Gawker Media’s Nick Denton knows where the money isn’t

An awfully provocative comment about the news industry from Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, taken from this Q&A with Advertising Age:

People — particularly if they’re under 40 — have news priorities other than those of the editors of The New York Times or producers of the “NBC Nightly News.” A new tablet from Apple — or last night’s episode of “Gossip Girl” or the adventures of the hipster grifter — is a bigger deal than the latest petty scandal in Albany. You think that’s a damning indictment of modern society and a recipe for idiocracy? Fine. Start a nonprofit to cover all the local-government news you think a healthy society needs. But don’t expect advertisers — or commercially-minded publishers or readers, for that matter — to share your interests.

Be accurate or be irrelevant

A friend of mine announced that Kentucky Oaks winner Rachel Alexandra might be shut out of this Saturday’s Preakness by owners looking to enter additional horses in order to prevent the filly from making the field, which is capped at 14 horses.  When I responded that I’d heard a radio report that Rachel Alexandra would be running, he was incredulous, and showed me a story in today’s St. Petersburg Times to verify his information.

“Right,” I responded with a tinge of smugness. “That was from this morning.”

To settle the disagreement, I quickly found an update on ESPN.com, which confirmed the radio report:

Bursting the Masters bubble

At Slate, Robert Weintraub pierces the pomposity of the  Masters golf tournament:

The four-day telecast itself was even thicker with treacle. Give the club credit for limiting commercial interruption, but I’d settle for a few more ads if it meant less of the music and slow pushes on photos of winners from the ’40s. As Phil Mushnick wrote in the New York Post, trying to watch the Masters with “all the scene-setters and homage-paying makes us wonder whether Augusta National members would prefer to watch the Masters as it’s being played live, or sit through a bunch of tributes to the course.” The main effect is to make the viewer want to give in and take that nap.

He also calls Jim Nantz a “corporate shill.” Read it.

Who wants to have an orgy?

An “orgy of self-pitying grievances,” that is. That’s how Glenn Greenwald describes the cunning linguistic flailings of “woe-is-us” conservative opinionmakers who fight a daily struggle to get their voices heard in the wilderness of the Liberal Media:

As they tell it, unless you read The Weekly Standard or National Review, it’s basically assured that you never encounter right-wing opinion, because the media hates them, silences them, and shuts them out.  Nothing is rarer than Andy McCarthy’s opinion being heard in The New York Times.  And the American media — which even Scott McClellan mocked for being ”too deferential” to the Bush administration and which is owned by America’s largest corporations and richest elites — is devoted to proselytizing a leftist agenda.   Like everything else, it’s all so, so unfair to our stalwart right-wing warriors.

(Sorry to get your debauched  hopes up with that misleading headline. Now I know how it feels to write for Fox Nation.)

Was the coverage of Natasha Richardson too much?

Writing about the late Natasha Richardson, Michael White lays into the media for their role in cultivating what he calls a “growing mood of public sentimentality” that is “potentially more destructive [than cynicism] of the tone of public life”:

Poor Natasha Richardson died during the night. What a truly dreadful thing to happen, the result of what looked like a minor head injury anyone might have suffered on or off the ski slope.

Perhaps that’s why they led this morning’s news bulletins on her death, even on Radio 4. Fairly well-known actress from a famous dynasty, married to a film star, tragic accident etc etc. The papers duly print photos of grief-stricken family members at the hospital, photos which strike me as intrusive, heartless even. The whole packaged affair is, well, ghoulish.

Shafer on Washington Post’s bad journalism

Jack Shafer tears the Washington Post a new one as he deconstructs its front-page claim that PCP use is on the rise:

How do stories like the Post’s get published? As Robert P. Bomboy wrote in 1974, newspapers don’t (but should) keep reporters on the drug beat and few employ editors who are knowledgeable about drugs. The press corps gives into their readers’ worst fears when reporting about drugs, embracing the most sensational or dramatic aspects of the story. And worst of all, the press routinely fails to cross-check information provided by law-enforcement sources.

Journalists are under tremendous pressure to produce articles on deadline that will grab readers’ attention.  But they do the public a disservice when reporting the kind of stories Shafer takes apart.

Newspapers should be like me

Scooping the News lists five ways newspaper Web sites must change. Me? I don’t need to change, because I’m already way ahead of the curve:

1. Two-way communication between the writer and the reader. — I often respond to my peeps.
2. Links to similar stories being published elsewhere on the Web. — All the time.
3. Show us reader comments on the very first page of your Web site. — Yep.
4. Tell us, the readers, about the people writing the stories. — You mean, like about me?
5. Don’t worry about the presentation. — Well, I did take care to choose a snazzy WordPress design.

Eric Deggans nails the Oscars

St. Petersburg Times media critic Eric Deggans is pretty much on the money in his assessment of the 81st Academy Awards.

I agree with Deggans that Hugh Jackman deserves another shot as host, particularly because I think the show’s producers under-utilized his talents. For long stretches, he was nowhere to be found.

Deggans also correctly criticized the gimmick of having past Oscar winners deliver testimonials to the nominees in the best acting categories: