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:

Writing advice for the perpetually fearful

I like to think I’m a damn good writing coach, the kind of Word Angel you want on your shoulder during the endless miles of writer’s block, whispering sage advice in your ear.

Why am I good? Because I empathize.

Anyone who writes knows what it’s like to sit in front of a computer screen or blank sheet of paper, wishing the perfect arrangement of words would instantly materialize in congruence with the fleeting insight of one’s thoughts.

At the middle school where I volunteer in its journalism program, I usually help one student in each of the last three periods of the day. Most times, they’ve already begun turning their notes into stories, and so my input is as a nuts-and-bolts editor –” let’s move this graf over here;” “you need to verify this or find out about such and such;” correcting grammar and spelling and adhering to AP style.

Putting the value back in journalism

As if newspaper layoffs weren’t bad enough,  someone had to go and present an essay titled “Why Journalists Deserve Low Pay.” Sheesh.

The provocative title isn’t one I would expect my journalistic brethren to embrace. Formal instruction has taught us that ours is a noble profession, one that provides an invaluable service by enabling an informed democracy. But as Robert G. Picard points out, that valuation no longer commands the tangible economic benefits it once did:

In the past, these journalistic benefits produced significant economic value, but today their value is diminishing rapidly. A significant reason for the reduction is value is that news and information producers and providers have less control over the communication space than ever before. In the past, limitations on distribution mechanisms and the cost structures of operating media promoted monopolies and oligopolies in communication supply. This increased the economic value of content by excluding provision by other suppliers.

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)

Check out this iPhone app to locate real estate

At the Reynolds Journalism Institute Symposium at the University of Missouri, a nifty application called NearBuy won the student iPhone app competition:

The app uses your location to serve up either homes for sale in the area or apartments for rent. They bring in listings from Google Base, Craigslist and Oodle. You can then view info on listings on a map, including photos, property details, contact information. Plus, you can use Twitter to query people for opinions on particular places, and then rate the place. Extras include a rent calculator and a Flickr add-on that lets you see photos geo-coded nearby.

And even though it didn’t win, I really like the sound of The ADverse Network, which offers an enticing business platform for news outlets in need of innovative ways to work with advertisers (particularly local businesses):

They wanted to create a geo-located advertising service, so that you would get local ads based on your location. Ads are inserted into the two apps we developed, iCoMoNews and Vox. For the advertisers, there are tools like a live map that shows where people are accessing the network, and even more granular “heat maps” to show where people are viewing and clicking on ads. They say they got a clickthrough rate on ads of 3.8% which is pretty good.

Rethinking the newsroom and journalism

I’m sharing a few quotes I’ve excerpted from Gina Chen’s excellent post, “Journalists must change thinking to change industry.” Chen was inspired by Jeff Jarvis’s recent blog entry about the need for journalists to add value in their newsrooms. And while Chen frequently cites Jarvis’ What Would Google Do?, her own observations are equally compelling:

• In my experience, the hurried newsroom culture doesn’t encourage deep thinking.

Indeed it doesn’t. To give but one example: Journalists on a beat are forced to quickly write stories both large and small, with no time to step back and consider, “Is my daily routine serving my readers in the way they would — and should — expect?”

• We forget that we’re a service industry: We’re in the business of helping readers make sense of their world, not of selling them news.

And yet how many times have we read articles that are little more than notebook-dumps of information? Journalists, in the rush to make deadline, have little time but to toss half-baked, confusing stories upon their readers — readers who need knowledge, and don’t care whether we’ve included a minimum of three sources, or have written an award-worthy nut graf.

Beginner’s guide to beatblogging

Patrick Thornton explains what beatblogging is, why journalists need to do it, who does it best, and offers examples of practices that lead to a successful beatblog.

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.