 as a food-service assistant at the local school district?

Marshall McLuhan predicted that evolving communications technologies would transform the world into a global village. I’ve lived in villages. They are places where people tend to know an awful lot about one another. It can be stifling. A mistake can follow you around for a long time. Some people have to leave town. Public knowledge of everything is not always a good thing.

So what do you think? Is the Times‘ providing a valuable public service with its Mug Shots gallery, or are they doing irreparable harm to people’s reputations and lives?

Jim Cramer isn’t unique, says Greenwald

One of my favorite media critics, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, has an excellent post today that reveals the core of the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart dust-up as but one instance of a industry-wide problem:

It’s fine to praise Jon Stewart for the great interview he conducted and to mock and scoff at Jim Cramer and CNBC.  That’s absolutely warranted.  But just as was true for Judy Miller (and her still-celebrated cohort, Michael Gordon), Jim Cramer isn’t an aberration.  What he did and the excuses he offered are ones that are embraced as gospel to this day by most of our establishment press corps, and to know that this is true, just look at what they do and say about their roles.

And what are those excuses? Here’s Greenwald quoting ABC anchor Charles Gibson, commenting on the pre-Iraq war coverage:

More thoughts on GateHouse v. New York Times Co.

Recovering Journalist takes the New York Times Co. to task for not defending established linking practices. Commenter Dave Mastio makes the interesting point that the New York Times Co. settled in order to avoiding winning the case and establishing a precedent that would have allowed other sites to similarly aggregate Times content.

But in Nieman Journalism Lab’s wrap-up of the case, Dan Kennedy suggests that the Times may have had a fight on its hands had the case gone to court:

Times arts critic takes fellow critic to task

An article by St. Pete Times performing arts critic John Fleming echoes the concerns I expressed regarding a conflict of interest for Creative Loafing theater critic Mark E. Leib.

In the story, which is currently online and will be published in the Times‘ Sunday print edition, Fleming doesn’t mince any words regarding Leib’s dual role as critic and playwright in the Tampa Bay area: